Tech Qualified

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Scott Ablin, Chief Marketing Officer at Keeper Security, Inc. During this podcast episode, Scott talks about his past work experience and explains some of the key marketing initiatives around promoting data protection and preventing password-related breaches.

• Scott starts the conversation by sharing his past work experience as a B2B tech marketer.
• Scott discusses how he has run marketing organizations at healthcare companies and IT organizations.
• Scott talks about Keeper and mentions how it’s a SaaS business, focusing on cybersecurity and password management.
• Keeper works on a subscription model that is applicable to business enterprises as well as independent consumers. 
• Keeper is Scott’s first venture into the security space because when he decided to leave healthcare IT, he wanted to be part of an organization where he felt at home. 
• Keeper prevents password-related data breaches and cyber threats. 
• Keeper reduces the risk of password-related data breaches for the consumer by offering a modest subscription.
• Keeper is a great fit for financial services, financial institutions, healthcare organizations, hospitals, hotel chains, retailers, all of these, big businesses and segments, that possess customer data.
• Scott talks about how he figures out how to best leverage the finite resources, how to prioritize efforts, energies, and budget.
• Keeper’s revenue is derived predominantly from the SMB market, but it also serves the enterprise segment as well.
• Keeper has an incredibly viable market-validated solution for enterprise customers.
• Experiential stuff, conferences, and trade shows are the few digital efforts that are put in practice to be enterprise-driven in nature. 
• Keeper has a very effective lead generation strategy, focused on a 14-day free business trial.
• Currently, Keeper generates 1200 to 1400 MQLs per month.
• Keeper is leveraging G2 and other software review sites to validate its offering with prospects.
• Scott discusses the competition of the consumer market on app stores, highly polluted, highly commoditized with free versions.

• The company’s ideal customer profile is any company that transacts business online and has workers that engage in business activities using online transactions.
• Scott mentions how Keeper has swapped out the marketing automation platform and migrated to HubS

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Rob Yoegel, the Senior Director of Marketing and Angel Guarisma, the Director of Content at Linode. Rob and Angel break down their past work experience in marketing and how they shifted into their roles at Linode. This interview focuses on how a marketing team can employ technical content, in a written format, to generate demand and fuel an overall marketing strategy.

• Rob starts the interview by sharing some of his marketing experience and mentions how he was a journalist by trade.
• Rob mentions that with his journalism degree, he had a dream to one day become the Sports Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. And even though he got a position at the Inquirer, he quickly learned that a career in journalism wasn’t the future.
• Angel starts the conversation by providing some insight into his past work experience which includes various roles; as an engineer, teacher, and a developer.
• Angel and Rob provide some background on Linode - it’s a cloud computing provider that gives someone everything they need to start and run a business on the web.
• Linode has almost two decades of experience and evolved with the industry over the last twenty years.
• During the interview, the guests discussed Linode’s ideal customer profile - consisting mostly of developers and then enterprises who are using cloud technology.
• Rob talks about marketing at Linode and mentions how the company has relied heavily on word of mouth marketing and traditional trade shows to drive revenue.
• One of the ways the company has grown is through its highly technical writing and a dedicated effort to high quality content on the blog.
• Right now, the company employs a large marketing team with nearly 20 employees - but most importantly, almost half of the members are on the technical writing team.
• The company has grown to attract SMB and Enterprise customers and the technical content has been a major driving force for garnering interest in these areas.
• Angel mentions how Linode is the largest independent cloud provider in the world and because of that strength, the company must have a focus on thought leadership.
• Rob mentioned how Linode is building out a Rev-Ops team, which includes sales leaders, sales directors, to drive the customer base with larger spends.
• Linode believes in the Paid, Earned, and Owned model and does a lot of paid media buys with Google ad words, both display, and search, to drive traffic to high quality technical content.
• Linode focused on consumer’s and developers’ journeys which includes few calls to actions such as going to their website, creating an account, and spinning up services for $5 a month.
• Linode also has a Reseller Program and Partner Program and a dedicated team of ind

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Jennifer Rathgaber, the Senior Marketing Manager at SQA (Software Quality Associates). Jennifer talks about her tenure with a B2B SaaS company focused on associations/nonprofits and her transition to a role at SQA. With SQA, Jennifer is now focused on modernizing a business which has been relatively stagnant on the marketing side of things for almost twenty years.

