graph

REVENUE DRIVEN FOR OUR CLIENTS

$500 million and counting

Cutting-Edge SaaS Marketing: Data-Driven SEO, ABM, and Growth Strategies with EHS Insight

VP of Marketing

In this episode of WYTPOD, Harshit Gupta, Director of Business Alliances at Wytlabs, interviews Chris Collier, VP of Marketing at EHS Insight. They dive into advanced SaaS marketing strategies, inbound marketing, and SEO techniques tailored for cybersecurity and EHS industries. Chris shares insights on the evolving role of marketing in driving organizational success, developing data-driven strategies, and implementing high-impact ABM campaigns. They also discuss how cross-functional collaboration between marketing, sales, and product teams shapes customer success and business growth.

EHS Insight provides next-gen software solutions for improving safety, efficiency, and organizational culture.

Chris Collier
VP of Marketing

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of wytpod. My name is Harshit and I’m the Director of Business Alliances at Wytlabs. We’re a digital agency specializing in SaaS SEO. I have with me today the VP of Marketing at EHS Insight. It’s a new next gen EHS software platform designed for ease and efficiency.

So a big welcome to you, Chris. So happy to have you on the show. Happy to be here.

Yeah, I’m very excited to be a part of this.

Hello everybody. Now Chris, you have had a brilliant diverse experience, I would love to understand like, let’s start with that. Let’s talk about your overall work experience so far, and how exactly, that has basically contributed to both your, post grad professional journeys that basically influence your strategies and your outlook in your current role.

Yeah, so I’m one of those weirdos that actually went to college and got a degree in marketing and he only wanted to work in marketing. It was at the bequest of my father, who, I’m a musician at heart. And my father told me you should have a, you should have a business background or something following my footsteps.

So you could lean back on this. If music doesn’t work out. The sad part is I never pursued music professionally. I still play a lot, amateurly, but I found something that I think passion is. overused too much and abused. I found something that aligned with the way my, my brain works, my moral code, my ethics, and my drive to learn more.

I think marketing was one of those things where it just excited me. And getting my degree in marketing, and then I actually, Got to jump in and start doing marketing research, which, even though it was a, it wasn’t the best job or the best title. It gave me a lot of good foundation, to pick up the phone.

For instance, we were essentially a marketing research firm and I was a BDR picking up the phone and asking questions. And that gave me a lot of empathy for my BDR teams. And, I tell them, I go, not only do you have the most important job in the company. Yeah, you have the hardest job in the company.

And so it resonates a lot with them moving forward and some of the other jobs I’ve had being the incumbent marketing hire for learning systems, which was then purchased by HSI 10 years later, which was my first introduction into private equity SAS backed companies. I had to start at the ground level, and I had to learn everything.

I had to teach myself every discipline of marketing, everything that’s in the wheelhouse. And, How that is brought me to where I am at is when I develop my teams and how I structure my teams is I give them their own little fiefdoms. I give them their own, you’re in charge of this, you’re in charge of this.

And so I expect you to report to me on, based on what our KPIs and our goals are for the quarter or the year, how are we up against them? And then I let them come to me. When they need help. And for me, that breeds loyalty. It breeds they’re invested in their particular discipline within the company.

But I like to look at myself as a utility player. So they’re in charge of that discipline, but I’m here to help a strategy and I can dive in and I can actually do everything. And so they, I’m not one that’s just turning the knobs up in my ivory tower. I like to look at it. It’s I’m, I like to be, I like to be knee deep in the weeds because it also tells me.

I know what’s happening. I’m not just being, having information floated up to me. Like I’m in the weeds with my team and I understand it. And some people may like, look at that not as the best use of time for a senior leader, but I look at it as I’m cutting out the middleman and I see what good looks like.

And I see what bad looks like. In addition to letting my team run with their particular what I’ve asked them to do within the department.

Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. Now, because you’ve had such a diverse career, multiple roles, multiple industries, how did this experience and specifically you’ve worked with CyberMax, HSI how did this influence your approach to make, when it comes to, digital marketing and inbound?

