When Steve Pollak describes his marketing philosophy, he uses a baseball analogy. 

“You can't hit a home run from the dugout,” says Steve who is the Director of Marketing and Design Services at Banyan Hill Technologies, a firm specializing in the Internet of Things (IoT) for a range of industries. 

As a result, Steve spends a lot of time in the top and middle of the sales funnel, focusing on increasing brand awareness so that when prospects are ready to execute a project they go with Banyan instead of other companies.

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Steve, who started his career as a newspaper journalist before making his way into SEO and marketing, details how he juggles marketing priorities across brand awareness, lead generation, and customer retention. 

Plus, he discusses how the lengthy customer journey — which is at least six months long — affects marketing. “You're really getting married to the person when you sign up with Internet of Things software — this is pretty big enterprise relationship,” 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.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown interview Jaimie Anzelone, the Director of Marketing Communications at Sitehands. This interview focuses on how she helped build the marketing infrastructure for a startup that spun out of another 25-year old company. Jaimie talks about the challenges posed by the pandemic and how the organization communicates with their technical community and customer community.

Highlights

• Jaimie starts the interview by providing some insight into her marketing career and she mentions how she got her first exposure by writing about FinTech. Jaimie started a blog called FunTech to explore a lot of the new companies offering payment functionality (i.e., Venmo).
• Jaimie mentions how she sees different companies emerging every day, and that's what attracted her to the IT services space.
• Jaimie talks about the company's ideal customer profile, which would be any large enterprise company that needs IT field services.
• The company provides the technicians at the customer locations, to help, support, maintain, upgrade the different technologies that they have in their organization.
• She talks about how the company is dealing with the current pandemic situation and coping with the new environment of remote working.
• To pivot and support their clients, they are working from their client's conference room and setting up remote working stations.
• Sitehands has big fortune 500 companies, even some smaller, medium-sized businesses as their clients. A lot of initial clients, who were very large enterprises, stemmed from relationships that existed with the original IT company.
• Sitehands is a provider community, and their technicians are going out in the field and implementing and delivering the work. 
• She talks about the company's efforts to make sure that their technician community feels secure and knows that there is still work for them...but it’s just a different environment.
• She also discusses how the Coronavirus pandemic has impacted businesses and mentioned how many organizations are trying to figure out how to keep their business running while still complying with company standards, security, and regulations.
• She talks about her concerns regarding remote working and its proper implementation, which is impossible without appropriate collaborative tools and the right setup.
• In current times, communication is quite different, and the channels which are brought into use are changing, and communicat

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 and Tristan Pelligrino chat with Josh Blanton, VP of marketing at Corevist. This interview takes a deeper look into Josh’s past experience as a marketing consultant- where he worked with both startups and larger organizations like Cisco. Josh highlights some of the key demand generation activities at Corevist and discusses how the company competes with larger organizations by focusing on organic content for the enterprise.

Highlights

• Josh starts the conversation by sharing some insight into his background and how he enjoys the faster paced environment of a startup.
• Josh introduces the audience to Corevist, which is a B2B commerce platform that directly integrates with a company’s ERP system - most notably SAP.
• The company is helping its large enterprise clients move to online commerce and avoid archaic situations with fax orders, phone orders, etc.
• Josh breaks down the company’s lead generation efforts which mostly stem from the development of organic content and paid ads (to organic content).
• Corevist does not have BDRs or SDRs in place to sell to the enterprises - nearly 95% of leads come from inbound marketing efforts.
• Josh breaks down the approach he took when arriving at Corevist, which was to initially identify what’s working and validate using real data.
• At many tech companies, there are large investors in place and there’s access to a wide range of resources - at Corevist, Josh had to build something scalable without these types of resources.
• A combination of SEO tools and techniques are used to drive Corevist’s organic traffic strategy - tools such as ahrefs are important to detecting what enterprise level prospects are searching for.
• Identifying keywords and long-tail keywords with the right search intent have become an important part of the organic content strategy.
• Generally, over the life cycle of a normal sales cycle, the company gets anywhere between 100 to 200 different clicks on thought leadership content through different channels.
• Josh heavily relies on SEO and Backlinko for B2B marketing.

