Marketing Insights from Sherri Schwartz: Storytelling, Strategy, and Success

Well, I appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me.

I started dabbling and dipping my toe into marketing, probably in high school. We had an organization called DECA, and I was active in DECA from my freshman year through my senior year of high school, and then was President of the program for my junior and senior years. It’s at that early stage, you’re taking these very specific classes around marketing as part of your daily curriculum. Then we’re also competing in both local districts regional to the state and national tournaments in a variety of different marketing activities. I always loved it. I loved the creativity. I loved that it was very different, the variety of different things that you had to think about, that B2C marketing was very different than B2B marketing, very different from hospitality to retail, you name it. But I wanted to go into broadcast journalism. I wanted to be the next Katie Kerrack and be on TV and interview people. So I went to school for broadcast journalism, but I was a marketing minor. Always wanted to keep it in my blood. But I graduated in the financial downturns of the 708 era, and it was really hard to find a job.

So I started my career in sales. That was my first job out of college, and I was doing sales for the military. But what I got to learn through all of that was what it was like to have great marketing support and what it was like to need a little bit more marketing support. I did that. I was in sales for four years, selling boots body armor, and underwater robots to the military. And it was a very male-dominated industry. Got a lot of learning from that as well. So stepping on base and having to learn about how to sell tools and government contracts to senior chiefs. But I left that after four years when my husband took a career change in relocation, and that’s when I decided, You know what? I’m just going to go back into marketing. I’ve been doing marketing ever since, so about 16 years now of marketing work. I think all of those different experiences shaped my marketing approach. Having started my career in sales, I have always found it so important to have that healthy bridge between sales and marketing. What sales are seeing and hear in the marketplace, what they need to be able to educate and learn about your products and offerings, what marketing needs to provide to them, and even more importantly, what my marketing needs to listen to, to understand what’s going on from the prospects and the customers and understand those pain points.

But then I started like some of my first positions in marketing were in product marketing. So then you parallel the bridge that you want to have between marketing and sales. But then product marketing brings that other department into it. It’s that bridge between product and marketing. I feel like all of these different stepping stones from sales to product marketing have shifted no matter what role in marketing. Marketing has to be this nice pyramid, and it has to be that bridge between what product’s creating to what sales need to be able to deliver in the market, and that nice communication bi-directional congregator and aggregator to make sure. I think it’s also the champion of just really a better company, collaboration, and communication. We’re hearing things and seeing things in the marketplace. We’re hearing things and seeing things at what product is developing or what customer success is doing. We are the place that gets to bring that all together and think thoughtfully about how we go to market as a business. But I always will go very, very back to being a freshman in high school or a senior in high school and It all started with DECA.

I will always give my love for marketing, going back to Ms. Atkinson, my teacher, my DECA teacher, and all of the wonderful things. She was my mother’s DECA teacher, too. Fun fact, way back when. But she started and gave me that little seed for my love of marketing, and it just grew from there.

Yeah. The organization has been around, formerly known as Boomtown since 2015, and it started in remote support and field activation support. Being able to act as a call center on behalf of your business, whether it’s your full call center or customer technical support, or whether it’s to work on your off hours or supplement and work with your support teams. Then we have field activation, where we have a team of reps across the United States that can go on-site and help with your installations. We have a lot of wonderful customers in the ISO community and the payment processing community, as well as even Rectangle Health in the healthcare space where we’ll act on behalf. But what we ended up doing is, as we were supporting our customers, we also realized that there are gaps in how to deliver great experiences and great support. That is where visibility gaps, communication gaps, management of your cases, and management of your customers are. We purpose-built our technology, our CXM platform, platform and started gaining a lot of traction selling that in the space because we were using it ourselves to better support our customers in our remote support and our field activation support.

Then we could sell that to other industries. What ended up happening is we decided about two years ago, it felt right with the momentum in the marketplace to rebrand our organization, to closely align with this CXM technology that we have purposely created that is very, very unique in the space. We have not forgotten by any means, and we still offer up our remote and our field service stuff with our CX services. We still have that. That’s a very, very important part of our business. Our teams still use our technology, but now we’ve rebranded the CXM & OvationCXM. It was a purpose-built decision about two years ago based on the momentum and the shift and wanting to go now I’ll go and pivot into SaaS technology and go sell the technology that we built. I joined the organization during the decision-making of the rebrand. I joined the organization in May. We launched the rebrand to the new website and the new messaging and brand identity on that September, early September. So it was quite a summer. I was also hiring a team of marketers at the same time. So you’re looking at rebranding while building your team.

