Tech Qualified

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Ryan O'Hara, the VP of Growth and Marketing at LeadIQ. The interview focuses on his past experiences and how he went from a prospecting role to more of a marketing-based role at LeadIQ. Ryan takes a deeper dive into account-based marketing strategies and pinpoints how he’s building the brand at LeadIQ through content.

• Ryan O'Hara starts the conversation by sharing his past work experience as a BDR at a company called Dyn in Manchester, New Hampshire.
• Ryan explains why branding yourself on social media posts and LinkedIn is important and discusses how it’s crucial to just showcase your own unique personality.
• Ryan talked about his initial days at LeadIQ and how he changed the approach from a “sage brand” to a “gesture brand.”
• LeadIQ saves sales teams time and makes it a lot easier for clients to capture contact data and push to different sales tools.
• The biggest thing that LeadIQ does for their clients is it helps create a better first impression with prospects. 
• Ryan discussed account-based marketing strategies at LeadIQ.
• Ryan loves to make people laugh and he discusses the approach he takes with the content he shares on LinkedIn and other platforms.
• Ryan suggested a revolutionary idea of putting sales reps in the content (or ads) and retargeting the audience. 
• A key strategy Ryan discusses is retargeting using human beings (or reps) instead of constantly hitting people over the head with the brand.
• One of the topics discussed included branding people within the organization and giving life to content (versus just a generic brand message).
• He breaks down the concept of thought leadership and discusses how people at any level can create great content - because everyone has stories and can “connect” with those in their industry.
• Ryan discussed his love for podcasts as it allows you to repeat, re-engage, and retell stories about your business.
• He mentioned the importance of consistency in creating content which, by the way, shouldn’t be boring. 
• Ryan takes inspiration from many B2C brands and then tries to apply some of those same strategies to B2B content.

• Ryan mentioned his working pattern and said “all the videos I put out on LinkedIn, I'm trying to make fun and entertaining. I'll make fun of things, but I'll still offer you insight. Like...I'll give you advice on how to write a good cold email, but I might make fun of my stupid haircut.”
• Ryan quoted “A brand is really important. If your n

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. 

Episode Summary: 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Jennifer Pepper, the Head of Content Marketing at Unbounce. This podcast interview takes a look into Jennifer’s past experiences with B2B tech companies, highlights some of the key strategies Unbounce uses for evergreen content and pinpoints some exciting new functionality rolling out with the Unbounce platform.

Episode Highlights:

• Jennifer discusses her background before arriving at Unbounce.
• Jennifer mentions her work with Vidyard, where she worked with great mentors and learned about full funnel video marketing campaigns.
• Jennifer talks about how she built the content engine at Unbounce and mentions how the company has nearly tripled in size since her arrival.
• Jennifer mentions what users get out of the Unbounce platform - designed to help customers building high converting landing pages.
• Jennifer’s job with content primarily focuses on creating material that’s helpful and interesting to marketers.
• Jennifer discusses the structure of Unbounce’s marketing team and covers how her role as Head of Content Marketing fits into the equation.
• At Unbounce, the team uses a Miro board to track content ideas and brainstorm about content marketing projects.
• Jennifer talked about three key components to the company’s content marketing efforts - focused on 1) “content bingo” or mapping content to the customer journey, 2) Organic opportunities to drive traffic and 3) Upcoming products and feature launches.
• During the interview, Jennifer described the importance of determining the intent around keywords.
• The company outlines major content initiatives quarter by quarter and develops a series of content briefs to plan for the content and distribution aspects of the piece.
• Because blog posts weren’t having a long life, the company established a campaign strategy and promotions part of the marketing team - this helped extend the life of content.
• The content marketing team strives to work alongside the product team to develop content around new features.
• Jennifer walks through some of the trends with landing pages over the years and how Unbounce has adapted to customers’ needs.
• Jennifer dives into the machine learning and artificial intelligence features that will be rolling out within Unbounce.
• During the conversation, Jennifer talks about the importance of personalization and how Unbounce technology can help drive conversions with some of the new features on its roadmap.

