Tech Qualified

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Veronique Lafargue, Vice President of Marketing at STRIVR. This interview takes a deeper look into Veronique’s past working experience and highlights how she helped build one of the first marketing teams for Google Cloud. She also covers how she transitioned form content marketing to more of a marketing leadership role at STRIVR. 

• Veronique starts the conversation by sharing some of her past working experiences at companies like Google.
• She then talks about some of the earlier efforts she made as a content marketer where she worked for over ten years.
• Veronique led some of the first content marketing campaigns for Google Cloud, focusing on Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa target audiences.
• In many ways, content marketing for enterprise cloud services was very new and she had a passion for storytelling to connect with B2B buyers.
• With her success on Google Cloud, Veronique transitioned to lead the content strategy for all of GSuite internationally.
• Veronique switched to her current company about one and a half years ago.
• She talks about STRIVR and how it’s a leader in immersive learning and virtual reality training solutions which was incubated at Stanford University.
• STRIVR started off early by signing about 14 teams in college football, professional football, and NBA, and even the U.S Ski Team.
• Veronique talks about how they moved from training for athletes to training for employees and associates, and especially the art of frontline workers.
• STRIVR has developed a unique methodology based on learning and development expertise and uses the unique benefits of VR to train people.
• STRIVR’s ideal customer is someone who can see how learning and development today can impact the business.
• She the core departments that STRIVR typically works with, mostly starting with the HR organization of a company and then moving to other departments who are interested in the benefits of immersive learning.
• She talks about how STRIVR rebranded themselves by building a strong foundation and built their website from scratch.
• According to Veronique, influencers are really important to spread the word and connect with the executive level buyer.
• STRIVR has a software platform, where one can collect a lot of information, push content, and manage content. 
• She discusses the importance of the orchestration between what the marketing team does and what sales needs.
• Salesloft is a tool that is

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 Adam Kranitz, Senior Director of Marketing, Brand & Communications at CloudCheckr. This interview takes a look at Adam’s past work experience which includes more than 20 plus years in creative services and technology marketing. Adam takes a deep dive into his role at CloudCheckr and shares his perspective on storytelling and other marketing campaign tactics.

• Adam Krantiz starts the conversation by sharing some insight into his past work experience - starting with more technical roles before transitioning into marketing.
• He started his career as a video editor, graphic designer, and producer of corporate videos and has seen a transition from analog tape to digital to high definition content.
• He took his first job right after college working for a video production company in Washington, D.C.
• He joined CloudCheckr four years ago and is focused on cloud computing, AWS, and how businesses can transform how they function, using the power of the public cloud.
• He explains why he decided to initially take up a producer role, creative role, and then eventually marketing to sell and market services, but not be the guy behind the computer screen.
• This career change was quite transformational as he could actually focus on storytelling using any type of media instead of just depending on video or graphic designers.
• He talks about the marketing field in general and how it’s one of those disciplines that perhaps touches more fields of study than any other.
• He breaks down the struggles of marketers which involves the psychology of a buyer and the ability to understand how to use technology in the service of a story.
• CloudCheckr works in the industry of cloud computing and especially with those who are actively using a public cloud. 
• CloudCheckr is using a combination of Salesforce as CRM of record and Marketo for its marketing automation platform.
• Adam breaks down some of the challenges marketers have with data and discusses how CloudCheckr commits to cleansing their data and appending their marketing/contact data with the latest information.
• At CloudCheckr, Adam is primarily responsible for brand messaging, communications, external comms, copywriting, creative services, etc. 

• CloudCheckr is currently working on creating a more personal connection and establishing more of a humanized brand - introducing more webinar content is just one of the tactics.
• CloudCheckr is a partner-centric organization and its partner channel ranges from mid to large-sized companies.
• Adam uses an app called

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 Blair Felter, Marketing Director at vXchnge. The interview focuses on her past experiences with programmatic advertising before shifting over to an in-house role with a technology company. Blair also breaks down how she’s built marketing functions at a few technology companies, blending content, advertising and other marketing tactics to drive demand.