But I believe when it comes to marketing leadership, that you hire people who are excellent at their job, they’re experts, and you get out of their way. You help, servantly work with them in the trenches, but also trust in them that you hired the right people and they’re the right experts. And that was the only way. It’s the people on this marketing team who helped get that rebrand done within three months.

Yeah. What makes our CXM platform unique is not just our journey orchestration capabilities. Some organizations have some workflow or journey capabilities where we bring something very unique in as we believe that you have to connect your ecosystem partners to the journey. Then we leverage our AI to be able to help through Gen AI support, but also data aggregation and data delivery. I’ll explain in banking, for instance, you have some pretty complex journeys. In merchant services, for instance, you have a variety of partners that you work with and depend upon. As a customer is going through an onboarding or an activation journey with your organization, they may, in some have questions, and they have to go talk to one of your partners that you rely on to help support that customer. The moment they leave you to go talk to that person, you lose all visibility and you lose all communication. You may reference a customer by ABC 123, but your partner references the customer and their systems as QRSTUV. What happens from all of that is if you need to collaborate with your partners, you’re not on the same page, and you’re They’re not on the same page in real-time so we have connectors, not integrators, but we have bi-directional real-time connectors to your partner ecosystem. That way, as you’re orchestrating your journey and your customer is going through that journey, you’re able to communicate in real time with your partners. A single pain, we have our platform, and you do not have to jump to another technology like Slack or Teams or an email to talk to you You’re doing it while you’re also tracking and managing your customer’s journey. You can kick off internal communications internally with multiple departments. You can also kick off partner communications. But then even more importantly, we’re taking all of your data and we’re able to provide you through our AI summarizations. We’ll help summarize the customer, summarize your cases. We’ll also be able to utilize chat. We utilize AI and chat to be able to expedite customers and seamlessly be able to help your organization and customer communications. But even more importantly, we’re utilizing that AI to serve up better data and better actions for you. It just seemed like the right next thing to do for us about a year and a half ago when we launched adding AI into our technology stack within our CXM platform.

We’ve seen huge savings, it’s operational cost savings, and even more importantly, time savings. The amount of time it’s saving agents or relationship managers to be able to do mundane routine tasks that take a long time. When you’re asked to summarize a customer case, what happened with this customer? Why was it a bad experience? What would you do differently? Your AI can come in and provide those summarizations for you to be able to help save time.

I think the most important thing that you can do is get in front of the customer and ask questions. When we did our rebrand, the first thing that I did was interview our customers. The most important thing that you can do is understand, internally, here’s who we think that we are. Here’s what we think our value is. Here’s what we think we bring to the table. Here’s what we think from our product suite are the must-have items. But does that align with the perception in the market? What do your customers or your prospects think are your most valuable assets? What would they deem are the most critical pieces to what makes your product suite most valuable? Sometimes they align, sometimes they don’t align. I think a marketing team must be able to not just understand industry trends and read the news and understand what’s going on in the market, what your competitors What marketers are doing, what new technology is coming out there, but even more importantly, perception of what’s going on in your sales cycle. What are the aha moments on a sales pitch on call one that they’re salivating over?

Also understanding their use cases becahat helps you so much from a new go-to-market perspective. You thought your use cases were this library of different things within banking health care or retail. But in reality, your customers are also identifying brand-new use cases in ways that they want to internalize and use your software. That kicks off better stories. That kicks off better value proposition tweaks. What you do in marketing is never stagnant and stale. It’s always evergreen and it always changes. It should change. It should also change based on what you’re seeing in the marketplace and what your customers and prospects are experiencing with your business.

Yeah. We have routine meetings set in place for discussion on it. We have a variety of meetings where your marketing sits in and has the conversations. We have email chains back and forth. We have Slack back and forth. There’s a variety of means to gather that information to be able to utilize. I’ve sat in on a variety of calls and also taken notes and shared them back with the marketing team.

