February 13, 2023

Implementing inbound marketing with Pete DeOlympio at Cleartelligence

Show Description

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Show Notes

Pete DeOlympio just implemented inbound marketing at a professional services firm with over 100 employees as the first full-time marketing hire. He talks through his progress setting up HubSpot and what's next.

He was recruited to be the marketing director at Cleartelligence. He talks about how he hit the ground running, identified early wins, and is moving forward with more advanced tactics like account-based marketing (ABM) as well as customer storytelling through case studies.

Pete also talks about how he works with his counterpart in sales, how channel sales fit into their strategy, and what he did immediately to level up the brand's website and social presence.

Find Pete DeOlympio on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petedeolympio/
Learn more about Cleartelligence: https://www.cleartelligence.com/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Intro

[00:00:00] Harris Kenny: Welcome to Pipeline Meeting where marketers come to talk about sales. I'm your host Harris, Kenny, and I'll be joined by guest every Monday and Wednesday for brief 15 minute interviews where we'll share tips that you can apply to support your sales team and help them close more deals.

[00:00:15] Harris Kenny: You don't have time to listen to this whole episode, you can skip ahead in the show notes in your podcast player, or find the transcript at introcrm.com/podcast. All the episodes are published there.

[00:00:28] Getting recruited

[00:00:28] Pete DeOlympio: I ended up, getting a phone call from some recruiter in the just outta nowhere, we're at this consulting firm, the owners wanna talk to you? I was like, eh, yeah. What the hell? Whatever.

[00:00:36] Pete DeOlympio: I've dived into this sort of data and analytics world that I don't know very much about at all. I'm a word guy. I could spin yarn all day, but like, Excel is daunting.

[00:00:45] Pete DeOlympio: So now I have to try to speak eloquently about things that are definitely outside of my comfort zone, which has been cool. The really cool part, you know, it was super appealing to me was they've been a company for like 10 years. It's these three guys that started their own company and it's been growing, slowly but steadily over the years.

[00:01:02] Pete DeOlympio: And they've pretty serious clients that they've been with long engagements with, with no marketing. They just didn't do it. They've had sales guys, we work with channel partners, so like your Tableaus, your AWS, FiveTran. There's a lot of them. Snowflake is a big one that people tend to know about.

[00:01:19] Pete DeOlympio: But that was sort of it. And so they're like, yeah, you're the marketing guy. I want you to stand up a program. Whatever you think is best. We're are tech nerds, we don't know the marketing thing.

[00:01:27] Harris Kenny: You took a bet basically on the executive team. You said, look, they seem cool. They seem like they're gonna gimme a chance to take some shots at doing different things. Trying different things, and just go for it.

[00:01:39] Harris Kenny: And changing up. Changing up the industry you're in and the tactics you're using, and it sounds like so far, so good.

[00:01:44] Establishing an inbound function

[00:01:44] Pete DeOlympio: Yeah, it's really been pretty successful so far. In terms of building social footprint, building inbound, I've always liked wearing a lot of different hats. That's something that I've always enjoyed.

[00:01:53] Pete DeOlympio: I hadn't used HubSpot before I came on board here, learning that, obviously a crm but not that one. Just standing up. Social platforms like it didn't exist. They had a Twitter page, you a LinkedIn page with like 50 followers.

[00:02:05] Pete DeOlympio: Just building that up and building out a content strategy, putting something in place that really checks all of the boxes that I feel like most firms have out of the box. And that just didn't exist here.

[00:02:16] What's working in inbound

[00:02:16] Harris Kenny: What's working in inbound right now?

[00:02:19] Pete DeOlympio: We have some awesome content creators where you have a lot of like how to videos and tutorials. I think part of what's working is we have two sort of separate audiences at the same time.

[00:02:28] Pete DeOlympio: People that know maybe their data isn't great, they wanna do this organizational shift.

[00:02:34] Pete DeOlympio: Then there's also like the people maybe that are the data guy at a smaller company looking to and that are sort of on their own.

[00:02:41] Pete DeOlympio: Providing them content of how they can maybe find practical advice around some issue they're having. how can they fix this without getting the consultant in the room.

[00:02:49] Pete DeOlympio: we did a site flip within the first like six months.

[00:02:53] Harris Kenny: What did you change from and two?

[00:02:55] Pete DeOlympio: It stayed on the same platform, but we did a redesign. The first thing I did was like,

[00:02:59] Pete DeOlympio: I need design help. I can't do it and I'm not, you don't want me to do it. So I found an agency that I could work with on not much of a budget. I was just like, okay, this website's okay, but you can tell a consultant did it no SEO at all, just not a consideration. It was a good business card.