• Blair starts the conversation by providing insight into her past working experience which includes oil, gas, pharma and the fintech industries.
• She talks about her working experience and how she helped a mobile app company and fintech financial services company to start their marketing departments.
• She also talks about her responsibilities at vXchnge, which starts with establishing the brand and getting the other core components of marketing in place.
• Blair highlights what vXchnge does and who the company serves. vXchnge is a data center and co-location operating service provider.
• The company mostly focuses on an organization that has to process online transactions and needs their services for auditing purposes - this is the company’s ideal customer for the most part.
• vXchnge is a data center that is engineered for perfection and has an incredible SLA uptime rate.
• She mentions the fundamental difference between vXchnge and its competitors which have built locations in a variety of growth markets.
• She discusses how the company has evolved its marketing since she joined and she’s witnessed the focus shift more towards doing shorter blogs and videos instead of long-form blog posts. 
• She believes that a customer needs to know what you’re doing for them...plain and simple and this comes through education.
• In 2018 to 2019, their traffic grew 525% only by doing SEO building and just being smarter with the content.
• She explains the importance of Google reviews and how it helped vXchnge in establishing customer relationships and allowed people to find them based on their location.
• vXchnge has a nurture program that is purely based on educating customers - the focus is more about the content and moving them into sales when they’re ready.
• For generating long term content, vXchnge relies mostly on organic engagement with a target rollout of one blog post per week.
• vXchnge is concentrating on tech talks and webinars as the content has worked quite well over the last year. 
• Blair mentions how webinars helped them reach people in the short-term - in one scenario within a week of advertising.
• One of vXchnge’s primary pieces of content is its data center migration checklist - it’s super simple, but has had a large impact on prospects.

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 James Winter, VP of Marketing at Brandfolder. The interview focuses on James’ past experiences and current role working in the B2B software as a service (SaaS) industry. Brandfolder is a company that helps marketers and creatives track, manage and protect their brand elements across all platforms.

• James talks about his past working experience and the different industries he has worked with, including roles in telecom and other software firms.
• James talks about the paradigm shift within brands functioning and how they have been inundated with the explosion of content, whether it’s video or photos or 3d files, or 360-degree viewer images.
• James discusses the different challenges faced by brands managing various digital assets.
• James mentions that he strives to get inside the customer's head and that’s what interests him the most about marketing. 
• Brandfolder is working on inbound marketing and G2 for reviews as it tends to influence their deals.
• James discusses the typical customer’s journey which ultimately leads to a traditional SaaS opportunity stage model, ultimately leading to a purchase of a subscription or even a multi-year deal.
• James explains the challenges within a customer’s journey and making them understand the difference between DAM and Cloud storage - as technology can easily solve their problems.
• James explains some of the aspects of Brandfolder’s content strategies and covers a focus on generating content through videos and advertising on social media platforms.
• Brandfolder is more inclined to focus on the demand-side and works on how to illustrate the brand value with the ads on paid social media platforms.
• Brandfolder’s main goal is tied around a qualified pipeline and this is determined based upon the deal value after a qualification call occurs with a sales representative.
• James mentions how there is reporting around leads and other marketing metrics, but the big focus on what marketing is accountable for is tied to a qualified lead pipeline.

• James Winter said “And you know, if you're selling one or two products, it can be relatively easy to distribute that asset or, organize it in the sort of typical folder base structure. But, when you're talking about these lengthy supply chains and the stakeholders at a lot of different touchpoints, it gets a little bit more tricky.”
• While discussing challenges, James said that Digital Asset Management is in a weird category where it's simultaneously really new and really old - depending on the type of prospect and their familiarity with the technology.

• James Winter:

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 Sarah Peduzzi, the Director of Marketing at Jetpack Workflow. During the podcast episode, Sarah talks about her past experiences with agencies and how she applies a lot of that knowledge to her current role at a tech company. Sarah also covers how she likes getting a little deeper with one company versus working with several different companies while at an agency.