I think that you have to understand customers are getting pitched so many different products all day long, from their email, from their LinkedIn, There are so many people and so many organizations saying, We solve for workflows. We solve for AI. We solve for automation. At the end of the day, how do you as a prospect, have to think about it, how do you even consume as your consumer? You go on your Instagram and you see all these ads. What makes you want to buy? At the end of the day, what makes a customer want to buy is understanding the value that you deliver. What are they going to get out of it? Not that, Hey, this is a great hammer and it weighs seven pounds or It’s 4 pounds, and it’s going to be great for hanging pictures on the wall or putting nails on the wall. It’s going to be a great hammer. They want to understand the value that it’s going to deliver. You’re going to be able to hang the picture that was passed down from generation with your grandmother’s face on it. They want to understand the story and how it relates to a need and a value and a want to them.

So don’t just sell the product. Don’t just sell the product by throwing a bunch of features down their throat. That’s not going to get them because everybody else is doing the same thing. You have to deliver the story that makes them emotionally say, Hey, this is what I need, and it’s going to save me X amount of hours in a day. It’s going to help us elevate what we’re doing here. It’s going to drive revenue. It’s going to provide efficiency. You have to be able to speak to the variety of different use cases and when it’s going to be delivered to your customer base.

Yeah. I go back to Simon Sinek and Simon Sinek’s golden circle. It’s always starting with the why. Why should you care? Not the how and the what. You’ll get to that. That is the thing that you have to always, I think, focus on. I will never forget in my early product marketing days, I worked for two different companies in product marketing. My first product marketing company, wanted you to write more technical product marketing work. Then when I switched and went to a different product marketing organization, I was told, That’s too technical. You’re batting left, but I need you to go bat right right now. Go into a little bit more storytelling. It’s probably some of the best advice that I’ve ever received that I will always remember, is that in marketing, while you’re connecting in what the product is building and what a product team is building and what they’re delivering, you’re going to get stuck in feature mode. They’re building all this technology. It’s going to have this amount of parameters and these new features and these security elements. Here’s what it’s going to do. That’s excellent. I could write about it all day as to how it works.

But nobody is going to go buy that anymore because the competitive market space has just gone in the boom. The amount of fintechs out there, the amount of technology SaaS providers out there, and the amount of chatbot companies out there now is through the roof. We can’t all just sell on those features. It was really important for me to hear that in my younger years as a marketer, and it’s something that we focus on marketing now because it is storytelling. It’s understanding the technicalities of what happens, but you have to deliver the story. You have to deliver the why. You have to deliver the value because nobody is going to buy just on a feature comparison.

Two years ago, what we found was we had to focus on the top of the funnel and a lot of explanations in the marketplace of what CXM was and how it was different from CRM systems. That was a lot of the number one question we’d get. Well, we already have a CRM. Well, CRM is different than CXM. We had to work a lot on myth-busting, the difference between CXMs and CRMs. Why, in some instances, you may only need a CXM, and why in other instances, we work very well with your CRM, and you’re a complement to your CRM system. A lot of times, it depends on the factors of the business. Now, where we’ve gone, and we were trying hard to bring that awareness, the general awareness of why a CXM technology needed to be looked at, why you should consider journey orchestration, why journeys are different than workflows, why journeys are different than process builders. They’re not all the same. Where we’ve What we’ve done now, and what we’ve been very excited at is really in the last six months, what we’ve seen that we’re finally ranking for are things that we built content for a year and a half ago.

I think it’s a great reminder, that marketing is a long game. Especially when you’re rebuilding and rebranding your organization, you will see a dip the moment you rebrand and you have a new domain. You’ll see a little bit of a dip because people are thinking about you as the old organization, and you’ve rebranded and redone your value proposition. We saw that dip. Then we had to go to educate the marketplace on what we were why we needed that technology and how it was different in the marketplace than what was already out there. But it’s not an overnight success. It’s not within 30 days, all of a sudden, we’re the trending product we’ve got 20,000 people on our site and we’re getting 100 leads a day. It doesn’t work that way, not in many instances. A year and a half later, we are now ranking for those things that we built in the early brand awareness days. That, for us, is exciting because what it lets us know is that when we went to market, there were not a lot of offerings out there. Now where we’re at a year and a half later people are starting to search for what is a CXM.

