The startup world isn’t for everyone, but Claudia Ring can’t help but be drawn to the “craziness” of them — even after working at IBM for several years.

On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Claudia about her most recent startup adventure as the Head of Marketing at rENIAC, a data engine platform.

rENIAC is a bit technical, to say the least, but Claudia succinctly defines the company’s mission, product and target audience before walking us through her experience building the startup’s marketing department from the ground up.

“A lot of teams will just start to try to run demand-gen programs without that foundation beneath their feet,” Claudia says. But you need, at the very least, a tool to track your analytics and a well-established voice and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

As if launching a startup’s marketing department isn’t enough, COVID-19 has really thrown a “monkey wrench” in things, Claudia says. But she’s rolled with it by planning a number of virtual events. Attendance has been surprisingly high, though she doesn’t expect the enthusiasm to last forever. When interest wanes, she’ll simply adapt — much like she does day-to-day at any startup she’s worked with.

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.

A great product is easy to sell, says Chris Gaebler, CMO of Marketing at Guardicore, a data center and cloud security company. 

On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Gaebler discusses collaboration with channel partners, the ways he maintains those relationships and the exploding creativity coming out of changes in the industry following COVID-19 restrictions.

“We're a leading cybersecurity company. It's an easy product or a solution to be a marketer of because it's really good, so I would say it's really fun to be a marketer in a company whose product is so good,” he says.

Chris was quick to come up with creative solutions for marketing during a pandemic and maintaining relationships at a distance. Chris believes marketers will be forced to push their creativity even further as the state of the world continues to evolve amidst the pandemic.  

“I think we're actually moving quickly beyond that to the post-COVID era kind of communication, which is like, what is the new value you can offer your customers?” he says.

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.

Providing digital banking software requires a long-term commitment between the service provider and the financial institution. For Kevin W., Brand and Marketing Manager at Tyfone, and Josh DeTar, VP of Sales and Marketing at Tyfone, that relationship is like a marriage.

In this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, the duo talk about how they work to establish and sustain those relationships and how their approach has had to change due to COVID-19.

Tyfone helps its customers make extensive digital change over a number of years. As a result, the company’s approach to sales and marketing is relationship intensive, enabling them to best help customers through the transition.

“It really takes a partnership between the provider and the financial institution to make that happen,” says Josh.

They used to rely on face-to-face interactions and trade shows for a lot of the relationship building. With the global spread of COVID-19, they’ve had to adjust their strategy to find similarly meaningful ways to connect with customers.  

“We've had to quickly divert a lot of funds and our way of thinking into content generation through creating relevant informative packets or just fun things that we're doing as a team and as a family to promote that relationship,” says Kevin.

One thing never changes, and that’s the quality of the relationship they’re seeking to build. 

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.

When COVID-19 hit, most marketers — especially those in the foodservice space — feared for the future of their industry. Jen Kern, CMO at Qu, an enterprise restaurant chain POS platform, saw an opportunity to reshape the way she markets to customers.

She listened to her customers’ needs, focusing on earning their trust when they needed it most. Though Jen doesn’t use annual marketing plans, 70% of the marketing budget was in events — so she had to quickly pivot Qu’s marketing efforts. That meant switching content plans, among other efforts. Qu’s marketing team created a COVID survival kit and a blog post about how restaurants can optimize their online menus for COVID. 

“Doing things that are going to be helpful — and that's the whole premise of inbound marketing … is helping and educating your buyer — not selling,” says Jen. 

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Jen goes into detail about how Qu shifted marketing plans to reflect the realities of the pandemic, which included launching an online ordering product that restaurants of all types can access and an initiative pairing restaurants with local first responders for food delivery. 

Plus, she discusses her top tips for success in marketing. “Listen to your gut. That’s the best advice I could give to marketers,” Jen says.

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.

Sean Spicer’s experience in digital marketing spans 20 years — and he hasn’t looked back.   

On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Sean, who is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Agile IT, a company that provides cloud-first managed services.

His company has been at the forefront of the digital revolution for years. But recently some things have changed.

When the stay-at-home orders came in as COVID-19 started spreading in the US, the phones started ringing off the hook. Companies needed solutions for their sudden remote workforce — and they needed them fast. 

“We're in a really fortunate place that this is a solution we've offered, and now we're just developing it a little bit more and delivering it a little bit faster,” he says.