That’s a great question. I think, at being at HSI and then, I was at HSI for four years, I counted as 14 years total because of Vivid Learning Systems to HSI. And then, getting poached by a dear friend of mine who was the portfolio CMO for another PE firm. He said, listen, Because you know how to do everything and you’re going to be a one man shop initially, I want you to come over to CyberMax and help out there.

And so what that taught me going from the EHS industry to cybersecurity is it totally shook up what I thought I knew about marketing. And it totally shook up what I thought about how one discipline or channel marketing would work for the EHS industry versus. Transcript The cybersecurity industry.

It also taught me to be grateful for having a large marketing team where a lot of people are disciplined have a discipline in one. area versus, having to do everything all at once from a digital marketing and SEO perspective. It also taught me too, that if you have an ICP and a set of personas you really have to get creative with how you’re approaching them.

And, I thought, okay, we’ll put some Google ads out there. We’ll start doing some SEO. There might be some third party campaigns we can run. From the HSI and EHS perspective, along with the EHS insight, a lot of times the ICP iss actively searching for your product. When it comes to cybersecurity and your I CCP is like the CISOs or the Chief Information Officer, they’re never looking for your product. Ever. And so an SEM approach typically isn’t the best way. Cause when your CPAs are going to be extremely high and you’re just not going to get the volume of leads that you need.

And so it helped shape with in my head to be a lot more focused on what are realistic numbers when it comes to MQLs and SQLs and opportunities open because what would be maybe thousands. And then QLs at HSI would equate to 10, maybe 15 at Cybermax granted your average deal size is much larger when it comes to these.

Cause you’ve got almost a transactional type product versus, an enterprise level project or project. And it, it definitely rewired my brain to think at a higher level. And it, I think I grew more in the last 18 months when I was at Cybermax and I had. In the previous 14 years at HSI and Vivid Learning Systems.

Hi, I’m talking about your current company, VHS Insight. It focuses a lot on safety, organization, culture. How does your marketing strategy reflect and support this mission?

So when we, when I first took seat, I’m, I’ve been told by my CFO that I’m the most technically sound marketing professional he’s ever worked for.

Like I’m, everybody says they’re data driven, but I am David, I am data driven. And after digging into the numbers, I realized we don’t have a lead problem. Don’t have an MQL problem. We don’t even have a pipeline problem. What the problem we had was how are we. Describing ourselves to ourselves and how are we describing ourselves to our prospects and our customers?

And so what I did was I went back and I created a 28 page brand document that dove in deep into competitive analysis, our tone, our voice, how we’re describing ourselves, what are some of the vernaculars and adjectives and other words that we’re using to describe ourselves and when I was doing that really good book building a story brand.

I read that last summer and one of the things that really stuck out to me is that For too many times marketing or just companies in general, where are the hero of the story when really the prospect, the customer, they’re the hero of the story. And where the armor or the boots or the sword that they’re going to take on their quest to improve organizational safety culture within each organization.

And so as I was building this, I wanted to make sure that we’re like, okay, our marketing strategy and. The branding, our content needs to support the fact that we are a tool that EHS professionals use to increase the maturity of their safety culture in their organization. And that really started at a start point.

And we knew we drew a line in the sand and we knew that from there we could move forward and keep progressing. And we’ve been seeing that it’s resonated quite well with our ICP. It’s not a one and done. We’re always going to have to be evolving our messaging and how we’re approaching our ICP and making sure that we’re meeting them, they’re not meeting us, but it definitely is resignated well, that it, I wouldn’t say I’ve given myself a pat on the back, but it’s definitely a victory lap for my entire team and myself.

Any specific challenges or any specific big opportunities that you see within your industry?

I think in our particular industry, when it, as it pertains to environmental health and safety and environmental safety and governance, or sustainability and governance ESG for one, especially in the United States, we always tout ourselves as being one of the safest countries in the world when actually in all the UK and others are actually some of the most safe, safest countries in the world.

And so safety budgets get cut, or they just don’t have the budget to, to bring on a platform period, which in all actuality, These platforms are designed to allow the team to do more with less. So you don’t have to hire another full time employee to handle these aspects or, humans are humans.