Key Points:

1. Accordi

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 Matouš Roskovec, the Creative Lead at Avocode. The interview focuses on the past experiences of Matouš as a copywriter and how he’s transitioned to leading a team responsible for campaigns and content on a variety of different platforms. Learn how the organization builds their conversion strategy after attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to their content.

• Matouš provides some insight into his past work experience which includes copywriting with a couple of advertising agencies before arriving at Avocode.
• He talked about his working experience as a freelance copywriter for several years before joining Avocode.
• Matouš discusses the ideal customer profile of Avocode...which aims to bridge the gap between designers and developers.
• The company provides a design collaboration platform for agencies, startups, enterprises and pretty much any entity that needs to code websites or apps.
• Matouš talked about how the web has evolved in the past four years and how Avocode originally started as a development agency.
• Avocode’s founders dealt with the problem of combining design and development, developed several plugins and ultimately landed on developing a single tool which could open a variety of design file formats.
• He explained their typical customer’s working process which includes the whole workflow of the design process and working through feedback until the design is finalized.
• Matouš discusses how the Avocode marketing team is constructed - a combination of three teams in Growth, Creative and Customer Success.
• Avocode’s growth team constantly evaluates the company’s pricing packages and feature set to align with customer expectations and requirements.
• Avocode uses over 30 paid tools for marketing (Notion, Intercom, etc) and the combination of a variety of SaaS tools allows their small team to be highly efficient.
• While talking about content, Matouš also talks about The Grit which is a blog series of branded content by Avocode.
• The Grit is a set of written interviews with thought leaders in the design and development space (check out Product Design Tips from the Twitter Hashtag Inventor, Chris Messina)
• He explained a content strategy which involves the 20% / 80% rule. The team spends 20% of their time creating new content and 80% of their time optimizing and distributing existing content. 
• Matouš emphasizes the importance of having marketing inspiration outside the industry you work in (he described StudioBinder as a key inspiration for him).

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 talk with Kirti Dewan, the VP of Marketing at Bugsnag. Kirti chats about her role as a consultant prior to joining Bugsnag and then takes us through some of the major marketing initiatives she’s spearheading at the company. Kirti has a wide range of marketing leadership experience with startups and brings a lot to the table with her role at Bugsnag.

Episode Highlights:

• Kirti discusses a bit about her background both as a consultant and as an employee  for various startup tech companies.
• Kirti talks about Bugsnag and its mission to be an application stability and management platform.
• Bugsnag helps companies capture errors and then prioritize and fix the errors within their development lifecycle.
• When Kirti joined the team, it had three employees on the marketing side - now she leads a team of six.
• When coming on board, Kirti had to focus on a lot of the foundational components to marketing - the marketing function inside a young company tends to need a lot more structure before growing too much.
• Kirti discusses the responsibilities of a marketing organization now, it's very difficult to be both tactical and strategic at the same time.
• Documentation was a big focus for the team as it started to build out various functions, especially for events.
• Kirti discusses the importance of communicating feature launches with their product, especially for those that are very important to the customer base.
• Kirti built out a lot of foundational elements for their content marketing - including explainer videos and other long-form materials.
• During the interview, Kirti talked about how she helped change the structure of the company so that content became a focus and a responsibility for everyone.
• Kirti described marketing and marketing initiatives as a “laser pointer” and how it’s important not to chase other projects or try to “boil the ocean.”
• As a startup, you can’t place your bets all over the place - it’s important to focus on a few channels and go deeper with strategy and tactics.
• Kirti discusses the development of their ABM strategy, which isn’t a “full blown strategy” - but a strategy that has a focus on segmentation.
• At Bugsnag, the company divides their content into four different “swim lanes” - areas focused on engineering, product features, thought leadership and sales enablement.
• The team develops a set of content initiatives for the entire quarter and assigns writers to each of the pieces to ensure a consistent cadence.
• Bugsnag is fortunate to have excellent writers within their development team and these folks contribute greatly to the highly technical content featured on the organization’s website.