[00:03:14] Pete DeOlympio: So they brought them in, they provided the art direction. I told 'em what I needed. Just firming up even just basic positioning stuff. Here's what we do and here's why we do it, and here's the clients that we serve, and all of these things.

[00:03:25] Pete DeOlympio: I feel like everyone on LinkedIn is an advice guru, and I kind of can't do it, you know? So I'm always joking about oh, I 10 Xed my pipeline and all of that stuff. You see that 500 times a day, and you pull up analytics and it just wasn't a tool that they used. They did their business word of mouth.

[00:03:44] Pete DeOlympio: So to be able to actually do five x and really bring up the site traffic and its footprint, you get to see this huge jump. So that was cool.

[00:03:52] Harris Kenny: You're the first marketing hire. You started with the site, on positioning and designing the site for SEO. Sounds like creating content and just getting visitors on getting a basic footprint on social media,

[00:04:05] Pete DeOlympio: Yeah.

[00:04:05] Working with sales

[00:04:05] Harris Kenny: and what does that look like in terms of sales? So are the principals of the company, are they responsible for sales?

[00:04:12] Harris Kenny: Are you involved in sales at all? Are, are you doing CRM work in HubSpot. You kind of got the top of the funnel filling up. You've got that flywheel spinning and then what?

[00:04:22] Pete DeOlympio: I have a sales counterpart. We have a director of sales that's bringing in net new type stuff. For our big accounts, we have a principal in there who is responsible for obviously overseeing the day-to-day tactical stuff of whatever implementation they're doing, if it's a database migration or whatever it may be.

[00:04:38] Pete DeOlympio: I do some retargeting and some ABM type stuff. Nothing super aggressive yet. That's certainly in the plan to be able to expand accounts. One thing that we find is we have a lot of business use cases.

[00:04:48] Pete DeOlympio: So like we might be at a life science company doing their supply chain stuff. That doesn't necessarily mean that the marketing team or the HR team is running analytics off of the stuff that we're running. They're very siloed in that sense. And so that's a huge ABM opportunity for us. And I think part of the plan going forward, something that I think HubSpot is gonna help with quite a bit.

[00:05:10] Lead generation

[00:05:10] Harris Kenny: Is sales doing their own pipeline generation? It sounds like they are doing a little bit of their own outreach too.

[00:05:16] Pete DeOlympio: Yeah, so I'm sort of the traditional B2B side of it where I'm trying to bring in inbound leads. Maybe they got one a year and now we're getting a couple a month. He is working with our technology partners, we have great ecosystems with them and long-standing relationships.

[00:05:30] Pete DeOlympio: These are huge enterprise SaaS accounts, they have much more of a reach than we do. So they're probably a primary channel and we do a lot of sort of engagements with them.

[00:05:38] Pete DeOlympio: Longer term stuff in terms of like sales enablement is the use cases and having case studies and things like that, that's stuff that in the first year wasn't gonna happen and is like a, and it's sort of a hurdle anyway in terms of just getting clearance to do things and what you can say and what you can't is hard in a service industry.

[00:05:54] Pete DeOlympio: That's the sort of thing that I'm looking to scale up as we go into year two. And being more involved in that way

[00:06:00] Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

[00:06:00] Harris Kenny: It's interesting that you mentioned ABM before, because we have another interview with someone who does AB M at Seagate and is a really interesting conversation, but they're a little further along in terms of implementing that program. So that conversation is kind of like a, you know, ABM 2 0 1 or 3 0 1, but since your earlier stage and just beginning to think about it, I think this should be actually really helpful.

[00:06:26] Harris Kenny: Other listeners who I know are in your position actually and and aren't at a place where they have huge team and dedicated ABM tools and stuff like that, they just want to start experimenting. So I'm curious, how are you thinking about that? So as you go into the next year, where do you think your first steps would be in that direction? What would that look like?

[00:06:46] Pete DeOlympio: I have sort of a two-prong approach I suppose, and this is probably not groundbreaking, but just a way to start somewhere and then build. We have a pretty good client list, some pretty big enterprise clients.

[00:06:58] Pete DeOlympio: It's like I said before, finding the business case users, doing all the account mapping. Who do we know? What are they doing? What sort of services are we providing to them? Who are their counterparts and departments, like identifying those stakeholders, and all of the stuff that goes along with that.

[00:07:11] Pete DeOlympio: And then separately, identifying comps, whether you're doing intent data, I'm a little bit of a intent skeptic, I would say. It's directional, at least it's something.

