Q&A with John A. Steinert, Chief Marketing Officer at TechTarget

John A. Steinert, Chief Marketing Officer at TechTarget helps bring the power of purchase intent-driven marketing and sales services to technology companies.

With a strong drive to help customers achieve their business objectives faster and bigger, John and his TechTarget team connects the information needs of enterprise tech buyers and the go-to-market efforts of solution providers, ensuring that everybody wins.

MEDIA 7: What inspired you to get into marketing?
JOHN STEINERT: 
That’s easy. Marketing inspired me to get into marketing. I’ve always loved great communicators and the formats used in communications. As a kid during some pretty tumultuous times in American history, I was surrounded by great political, guerilla, and yes even commercial communications. Speeches, hearings, demonstrations, TV, advertisements, even album covers and t-shirts made a strong impression on me. Obviously, with the rise of the internet, long-tail video channels and social media, things have blossomed to an even more amazing level.

M7: How does TechTarget's Priority Engine™ support tech vendors to achieve their marketing and sales objectives?
JS:
 By helping companies see and interpret real buyer needs and preferences, Priority Engine first provides a relevant, permissioned basis for a marketer to intercept a buyer’s journey and then it assists users in taking very specific influencing and engagement actions. Because Priority Engine provides the actual permissioned people doing buying research, it saves tons of resource that’s commonly wasted chasing prospects who don’t have a need and leads that are actually dead ends. And because Priority Engine shares the real needs and preferences of the actual buyers with both marketing and sales when they share the platform, it enables far better conversion at every step, from funnel, to pipeline, through to renewal.


"To truly enable sellers with content, the content needs to reflect what we know about this specific buyer’s needs and preferences."

M7: What according to you is content-enabled selling and how does it help drive a buyer’s journey?
JS: There are two key pieces to content-enabled selling. The first is the content itself – what it is and how it assists the buyers in fulfilling the necessary or required steps of their buying process. The second is how we adjust our own approach in response to buyer inputs and feedback.
To truly enable sellers with content, the content needs to reflect what we know about this specific buyer’s needs and preferences. To perform better, your content needs to be more buyer-centric. This can be achieved when product marketers and sales enablement folks are consuming real purchase intent insights from Priority Engine and leveraging them into evolved content outputs.

Then there’s what I’ll call the “personalization wrapper” – how the communications that accompany the assets present and create context for that use-case relevant material. These wrapper – be they email copy, call guides, etc. must be built with an eye to the nature and the stage of the relationship at hand. Marketers and sellers alike need guidance on the proper way to do this.

It’s not as simple as “you liked this so of course you should want to buy this”. Buyers need help with both their rational business needs and their more emotional needs around both their company, their department and themselves. The “personalization wrapper” is a useful metaphor for being holistically considerate of the person and the company you are interacting with. Obviously, this is substantially more nuanced than simply recognizing what company they are from. It’s about ingesting what you can see are their expressed concerns and preferences, learning from that, and shaping your own communication in that context.

M7: What features make TechTarget's 'Data-Driven Display' drive B2B demand and accelerate sales?
JS:
 Because it’s fueled by permissioned knowledge of exactly who is performing research at any given moment, TechTarget’s data-driven display advertising can deliver higher engagement rates and higher conversion.  When used in conjunction with demand generation techniques and intelligent sales outreach, independent studies with leading 3rd parties have achieved remarkable lift across the funnel as compared to what’s available when using more generalized “intent” data.


"The biggest mistake of all that’s commonly still made in marketing is to not use prospect behavior as a critical guide."

M7: What is the biggest mistake B2B marketers make while targeting specific prospects?
JS:
There are many actions that teams continue to take because they’ve simply been tasked to take them.  There are old-school KPIs, typically focused on process outputs rather than business outcomes that perpetuate chronic under-performance. Take, for instance, a narrow focus on cost-per-lead – too often this incentivizes continued purchases of higher and higher volumes of lower and lower quality. To wean themselves off of this Catch 22, teams should work to turn their attention to down-funnel metrics like conversion-to-opportunity – measuring cost per opportunity is a much more useful predictor of pipeline yield.