We’ve only got 24 hours in a day and realistically you shouldn’t be working your employees more than eight hours a day, just because productivity is going to go down. You’ve got one, eight, one full time employee, eight hours a day. How much can I get done? And one of the things that I still feel.

Is lost in the industry is really conveying that value of what these platforms bring to each organization in order to make sure that they’re meeting their regulatory and compliance needs and building a healthy, non toxic culture. That’s wrapped around safety and safety one of the, one of the trends it’s happening, and there’s been a lot of analysts are talking about it.

There’s been a lot of articles, but it’s really about. a total body safety. So mental health, mental being in addition to making sure that, limbs don’t get amputated or, other in, other serious injuries and fatalities happen. And so I think education is definitely one of the, one of the challenges which is also an opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader within the organ within the industry as a whole.

So people look to you, it’s okay what are they doing and how are they doing it? Yeah, makes sense.

Any specific trends that you’re seeing when it comes to, digital marketing or SEO that you believe are something that’s like relevant for you and EHs in general?

I’m, because most of my career, I cut my teeth with demand generation, search engine marketing.

Growth marketing, whatever you want to call it today, because it’s got several different names. I that’s still where my brain resides, being the marketing leader, I’ve got to have my hands and all the different and everything in order to make sure that I know what’s good and what’s not good and the team is meeting their goals.

But I think the biggest trend and, extremely high, extremely detailed  targeted ABM. Everybody talks about it, but my philosophy is a lot of companies don’t know how to get ABM platforms lifted up and also, launched adequately. And I think you’ll agree with me on this one, but it comes down to data.

There’s a lot of cost also involved. Just to make it like, run in the right direction and just work in your field.

To the platform. But you’re so paying for all of the the advertising that goes along with it, plus the creative if you don’t have a house

 

You don’t have a team in-house to do it. And so the thing that I came in is my senior growth and rev ops manager. He had attribution tracking down so tight. And we knew our ICP so well that we could stand up our ABM a lot faster, probably than most companies.

So in that instance I’m very spoiled. Granted numbers can be thrown at people all day long. And unless you know how to read the numbers, you’re not going to really know, what’s good, what’s bad, what, what needs to change what lever you need to pull what you need to tweak.

But I would say one thing that we’ve done is, matching our ABM with our sales cycle, not only from an intent perspective and nurturing intense spikes as they’re coming in through third party or first party, but also matching the messaging not only from an email nurturing and workflows moving prospects in and out of different buckets as they’re progressing down the sales cycle.

And then also getting hit with those ads as they’re being targeted through ABM. Why I think that’s a big trend is it gives further alignment to sales and marketing. I’ve got to work with, my, my EVP of sales at EHS insight is brilliant. And we’ve got a really good relationship where, my philosophy is we’re part of a greater, Revenue team.

And I think that’s also another kind of trend in digital marketing is that it’s not necessarily top of funnel. You should be a revenue team. That’s okay, sure. I’m in charge of brand awareness, making sure the leads are flowing into the funnel, but then helping the sales team and sales enablement, that nurturing.

As they’re going through into the, to the pinch of the bow tie, and then they’re passed off to customer success, where, that’s another facet too, is supporting your customer success leader and making sure that they’re getting the messaging and the automations to help their team. Retain nurture.

upsell, do other things that, can add to the bottom line as a whole.

And you’re close to you and your team. You’re doing pretty good when it comes to, social optimization, driving some good traffic on your website. I’d love to understand any specific strategy that you would love to talk about or share with the audience that may be fruitful for you when it comes to your social media monetization.

So last year when we, when I took a seat, I took a seat in November of 2023. We already had a fantastic SEO strategy, but it was a lot of content and I think sometimes too much to manage and my content manager, I think she was a little happy when I said, let’s stop doing as much and let’s just do.

