Chantelle is the head of the sales/marketing for a local company that specializes in search optimization for websites.
- 1. What were some of your previous decisions/jobs that led to your current position and career?
Served in the USAF for 6 years, acquiring a solid work ethic and quality work experience. During college I looked for opportunities to grow my resume and further build work experience in the professional arena. Landed an internship with Wildwood Casino in charge of social media marketing, internal branding, and contests and promotions. Later I then started working at Robert Half Technology recruiting and placing IT professionals in positions throughout the western rocky mountain area. The experience in these two roles educated me on department structure, process management, time management, and strategy. As a result I was able to land a positon building a sales and marketing organization specializing in eCommerce software development.
- 2. What does your job entail?
The product we sell is subscription based software(SAAS). Organizations pay a monthly service fee to integrate our technology onto their eCommerce website. The products we offer include:
Rich Autocomplete: a dropdown of search suggestions and product recommendations when customers begin typing a query into the search bar.
Advanced Site Search: automatic re-ranking of products from a search results page or category results to ensure the highest converting/most popular products gravitate to the top.
Customized filters: allowing customers to narrow the scoop of results by filtering off of size, color, brand, best use, rating. We can create any filter that will help customers find the product they are looking for more efficiently.
AJAX: eliminates the need for a sub domain and increases page loading speeds by keeping the header, footer, and side menu stagnant when a filter is selected and only reload the product images.
Product Recommendations: “Customers who viewed this also looked at” and “Customers who purchased this item also bought”
Mobile Search: What works for a mouse will not always work for a finger – we optimize ecommerce sites to be compatible with mobile technology enlarging selection areas and applying an advanced search and drill down navigation menu to accommodate the condensed real estate smart phones encompass.
- 3. What strategies do you apply when it comes to marketing?
Target marketing: ecommerce organizations generating 2-10 million per year in revenue.
Kill the competition: Reaching out to customers using competitiors software looking for an opportunity to describe why we are a better solution.
Search Engine optimization: Generating high rankings for ecommerce search, customized category navigation, advanced site search, ecommerce navigation, mobile site search, mobile navigation, ecommerce integrations, ect…
Trade shows: Live product demonstrations collecting leads and building partnerships.
Affiliate referrals: 10% monthly reoccurring commissions for referrals from our partners
Customer referrals: a free month for the existing customer and the new customer with every referral (I email out coupons much like Netflix)
- 4. Do you have a target market? If so, what is it?
Target marketing: ecommerce organizations generating 2-10 million per year in revenue.
- 5. What do you believe to be the most effective marketing tactic?
B2B referrals – Web Design agencies, Shopping Cart Platforms and SEO companies send us the best leads due to the fact incorporating an advanced site search and customized category navigation is not really top of the agenda for many ecommerce business owners – these agencies help educate the customer on the benefits and ease of integration with SearchSpring and we convert over 90% over partner leads.
- 6. Once you have their attention, how do you real them in to commit?
With every sale you must either make the customer more money or save them a ton of money. With my sales approach I always listen for the points of pain present a solution and always always always add one more benefit – I add in bogus fees that I always waive to make the customer feel like they are getting a great deal and I call each client to check in bi weekly during software creation and integration on our end and database creation on their end. Once everything is live I then check in either monthly or quarterly.
- 7. Do you feel it’s better to use price as a marketing tool or save cost until later?
Compared to our competition we fall into the middle (Nextopia is cheaper, SLI is more expensive) Price is difficult because when the customer is comparing us to SLI they get excited about the price and when comparing us to Nextopia they get offended. So I usually wait till close to the end to discuss price.
- 8. How effective is social media in your line of work?
Twitter is good for getting exposure on blogs or press releases, great to see what customers are saying about our service that also can serve as a CRM solution as well.
Linkedin we use to connect with clients and prospect for new opportunites.
Pinterest and Facebook we sell integrations on so we work with the networks in that sense but because we are a B2B sales model Pinterest and Facebook are smaller components.
- 9. What seems to be the most frequent obstacle when marketing your product?
Since my role is hybrid of Sales and Marketing the balancing of time has been the biggest obstacle. Over the past 90 Chantele and I have grown organizational revenue 19%. Sales are blowing up – when things calm down I look forward to generating some killer case studies, Press releases, and blogs to create even more hype.
- 10. How big of a role does your attitude/disposition play in the marketing process?
Having a positive attitude plays a huge role in the sales and marketing process. I love the fact I am selling this product as well as marketing because I get to learn more and more about the benefits we provide. Seeing the results first hand helps me get excited about what we do. So when I come into the office pumped up and high on adderall and energy drinks customers can hear my smile and my writing becomes more profound with passion behind my words.