How is CXM different than CRM? What is journey orchestration? How is that different? And those let us know that we have those right thoughts and slow and steady wins the race. And so we’re excited about that.

Yeah. So a lot of our ICP has been within the LinkedIn community. So we focused a lot within Dark Socond building out our content and our voice within the LinkedIn community, focusing on our existing page, focusing on our executives’ thought leadership out of their voice on their pages, and also focusing on a variety of different communities within LinkedIn. I think they’ve grown over the years. We focus a lot on that. What we’ve seen is not just our branded search and our organic SEO going through, but even the SEO coming from… Our LinkedIn traffic has steadily grown year over year into our website. We have focused on the voice there. We have a Twitter presence, but our community is much more active on LinkedIn. In the space.

Yeah. I think sometimes marketing has come over the years, analysis, paralysis by analysis. I think we’ve become very, very inundated with so much data. But do you become so inundated? I think you have to remember there’s a difference between qualitative and quantitative, and you have to have a good mix of both. Our number one is revenue. We hold ourselves accountable in marketing to help drive revenue. We looked at it as both sourced and influenced. And not that we have one number higher than the other on that. We would like to see revenue grow in both channels of sourced and influenced. We are looking at customer acquisition cost as well and looking at the channels in which that’s delivering. From the website perspective, we are interested in where we’re putting a lot of eggs content-wise in the organic basket right now instead of large ad spends. We are looking at what’s that trended branded search over time. What is the organic social growth? What is organic SEO growth? Those are the numbers that we’re looking at. We do get hit, just like everybody else, with algorithm changes. We experienced one in March where Google changed its algorithms and we took some hits.

But what I look at impact down in the trenches of that is I still want to see, no matter if we hit highs and lows in our traffic, I want to see the branded and organic growth continue to trend over time where they don’t experience the dips. That lets me know that those things are working. I might have the overall traffic site down one month, but if my branded and organic, it’s SEO and organic search, never dipped and they steadily continued to trade up, I did my job. That lets me know that the guys that we want to attend our website are finding us while we then on the back-end are also figuring out, Okay, well, why did it get this month? What’s changed with the algorithms? How do we solve that? We also do look from an attribution perspective of how people are finding us. We are breaking it down into, are they finding us from digital ads? Are they finding us from referrals and word of mouth? Are they finding us from podcasts? Are they finding us on LinkedIn? That lets us also know where we need to continue or events, what events we need to continue to go to and support, or what channels we need to go even harder in from a content perspective.

Yeah. We’re very much in the land and expand mode of a business right now, too. And from our expansion perspective, we have monthly customer newsletters that we’re putting out, and we have webinars that we’re putting out. So we are still trying, even once you’ve become the customer, we are still sending the information and education In our customer newsletters, and the content that we deliver is vastly different than what our prospects may get, or those that only sign up for our LinkedIn newsletters. And so we’re delivering a variety of different content by audience. We want our customers to know the latest, even from a feature perspective, like a feature release. We want them to know that because if they’re already leveraging us and they realize that they get more in-depth access and capabilities to a new feature release, we want them to engage back with our CSM team and to be able to take that. If they can beta test a new release, and we’d rather them maybe beta test that first, those are great ways. We regularly communicate through newsletters and webinars with that customer base. We’ve been pleasantly surprised, too, with our software retention rate.

We have seen growth over time of them taking more and more on when it comes to their expansion talks and when they’re ready to expand and renew.

I do not have that on top of me. It is near 100. I cannot confirm or deny how close it is. But we have on our software side of the business, that is, we have been very, very, very excited about that. But do not quote me on that. I do not have that with me today.

Yeah. There are a couple of different things. I like to see growth individually. I think that it is best when you are hiring a team to hire, especially when you’re building from scratch, experts that have done this, that have led teams within their respective departments or become principals in their craft year after year. That’s going to allow you to know that your first hires are going to be those experts who are going to come in and know how to grow their craft and go. You got to move super, super fast. But even more importantly, I like to see unique differences in personalities and backgrounds and experiences, you name it, because I do not want a bunch of people that copy and paste, say the same thing, have the same beliefs, have the same ideas, have the same values, you name it. I celebrate differences because I do believe that when we get together as a group when we’re throwing spaghetti on the wall and we’re trying to see what sticks and what we need to do differently, I appreciate the fact that we can come together as a group and say, Yeah, I love what you’re saying here, but I don’t know if that’s going to work because here’s how I’ve experienced it in the past, or I read a new article and I think that this could be a great approach, or what about this, or what about that?

