As President and CEO, I am responsible for setting the company’s vision and strategic direction along with managing all daily operations. This is my third business. I started in the restaurant business, owning and operating 35 Subway Sandwich franchises. This provided a foundation for operations, controls, and measurements. I also owned a sales training company, which gave me important insights into what sales needs from marketing to be successful.
After working for several software companies managing marketing, professional services, and channels, I discovered Eloqua in the early 2000s and saw the potential.
For the first time, I truly felt a professional calling as it combined my passion for sales, marketing, technology and consulting. I loved the product and the opportunity so much that I joined Eloqua and ran their professional services group. After working with an amazing team and developing many best practices that are today widely adopted, I realized that there was an opportunity to build a company.
My Team, My Champions
A few years ago we realized we were having the same challenges as our clients were – marketing had grown complex, there were too many things to do and not enough resources. As a fixed cost, we couldn’t justify adding to the investment as we were already spending a higher amount. So we moved our marketing department into our consulting team and became our own client. Today we have 15 people that regularly work on marketing projects and are led by our VP of Strategy and CMO, Kevin Joyce.
This allows us to use every skill-set we need to drive our marketing programs with no incremental headcount. Our entire team is customer-focused and is driven by creating results and value for our customers.
V3media Skills: I have a very tech-savvy and adaptive marketing, sales, and branding team
On a scale of 1 to 10 – 10. Our team is highly skilled. We have over 60 sales and marketing technology partners.
Our average employee has at least 5 different platform certifications. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how skilled we are in technology if there isn’t a sound strategy in place. We need to execute and we need to perform.
Marketing needs to be adaptive and agile. Too many marketers make the mistake of focusing on technology as a panacea and don’t focus on the things that really matter – the customer, the needs, the message, the content.
This allows us to use every skill-set we need to drive our marketing programs with no incremental headcount. Our entire team is customer-focused and is driven by creating results and value for our customers.
Unification of Sales and Marketing: Nope, Not happening Anytime soon!
Actually no, I don’t see either of these scenarios happening. Sales technology vendors still predominantly sell to sales and marketing technology vendors still predominantly sell to marketing. Until sales and marketing departments actually align and have shared business objectives, goals, and processes, no vendor or technology is going to magically bridge the gap. Marketers should be working actively to align their goals and measurements with sales and vice versa.
My Mentor, My Message to the V3media Industry
I draw inspiration from many places, but one of my favorite stories I like to share is from my time at Eloqua.
It was in my first few months and I had prepared a very sophisticated spreadsheet that had over 50 metrics on it for a marketing executive. I was really proud of it and went to share it with the CFO at the time, Ralf Riekers. He just shook his head and said “Jeff, I don’t need all these metrics to measure how well marketing is performing.
I just need one – Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). I look at how much money we invested in marketing last year and how much revenue we got in return. If the ratio went up from the year before, I am more inclined to approve a budget increase. If it stayed the same or went down, then the budget needs to be reduced until Marketing proves it can generate a return.”
This was 2005. That stays with me every day.
It’s not how much we do or how much we measure. It’s WHAT we do and WHY. Less is more. Quality over quantity. In other words, stop the insanity. Just because we can build more software and create another category, doesn’t mean we should. If we can’t even drive ubiquitous adoption of core marketing platforms, why are we creating more technology for every conceivable category? Let’s help marketing succeed by giving them ONE suite of tools that can be tailored to enable marketers to perform their jobs optimally and ultimately drive sales revenue.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]