• Jennifer talks about her past experiences in the marketing world - recently transitioning from a B2B SaaS company.
• In previous roles, Jennifer has worn several different hats - responsible for demand generation, content development, digital marketing, branding, and every other leg of marketing that you can think of.
• Jennifer discusses how SQA is primarily a services firm and it helps other organizations transform digitally.
• SQA is predominantly a regional company, focused mostly in the New England area.
• For the most part, SQA has experienced stagnant growth as of late and there are initiatives in place now to optimize for growth.
• Before arriving, SQA really had a passive marketing strategy, where an agency was driving the team and Jennifer came in to really kick off demand generation.
• Right now, Jennifer is crafting the customer journey and still working through the process.
• SQA actually has two sides of their business - services and then staff augmentation where they are responsible for recruiting and placing specific roles.
• SQA is using a variety of pillar pieces to then use for a foundation of shorter pieces of content - webinars, panel discussions and longer white papers.
• Jennifer has found that it’s important to weave in thought leadership content in a variety of situations - from PPC to email outreach.
• Jennifer has leveraged internal subject matter experts to get a sense of the ideal customer at SQA. Many internal resources have been buyers of their types of services in the past.

• Jennifer compares and contrasts services with B2B SaaS, “In the B2B SaaS space, that was a little more black and white, where if you hit somebody with an email, they raise their hand saying, yes, I want a free demo - that's an MQL. If they go to an SDR, then they go to the sales team. The services space I'm finding is a lot more different. The services space is more of a long game.”
• Jennifer mentioned “I have to stop being so focused on MQLs and be more focused on the relationships that we're building. Whether it be through marketing or through sales or a combination of both...”

• Jennifer Rathgaber: Li

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown interview Brooke Browne, the Marketing Manager at Smartbridge. This interview focuses on her past experience in marketing, often operating in smaller teams. During the chat, Brooke talks about her priorities at Smartbridge and how the company uses the talent of all employees to contribute to their content marketing initiatives. 

• Brooke mentions how she started her career in marketing while she was getting her college degree.
• Brooke has been working with Smartbridge for the past eight years.
• Smartbridge is an enterprise business technology consultancy, and targets those companies that are looking to transform their digital roadmap.
• Smartbridge deals with a lot of robotic process automation - upgrading, and modernizing ERP systems, CRM, ECM...all the acronyms.
• The digital presence of Smartbridge was non-existent when she joined the organization eight years ago and she’s been a big part of leading the charge ever since.
• During the initial years, content marketing was their fundamental marketing strategy and remains a core focus of the company’s plans.
• Brooke chats about one of the first blog posts that generated interest - it was a very simple “how to” post that generated traffic and led to revenue.
• At present, Smartbridge uses a wide range of marketing techniques such as content marketing, search engine marketing, advertisements on the radio and more.
• She mentions that Smartbridge is hyper-focused on content marketing and publishes their content on different social media platforms and through podcasts.
• Smartbridge is quite consistent with articles and writing posts but also works on video content to drive more interest.
• Smartbridge uses a lot of sales intelligence tools that help them understand what a particular company is looking for (intent-based data).
• While getting started with podcasting, the organization concentrates on authentic thought leadership and sharing a little information about them; to people who want to listen, even if it's competitors.
• At Smartbridge, business analysts, data scientists, developers - all contribute to marketing content and the company ensures this is outlined in the hiring process.
• Their hiring process is quite transparent; a candidate may or may not be a marketing person but must contribute to their marketing and sales efforts.
• When producing content, the marketing team gets help from a variety of employees - even if it’s just doing a screen recording or a rough draft to get a piece started.
• Smartbridge implements an incentive program, so anytime an employee gets published, he/she receives a $50 gift card.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Courtney Porcella, Marketing Director at coUrbanize.The interview takes a look at her past experiences with marketing and PR agencies for B2B Technology companies. Courtney then takes a deeper dive into her current role leading a marketing team at coUrbanize, a technology company that connects new real estate projects with the surrounding community.

