Tech Qualified

When Louisy Raymond joined the Zipari team more than two years ago, she was the second member of its marketing department — and the only one who actually had a background in marketing.

Tasked with establishing a marketing strategy for the SaaS health care company, she used her 18 years of experience in the field to build her team and map out a cohesive plan. This included everything from redesigning the team’s sales decks to planning conferences and webinars.

On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Louisy who is now two years into her tenure as the senior vice president of marketing at Zipari.

She talks about how she approached the startup’s marketing strategy (health insurance companies are wary of startups — they see them fail all too often), targeted the software’s ideal audience (the highly educated C-suite) and built out content (super niche white papers).

At the end of the interview, Louisy reveals how she keeps her finger on the B2B marketing pulse. Spoiler: She loves Medium.com and podcasts.

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. 

Playing it safe with content is not optional for Chris Damico. 

With almost 20 years of marketing industry experience, he’s taking Penta Technologies — where he’s the Marketing Director — to new heights by introducing thought leadership into the organization’s content marketing strategy to help tackle some of the challenges facing the construction industry. The company develops enterprise construction software that helps construction, service, and engineering enterprises improve business performance.

“It’s just getting that knowledge out there that, Hey, you have a problem and here’s how you can streamline your payroll. Here’s how you can streamline your planning. It’s really helped us gain the trust of customers who might have not looked to us as a solution before.” 

In this episode, Chris explains how he’s doing that through webinars and testimonials. 

Additionally, Chris discusses content marketing hurdles. “I think the biggest challenge in content marketing is not deciding what to do. It’s deciding what not to do,” says Chris.  “And you know, a lot of times you’re not going to know that until you try it, so I say that when you try something and it doesn’t work, you have to be comfortable with letting go and then going for something that does.” 

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. 

Michael Wise says he’s selling a solution not a product, and this is essential to all aspects of marketing and the customer journey. 

As Director of Marketing & Strategy at Intelligent Contacts, a company that provides innovative cloud contact center communication, billing, and payment software for the healthcare and financial services industries, Michael focuses on brand management, lead-generation and strategy development for a technology product that can be difficult for clients to understand. 

So that’s why he tries to look at it from a different perspective, showing clients how to leverage their use of the latest in data management systems and machine learning to hook their own new clients. 

“The big thing is solution selling. We're not selling a product, we're selling a solution, so all of our communication is based on: ‘Hey, remember that problem that we both kind of identified that seemed to trigger some emotion in you that you want to get fixed immediately? Is that still a problem? We did agree that was something our solutions could fix.’,” Michael says. 

They try to look at these relationships more as partnerships, working alongside client companies to help them understand how to market their own products and services by showcasing the solutions Michael’s company offers. 

“We're saying not only will this help your business grow from today, but it'll help you get new business because you're now using the types of technology that are required to reel in the big fish.”

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 Trinity Nguyen joined lead generation solution UserGems as its Director of Marketing she made a bold move: She got management to move revenue contribution tracking to the marketing team. 

"Revenue is the only number that matters to us in marketing," she says. 

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Trinity discusses why marketing should have a front-row seat to the sales lifecycle. At UserGems, marketing takes an active role in listening to sales calls in the pipeline review, and both departments agree on leads before outreach. 

They don’t partition the pipeline like MQL and SQL, she says, "We look at the pipeline together. We review our pipeline pretty intensely every single week. It’s all hands on deck." She notes this collaboration is possible because UserGems is a small company, but they want to maintain that teamwork even as they grow.

She discusses why they’re more focused on LinkedIn than other social channels, and shares how she’s thinking about expanding content operations in the future (hint: They don’t want to create stuff that won’t actually be consumed).

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. 

Liam Moroney is no stranger to the ups and downs of startup life. 

“[T]here’s enormous risk that comes along with working at a startup, you don’t have the stability or predictability that a lot of big companies have,” says Liam who is VP of Marketing at Rocketrip, which helps enterprise companies reduce travel costs through employee award incentives. Rocketrip is Liam’s fourth startup. 

It’s a good thing that Liam can handle riding a professional roller coaster — doing marketing for a travel-related startup in the age of COVID-19 is tricky.    

In this episode, Liam discusses his tactics for changing the game for the travel rewards industry through content marketing, including the importance of updating Rocketrip’s messaging and the overall go-to-market strategy, with the understanding that there will be new concerns for travelers post-COVID. 

“There are anxieties. There are going to be challenges. There are going to be stresses when it comes to travel,” Liam acknowledges. “So we want to make sure that we’re leaning into that because we don’t want people to travel more than they need to, or more than they’re comfortable to.”

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 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.