Author: Sara Salarvand

Gina Orlando is a product marketer with 10 years of experience in the government technology sector. She has built public sector-focused marketing functions from the ground up at startups like Dataminr, Mark43, and goTenna. She currently works as a Product Marketing Manager for government and supply chain risk management solutions at BlueVoyant. 

As a product marketer, did you start your career with this goal in mind?

What challenges do you have with the sales team and getting the product to market?

Pace of development and bandwidth can be the biggest challenges. The pace of development is usually not as fast as the sales team would like. The sales team is always looking for something new and interesting to say: here’s this new feature, here’s this new enhancement, here’s this new partnership, etc. And sometimes those things take time.

It can also be challenging to make sure everyone on the team has enough bandwidth to keep effectively pushing a project through all the stages. My focus has to be not only on my own bandwidth, but also the bandwidth of the subject matter experts within our company.

To preserve bandwidth, I try to find resources that can help multiply the team. Sometimes brining on freelancers and agencies can help you work a little bit faster, but that leads to a different challenge: trying to find the right mix of people in house and out of house that can help you scale up as quickly as you need to.

Is marketing at a startup different from marketing at an established company?

I’ve found this sweet spot of an early- to mid-stage startup. At this point a startup has product that’s in a solid spot, and usually a couple of marquee customers that use it and love it. At that point it’s time to scale up and ask, “How can we take this out to a broader market, you know, past our friends and family and the people that we know, well? And how do we attract new people?”
 
At that time a startup needs to establish their brand and showcase the product. For me, that’s always been the most exciting time to join a startup and the most beneficial to my career. I’m always most excited by the kind of growth that involves figuring out who a company is and introducing it to the larger market, and then coming up with a mix of brand creativity and a little bit of digital magic to kick it off. And that’s always been the most exciting thing for me.
 
I’m at a company now where in many ways I’m working at a startup within a startup because we’ve just brought a new subsidiary into the fold. They have a really great product and they have less than 10 customers, but they’re all solid. So, I’m in that sweet spot within the startup where it’s a different kind of growth that’s really exciting.better.

Is there anything in your MarTech stack that has become really useful to you?

Tonya Cardinali has 19 years of experience leading marketing efforts for B2B companies focusing on strategy, demand generation, content, and sales enablement. 

She delivers results by being creative, adaptable, and agile. Partnering with Sales and connecting with clients to understand how to solve customer problems she delivers valuable, relevant content that drives engagement. She brings an integrated marketing approach to deliver qualified leads that contribute to achieving revenue goals. 

Outside of work, Tonya enjoys cycling, roller skating, standup paddleboarding, and pottery. She also has a neurotic Boston terrier/French bulldog mix named Crash whom she adores.

How important is it to understand user experience when creating content?

How do you stay on top of user experience?

I test everything from the user’s perspective. For example, I’ll navigate from a (test) email to each link or landing page to ensure the process is smooth and intuitive for our customers. I force myself to reread everything. You’d be surprised how many little opportunities you find to improve. I think about my goal – often times it is to generate engagement through a form fill. So, in that case, I’ll go through the process of navigating to the form and submitting it. Was it easy to find? How many clicks did it take? Did I receive a “thank you” message or an automated email that may have been attached to the form? And finally, did it register in my reporting? Then once I’ve made any necessary adjustments and the campaign is launched, I keep a close eye on the reporting. Data can tell you if something is going well or if something is wrong.

I say all this and it sounds like I’m a perfectionist. I am. That being said, I would rather get something done at 95% than hold onto it until it’s perfect. The cost of perfection is missed opportunity. 

What about inspiration? How is it possible to find and keep inspiration in marketing?

You’ve got to expose yourself to more than just one thing and adapt yourself to a constantly changing environment. New and exciting tools are becoming available all the time. That’s the beauty and fun of marketing. If you’re really focused on one area, then you’re not going to be able to see the bigger picture. But in learning (even just a little bit) about all the parts of that big picture, you can contribute in a more meaningful way. You may also find something that interests or inspires you that you may not have been exposed to. 
 
It also helps to surround yourself with people you’re inspired by. And people you can learn from, have fun with, and trust. People who are different than you. They’re likely better at something than you are – don’t be threatened by that – and they can probably can fill in a gap that makes whatever result you’re working toward better.

What’s your MarTech stack?