• Courtney talks about her background where she studied marketing and worked in marketing for ten years with various B2B tech companies.
• Before transitioning to an in-house role at a technology company, Courtney talks about her four years working for marketing and PR agencies.
• Courtney breaks down some of the pros and cons between agency life and being an in-house marketer.
• Courtney discusses how she’s had a relatively linear career path, by serving the commercial real estate industry, and eventually ending up at coUrbanize.
• coUrbanize is the real estate startup where she is leading a marketing team-including lead generation, branding, and communications.
• coUrbanize is a tech company that focuses on connecting real estate companies with people - these are often cases where large real estate projects are a part of an area and getting community buy-in is critical to the overall success of a project.
• coUrbanize serves large real estate companies that are owning, maintaining, and developing buildings. 
• coUrbanize specifically works with people within the real estate company who are tasked with building projects.
• coUrbanize did a brand strategy exercise to get some insights around how they can better position their company.
• Courtney breaks down inbound versus outbound outreach and explains how content marketing helps them get customers.
• coUrbanize does a mixture of digital marketing content and also live in-person marketing.
• When coming on board at coUrbanize, Courtney was supplanting a marketing function that was relying mostly on junior talent and one of her major goals was to show immediate value to the board and senior management.
• One of Courtney’s biggest challenges early on was hitting the company’s Q4 number and she breaks down how she approached that goal.
• The organization’s 2020 goal is to become recognized experts by more people in the real estate industry.  
• Courtney’s reading a weekly newsletter called a very good copywriter that publishes micro-content. 
• She also follows companies and like-minded people on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Nick Waterhouse, Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. This interview takes a deep dive into his past work experience as an entrepreneur - when he built and sold a company that made headphones. After exiting his headphone company, Nick took on a role as Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. Evaluator Group is an IT analyst consulting firm based in Boulder, Colorado.

• Nick starts the interview by providing some insight into his entrepreneurial efforts when he started and then ultimately sold a headphone company that specialized in ergonomic, memory foam earbuds. 
• When starting the headphone company in China, Nick was introduced into a wide range of digital marketing disciplines and realized how much he enjoys spending his time there.
• After a period of success, Nick describes how he sold his headphone company and decided to dive into the marketing field head-on by working for an IT analyst firm.
• Nick explains the fundamental similarities and differences between B2B and B2C companies.
• Nick describes how a consumer can easily see a set of headphones and understand its cost structure, whereas the same is not the case with working for a consulting firm.
• Nick takes some time to provide a description of Evaluator Group’s ideal customer profile, which really includes two major types of customers - vendors and end-users.
• For vendors, the company mostly relies upon relationships with major players such as IBM, VMWare, etc. 
• From an end-user perspective, Evaluator Group’s ideal customer is anybody who’s looking for a new solution in the data storage industry, or a person who's having a problem with the way they're currently managing their data.
• Nick discusses the challenges with marketing the company’s services because, in this day and age, there are so many types of roles who manage a company’s data - IT Specialists, Cloud Specialist and a range of other titles.

• Webinars are one of the successful approaches to attract potential customers - and the company really tries to keep them unscripted and “personal.”
• Product reviews of data storage products attracts prospects and also serves as a great tool for marketing.
• The company is completely unbiased and does not have any pay-to-play relationships with vendors. All information available on their website is researched by analysts.
• Nick’s team sits down and schedules video interviews with either past clients, current clients, or potential future clients which have helped them in relationship building.
• Promoting webinars natively on BrightTalk and pushing videos out on social media ensures the company gets the most out of these webinar and video assets.
• Video interviews are posted on various social media platforms and i

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Kristen Moore, Chief Marketing Officer at InVia Robotics. The interview focuses on 

past work experience and how she’s applied a lot of lessons learned to her current role with a “robotics-as-a-service” startup. She also takes a deeper dive into her marketing strategy and how she’s focused on collaborating with the sales team.