• At first, Sarah breaks down some of her past roles within various agencies - ranging from a focus on analytics to paid advertising.
• Sarah talks about some of her new skills she’s been able to build - email marketing, content planning and customer engagement.
• Jetpack Workflow services accounting firms, CPAs, bookkeepers that typically employ anywhere from 10-15 employees.
• For the most part, the company focuses on accountants who have “big four” experience but have decided to strike out on their own.
• According to Sarah, the number one thing about her target audience is that they want to make sure they do not miss deadlines - and that’s where Jetpack Workflow comes into the picture.
• When scaling a small operation, it’s important for her target audience to ensure work doesn’t fall through the cracks - especially during time periods where seasonal staff are introduced within the operation.
• From a demand generation perspective, the company has a range of paid advertising in place - including software review platforms.
• The ultimate goal for the target audience is to start a 14-day free trial and then a nurturing sequence kicks in.
• The company has a flagship “grow your firm” course that’s used to educate the customer base.
• The company has a relatively short sales cycle (7-14 days) for smaller firms and larger firms require more of an engagement with the sales team.
• Right now, outbound is something that the company is testing as a majority of the pipeline is established through inbound marketing efforts and paid channels.

• Sarah mentioned “So some of the things that I learned in the first few months here was...things that I thought worked well for one industry doesn't mean they're going to work well for another. Best practices that you thought you knew on the back of your hand might have to go out the window because you're talking to a completely different audience.”
• Sarah talked about some of the new exposure she’s had to email marketing, “I've really enjoyed learning the email side of things. It's something that I never really thought I'd be super interested in learning and owning. But as I've gotten more comfortable in this role in the last year that's the one area where I'm like, okay, I just can't wait to really dig into understanding these sequences and how can we improve it and how can we better segment

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 Jess Otero, CMO at BI Tech. The interview focuses on how the company uses a predominantly ABM-focused approach to marketing and ensures content answers big questions from customers. Jessica also breaks down some of the key technologies the marketing team uses - from researching accounts with DiscoverOrg to maintaining nurture sequences in Hubspot.

• Jessica started out studying to be an English teacher before getting into a marketing profession.
• Jessica starts the conversation by sharing her past experiences as a marketing associate with a company named Paris Technologies where she worked for ten years.
• A leader in the finance department who has a lot of import and export data processes is the ideal customer for BI Tech.
• BI Tech’s consulting helps companies connect with almost any kind of data source or ERP system. 
• Jessica discusses her approach to reaching out to companies by trying to understand the company’s problem and if they’re looking to bring automation to some of their finance workflows.
• BI Tech uses a marketing intelligence tool called DiscoverOrg to find people who might be good candidates for their solutions. 
• Jessica talks about how BI Tech has been ahead of the curve a bit with technology and now customers seem to understand their solution a bit more.
• One of the biggest shifts Jessica has seen over the years is how they package and ultimately sell their solutions - BI Tech has migrated away from traditional licensing.
• As a marketer, there is a lot of automation and tools available. However, for finance professionals, the same level of automation doesn’t really exist.
• SEO is not a big priority for Jessica and BI Tech right now because a lot of their target customers are not actively searching for their solution.
• The company has placed a big focus on researching prospects before writing emails or doing any outbound communication.
• Rather than going to large industry events, BI Tech has shifted their focus to smaller events where there’s a bigger opportunity for in-person engagement.
• Jessica points out how LinkedIn played an important role in changing the game for B2B business overall.
• When attending events, it’s important to do some research about the people you plan to meet in person so that you have background and context to any conversations.
• HubSpot is the most important tool for BI Tech’s content-based marketing efforts.
• BI Tech is connecting with its audience by sharing content on LinkedIn and gets engagement by asking questions of the day and reusing content from their blog posts.

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 Amy Sitnick, Vice President of Marketing of Greenphire. The interview takes a look into Amy’s past work experience in the financial sector and then how she got into a new field of “clintech” at Greenphire. Amy discusses some of the challenges faced with the absence of events and how her team builds a content strategy around product launches.