But the biggest mistake of all that’s commonly still made in marketing is to not use prospect behavior as a critical guide. When marketing (and sales) energies are spread evenly over active and inactive prospects alike, energy is wasted on those who are not in-market, and that investment of time and resource is not available to increase attention on those active buying teams that should be converted. By focusing more intently on those prospects that are actually demonstrating in-market buyer’s journey behaviors, teams get far more out of their investments.

M7: How does 'Data Cleanse' assist marketers in email verification and contact record accuracy?
JS: 
Some percentage of the data coming into your database from form fills, other manual entry and so on naturally contains incompleteness, mistakes and outright falsehoods. Furthermore, people move around, both inside of companies and between them. So even once-accurate data decays amazingly fast. To counter these realities, your data practice should put into place a variety of processes that together comprise a mature “data cleanse and append” approach. In this way, you can address data quality issues at both the point of entry and over time. At TechTarget, we offer our clients cleanse and append services both directly via our Oceanos offerings and indirectly via our Priority Engine platform wherein the data goes through rigorous checks and verifications before it qualifies to be shared.


"Even once-accurate data decays amazingly fast. To counter this reality, your data practice should put into place a variety of processes that together comprise a mature “data cleanse and append” approach."

M7: When did you start working, how old were you, and what was it?
JS:
 My first stable paid position, $1.40/hr, was at age 14 pumping gas at Greene’s Exxon. I was super excited because I got to wear the striped shirt with the logo patch! I loved washing windshields and checking the oil, especially when my superior CX delivery got me a few cents in tips!


ABOUT TECHTARGET

TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT) is the global leader in purchase intent-driven marketing and sales services that deliver business impact for enterprise technology companies. By creating abundant, high-quality editorial content across more than 140 highly targeted technology-specific websites, TechTarget attracts and nurtures communities of technology buyers researching their companies’ information technology needs. By understanding these buyers’ content consumption behaviors, TechTarget creates the purchase intent insights that fuel efficient and effective marketing and sales activities for clients around the world.
TechTarget has offices in Boston, London, Munich, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore and Sydney. For more information, visit techtarget.com and follow us on Twitter @TechTarget.