I love, too, that we can all get together as a group, Some of us have kids and some of us don’t. We can even just non-workwise laugh about it all, or one has a dog that all of a sudden is stealing shoes and bringing them to them in the middle of the office meeting. I enjoy it it. I think it should be a family. I think we spend a lot of hours at work, so why shouldn’t we get along? Why shouldn’t we be able to collaborate? But also, more importantly, still push each other creatively. I want to grow. I don’t know everything. My content marketer wants to grow. She doesn’t know everything. My graphic designer wants to grow. He doesn’t know everything. I like to learn from each other. I like to know that they have a passion for what they’re doing and years of expertise. Because then as we do scale our marketing team and we want to bring more people on staff down the road, and as we look to more mid-level to entry-level people, we have the right people in place that are so passionate about what they do, so passionate about where we work, and so passionate about our team that we’ve built, that we’re going to be able to go in, and rightfully so, bring someone in that’s more mid to entry-level and train them up and continue to grow people in their careers.

I’ll be the first to admit. I try to stay as in the know as possible, but I don’t always do the greatest job. Look, I had a meeting today with my content marketer and I said, You know what? I said I feel like I need to carve out a little bit more time in my week to read a little bit more. I feel like I’m falling behind. There are moments in life where you’re all caught up and you have all the time to read and get up to speed and listen in. And then there are moments where life happens and I’m like, Oh, my gosh, what happened in the last two weeks? I’m falling off. But I carve out time in my week dedicated to it. I can’t tell you how many newsletters, probably way too many newsletters I’ve subscribed to. I love the idea of getting the newsletter. I am a fan of it because I can bite-size chunks look at the variety of articles they’re pitching and see which one I want to click on at that time. I love a podcast. I do not, unfortunately, with my kids’ schedules lately, always get to listen to the podcast.

I used to love listening to it while I was cooking until all of a sudden they’re screaming in the background, so podcasts don’t work for me right this second. However, I do love to be able to consume the information, and I try to stay in the know as absolutely much as possible. But it’s hard. I do feel like it’s become marketing guerrilla warfare. I do feel like things are changing all the time. When I am looking for information, though, I do look for a variety of different things. I love looking at the larger brands what they’re doing and what their subject matter experts are putting out. I love that, but I’m not always one-to-one with where they are in their businesses. I don’t have the marketing budget sometimes that they might have. But I love it because it’s the dream, right? Okay, if I had the budget, that’s exactly what I would want to do. If I had the budget, this would be an interesting concept. Let’s go test it. But what I also really love doing finding information and talking in marketing communities with organizations that are right-sized like me. Because a startup scales up a smaller marketing organization, you’re in the trenches, and it’s not always pretty.

You don’t have 25 marketers or 30 marketers on your team. You’re a smaller team. But I also feel like that’s a superpower because we get to learn and wear a variety of different caves. It also stretches you to learn a variety of different aspects of marketing that in a larger organization, you have individual seats for. It does push you to have to learn more and learn faster. But I also love consuming information and sitting on round tables within the marketing community, right-sized, where I can talk to another marketing leader who might have just gone through a budget cut or has only three other marketers on their team like me, and we can just sit down and go, What’s working for you? Okay, what’s working for you? What about this? What about that? I think having that type of network and outlet with other marketers, and leaders in the industry that are right-sized for your business It’s nice because you feel like you’re having a therapy session. But even more importantly, I think you’re always learning something a little bit more new. They’ve carved out intentional time to do this in SEO or that in product marketing.

That’s interesting. Maybe we should write size and try that for our team. I learn a lot that way.

Sure.

Instagram.

Advertising.

In my dreams. Sleeping in my bed. I know it’s not lovely.

It was in a book. It was a basketball team that sent rubber chickens out. Maled rubber Chickens. It’s in the book Marketing Outrageously.

Real-life.

Over analyzing.

History.

The last Google search was learning all about the supplement NAD. I’m looking at a supplement for Amazon Prime. It has nothing to do with work. But that was my last Google search.

Thank you.