• Amy provides some insight into her past working experience which includes roles within financial services and B2B marketing.
• Amy discusses how Greenphire is a unique combination of financial services and healthcare - a term she likes to call “clintech” as the company helps facilitate financial information within the context of a clinical trial.
• Greenphire helps remove all the financial and logistical obstacles from clinical trials and stakeholders around the world. 
• Greenphire has helped automate the process of reimbursement of Clinical trials for participants.
• Amy discusses some of the initial steps she took to understand Greenphire’s ideal customer profile - including interviewing people in her own LinkedIn network and staff members when arriving at the company.
• Amy discusses the importance of messaging (referencing Simon Sinek’s “Know Your Why”) and really addressing a customer’s pain points when developing content.
• During the onset of quarantine, Amy discussed how the organization put an even bigger emphasis on the messaging they were placing in front of prospects and customers.
• During the interview, Amy mentioned that “patient convenience” really means a different thing during a pandemic and discussed how Greenphire is aiming to focus on education during clinical trials once those become more commonplace again.
• The company typically participates in over 25 trade shows each year and that strategy has changed quite a bit in 2020.
• As trade shows fall off, Amy and her team shifted focus to other initiatives like a redesign/redevelopment of the company’s website.
• Pausing the traditional customer journey during a pandemic allows Greenphire to focus on some of their core marketing initiatives - like messaging and the website.
• One of the challenges Amy discusses is the very active fall season that may materialize - as events get turned back on.
• One of the ways Amy and her team determine the schedule of content is based upon product and feature launches throughout the year.
• Amy discusses a strategy where she interviews senior members of Greenphire to capture unique insights for content.
• Amy discusses the process she uses to determine the types of content created - whether it’s a blog post, white paper, video or other format.
• Amy breaks dow

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 Ivan Gomez, Senior Director of Global Sales Development at Tenable Network Security. Ivan Gomez walks us through some of his major lessons learned from his 25-year experience in sales development and inside sales. He discusses what it’s like to establish, launch and grow a global organization using a very strong sales cycle process.

• Ivan talks about his past work experience prior to joining Tenable - he’s worked for startups and large companies.
• Tenable’s mission is to empower organizations to understand and reduce their cyber risk.
• Tenable provides solutions to small, medium, and larger organizations to help mitigate their cyber risk.
• The sales development team has a very clear mission on what their objectives are - to drive pipeline with qualified sales opportunities.
• In order to drive opportunities, the sales and marketing teams must be closely aligned.
• At Tenable, sales development reports to the sales team versus the marketing team...however, it’s important to recognize that they work closely with marketing.
• When a company grows, Ivan talks about the importance of having sales development report to sales versus marketing.
• Tenable has a strong focus on human capital development with the young professionals who are a part of the sales development team.
• Ivan talks about the importance of a “full funnel approach” with sales development and how it’s crucial for sales to have a complete understanding of the industry and specific pain points of customers.
• Ivan discusses the importance of understanding the entire buying committee - not just the CISO...but project managers, network security professionals and more.
• When launching campaigns at Tenable, Ivan discusses the approach of a “campaign in a box” and how the organization aligns marketing and sales together from the beginning.
• With outbound sales, you go after the prospects that you definitely want to work with versus those who engage with webinars or other inbound marketing efforts.
• Ivan discusses Tenable’s focus on its website and the resources available (i.e., podcast about cybersecurity).

• When discussing outbound sales, Ivan mentioned “...when you go outbound, you get what you want. There are some individuals that despite our best marketing efforts, they just don't raise their hands for a webinar. They don't attend a particular trade show. They don't download the information. These are individuals that are extremely busy. So consequently, we have to go in a very targeted approach and implement what we call our account based marketing strategies…”
• Ivan spoke a bit about intent data and how it’s important to combine intent data with a very

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 Aditya Vempaty, the VP of Marketing at Synthego. Aditya chats about his past working experience prior to Synthego and highlights how it’s important to build trust with prospects with B2B marketing. Aditya also covers why he enjoys the startup culture so much and pinpoints what drives him as a marketer.