Longer form blog posts. More of a quality versus a quantity standpoint Another thing too was, you know after I did my brand messaging exercise, you know matching a lot more of that content to we’ve got a lot of content that scratches the itches of, what is an EHS platform and how do you sell up to your leadership team on why this is important and what are the top 10 things you should be looking for.

And, so we’ve got a lot of those, but diving into things that. Actually helps the safety professional on a day in and day out basis. Things that they may be searching for, there’s other publications within the industry that they could go to, but just really looking at it as a thought leadership.

And so that was really the big thing is moving us from so much spray and pray, but more to thought leadership and diving into the fact that, we’ve been around since 2009. We are one of the best. If not the best, you just platform in the industry. So we’ve got to raise our content and up to that as well.

Another thing we did too, is in August of this year, we launched a. I wouldn’t call it a new website, but it’s definitely a new iteration of the website, but we looked at the, we looked at the technical side, the technical SEO, the forward facing SEO, the words and what Google crawls and looks at what people read.

But we wanted to make sure that if we’re going to do this, let’s put a let’s get a good foundation. Let’s make sure that. Let’s make sure that, everything from canonical tags, the 301s and everything else you’ve got to worry about it, a technical SEO standpoint are done correctly. And the nice thing is the SEO agency we were using, and then the branding agency that helped us build the templates, because we actually built the website ourselves.

they both said this is probably one of the best migrations they’ve ever seen for how large of a website we’ve got, which I think we’ve got about 1400 pages right now. And so no hiccups. We were able to launch it without any, anybody staying up to two, three in the morning, reverse engineering, why something’s not working which, I told my team, I’m like, give yourselves big pets in the back on your back because that’s going to look really good on your resumes, when you leave me, which I told him, I hope they never leave me, but when do they do?

Yeah, I think in fact your traffic bound up after this revamp of yours. Yeah, great.

Yeah.

Now I would love to understand because you mentioned this revamping the whole site and things turned out to be good for you. Any specific broad factors that, You add on your checklist, basically while doing this exercise and ensuring that, your traffic doesn’t hit a nose dive after the new version is out.

So basically you’re asking like what did we do after the revamp to make sure that we didn’t take a, we didn’t do a nose dive in the plane. Yeah. We evaluated a lot of the content to make sure that we. We got rid of the fat. I wanted to make sure that we maintained a lot of the high quality content that we had been publishing, removing the fat, maybe consolidating pages, adding canonical tags, 301s, but overall, the strategy was we have to maintain that core.

Of what has brought us to this level. And luckily with, we use SEMrush to monitor multiple different facets of, SEM, SEO, site health, etc, etc. We were climbing last week. I came back from my talk in London, got our first email really, I think about three, four weeks after the launch.

And we took a, just a little bit of a hit to the chin. And my philosophy is bad news should travel faster than good news. And so I sent out a meeting immediately to the rest of my senior leadership. I copied my team. I go, listen, we took a dip. We took a dip and I’m not worried because with any migration, this is going to happen today.

Another email came in, sent it out to everybody. We’re above where we had dipped from. And so I think how we mitigated a lot of that was just making sure that we were maintaining the high quality content not fucking the horse, as they say here in the States, not rocking the boat too much.

Because I think what a lot of people forget too, when you’re working with SEOs, you shouldn’t be doing major shifts. When you’re working with this, it needs to be incremental and it needs to be measured and you need to be, you need to have benchmarks to say okay, where am I going?

Where have I been? Because if you do too much at one time, You run the risk of it’s totally taken a nosedive. How do I fix it? You’ve done too much. So now you either got to go back to square one and then start slowly making changes or ride that trend. And maybe put some things back and just hope that it climbs back up.

That makes sense. All right. Now, definitely like you have some investments done on the paid front as well. I would love to understand what’s the balance between paid and again, in your marketing strategy and how do you decide where to look at your business?

So that’s a great question. (21:43)

Within our organization, we, a lot of organizations it’s flipped, but we’re actually a. Oh, I would say a 65-35 split between organic to hate leads. Now it’s not to say that most of my budget. Goes to paid, but I look at it from, really my strategy and how organic is going to be organic and you’re going to build your website and your thought leadership and hope that, your pages that you want people to come to are ranking and they can come in and they’re converting.