• Kristen started her professional career in telecom, working for companies like Lucent Technologies and AT&T, before transitioning to other tech companies.
• Later on, she moved to digital media and other internet-related companies and software as service e-commerce companies.
• She mentions that throughout her career, she has always been interested in new technology and figuring out how to bring that to market.
• She discusses her roles as a contributor, in areas such as advertising, business development and even PR, which helped her figure out the right combination of marketing and how to make marketing more powerful overall.
• Searching for creativity in her role and new technologies brought her to InVia Robotics.
• InVia Robotics provides a mobile automation solution to e-commerce companies and helps them become more efficient.
• InVia also helps e-commerce companies to fulfill their orders.
• Kristen discusses the antiquated processes (at the warehouse) that are often in place for many e-commerce companies.
• Figuring out how to implement a technical and complicated solution and determining how to select the right solution is the main challenge InVia has dealt with along the way.
• Kristen mentioned that e-commerce has become very popular and the whole shopping process is frictionless, but a buyer doesn’t have knowledge that it creates a lot of pressure on the vendors. 
• The ideal customer for InVia is any customer that’s selling products online, but not on Amazon, and needs help to be more efficient so that buyers get the right product to the right people quickly.
• She talks about how a common theme in her career is tackling technologies that are new and that often don’t have a precedent in place within the market.
• The customer’s journey of an organization is quite different from other technologies - a lot of the journey involves helping people understand automation and the importance of the new world.
• InVia Robotics has established a mobile and agile solution that is different from traditional automation which was very fixed and rigid.
• InVia has been in the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, and CNBC.
• Instead of going out and selling equipment, InVia sells robotics as a service, which is quite different from how other solutio

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Rebecca White, Vice President of Marketing at Databook. During the podcast episode, Rebecca talks about her past working experience in B2B organizations. Her experience stems from mostly field sales organizations where she’s driven pipeline from a marketing perspective. Rebecca also discusses her current role at Databook which is a startup that differentiates itself as an Enterprise Customer Intelligence platform.

• Rebecca graduated with a degree in English and feels this helps her understand how to analyze information and share information which resonates with people.
• Rebecca starts the podcast by sharing information about her past experience working with B2B organizations and building marketing functions. 
• She talks about how she got into marketing after taking jobs at an entry-level after school.
• She spent about ten years in marketing, consulting, running a marketing strategy company. 
• Rebecca introduces Databook as a platform that reduces the time that Account Execs spend on research and then provides them with a financial case for change so that they can close more deals faster, which drives pipeline acceleration across the board. 
• She discusses how it’s important for marketers to have industry expertise, because it’s easier to learn a product than it is to learn about an entire market.
• She discusses the marketing function of startups which change every three to six months.
• Rebecca states that it’s good to be a generalist because tools change, flows change - find out what works and what doesn’t work.
• When discussing the platform, Rebecca mentions that apart from the regulatory, compliance-related part, one needs to have the right data to send the right messages to people. 
• Tech stack and data is a storyboarding process because you need different inputs and outputs -  the entire process is like putting a puzzle together. 
• Setting up a foundation, making sure everything is correct, making sure that, everything is in compliance, building out the messages, building out all the materials are things that are required to accelerate the business.
• Creating an inbound engine is a lot more expensive than creating an outbound engine, but it bears much more fruit in the long term.
• One of Rebecca’s early initiatives was at least installing a “billboard” for the Databook brand and this involved a simple website, with clear messaging in place. 
• According to Rebecca, Digital marketing has created an incredible amount of noise - fruit that’s a little bit too ripe. 
• Rebecca discusses the importance of creating a valuable network and how this is as important as following/reading publications or other online resources.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Gaurav Harode, Founder of Enablix. During this interview, Gaurav talks about his past work experience in enterprise software and how he embarked upon his journey of creating Enablix - a company founded in 2017. Gaurav talks about the challenges sales professionals face with organizing and sharing the best content and pinpoints how technology can help them break through the noise. 

