Outbound calling; social media outreach and scheduling; PPC; SEO; trade shows, email campaigns – kinda sounds like the beginnings of a job listing for every marketers responsibility, doesn’t it?
While that may be true, it’s also the foundation of understanding the relationship between these actions in generating demand for your product and building you brand. These channels all require strategy and optimization to work in harmony with one another. But when there are so many channels that can make or break your marketing efforts, where does one even start?
In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet Vivian Gomes, Head of Marketing and Inside Sales for CSS Corp, a technology services firm. His insight tackles why creativity is the genesis of marketing, and why it’s so important to start at the top to satisfy some kind of curiosity of the targeted end user.
Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking to Vivian Gomes. Vivian, welcome to the show.
Vivian: Hey, Glenn. Thanks for having me here.
Glenn: Vivian, could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Vivian: Sure. Absolutely. So, I head the Global Marketing and Inside Sales for a company called CSS Corp. We’re a mid-sized IT and technology support services company headquartered out of Milpitas, California but with a presence across five continents. I’ve been here for about three years. Prior to CSS Corp, I have worked with other IT services companies, like Infosys, Genpact, NIIT, and a Bay Area based fintech startup as well. So, totally about 17 years in the IT industry, having played various roles in operations, sales and marketing.
Glenn: You know, it’s interesting because the IT industry has always been a very tough one for marketers to get a hold of. Sales people have tried to call them directly, that usually doesn’t work, so there’s a lot more that marketing has a role to play with, you know, just trying to figure out who they should be going after and what they’re going to say to them? How do you step back and think about the strategy around something like that, particularly in an industry that has so much competition?
Vivian: Oh, absolutely, that’s a great question. So, I think it’s important to understand that in the IT industry and especially the part that I am in, which is services, so we are B2B, and things here are extremely high-touch. So, in our industry there’s no such thing as an impulse purchase, which is pretty much core in the B2C world, right? You’ll serve up an ad, which has an offer, you click on it, you like it, you just buy it, it’s not a high-value purchase, you’re done, instant ROI, right? But that’s not how it works in our world. Things are a lot more complicated. Conversations typically run – sales cycles run from 6 to 12 months. And even within our IT industry, I would say there are two parts to it, you’ve got products and you’ve got services. On products, I would say, the world is a little more finite there in a way because you know what your product does, you know what it can solve. But in services, it’s a lot more complicated. I’ve, by the way, worked in both environments, but in services all that matters is each client is unique, their requirements are unique, the end is more important than the means. Everybody wants to get somewhere and you’ve got to come up with a customized solution for that client. So, it’s a pretty complex world that we are in. So, it’s very important to be able to clearly define your target market. And in our industry, typically organizations don’t have more than maybe 500 to 1,000 companies, that’s your target market,