As a Senior Marketing Manager at Crowe Soberman, Paris develops strategic marketing plans and campaigns to elevate the firm’s brand and build client engagement. Before joining Crowe Soberman, Paris worked for a global accounting firm for nearly five years, where she honed in on her keen interest in the professional services industry.

With over ten years of marketing experience, Paris’ background spans across diverse industries including in real estate and the technology sector.

Paris strives to continuously adopt innovative marketing strategies and refine her craft in the digital space.

You’ve worked with smaller startups and larger corporations – Benevity, KPMG, and currently Crowe Soberman LLP. Did it benefit you to begin your career with a startup environment?

You’ve developed a successful career in professional services. What would you advise new marketers who enter that field?

Professional services is a unique environment for marketers, and it can be challenging to maintain creative strategies in a dynamic B2B territory.  A lot of marketing in professional services is about building profiles for partners – who are essentially your clients – helping them shape and define their digital presence and profiles in their respective service areas. A major focus is creating strategic thought leadership that your partners can leverage with their current clients and help bring them to market in distinct ways. 
 
Professional services is also an environment where you can really push boundaries and use your expertise to position yourself as the service matter expert to let your partners know there’s a bigger and better way to do things. That can be very exciting and truly rewarding.

Collaborations are necessary to create really engaging content, but where does technology fit in for you?

 A return to familiar tools is always fantastic because you can see how those platforms have evolved in terms of what new features and functionality are available to us as marketers. Of course, we now have an influx of options we can rely on to create the perfect tech stack so it’s crucial that we remain open to learning about the latest and greatest digital marketing tools – and I think that’s what defines us as marketers, actually: we don’t stay in the confinement of our boxes – we’re continually growing and changing with the industry.
 
If you don’t keep up with those transformations, that’s to your detriment. ChatGPT springs to mind because it’s been easy to focus on the negative aspects – that it could take away our role as marketers and be particularly threatening for those in AdTech. But we, as marketers, must jump outside the box, learn to work with AI and to view it as an asset in creating a powerful marketing funnel. ChatGPT is useful for me as a launching pad for content creation because it serves as an excellent starting point. Its strong capacity for generating research and data can serve as a valuable tool in expediting processes, ultimately affording me more time.

Are there tools or technology you use that allow you to create stronger human connections?

I really like Mavenlink because of how it helps marketers with workflow and project management. It’s the key to running multifaceted campaigns and enables marketers to have everything in the pipeline before activating a campaign. It creates seamless collaborations by building connections between team members working on the same campaign – everyone has visibility into each task and update. It also supports consistency and transparency, so everyone stays on the same page, with fewer email trails along the way. 
 
You can also see historical projects that you’ve worked on and who was involved, which is critical in larger organizations because it brings everyone into the same room, so to speak. So, when working with a group of partners, marketers, graphic designers and people at all levels, you can connect the dots and gain insight as campaigns are rolled out. 

What are the most valuable tools in your MarTech stack?

With a diverse career spanning from technology to sustainability, Sarah is a marketing and communications strategist driven by producing great content that delivers results. A strong believer in the power of curiosity, collaboration and asking the right questions, her career accomplishments range from industry-leading campaigns to global research. Sarah currently works at Snowflake as a Content Manager-Industries, developing a wide range of content, from thought leadership to videos, for the healthcare, life sciences, technology, media and entertainment, and telecommunications industries. Prior to Snowflake, she worked for Fortune 500 companies as well as several nonprofit organizations. She is also a Leadership Award recipient from the San Diego County Women’s Hall of Fame, founding member of the Silicon Valley chapter of Grapevine, a community-based philanthropic organization, and former board member of the Public Relations Society of America and Silicon Valley American Marketing Association.

How does focusing on the intersection of human experience and the hard data of marketing make you a better marketer?

How do you apply that connection mindset to your current work?

For me, the overarching theme is to listen not only to your customers and those who are speaking with your customers, but to what’s being said in the news by reputable analysts, as well as by industry experts or thought leaders, both within and outside your company. Of course, quantitative SEO data and analytics information are critical, but so are the qualitative aspects of continual listening and learning.

There’s always that initial momentum and excitement about a product, right? But it’s hard to be successful if you lose sight of the fact you’re providing a worthwhile service. And you can only provide that valuable service – or product – if you’ve listened to what your customers say, think and feel so you can help them overcome their challenges and meet their goals.