• Gaurav starts the conversation by sharing some background information about his fifteen years of working experience in financial services, selling risk, and compliance products.
• He talks about his experience working at Oracle leading their go to market and product management strategy.
• Enablix was founded in 2017 with the vision of making the process easier for B2B and product marketers, to manage content and help their sales team.
• The ideal customer’s profile is a midsize or small organization that includes a salesforce of one hundred sales representatives or less.
• The main challenge of many of Enablix’s customers is utilizing content throughout the entire sales process - once a campaign is done, or sales meeting is complete.
• The primary driving force of Enablix is to allow marketers to scale their content and ensure that the content doesn't get lost within the typical cloud storage platforms.
• He talks about the sales process of Enablix and how, as a startup, he really focused on just getting feedback from prospective customers versus trying to close immediately.
• He shares some of his highs and lows which he has encountered during his startup’s journey.
• Enablix’s top priority is their prospect list and this ensures that all outreach is highly targeted and is within the ideal customer profile.
• The organization uses blog content to educate prospects and to fuel engagement within emails and other outreach.
• One of the biggest challenges many salespeople face is personalization because automation most often prevents highly personalized emails.
• Gaurav talks about the challenge he faces with being consistent with outreach because he values a lot of personalization in his process.

• Enablix works with B2B  marketing teams and enables them to organize the content, as the content is the nerve center of the marketing and sales process.
• Gaurav said that “There's no automation tool that we're using. We have a bunch of different email templates and ideas keep growing every week.”
• One of the challenges which Gaurav faces is being able to be consistent about outreach while he folds in a lot of personalization and research with each prospect.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Joan Silver, the VP of Marketing at Sixgill. Joan talks about her experience in digital marketing - which began with an internet pioneer, Mapquest. Joan talks about the addiction of going along for the ride in a venture like Mapquest and how some of what she learned applies today. With experiences of more than a decade in B2B marketing, Joan brings a lot to the table with her role at Sixgill.

• Joan starts the conversation by providing some insight into her past working experience in digital marketing.
• She started her career with Mapquest which offered free maps and driving directions to anyone who had internet access.
• She worked with Mapquest for over a decade and learned about B2B marketing as the company transitioned from B2C to more enterprise customers. 
• At Mapquest, she worked with brands like Walmart who used their services for transportation, logistics, and supply chain applications.
• She explained how Mapquest launched her career in the combination of B2B, B2C branding.
• The goal of  MapQuest was to make maps ubiquitous, to make online digital mapping ubiquitous and accessible to everyone.
• Joan discusses the exciting challenges with Sixgill and how the company helps others manage the data associated with the internet of things.
• Sixgill also helps companies in solving the accurate and continuous collection of data, through maintaining its integrity with a blockchain solution for data security. In this way, Sixgill makes sure that data does not tamper.
• For the most part, Sixgill is a B2B tech company, but there are some applications applicable in a B2C context.
• Joan mentioned that a journey from MapQuest to Sixgill has been remarkably successful and a great learning opportunity.
• Joan discusses the types of customers the company targets and how it’s more of a horizontal market versus a select group of industry verticals.
• Sixgill has worked successfully within the construction space and healthcare, by helping companies eliminate the manual process of data automation.
• Sixgill is associated with quite a few cutting edge technologies and video AI is a very interesting use case for customers across several industries.
• The organization emphasizes on customer needs and how they respond and adjust throughout their journey.
• Joan mentions the types of personas they’re working with - mostly focused on individuals leading innovation within companies.
• Sixgill targets a particular group of people who might be involved in data collectio

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.