And really when it comes down to a, from an organic strategy, making sure that you’re using the best UX, UI, That you can. Okay. You’ve got a blog page, but do you have appropriate CTAs and CTAs that aren’t in your face the whole time? And, what’s really worked for us is, we give a free trial of our.

Of our platform. And so people get to actually sit in for two weeks, use the full platform, get some of their folks in there and see how it works. And so from an SEO perspective, it’s okay, there’s, they’re searching for a platform. They land on there. I’m like, okay, we’ve got applicable CTAs and they can click on it.

From a paid perspective, I look at it from where is my ICP? How is my where are they searching from? A lot of people, talk about LinkedIn advertising for me, doesn’t work. Very expensive. And where, and actually I shouldn’t take that back. It would work, but the CPA is just very high.

And so I’m looking at, I’m like, okay, from an intense standpoint, how do I measure where these folks are? Where are they floating around? Where are they doing their research? What, where can I. Where can I put my money in to, to draw that attention? But then I look at it. Much further.

So as MQLs are going in, I’m like, okay these MQLs are coming in from either of these channels. How much of those are translating to SQLs? How much of those are translating to new opportunities? And then are they going close one or close lost? And so it’s at that point, I’m like, okay, we do this today with Bing.

We saw that Bing was actually generating a lot of MQLs and it was high quality  MQL traffic. Bye. It was rarely being turned into an SQL on the new app. And so I suggested to Mohammed, who’s my growth manager. I said here’s the calculations and the numbers that I’ve ran. And I think we probably should dial it back by XYZ amount and not necessarily reallocate it because there’s that point of diminishing returns when it comes to SEO and your prices just go up.

astronomically. And so I’m like, let’s just hold on to this for a rainy day. But, that’s some of the things I look at. It’s, I look at not just from top of funnel and then, things start closing, you start pointing your finger at the sales leader and going you’re not closing stuff.

Cause you know, just because they’re an MQL doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually Go one way or another.

Now are there any innovative marketing approaches or technologies that you’re excited about or maybe currently exploring?

Can you repeat that question one more time? I apologize.

Are there any innovative marketing approaches or even, tech that you’re excited about or currently exploring?

I think for me it’s definitely a BM as a whole. That’s, it’s still something that’s being spouted out, but.

I think a BM as a whole, but then also this isn’t really, this isn’t really technology, but wow, this would be a marketing approach.

But

yeah, making sure a BM does offer tons of new tools coming for it. Exciting tools as well. So yeah,

there’s this one, there’s actually this new tool coming out right now. It’s being created by a gentleman Paul Sullivan. I met him in London. It’s called Arise GTM and it’s an app that works within HubSpot and overlays within HubSpot and there is an AI component to it, but what I really like about it is that you can upload.

Your personas, your ICP, your differentiators, your all your different playbooks, their playbooks that have been working basically all these different data points. And then what happens is as you’re having these conversations, as you’re retro having these conversations, as more data’s coming in, it will actually start to slightly tweak your ICP, or it’ll slightly It’ll change your answers to some of these questions that are asked, be it that they’re FAQ questions from prospects or anything.

And it really, we haven’t onboarded it yet, but it’s something that we’re seriously looking at and really intrigued me because go to market is a term that’s used quite frequently. I feel personally, I don’t think, I don’t think a lot of people really understand what that means, because it’s not as simple, let’s go to enterprise or let’s stick in mid market or, maybe SMB is our, bread and butter.

And what I really liked is it takes. We have all this information, but it takes this component and lays it in your CRM. So you’ve got all your data there and what I always like to say is how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time. It allows you to really dial in your go to market one little incremental step at a time, and it changes as the market changes.

And so that’s definitely one innovative, like marketing technology. And I think approach that. We’re probably going to be implementing here in the next couple of months that I don’t know. Is it going to be the magic sauce that brings in millions of dollars? Sure. I feel pretty good saying that.