Key Points

• Corevist has built its lead generation efforts mostly on organic conte

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 Emily Negrin Director of Global Communication and Marketing at GEOSYS. This interview focuses on Emily’s past work experience and how she transitioned from the B2B side of the food business to the agricultural world. Emily takes a deeper dive into how she helped implement marketing strategies for a 30-year old company battling a number of new agtech startups.

Highlights

• Emily starts the interview by providing some insight into her past experiences prior to joining GEOSYS - she started her career with the consumer side of public relations and worked with several agencies in the Minneapolis area.  
• She decided to change her career from the B2B side of the food business into the world of agriculture and “Agtech.”
• Emily mentions how she worked for a few years at Land O’Lakes - in their wind field business and was introduced to GEOSYS from that experience. 
• GEOSYS is actually an older company with over thirty years of experience in the agricultural technology industry. 
• The company uses satellite imagery to monitor how crops are growing across the globe and this data is used for all of the businesses “around a farmer” which include insurance companies, bankers, commodity traders and more.
• Emily came on board at GEOSYS about four years ago and helped them start their marketing and communications efforts.
• GEOSYS found that a variety of Silicon Valley startups surfaced within agtech and a stronger focus on marketing and communications became inevitable in order to differentiate the company from new players.
• Emily talks about the difference between agency work and being on the corporate side of marketing and communications.
• GEOSYS doesn’t sell anything directly to farmers and is focused on being a trusted advisor to those who are working directly with farmers.
• Emily talks through an earlier initiative, which was helping business people understand the market so they could ask better questions and make better decisions themselves - it wasn’t about promoting anything around GEOSYS.
• Emily describes the overarching custom journey which is very long and requires a lot of information along the way.
• GEOSYS has several different levels of service, some solutions are completely custom and involve a lengthy implementation process.
• The company uses social heavily to distribute content and educate the mar

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  Mae Cichelli, Senior Marketing Manager at Bluedot. This interview focuses on Mae’s past work experience and how she transitioned between B2C and B2B in the retail and sports industries. Mae talks about how the company transitioned into ABM and what was involved when the team decided to get more focused with targeting.

Highlights

• Mae starts the conversation by sharing her past work experience with both B2C and B2B technology companies.
• She talks about her experience in the sports industry where she sold software to sports teams.
• After selling software to sports teams, Mae worked as a Marketing Director for the University of San Francisco and helped them with selling tickets online, implementing mobile ticketing, building an app, launching an app...and really just taking care of season tickets holders.
• Mae talks about Bluedot’s ideal customers, which include tolling companies and enterprise companies who can take advantage of a customer’s location (mobile ordering with retail or restaurants, etc.).
• Instead of getting cash out, Bluedot helps their customers “unlock the power of place” and use location data to enhance experiences for their customers.
• She talks about how working with enterprise clients requires a lot of specific needs, which drove Bluedot into more of an ABM strategy. 
• Mae talks about some of the challenges with website traffic that’s not targeted - this led to leads that weren’t really qualified and contributed to a lot of “noise” with their marketing.
• After analyzing the leads and realizing that a lot of traffic was noise, the team decided to analyze the types of traffic that they wanted - and really honed in on their SEO strategy.
• The company makes strong use of introductions made by investors and this process has really helped get their organization to the next level.
• Bluedot is very thoughtful about content and strives to be just very deeply embedded in the industry. 
• She loves launching different kinds of campaigns, with different types of content formats, to strike up engagement with prospects.
• Bluedot strives to have a fair mix of new top of funnel content, which is educational.
• She explains that once a prospect has downloaded their demo app, they send them an unexpectedly delightful message - this helps to delight a prospect right away.

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 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.

Highlights

• 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.

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.

Highlights

• 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 l

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.

Highlights

• 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.

Key Points

• 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.”

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. 

Highlights

• 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 m

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.

Highlights

• 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 indu

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.