Unlike most SaaS professionals, Aaron Stillman didn’t end up in software because it was a longtime passion. Instead, he wanted to drastically increase his fresh croissant intake. In other words, he saw his first SaaS job as an opportunity to live in Paris while developing his product management — and eventually marketing — abilities. That first role kept him in the global market, where he now works for international customer experience optimization platform AB Tasty as its “director of storytell...
Oct 27, 2020•34 min
Half a year doesn’t seem like much time to take a marketing department from idling to racing ahead, but Mary Ford moves fast. Mary recently became the Chief Marketing Officer of CENTEGIX, an internet of things (IoT) company making emergency alert software. Its main clients are K-12 schools and hotels. School safety is a potentially heavy subject, but Mary focuses on the positives of what CENTEGIX’s product can do. “My job as a marketer is to help people understand the day-to-day value the soluti...
Oct 23, 2020•27 min
Michelle Tilton fell in love with B2B marketing while working at a small boutique agency after college. It wasn't the "glamorous B2C space" everyone else wanted to get into, but something pulled her in and she's been in the B2B world ever since. Now, Michelle works as the VP of Marketing at Infutor, a data solutions company that helps its clients better understand their customers through data. Michelle uses a multi-channel, multi-touch marketing approach to drive demand and integrates processes ...
Oct 22, 2020•28 min
Laura Scruggs attributes her company's "astronomical growth" to a strong alignment between sales and marketing. As the Director of Marketing at Mindgrub, a full-service digital marketing agency that focuses on tech companies, Laura tailors both Mindgrub’s and its affiliate companies’ marketing strategies to the changing needs of the B2B world. In a time when marketing budgets are slashed each quarter and most businesses are just trying to stay afloat, it’s not easy to stay relevant. "That window...
Oct 21, 2020•34 min
AnnaMaria Turano is Vice President of Marketing at Synzi, a company that was facilitating telehealth services before it was cool — or, rather, before it became an overwhelming necessity because of COVID-19. “In late 2017, entering 2018, we figured out Synzi was the right name, the right brand. And then we determined the look and feel of what that brand identity should be, including the colors, including the font, etc., to be markedly different from everyone else in the telehealth space,” AnnaMar...
Oct 19, 2020•36 min
Heather Knutson is a seasoned marketer who has spent the last eight years in the housing industry space and data market. In the beginning of 2020, she took a new role as VP of Marketing at Ascent360, a computer software company that supports B2C marketers with its comprehensive customer data platform. On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Heather explains her marketing philosophies and how she strives to keep Ascent360’s marketing strategy fully aligned with its sales team. She al...
Oct 15, 2020•29 min
Knowing when to play it cool and let the customer come to you can work better than a hard sell. As VP of Marketing at Narrative Science, Cassidy Shield has learned that the most effective approach for drawing customers to the company’s product is by showcasing its abilities and the brand’s values. What exactly does Narrative Science do? The brand calls itself a “data storytelling company” — its software Lexio transforms analytics data into plain language stories that people can easily understand...
Oct 12, 2020•34 min
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 looki...
Oct 09, 2020•29 min
Anusha Sethuraman has been creating and promoting content ever since her days on the theatre production team at R.V. College of Engineering in Bangalore. These days, however, it’s a lot more business-oriented creativity. Currently, Anusha is the Head of Marketing for explainable AI platform Fiddler. The company is a startup, a business structure she has prior experience with, though she came to Fiddler after working at Microsoft. While Anusha credits her time working for companies of all sizes a...
Oct 07, 2020•30 min
The past seven months have been a whirlwind for Nick Bennett. In March, he began building his personal brand on LinkedIn by commenting on others’ posts and sharing his own content. Within six months, he grew his network to 10,000 followers. What got Nick started on crafting his personal brand in the first place? A simple LinkedIn challenge from a former colleague. “I was really the only one that kind of stuck with it,” Nick says. Along the way, he learned that consistency was critical: “If you'r...
Oct 05, 2020•34 min
Molly Clark has spent the last decade and a half working all across the marketing industry, beginning with a role as an interactive marketing coordinator at a pharmaceutical software company. Through the years, her passion for marketing, advertising and logistics has grown — but Molly also discovered a second passion for marketing operations along the way. This led her to becoming Director of Marketing at her current company, inMotionNow, a B2B SaaS company that offers a workflow management solu...
Oct 02, 2020•30 min
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...
Sep 30, 2020•35 min
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 I...
Sep 28, 2020•29 min
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 re...
Sep 25, 2020•46 min
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...
Sep 24, 2020•31 min
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 workin...
Sep 22, 2020•28 min
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. I...
Sep 16, 2020•35 min
Taking the reins of an established marketing team shouldn’t mean throwing out everything that’s come before. Put the hard work of your predecessors to good use. Adam Lambert joined scheduling software company Calendly as its Senior Content and Digital Marketing Manager in January 2020. He spent his first three months studying what his team had achieved before his arrival. “Customer service was really strong: people had good resources to answer current customer questions. So I didn't have to spen...