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 the Head of Marketing at COTA, Jaimee Ryan. The podcast episode uncovers Jaimee’s journey as a B2B marketer, why she enjoys the startup culture, how she built a strong marketing foundation and what’s on the horizon with COTA’s marketing plans.

Episode Highlights:

• Jaime talks about her earlier career...working for a series of startups
• Jaime breaks down how she came across the opportunity to work with COTA and why she loves the startup environment
• She discusses how COTA’s mission is important and how it connects with her as a marketer
• COTA works with Life Sciences companies, Provider organizations and Payers - all which require different strategies.
• The organization’s primary source of revenue is through the Life Sciences target audience.
• COTA provides organizations with real world data that can be used to accelerate clinical trials.
• One of the major challenges COTA’s target audience faces is the fact that clinical trials are constantly under scrutiny and must continue to be more efficient.
• COTA’s technology takes a lot of unstructured data and formulates the information in a way that makes sense for their customers.
• Jaimee describes the state of marketing when she came on board and what she did to build the foundation.
• At COTA, it was important to establish the company’s credibility in their space and a lot of focus was put into that effort during Jaimee’s first year.
• In-person events were never a big ROI for COTA and they focus on promoting the research done by their innovative employees.
• Education material is a very large part of the company’s marketing strategy - building content around real world data and real world evidence.
• One of COTA’s big company goals in 2020 is to increase brand awareness.
• Jaime breaks down how her team develops goals - a focus on quarterly objectives called “rocks” drives the process.
• COTA has a dedicated team member who manages the company’s rocks and holds everyone accountable.
• Jaimee works to get feedback from internal and external resources - especially when trying to determine what content is the most effective.
• One of Jaimee’s most effective approaches to understanding COTA’s customers is through listening to sales calls.

Key Points:

1. Jaimee talked about her decision process to get back into the startup world and stated “I decided life waits for no one, so, we just kind of had to go for it. So I jumped back in.”

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 Laurie Hood, SVP Marketing at Mobilewalla. The interview focuses on Laurie’s experience in a B2B capacity - mostly with technology and technology marketing. Laurie takes a deeper dive into how marketing functions at Mobilewalla, which focuses on selling to B2C companies across a variety of industries such as retail, telecommunications, travel and financial services.

Episode Highlights:

• Laurie breaks down her past work experience before arriving at Mobilewalla in 2018.
• Laurie started her career as a consultant at Accenture, and later on joined IBM where she was VP of Product Marketing. 
• Mobilewalla marketing focuses on three primary things, driving brand awareness, generating demand, and enabling our sales teams. 
• Mobilewalla is a data and insights company, with expertise in consumer intelligence solutions.
• Laurie was the first marketer at Mobilewalla. 
• At Mobilewalla, the company also partners with advertising agencies to help them serve their clients.
• They help companies increase customer loyalty, grow revenue and improve the predictiveness of their models and effectiveness of their marketing spend.
• Mobilewalla places content on their own channels, website, social media properties and partners with groups who serve or try to attract the same target audiences. 
• Mobilewalla is also shifting towards becoming more digital by actively participating in webinars and other virtual formats.
• Laurie talked about how her team is reaching out to local groups, who would have done in-person events, and then offering content to help them produce virtual events.
• On a quarterly basis, the marketing focuses on publishing a significant piece of content - like a white paper - and then two to three blog posts a month covering themes such as data enrichment or leveraging artificial intelligence in marketing.
• Laurie talks about how the company has developed content in a designated section on their website as “Technology Briefs” and discusses how these pieces take a much deeper dive into areas not available in traditional blog posts.
• Laurie also mentioned that she started many marketing initiatives from a standing stop...and started with a website for the most part. So, there’s been a strong focus on just creating foundational material needed for the marketing team.
• Laurie’s important lesson for marketers “What do I want to do, but what can I do and what can we do and do well".
• Laurie uses HubSpot’s blog for staying up to date and for ongoing marketing education.