• Aditya’s education included an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech and he started his professional career as a programmer before moving into a marketing role.
• Aditya discusses his inclination towards startup environments and highlights why he’s attracted to these types of companies. 
• During the interview, Aditya provides some context to what Synthego does - it’s a genome engineering company and develops products for scientists & researchers. 
• The organization’s ideal customer profile is someone who understands the power of CRISPR and can utilize full stack genome editing.
• When coming on board, Aditya focused on purely understanding customers through conversations with researchers. Aditya had conversations with over one hundred customers in his first quarter.
• Aditya utilized conversations from the Synthego inside sales team as a way to develop an understanding of the company’s customer base.
• When arriving at Synthego, the team had content in place and had marketing running...but he then shifted the focus to educating the customer.
• Aditya developed a process for creating content around CRISPR and its uses - not just from blog posts, but also guides that talked about how to get started with CRISPR and how to get started with genome engineering.
• One of the big pillar pieces of content that’s worked quite well for Synthego is their industry report - a process that includes data from surveys (from customers, non-customers and industry leaders).
• Developing educational content for customers (as well as creating SEO value) is not a short-term game...it’s a long-term strategy that does take time - so it’s important to set expectations with the company up front.
• For short-term leads, Synthego focused on events and that helped balance some of their long-term strategies around content.
• He explained the difference between scaling a business versus growing a business.
• Long-term marketing initiatives can be less expensive overall, but they take a lot of time to build. On the other hand, short-term investments which drive leads can be more expensive.
• Aditya breaks down some of the key metrics the team monitors on the marketing team and stresses the importance of always keeping an eye on revenue as well.
• Synthego works hard on delivering valuable content for the end-user.
• He pointed out the

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 Jenn Steele, the Chief Product Officer at ORSNN. The interview focuses on Jenn’s past experiences with large organizations like Amazon and Hubspot, and then breaks down a lot of her strategy with a brand new startup environment at ORSNN.

• Jenn confesses to being the most driven, most aimless person you’ll ever meet!
• Jenn spent quite a bit of her professional career running IT departments at law firms and then moved to Amazon (as a product marketer), Hubspot and other startups in the Seattle, WA area.
• Right now, ORSNN is pre-revenue, pre-funding - so it’s truly at a very early stage.
• Jenn talks about the excitement around finding product/market fit, defining the true need within the marketplace, understanding customers and many of the other fundamental components of a startup’s success.
• Jenn’s tenure with Hubspot allowed her to really get a true understanding of inbound marketing and how people struggled to get it off the ground.
• ORSNN brokers whole loan trades between financial institutions - and this concept was very foreign to Jenn when she initially got started with the company.
• Jenn’s roots in account-based marketing have proven to be effective with both raising money and initiating customer relationships at ORSNN.
• After determining the “who” you are talking about, Jenn breaks down the importance of the messaging framework with customers.
• Jenn talks about the difference of tactics between a very small team at a startup versus the larger, 30-person team she had experience with at other companies.
• Jenn talks about understanding best practices within ABM and other marketing tactics...and then adapting them to your own ideal customer profile.
• Jenn discussed the importance of ensuring content works across both sales and marketing when selling to the enterprise. 
• When selling to the enterprise, it’s important to keep in mind that the person conducting the research is often just a part of the overall buying committee.

• Jenn mentioned “...the number one thing, whatever you're trying to do is answer two questions. What are you trying to do? And who is the person on the other end of the communication?”
• Jenn said that “every marketing tactic works until it doesn’t.” 
• Jenn talked about content when marketing to enterprises - “So, you know, for enterprise it's not actually that you need less content, you just need it in different ways. And the way that you just talked about marketing and sales playing together with content is exactly what drives the enterprise content development process

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.