Sep 10, 2020•35 min
With more than 20 years in marketing, Steve Wagner has watched the demand generation concept “grow up,” so to speak. When he was starting out, it was in its “baby phase,” and he has since watched it become an integral part of the marketing life cycle. Steven started his career on the account management and sales side of business — which helped him better understand and appreciate those teams — before working his way over to marketing. These days, he’s the Senior Marketing Manager at Webbula, a d...
Sep 08, 2020•32 min
Audio has always been Jaclyn Schiff’s favorite way to consume information. Whether it was a book on tape or early versions of podcasts, she was right there listening — donning a cassette player or nestled up by her desktop computer. With about 15 years of combined experience in journalism and content marketing, Jaclyn started PodReacher — a company that helps podcasters increase their brand visibility by turning each episode into engaging content for their website. “I think any savvy marketer in...
Sep 04, 2020•36 min
For Melissa Greiner, establishing a human connection is the key to developing — and keeping — a successful customer, no matter what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at. Before entering the B2B marketing world, Melissa studied journalism in college. It gave her valuable experience that would eventually land her as the Director of Marketing at WizeHive, which is a SaaS platform for nonprofit organizations. On this episode, Melissa discusses her strategies for developing successful content, inc...
Sep 01, 2020•34 min
Marybeth Sheppard spent years working at a B2B marketing agency before joining Seamless, the online food-ordering service owned by Grubhub. She spent more than five years there, marketing the product to hedge funds, law firms, tech companies — really, anyone who was ordering large amounts of food or catering company events. Now, Marybeth serves as the Senior Vice President of Marketing at SEVENROOMS, a hospitality technology company. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Mar...
Aug 28, 2020•32 min
At Lessonly, a training software company, marketing and sales play on the same team. And Chief Marketing Officer Kyle Lacy wouldn’t think of having it any other way. “Part of the reason why I wanted to move the BDRs and SDRs under marketing is that you force alignment,” Kyle says in this episode of Tech Qualified. At other companies, the marketing department might focus on attribution or proving influence. Kyle’s goal is to focus the marketing team on revenue. He says they’re not quite there yet...
Aug 24, 2020•34 min
In her role as the lead marketer at a small company that offers IT services, Megan Battaglia says she has the best of both worlds. After beginning her career in consumer product marketing for the popular spice company McCormick, she next landed a role working on the tech side for a health company. Now at ThunderCat — where she is Director of Marketing — she gets to combine her creative side with her tech background. “I kind of have the best of both worlds with marketing for a tech company,” she ...
Aug 21, 2020•19 min
Account-based marketing isn’t a buzzword Juliana Pereira can get behind. “I actually call it marketing because I think that’s the only type of marketing you should be doing,” says Julianna, Vice President of Marketing for Flow, which provides software to help brands and retailers build a cross-border e-commerce business. In pre-pandemic times, Juliana invested carefully in getting the right people to Flow’s events. Of course, in-person events are no longer possible given the current state of the...
Aug 18, 2020•36 min
When Louisy Raymond joined the Zipari team more than two years ago, she was the second member of its marketing department — and the only one who actually had a background in marketing. Tasked with establishing a marketing strategy for the SaaS health care company, she used her 18 years of experience in the field to build her team and map out a cohesive plan. This included everything from redesigning the team’s sales decks to planning conferences and webinars. On this episode of Tech Qualified, J...
Aug 14, 2020•31 min
Playing it safe with content is not optional for Chris Damico. With almost 20 years of marketing industry experience, he’s taking Penta Technologies — where he’s the Marketing Director — to new heights by introducing thought leadership into the organization’s content marketing strategy to help tackle some of the challenges facing the construction industry. The company develops enterprise construction software that helps construction, service, and engineering enterprises improve business performa...
Aug 12, 2020•24 min
Michael Wise says he’s selling a solution not a product, and this is essential to all aspects of marketing and the customer journey. As Director of Marketing & Strategy at Intelligent Contacts, a company that provides innovative cloud contact center communication, billing, and payment software for the healthcare and financial services industries, Michael focuses on brand management, lead-generation and strategy development for a technology product that can be difficult for clients to underst...
Aug 10, 2020•26 min
When Trinity Nguyen joined lead generation solution UserGems as its Director of Marketing she made a bold move: She got management to move revenue contribution tracking to the marketing team. "Revenue is the only number that matters to us in marketing," she says. In this episode of Tech Qualified, Trinity discusses why marketing should have a front-row seat to the sales lifecycle. At UserGems, marketing takes an active role in listening to sales calls in the pipeline review, and both departments...
Aug 07, 2020•32 min
Liam Moroney is no stranger to the ups and downs of startup life. “[T]here’s enormous risk that comes along with working at a startup, you don’t have the stability or predictability that a lot of big companies have,” says Liam who is VP of Marketing at Rocketrip, which helps enterprise companies reduce travel costs through employee award incentives. Rocketrip is Liam’s fourth startup. It’s a good thing that Liam can handle riding a professional roller coaster — doing marketing for a travel-relat...
Aug 05, 2020•32 min