Key Points:

• Laurie states “ So for most marketers, whether you're B2B or

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 sit down with Kevin Alansky, the Chief Marketing Officer of Higher Logic. The interview focuses on Kevin’s career as a B2B marketer, his experience leading marketing efforts for technology companies, the evolution of the CMO over the years and highlights some of Kevin’s goals with Higher Logic’s marketing team.

Episode Highlights:

• Kevin breaks down his past work experience before arriving at Higher Logic in 2019.
• Kevin talks about his experience leading marketing teams for analytics companies and going head-to-head with large analytics companies like Tableau and Sisense.
• Higher Logic is predominantly focused on two areas - associations and corporate markets.
• Higher Logic’s online community platform has a strong customer base and the organization has expanded into marketing automation with recent acquisitions (Real Magnet and Informz).
• When Kevin joined the marketing team, it was at an inflection point and the team was moving from a startup to a more mature model.
• Using and analyzing data was a key component of the growth within Higher Logic’s marketing team (now consisting of 16-17 team members).
• As the team grew, project management and communication became more vital as the team had to organize their work more efficiently.
• Kevin experienced a bit of culture shock coming from professional sports marketing to higher education (when he transitioned to Blackboard several years ago) and he was able to learn the importance of understanding your target audience.
• When arriving at Higher Logic, Kevin focused a lot on regular cadences with not only the marketing team, but with teams outside of marketing.
• With 3,000 existing customers, Kevin placed a focus on improving the onboarding experience and building out the customer marketing team.
• Kevin discusses the strong content team that’s in place at Higher Logic - which includes a strong commitment to thought leadership material that’s beneficial to both customers and prospects.
• Higher Logic is currently in the process of rebuilding the company’s website and improving its current marketing technology stack.
• Kevin outlined the Community Leader Changemaker program launched by the organization and discussed how Higher Logic highlighted influencers and other thought leaders in the association space.
• Kevin talked about the evolution of CMOs in the 90s (being brand-driven) and how the role has evolved to more of a data-driven role now...especially with B2B SaaS companies.
• One-on-ones are a big part of the communication at Higher Logic and Kevin has a focus on his team’s career aspirations and helping them along their career path.
• If you want to connect with Kevin on Linke

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 the Vice President of Marketing at Backblaze, Ahin Thomas. The interview focuses on Ahin’s past experience, Backblaze’s highly effective inbound engine, and how the company competes with their competitors. Backblaze’s mission is to make backup software elegant and provide complete peace of mind to SMB storage requirements.

Episode Highlights:

• Ahin provides some highlights on his past work experience which included his role as a director in the E-commerce industry.
• Ahin discusses the company’s ideal customer profile which includes SMBs (SysAdmins, CTOs or the people running the storage infrastructure at a company).
• Ahin pinpoints that Backblaze’s storage solutions are more affordable than their competitors who are Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
• Ahin talks about their affordable pricing - a quarter of the price of Amazon’s storage costs and 1/9th the price of Amazon’s downloading costs.
• Backblaze’s pricing table is a single line, with no fine print. This is a stark contrast to other competitors, with confusing price structures for the SMB marketplace.
• Backblaze is a bootstrapped organization, with growth resulting from only $3 million in invested capital.
• The organization believes that their storage server is the first ever open-sourced hardware project.
• Ahin pinpoints the unique value proposition of Backblaze - that they are simple, reliable and just less expensive than anyone else. 
• Ahin is proud of the company’s success rate which has been growing at 40% year over year in the last two years.
• Ahin talks about the uniques for their content posted on their blog...which is focused on storage (recent numbers hit more than 3.25 million views) and aims to simply provide content that’s useful.
• Backblaze’s quarterly hard drive stats report has been an effective “content franchise” for over five years.
• A majority of Backblaze’s customers come to the organization because they have a fundamental problem with their workflows.
• Ahin says that Backblaze has over an Exabyte of stored customer data- placing it in the top 10 or 15 companies in the world (based on the amount of data stored)
• Ahin pinpoints how the actual customer milestones are a big deal to achieve and how Backblaze easily achieves it.
• Ahin says that listening to podcasts while commuting generates a lot of ideas for his work and keeps him up to speed with B2B tech marketing.