Also, be thoughtful about peoples’ decreasing attention spans. For example, two minutes used to be an appropriate time for a video, but shorter videos are trending now. And because attention spans are shrinking, you must be extraordinarily choosy and strategic with the words you use. The best way to do that is to really listen to what your customers are saying – the words they’re using – and understand their experiences. This way you communicate to them in ways that are uniquely impactful for them.

Do you have any advice for marketers just starting out?

Be extraordinarily curious about the business. All of it. Engage with colleagues in departments across the organization to learn as much as you can about the “how” and the “why”. You will better know the words to use, you will know selling positions, and you’ll be able to create content from a place of power and strategy.

I’ve had conversations with recruiters, and they say it’s rare to find a marketer who dives into the business and really wants to learn. You can have excellent writing skills, but you also need to be curious to become genuinely informed – and stay informed – not just about the industry and all its facets but about your customers, too, and their goals, their challenges, and the market dynamics affecting their industry.

What are the most valuable tools in your MarTech stack?

Liz Austin joined Exos in 2022 as chief marketing officer, bringing over 20 years of experience across global marketing, communications, strategy, operations, and digital transformation. Liz leads the company’s marketing organization and is responsible for creating and implementing marketing strategies that drive brand awareness, revenue growth, and customer engagement. Prior to joining Exos, Liz previously held a range of marketing leadership roles at LEAP Legal Software, McGraw-Hill Education, Reed Elsevier, Complinet, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Reuters, and Wiley. 

Outside of work, Liz spends her downtime doing yoga, travelling, attending live concerts and artistic performances, and relaxing at the beach.

As the CMO of Exos, a company that supports customers in health and wellness, how do you define a “pro-recovery culture” and why is it important?

Exos started out supporting professional athletes. In our 20+ years of working with elite athletes, we know that when they prepare for their big moments – they’re very purposeful about it. They continually build in the proper recovery time in order to achieve sustainable high performance. We realized this focus is important for the rest of us too and can have real benefits. As corporate professionals, we run a very long marathon for 40 years of our career and most of us don’t give ourselves enough space to recover properly.
 
We do things the wrong way by pushing too hard, creating an epidemic of burnout and bad habits. But honestly, the moments where I’ve been the most creative and most effective are where I’ve also given myself space to take time for things like daily meditation and movement and focusing on things I enjoy outside of work. These are some of the ways I recover, and in the long run, this is what helps to level up my performance. For this reason, Exos culture supports conscious downtime, which is often missing from the corporate sector.

How does the pro-recovery culture at Exos allow your own marketing team to perform at their best?

Marketing is a highly executional sport. It really is. You don’t win in marketing without doing, but you can easily get caught between managing deadlines and constant doing – so we need to plan and work in recovery time, too. All the things that make marketing exciting can also be extremely stressful, so you need a very strong toolkit of ways to manage and balance your time.
 
 As a marketer, you must stay focused but also make space to be creative and craft winning strategies. Instead of constantly executing and doing, you need that time to think strategically and to allow for those “aha!” moments. It’s important to build a gameplan that aligns with the goals of the business. The best way to do this is to make sure the team is involved and aware of what we need to do to win. A strategic plan allows the team to stay focused because, in marketing, it can be very easy to get distracted on shiny objects and ad-hoc requests. At the same time, I want the team to understand the importance of giving themselves downtime and the ability to be inventive and brainstorm ideas, so work your plan but always make space for new and disruptive ideas. And, most importantly you must also take time for yourself. In my experience, making space and time for yourself will always help lead you to those breakthrough ideas.

Do you have any advice for marketers just starting out?

Make purposeful career choices. It’s important to have a vision of where you want to head and to make choices that help you move in that direction. But it’s also important to be flexible and open because career progression isn’t always linear, and career moves don’t always have to be upward. Making a lateral choice that gives you a new skill set is often worthwhile, and you will eventually gain skills across the full range of marketing functions. Early on, it’s wise to be a generalist and learn as much as you can – but making strategic career moves to learn key specializations can be indispensable – especially if your goal is to end up in leadership. 
 
As well, build strong relationships with the teams outside of marketing and know how to speak their language. Create relationships with the finance, sales, product, and tech teams – and understand their perspective and their function. Often, early in your career, you don’t realize that career opportunities aren’t just influenced by your boss, it’s these other stakeholders, and how they view you, that can have meaningful influence too! 

What are the most valuable tools in your MarTech stack?

