In this episode, Geena Greguric, an independent marketing consultant, shares her experience marketing a B2B SaaS safety software company in the trucking industry. Geena discusses the challenges she faced and the strategies she employed to successfully market the product. She emphasizes the importance of leveraging CRM data and marketing insights to improve sales outcomes and foster a strong relationship between sales and marketing teams.
Geena Greguric is an experienced marketing leader who has led growth initiatives for tech companies like Idelic. She started her career in healthcare PR before pivoting into marketing roles at Information Age Technologies and eventually, Idelic, where she rose to Director of Marketing. She is now an independent marketing consultant helping brands develop winning strategies. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market:
- The trucking industry, despite being perceived as antiquated, is highly interested in safety technology.
- Differentiating the product from other tech companies in the crowded safety space was a major challenge.
- Creating brand awareness and educating the industry about the product and category were key objectives.
- The target market consisted of leaders in risk, safety, and operations in trucking companies of various sizes.
- Implement CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot to track key page visits and automate email marketing.
- Encourage a paradigm shift where all leads are seen as a joint effort between marketing and sales.
- Leverage data to make informed decisions about future marketing strategies and campaigns.
Resources:
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Quotables:
- 14:28 -“And something I’ve always said to the team when I manage them, and I still kind of push that message today to marketers that I talk to, is that you never want to look at your pipeline or in, or your, you know, leads as marketing or sales. You don’t want to say this is inbound versus outbound. Really, how I like to look at it is 100% of the pie is marketing. It just is, even if they aren’t inbound, they were influenced by marketing in some way, shape, or form. And at the same time, 100% of that pie is sales.”
- 07:24 – “So a part of our strategy was also to essentially take our founder and make him an influencer in the space. And so, yeah, a big part of that was building relationships with the different associations to, you know, get him on stage, on webinars, on, you know, on all these different platforms. My goal early on was to say, anywhere someone looked for information, how do we get our logo there? How do we get our input? And, it absolutely is important to eventually pepper in product marketing into that. But again, that, that top of funnel, it was really important to make sure that we were educating the industry on safety and putting ourselves in a place where, where we became a trusted source of knowledge when people had questions, we wanted them to think, oh, Idelic, and come to our website.”
- 19:06 – “Being from a startup, I have to say you have to collect the data. It’s so important to make sure you’re understanding where these leads are coming from. You’re understanding the success of your campaigns. But as I mentioned earlier, you have to trust your gut. Sometimes there’s going to be those campaigns that don’t have the numbers behind them. There’s going to be those things you do that, you know, you might hear a lot of word of mouth afterward, a lot of people talking about you, but there’s no way to really capture that. And so even though you’re not generating these crazy numbers, use your gut sometimes and take a leap and do something bold and make a statement, even if it’s not going to, you know, help drive a certain metric. Because at the end of the day, you can influence pipeline a lot by doing that.”
- 08:46 – Brian: “I know you’re gonna look at like revenue and conversions and stuff like that, but there had to be some kind of like a vibe there along the way where you’re like, yeah, this is the way we’re, this is the way it’s going to go.”
Geena: “So, you know, I, I always say revenue is number one. That’s always the thing I am, I’m looking at, right? And, and pipeline and kind of working your way back demos. But, you know, a, a big part of tracking the metrics was working hand in hand with the sales team very closely.” - 17:48 – Brian: “In your sort of varied marketing journey, what are the three biggest lessons you picked up along the way that you would’ve told your younger self?”
Geena: “Oh, those are great. That’s a great question. So the very first thing I would say is to really learn your industry and your target market, especially if you want a good content strategy that’s going to drive revenue when you’re putting out a webinar. The number one mistake I think I see a lot of people make is they’ll, they’ll put, you know, how to use our product to achieve XYZ. And you know, as much as we as marketers want to think that everyone cares about what we’re doing and wants to see what we’re doing at the end of the day, a lot of them don’t. Right? So if you’re putting out something that’s about your product, you’re going to get customers, which, if that’s your goal, that’s great and you’re going to get maybe some bottom-of-funnel folks who are in a consideration stage. But if you’re really focused on creating new pipeline revenue, you need to make sure that you understand your market enough, and you are enough of an expert in your space of it that you can deliver something that’s so thoughtful, and really is educating them on something that they, they didn’t otherwise know.”