Because I just realized our time is do you have a few more, minutes to,

I do actually. I just I have another meeting that just started, but I just asked for another 10 minutes. So I think we can, I think we can definitely get through the rest of your questions.

I think I’m just going to have one more and then we’ll close it down. Can you share how your cross functional collaboration basically impacts your marketing strategies, especially when it comes to your product and sales team?

Great question. When I was brought into EHS Insight, the, one was to take our marketing department and elevate it.

But also be that glue between sales customer success and product, and make sure that we’re having the conversations we need to be proactive. And not only how we’re launching new products, product updates, but also retaining our customers and then also closing deals. And, I’m also, I, it’s probably part of my personality too, where I view everybody’s job in the company is the most important job because everybody’s got a job and if they do their job well, it’s just, it’s, The machine is humming appropriately.

And so I definitely say that we try to have meetings with everybody on a regular basis. We’re always being that we’re all totally remote. We’re a remote first company. I’m in Washington state of the United States. Our company’s out of Houston where I probably about 45 percent of our employee bodies are, We’ve got teams everywhere.

So there’s constant communication. And the nice thing is that the barriers have been dropped since COVID where it product isn’t in another part of the company. Sales isn’t in another location of the building. It’s basically, it’s a matter of keystrokes. I can just start asking these questions.

And so I would definitely say that I run a sales enablement marketing department because Let’s be honest, you could have the best leads in the world. You could have the best automations and workflows and rev ops and everything. But unless you’re giving sales the tools they need to close deals, you’re going to fail because fails, they have the harder job where they’re actually asking, can I have money?

Will you give me money? And that’s a hard question that most people are not comfortable asking for. And I’m always about sales enablement first. I’ll create as many PDFs as they think they will. Now, if I had to create 500 and you only close one deal, I’m not going to be creating the other 499 again that you asked me.

Also from a product standpoint too, it’s okay, products talking to us and then we have to figure it out. I’ll. How do we disseminate what features, what new products are coming out to our ICP? What are, what’s going to be the correct way, the correct channel, the correct content in order to get that information to our ICP.

So then they’ll think one it’s important and two, I want to see it and I want to try it, or I want to add it onto the platform if I’m already a customer. And we, what I say that we’re perfect. No, no one’s perfect, we’re definitely getting better all the time, being a lot more close knit with our product team which I think they appreciate that just because.

They don’t feel like they’re just off on their own and then all of a sudden marketing does something, everybody feels like they’ve got a seat at the table. That’s always my philosophy.

Okay. And now if you could so uploads when any of the department within your company for a day, which were it be.

Oh man. Customer success. I would definitely go customer success. And here’s why you get to have that interaction with your customers. You’re learning their problems. And it’s built on relationships. I feel that my career, building relationships has been extremely important because you never know who’s going to help you at one point, but also I don’t.

I also don’t thrive on, if I scratch your back, you scratch my back. I’ll scratch backs all day long and not expect to, someone to scratch my back. I’m all about helping. And so I would probably switch roles with a customer success. Cause it’d probably give me the, I don’t know.

The most enjoyment for a full day.

Yeah. All right. Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate you’re taking time out for this and sharing some brilliant insights about your past experience, I want to come in, about your current strategies and  future planning.

Thank you so much. We truly appreciate it. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun. I always like speaking with other professionals. And my philosophy is knowledge should be shared, should be completely transparent. Other people have seen it as a competitive analysis that are competitive advantage that if you’re holding what you know, they can’t get ahead of you.

I say share it because just because they have the knowledge doesn’t mean that they necessarily know how to execute it. So I’m happy to. Happy to share my knowledge and my insights with the 20 years I’ve had my career. And if it helps somebody.

then it makes me smile at the day. so much. Let me put this on.

    UNLOCK YOUR SEO ROADMAP: GAIN INSIGHTS INTO COMPETITORS, INDUSTRY, AND A WINNING STRATEGY!

    APPLY FOR YOUR FREE SESSION NOW!

    Name*

    Email*

    Phone Number*

    Website URL

    Schedule My 30 Minutes Consultation Call


    Get a Proposal

    Get a Seo Roadmap