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SugarCRM, provider of the award-winning AI-driven sales automation platform, today announced the global winners of the 2024 SugarCRM Customer Breakthrough Awards. Winners are: Customer Experience Breakthrough Award – Empresas ADOC, a Central American retail company, is recognized for using SugarCRM to drive business growth and improve customer engagement. Using SugarCRM, the company significantly improved customer service quality and customer retention, reduced customer churn while establishing its “Puntos ADOC” loyalty program that attracted over 600,000 members, representing more than 20 percent of total sales. ADOC has a rich history of using high-quality materials and specialized techniques to produce outstanding products that meet the needs of its customers. ADOC is a customer-driven business supported by a culture dedicated to enhancing customer satisfaction and building strong, lasting customer relationships. In addition to its own branded footwear, ADOC also has partnered with international brands, including Hush Puppies, The North Face, CAT, and Steve Madden, to create a complete shopping experience for its customers. Industry Excellence Breakthrough Award – Reusable Transport Packaging, a leader in sustainable transport packaging solutions, is recognized for using SugarCRM to improve its bottom line, unify customer data, streamline processes, and increase sales efficiency, resulting in a 20 percent revenue growth year over year. A key strategy in its growth is the use of Sugar Market for regular email communications, which keeps customers, distributors, and leads informed about new products, pricing updates, and other relevant industry news. Marketing Excellence Breakthrough Award – The Swedish Institute (SI), a Swedish government agency, is recognized for its innovative approach to data management and customer engagement. The Sugar Sell and Sugar Market platform integration centralizes data, segments audiences, and automates responses, significantly enhancing marketing efficiency and improving engagement with international students and alumni. The Swedish Institute saw an increase of over 31 percent in lead volume since implementing SugarCRM and boasts a best-in-class 40-to-50 percent open rate on marketing emails. Sales Excellence Breakthrough Award – J&J Ventures Gaming, LLC, a leader in gaming and amusements and one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S., is recognized for implementing Sugar Sell to consolidate customer accounts and interactions into a centralized communication hub across sales, marketing, and account management. Streamlined sales processes have established a new model for sales excellence for the J&J team and its growth in the gaming industry. Service Excellence Breakthrough Award – Super General Company of the Albatha Group in the UAE is recognized for revolutionizing its service operations with Sugar Serve. Working with Sugar partner Ambit Software, Super General successfully implemented a repair and maintenance service platform, including a field management application for efficient case handling and simplified technician dispatching. Due to increased efficiency and workload management, the number of cases per technician has surged by up to 26 percent, alongside a 10 percent increase in first-time fix rates. Other notable achievements include a significant increase in call closure rates and substantial improvements in customer satisfaction scores. Customer of the Year Breakthrough Award (Asia Pacific) – zazen Water, a provider of alkaline water solutions in Australia, is recognized for its use of SugarCRM to support business growth and customer satisfaction. Through strategic integrations, zazen Water automated its business and customer service operations to streamline high-order volume processing. Notably, during its Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023 campaign, zazen Water managed a significant order peak, accomplishing its same-day dispatch promise, which, prior to automation and integration projects, would have required 16 employees. Customer of the Year Breakthrough Award (EMEA) – FAMO GmbH & Co. KG, a German wholesaler of electrical and plumbing products, is recognized for its collaboration with Sugar partner Insignio to deploy SugarCRM for advanced customer data management and opportunity nurturing, the Sugar mobile app with enterprise resource planning (ERP) data integration for field sales support, and Sugar Market for automated newsletters and targeted communications. Customer of the Year Breakthrough Award (Latin America) – Mac Construtora e Incorporadora (MAC), a leader in construction and development in São Paulo, is recognized for the creative use of SugarCRM in the dynamic real estate market. Technology adoption significantly improved lead management and customer engagement, enhancing marketing approaches and project sales, resulting in a substantial increase in sales, ranging from 50 to 94 percent of its real estate agency. This has led to MAC substantially reducing its dependence on partnering with other real estate agencies. Customer of the Year Breakthrough Award (North America) – Alto-Shaam, providing foodservice equipment solutions to more than 90 countries globally, is recognized for use of SugarCRM to significantly enhance opportunity close rates by 61 percent while achieving up to 600 hours of time savings in marketing and sales efforts to forecast customer needs. The integration of Sugar Sell with Sugar Market has streamlined key processes, improved lead management, and enhanced operational efficiency and global communication. ISV Technology Partnership Breakthrough Award – FSIoffice, a leading independent office supply company, together with sales-i, are recognized for transforming FSIoffice’s CRM strategy from data repository to sales powerhouse, with 40 percent improved sales efficiency. Supported by Sugar partner CRM International, FSIoffice is driving remarkable revenue growth and enhancing customer engagement with Sugar Sell Premier and sales-i for predictive business-to-business sales intelligence. Reseller Technology Partnership Breakthrough Award – The Joint Corp., the nation’s largest provider of chiropractic care through The Joint Chiropractic® network, in partnership with Sugar partner Faye, are recognized for driving significant improvements in healthcare operations after transitioning to SugarCRM and Amazon Web Services, with a 40 percent increase in web transaction speed. This transformation allowed The Joint to focus on integrating AI to elevate SugarCRM from a functional tool to a strategic platform for competitive differentiation in the chiropractic care sector. Judges’ Choice Award – RTCR, the public transit provider in La Rochelle, France, operating under the Yélo brand, is recognized for significantly enhancing customer service with Sugar Serve, with implementation support by Sugar partner Synolia. The deployment has led to a minimum three percent increase in customer satisfaction and streamlined complaint management, saving agents’ time by 50 percent through improved response structuring. “We’re pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 SugarCRM Customer Breakthrough Awards,” said Chris Pennington, Chief Customer Officer, SugarCRM. “These customers and partners are recognized for excellence and innovation in letting Sugar’s AI-driven CRM platform do the work to make the hard things easier for sales, marketing and service professionals, and for driving breakthrough success and exceptional customer experiences.” About SugarCRM SugarCRM is a CRM software that helps marketing, sales, and service teams reach peak efficiency through better automation, data, and intelligence so they can achieve a real-time, reliable view of each customer. Sugar’s platform provides leading technology in the sales automation, marketing automation, and customer service fields with one goal in mind: to make the hard things easier. Thousands of companies in over 120 countries rely on Sugar by letting the platform do the work. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sugar is backed by Accel-KKR.

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