Tech Qualified Motion

Dan Daron of Searchspring links an improved e-commerce customer experience directly to a company's bottom line. Merchandising and improved search solutions are important to this improved customer experience, whether the company is a retailer, brand, or B2B wholesaler or SAAS company.
"If a customer can't find the products that they're looking for, you've basically lost them. They have, little to no attention span these days," says Dan.
Calling on his experience at Searchspring and as an e-commerce and marketing consultant for 16 years, Dan provides tips on merchandising. He also discusses how Searchspring works with e-commerce teams to provide the tools and services to enable them to succeed. He describes how Searchspring is building relationships, becoming a thought leader in the e-commerce industry, and creating a community among e-marketers. He also gives hints about what the company's recent merger with Nextopia will mean for the industry. 
Highlights include:
Improving your search engine is a quick way to improve your bottom line. Customizing product recommendations will drive both upsells and cross-sells, while simultaneously improving the customer experience.   Searchspring gains customers through building relationships. It builds these relationships through a variety of channels including Sales Development Representatives, thought leadership, trade shows, media, and developing relationships within the tight-knit e-commerce community.

As a marketer and a creator, you know creativity is essential in this industry. But what you might not know: You could be thinking about creativity all wrong.
Now, that sounds a little oxymoronic. Isn’t creativity all about not having boundaries? Thinking big? Creating that “wow, genius” viral moment?
Jay Acunzo begs to differ. 
The award-winning podcast host, global keynote speaker, and author firmly believes creativity is less about coming up with sporadic, disruptive ideas and is instead something that should occur consistently on a more micro level. Spoiler: Putting processes in place to help you harness your creativity is key.
Jay has worked for some major tech companies, including Google and Hubspot, and he’s had a hand in helping grow startups, like Dailybreak Media and Boston Content. Now he’s doing his own thing at Marketing Showrunners, where he helps marketers from brands like Red Bull, BBC, Adobe and The New York Times best serve their audiences.
On a recent episode of Tech Qualified, Jay explains how he’s rethinking creativity — plus the essential role creativity plays in marketing.

Stephanie Cox, VP, Sales and Marketing at Lumavate talks with Tristan Pillegrino about her journey as a marketer. She reflects on the challenges of making her opinions and ideas heard earlier in her career. 
She recounts her progress along a path of personal growth from that early career experience, which led to her ultimate adoption of a professional philosophy grounded in proactively tackling problems independently, without permission. 
Stephanie reflects on her former sense of relentless determination to achieve perfection on all projects, and the problem with striving to maintain that personal standard over time, especially in terms of the trade-off of speed and quality. She discusses the evolution of her mindset from commitment to incessant pursuit of perfection in outcomes to a principle of iterative stages of development. Stephanie compares the objectives of achieving top quality and providing rapid results and talks about how the switch to focus on incremental improvement through processes of iteration has transformed her project management and team leadership methodologies.

Lindsay Tjepkema has spent her career in marketing, usually on branded content and improving customer experiences.  She wanted to broaden her reach and explored using audio content as a content marketing strategy.  However, in her previous role at a technology company, she found that the technology for marketing with the spoken word was pretty deficient.
While many pieces of the puzzle existed for podcasting, nothing existed to pull all the pieces together.  Lindsay wanted to create a new way of using the podcast as part of a content marketing strategy. Thus, Casted was born.

According to Aashish Dhamdhere, the VP of Marketing at Skilljar, optimizing customer experience is at the core of every marketer's goal. Any interaction should add value to the company. Companies need to have a clear sense of their brand projections to ensure that they give customers the right impressions. Aashish Dhamdhere emphasizes that the number one driver of business decisions is how customers respond and interact with the products. A close second is the support and education provided by the company to the customers. Deliver content in a variety of formats. The goal is to find what works for the company. Options include webinars, question and answer sessions, and conferences.
Marketers must put themselves in the mind of the customer. What type of experience is the company providing to the customer? Along with being particular about the content offered by the company, how is the content being delivered? Websites need easy navigation with user-friendly designs. Building and nurturing connections is also an essential facet of marketing. The more interactions, the more likely that trust levels improve between customers and the company.  
Sales and marketing departments need the same goals, which boils down to pipeline. The pipeline for sales and marketing is always the same. Aashish Dhamdhere stresses how his goal is to pipeline everything up. Sources of lead generation are less important than securing the high numbers, no matter what channel used. Collect data, but collect the right data to make high-value decisions. To achieve this, focus on designing a reliable data infrastructure.  

Nathan Bliss is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Kinsta, a WordPress hosting platform that knows what it does well and continues to get better at it. 
“We don't bend a lot on where we feel we fit in,” Nathan says. “It’s kind of like why you can't Google a discount code for a Tesla. The price is the price. So that may sound a bit standoffish, but we ultimately feel that we want to provide that level of value.”
Nathan’s previous roles include everything from account executive and solutions specialist to sales coach and regional sales manager, so he calls himself a sales and revenue guy “through and through.” That background gives him a unique approach to his current position as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, in which he combines his passion for recruiting top-tier employees with his knowledge of what strengths a company should emphasize from a selling standpoint. 
On this episode of Tech Qualified, Nathan discusses how to move from a broad to a more targeted marketing approach, why it’s possible for a bootstrapped company to grow with the right marketing and the aspect of management he’s currently struggling with the most: delegating. 
“We are not institutionally backed and we have no institutional financing,” Nathan says. “So we had to use very scrappy, time-tested methods to grow the business from its historic past. And now if you go to Google and you search a term anywhere related to WordPress or building a website that kind of falls anywhere on that spectrum of interest, it's hard not to find a search result [for us] on page one of Google.”