Imagine this – you have a market of potential clients in which your product or service can substantially streamline their day-to-day and make their jobs easier. I bet we’d all like to be a BRD selling these clients – they’re a slam dunk. But what if I told you these potential clients have a fiduciary responsibility to serve their business and client base, and not themselves, and certainly not by adding costs from a vendor. That changes your perspective on this market, doesn’t it?

This client base is accountants and while they are excellent corporate soldiers, their access to technology that can create efficiencies may go overlooked. But, they are still human and still interact only, which is where a lot of their journey starts in simply building awareness.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Andres Botero, the Chief Marketing Officer at Blackline. He discusses building brand awareness and knowledge of his products by  working in concert with sales to achieve their goal of demand generation. This groundswell approach has allowed the team at Blackline to have a crystal clear and consistent message throughout the buyer’s journey, allowing them to tap into this difficult to sell client base.

Transcript: 

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking to Andres Botero. Andres, welcome to the show.

Andres: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Glenn: Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Andres: Sure. I’m a Chief Marketing Officer at Blackline and we are the leader in software for accountants for financial closing. We help accountants close the books quarterly, monthly, yearly and at the same have a life, essentially. We automate a lot of the stuff they do manually. Things that they do in Excel and they improve the quality of life and the quality of the numbers.

Glenn: And so, accounts are kind of interesting, right, because you don’t necessarily think of accountants as spending a lot of time online, but maybe I’m wrong with that. So, how do you think about marketing to accountants and where are they hanging out? How are you getting a hold of them?

Andres: Good question. That’s a misconception that accountants are not online. They are people. They are online. They are really busy. And you got to find them where they read their news, where they buy their things. You gotta find them in their offices where they spend a lot of time and nights and to be really targeted geographically in where you advertise digitally.

Glenn: And so, I understand, one of the things that you are focused on right now is integrating various components of the marketing, whether it be physical, digital, people-wise and kind of bringing that all together. How did you get to the point where you said you needed to do that and then maybe you could walk us through how you’re approaching that?

Andres: Sure. I mean, we are finding that, you know, essentially connecting to our accountants from all – in an integrated way with all the channels, we’re talking about our message and putting them in front of our – what we can do for them is powerful. We have a solution that in many cases, they don’t know that exists. They’ve been doing this job for a long time. In the same way they use Excel, they use paper. And, you know, initially, years ago, there was very little volume online. And over time we’ve been investing in awareness, we’ve been finding where they are, where they read, where they shop. And the awareness has been rising. And now we have moved to a place where they might know who we are, now we just need to get them to consider adopting something like ours. And the accountants are a group of people that are not really used to b...