[00:07:22] Intent-based data

[00:07:22] Harris Kenny: You mentioned you're a little bit of a skeptic about intent-based. Can you expand on that? I'm super curious.

[00:07:28] Pete DeOlympio: I've only used it sparingly in sort of like in a ZoomInfo sort of context and Bombora is the one that I happen to know. I don't know if there are others.

[00:07:36] Pete DeOlympio: If you're looking at a small, 500 person, 200 person company, I'm kind of interested.

[00:07:43] Pete DeOlympio: But when you have, you know, 25, 30,000 employees, I feel like that data can be kind of, bloated, I guess is what I would say.

[00:07:51] Pete DeOlympio: Just hearing what's going on in the industry, know who the players are, know who their stakeholders are, find the pain point, I'm gonna trust that a lot more than, I'm gonna say, like, this IP has searched for data visualization. Yeah, I'm sure that an enterprise account looks at big box terms all the time, you know?

[00:08:10] Pete DeOlympio: And so I'm a little bit skeptical, and maybe it's that I don't know the tech that well, my sort of layman's understanding of it I wouldn't hitch my wagon to it too closely. And I'm also sort of stubborn, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna trust my gut like 90% of the time anyway, for better or worse,

[00:08:24] Steady growth

[00:08:24] Harris Kenny: Yeah. Well, and especially with the stage and where you're at in terms of building this out, you know, you've gotta build a program that you can manage, and if there's lower hanging fruit, maybe that is the, the new hotness, and it's a cool thing, but it just might not make sense for where you're at with what

[00:08:42] Pete DeOlympio: Yeah, and we're not doing volume, my contact database has grown exponentially in the first year, and it's a couple thousand people. The people that we have in there are pretty attached to the organization or they know what we're from our events, they've met us in person.

[00:08:58] Pete DeOlympio: And it's just like building slowly. Like I don't think people need an email once a week from Clear Intelligence. I don't think anyone needs to see that. They can get a newsletter, they can opt in and people do, like, that wasn't even on the site when I started. There wasn't like a get emails from us thing and they're like, no one's gonna do that.

[00:09:13] Pete DeOlympio: And, and they do, you know, uh, , but I don't think you need to abuse it either. I mean, I can't even tell you what I used to send in a week. Hundreds of thousands of emails and I've played that game and you're hoping for 0.1%.

[00:09:25] Pete DeOlympio: And I get that, but that's just not the model here. We can take our time and let it sort of simmer. We build trust that way. We're a small firm. We're like a hundred person firm. The whole point is that, Kind of regular people, we understand you have a, a certain thing that you need to do.

[00:09:40] Harris Kenny: Yeah, and you, you know, again, you have that support at the executive level. You've got these high ticket deals are coming in and you've got channel partners, so you have that runway to, you have that breathing room,

[00:09:50] Pete DeOlympio: Oh yeah. Yeah. It's a great situation. Awesome people. Like I said, that principal team is brilliant and I'm working with them as much as I can to figure out what's the hot thing and what are we doing and how do we leverage, our expertise in this space.

[00:10:03] Follow Pete DeOlympio

[00:10:03] Harris Kenny: How can people find you if they're interested in seeing you share about what you're doing and how you're learning? Where, can people find you online?

[00:10:11] Pete DeOlympio: I'm on LinkedIn mostly. Pete DeOlympio, Cleartelligence is the organization, it's a toned down version of myself, I would say. I try to, you try to have a filter, right? Uh, but yeah, it's that, we're on Twitter, you'll find Cleartelligence.

[00:10:24] Pete DeOlympio: And myself, I don't, I don't know. Twitter's gotten weird, uh, , that's a whole thing. Uh, I don't know what happened. I think, I think it might be a little bit on fire at the moment, but, uh, you know,

[00:10:35] Harris Kenny: I don't know if anybody knows

[00:10:37] Pete DeOlympio: right? Yeah. I don't know. I, I don't know what he is doing, but it's entertaining in a sort of morbid way, I do a lot on LinkedIn and, uh, most of our messaging is coming out of there.

[00:10:47] Pete DeOlympio: Happy to chat with anyone, I remember being the sort of junior marketing guy and and it feels daunting. Feeling like the senior folks always knew, they put on the game face, I'm like, come on, come on now.

[00:11:00] Pete DeOlympio: You have? Yeah. Like, come on, let's, let's just, let's be real.

[00:11:05] Outro

[00:11:05] Harris Kenny: That's all for now. You can find show notes at intro crm.com/podcast. The theme music for Pipeline Meeting is by Neighbourhood Vandal. If you learned something, consider sharing this show with a friend. Thanks for listening.

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