Key Points:

1. At Backblaze, we have been growing at 40% year over year in the last two years...entirely from our inbound efforts.
2. All five founders of Backblaze are still in their operatin

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 the CEO of Triblio, Andre Yee. The conversation pinpoints some of the major challenges with B2B marketing right now - especially with standard MQLs and the traditional “lead model”. Andre talks about the shortcomings of using some of the standard marketing automation tools and how companies can pivot a bit to help gain rapport with prospects before they reach out and engage directly.

Episode Highlights:

• Andre provide some highlights about his past work experience which includes a range of B2B technology companies
• Andre was a very early employee at Eloqua and helped grow the organization from around $15-$20 million to $125 million - in about 5.5 years
• Triblio was sparked by a lot of the experience Andre had with many first generation marketing automation platforms and technologies
• Triblio helps companies execute account-based marketing from end-to-end instead of piecing several different types of technologies together
• Andre discusses some of the major components to an account-based marketing strategy  and how an organization can set up an effective foundation
• To execute and account-based marketing strategy effectively, one of the most important things to note is the customization with your prospects
• Based on research conducted by Triblio, it’s important to understand that many companies interact with prospects 90 days or more before they fill out a form
• With an account-based marketing strategy, companies can actually be more proactive in how they engage their prospects and avoid sitting back until someone raises their hand and provides contact information
• Retargeting is effective, but that whole process depends upon a prospect actually visiting the website first
• With Triblio, companies have the ability to customize a visitor's experience on a website without any type of programming
• Content is truly the fuel behind your ABM campaigns and if you don’t have great content, you’re going to have limited success engaging prospects 
• Andre sees a very strong trend towards video and developing a variety of types of content for prospects to consume in a number of different ways 
• For those looking to get more information from ABM experts, Triblio actually has a new video series featuring interview segments from experts in the field

Key Points:

1. Many of the methods and techniques used 10 years ago in B2B marketing no longer work in the same way - evidence points to the fact that MQLs only close at less than a 1% rate now.
2. The traditional model suggests that you go out and get as many leads as possible versus focusing on the specific accounts in your target market.
3. Most

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 the CMO of Apixio, Mark Scott. The interview focuses on Mark’s experience in a B2B capacity - mostly with healthcare companies that include direct delivery, medical devices, biotech and now software. Mark takes a deeper dive into how marketing functions for Apixio, which is essentially a data science company that takes structured and unstructured data inputs and creates unique insights from the information.

Episode Highlights:

• Mark provides some highlights on his past work experience which includes jobs in a variety of healthcare companies
• Mark pinpoints the  unique value proposition of Apixio, which is essentially a data science company
• Mark talks about joining a growth stage company and focusing on building brand awareness
• The Apixio field sales team is one of the best that Mark has ever worked with in the industry
• The organization focuses a lot on an ABM strategy - which includes targeting specific accounts and building towards an in-person meeting
• Mark discusses the types of changes the organization had to make as the world battles with COVID-19
• Mark discusses the types of communications the organization rolled out to prospects and customers during the period of social distancing
• In many ways, Mark has seen that a lot of people in his particular environment were exhausted by the negativity surrounded by COVID-19, so it was important to strike a balance with communication
• As the pandemic situation surfaced, Apixio has seen the buyer’s journey slow down
• Mark sees that prospects are asking more questions and objections are coming to the surface - so this is fueling the creation of a variety of content
• Some of the personas that Apixio works with are completely overrun with information right now with the pandemic...so connecting with them is not a huge priority - they don’t necessarily have open ears right now
• Over the next three months, Apixio is really placing a focus on content that will help the organization establish their position in the marketplace over the long-term

Key Points:

1. When marketing in healthcare, it's crucial to build trust with your technology.
2. A big initiative of Apixio was surveying the organization’s key customers and determining what types of information they were looking for - especially as they started working from home.
3. Right now, in these tough times, is when a brand’s true colors come to the forefront.

Resources Mentioned:

• Mark Scott: LinkedIn 

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.