For Sean, being able to provide essential services that allow people and their companies to work in safe conditions from their homes has also affected him personally, giving him renewed purpose: “Seeing those impacts and seeing how we're actually helping instead of just being another technology company really gives me chills.”

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.

As SVP of Marketing at Alpha, a rapid consumer research platform, Tom Burg has always pushed his clients to think digitally. Now, this is even more imperative — Tom’s team aims to find the best ways to reach and interact with people virtually.

On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Tom Burg talks about the ways he and his team are pushing the bounds of their marketing strategies, especially given the changing spaces of human interaction.

One way he has done this is by taking advantage of their podcast, which has been streaming for four years and has an established listenership. The podcast has been a great way to attract clients. 

“If people are taking the time to listen to the podcast, generally they're going to be a pretty good fit for our business.”

They are currently working on an experimental webinar program as well, which will focus on how to navigate the world today.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life for everyone. Nowhere is that more true than for the healthcare industry. So what do you do if your buyers are precisely those people, the ones on the frontlines of the crisis?

In this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Elyse Lazartic, Senior Manager of Sales and Programs at Waystar, a company that provides RCM technology for the healthcare industry, talks about the ways she has had to shift her thought process and marketing tactics to adapt to our current reality. 

“We've had to pivot quite a bit in terms of who we're targeting and how we're messaging and what solutions of our portfolio are most urgent for those providers right now, given the situation,” Elyse says. 

Her team has had to rethink tactics to try to understand what is most useful for the market at this time, which has meant adapting the content they are producing, the format of that content, the way they get buyer attention and how they interact with them throughout the customer journey, relying a lot more on digital and virtual methods. 

“It's about deeply understanding the problems, identifying with the buyers and then taking the solutions that you have developed and aligning them really closely with what that person is trying to solve for,” Elyse says.

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.

When Taylor Vossler joined technology consulting firm C3 Technology Advisors to lead marketing efforts, she wanted to pull a list of clients that had just experienced an outage with one provider and suggest that they reevaluate and create a backup plan. 

Good marketing, right? 

It would have been, but the company didn’t have the tools in place to segment a list that way. Fast forward a few months — Taylor convinced the company to implement Salesforce to better align sales and marketing. Next, she added Hubspot to improve marketing automation.

Her timing was serendipitous for a company that has relied heavily on physical events for demand generation. With face-to-face off the table for now and their largest event postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Taylor has helped the team pivot to more of an inbound strategy. 

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown talks with Taylor about how she’s expanding the 12-year-old firm’s marketing efforts, the challenges of positioning the firm as a trusted advisor since its service offering has changed over time, as well as how she’s able to align sales and marketing efforts.

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.

Collaboration seems to be a motto to live by for Kieran Farr, and as VP of Marketing for Bitmovin, Kieran has made it his particular mission to get his team working alongside the sales team to create positive change and forward momentum. 

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Kieran about how that alliance was formed, being a thought leader for different target audiences and how content plays into Bitmovin’s demand generation strategies.

Over the past two years, Kieran’s marketing team has worked alongside the sales team to implement a system of unified metrics through pipeline generation. This helps both teams work toward a unified goal and improve the quality of leads.

Kieran also builds relationships with other marketing executives, so he can ask questions and share information. For him, this has been an effective way to confirm strategies, make comparisons and explore improvements. 

“It does take time. It takes effort, but it's worth it, because you learn a lot and you make great relationships as well,” he says.

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.

Content production is important, but building relationships on the ground is far more crucial, according to Jeff Perkins, CMO and Head of Product at ParkMobile, an app that helps people find and pay for parking in over 400 cities across the U.S. 

“Build a peer group that you can go to and bounce ideas off of and share insights and share learning,” he says in this episode of Tech Qualified. “That will be one of the most valuable things you can have in your career.”

Jeff is a 10-year veteran of the advertising industry who now leads the marketing team at the startup, reinforcing their reputation as an industry thought leader.

At ParkMobile, Jeff nurtures crucial relationships with business partners, suppliers and municipal employees in the parking service industry while also navigating the behaviors and needs of customers. 

“It really is a fun opportunity where I'm able to work across B2B marketing and B2C marketing,” Jeff says. 

Jeff has championed his company’s role as an industry thought leader, particularly through the production of meaningful content. At both his previous and current job, he has found that providing information through webinars, newsletters and trade show events helps bring in new clients and partners and reinforces relationships.

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.