Lily Malota, a results-oriented content marketing expert, specializes in developing engaging content and campaigns while refining processes to maximize engagement and operational efficiency. With over a decade of experience across diverse industries, such as energy, project management, and online education, Lily has proven her expertise in employer branding, content, social media strategies, and executive communications. Her talent for crafting persuasive brand narratives, launching high-profile products, and devising innovative content strategies has consistently elevated brand awareness and driven business growth.

How do you avoid white-noise and create content that is unique for your customers?

My focus is on serving the customers, so respect for their time underpins all my marketing content. I liase with our sales department to figure out how to answer those customer questions and ensure the content we’re putting out here isn’t just “content for the sake of content.” So, a lot of the content we release is education focused: I want my customers to make educated decisions, but I don’t want to push them too hard to make them. 

How does this approach improve relationships with your customers?

Our customers look to us for solutions because they trust us. Cookie-cutter content doesn’t help build that sense of trust. In that case, you’re no longer a trusted authority figure or a subject matter expert; you’re making a sale. 
 
The other piece is that we’re all being more careful in how we allocate our time, especially post-pandemic, so it’s important that the content customers receive is the content they want to see. Providing that for our customers shows that we value their time.

Do you think there is value in becoming a specialist rather than a generalist?

There is a place for both. Right now, we have this focused approach to niche marketing and it’s important to have your hand in a little area of marketing and know it well. But I came from a general marketing background, so I think it’s also important to know a little bit about everything, especially as you grow in your career. It makes it easier for you to grow as a leader in marketing.
 
My advice would be that even if you are specializing, sit in on some of your colleague’s monthly or biweekly meetings and learn a little more about the company lifecycle. This will make you a better leader in the future because you’ll be able to oversee a team that specializes in these different niches, big or small.

What are the most valuable tools in your MarTech stack?

Jake Freivald’s 25-year career includes product marketing for software related to data collection and management, reporting, and analytics for a variety of industries and use cases. He has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and lives on Long Island, NY with his wife, their eleven children (not a typo), two dogs, and two cats.

Your company is all about automation. Where do you see GPT making our lives easier as it grows with us in the marketing world?

The potential is there. Right now, AI is offering us a big open promise that it won’t take our jobs but perhaps change them into something focused much more on creativity, something more dynamic, and maybe more exciting. AI understands the stuff we’ve already done, the stuff it has been trained on, while the best marketing work takes all that as background and synthesizes from it brand new things that we’ve never thought of yet.

AI is also likely to be able to help get that idea out, that first draft, which can result in significant increases in productivity. I’ve used it that way myself. I recently told ChatGPT to write a casual email for me, and when I got it back, I only had to say “Not that casual” to get a much better draft. Being able to see different versions of a first draft in a matter of moments can help eliminate the “blank page” problem and might help us see different creative angles we can pursue – things that the AI isn’t going to pick up on and synthesize, but that we can see, understand, and relate to faster because we don’t have to go through the mechanical process of getting initial thoughts on paper.

How important is the creativity aspect to marketing?

Extremely. It’s important both for our own job satisfaction and for the effectiveness of our work.

Creativity is often the thing that most makes work interesting. It’s not hard to feel hemmed in by the constraints on our creativity: where we are, what we’re trying to market, who we have around us, that sort of thing. Also, some markets take themselves very seriously – safety professionals tend not to be flippant about safety, for instance, and frankly I approve of their seriousness – so one’s instinct to get a little “out there” has to be exercised in a way that’s entertaining and interesting without being perceived as derisive. But if we don’t satisfy that creative itch, most of us probably won’t feel fulfilled about what we’re doing.

And that’s important because if we’re not having fun, our audience knows it. If we’re bored when writing a blog post, it becomes a boring blog post. Don’t get me wrong, there’s value in having a method. There are marketers who have a formula, and they use the formula, and that’s that. Their marketing is typically okay: It communicates a message, and that’s an important part of what marketing does. But when there’s a spark, our audience can feel it and come along for the ride. They get invested in fanning the spark into something bigger – and that’s an essential part of doing marketing really well.

What advice do you have for marketers who want to get ahead?

Stay focused on and interested in in the kinds of problems your product solves. (Yes, I’m currently a product marketer, but I think this is true for all sales and marketing professionals.) The intellectual interest generated by solving problems will stimulate new ways to think about your product’s value. Instead of saying my product does this or my product has that, you’ll find yourself saying you can do this really cool thing with my product that’s going to make your life a lot better. The first two might be interesting, but the third makes people want what you’re offering.

Can you expand on that pragmatically?