Fireside Chat with Shawn Schwegman

Shawn Schwegman talks about his journey in Martech and the launch of DemandJump.

Know Me

Today, I serve as the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at DemandJump. My path here began about 15 years ago when I was the CTO and VP of Marketing at Overstock.com. While there, I led our team with an “Art of War” marketing strategy (ie. go where your competitors are not). We would purchase piles and piles of data and then manipulate it using tools like Microsoft Excel.

After countless long nights (and many more crashed spreadsheets) my team and I would be left with a singular snapshot in time of the sources driving traffic to our competitive ecosystem.

Fast forward to 2015.

Thanks to advances in mathematics, database technology, and computing power, we were able to exponentially improve, and then productize my method from Overstock. We can now analyze all the sites, sources, keywords and influencers in real time for virtually any competitive ecosystem in the world, and serve up execution and action plans to increase revenue while decreasing cost. And it’s all powered by intelligent AI, so the recommendations and actions get smarter every single day.

Know My Team

Our team is small but mighty. Currently, we are 25 members strong made up of primarily engineering, sales, marketing, customer success and executive teams. We are driven to succeed every day by delivering triple-digit revenue growth for our customers and bringing laser-focused purpose to the mess that is digital marketing.

If you ask me how tech-savvy is my marketing, sales and branding teams on a scale of one-to-ten, I’d say a solid-9. We have a great team but there is always room for improvement.

As a resource-constrained, fast-growing team, we have to take advantage of the latest and greatest tech to outperform our size and budgets. Our sales and marketing technology stack is state of the art, including our own Traffic Cloud™ technology, which is the world’s first AI-powered customer acquisition platform.

I think young sales professionals should train themselves to master MarTech skills.

The best advice I have for any sales pro is to always keep learning. Stay up to date on the latest trends and advances, and don’t ever be afraid to try something new. There are amazing innovations happening in sales and martech solutions every day. First movers and early adopters of new technology can gain a massive advantage over their competition.

B2B Marketing Strategy and Customer Acquisition Models

I think that contemporary marketing technologies are ‘absolutely’ pushing the boundaries of present-day brand engagement and customer experience.

Using the Marketing Technologies, with the integration of machine learning and AI, we can now learn, diagnose and execute faster than ever before – ultimately improving the experience for new and returning consumers, and driving more revenue for brands and marketers.

Marketing and Sales Alignment: Social Media and Content Marketing Strategies

We use automation tools and strategies to create effective B2B content at DemandJump.

While we believe in staying on top of the latest solutions, and always being eager to test something new, we also believe in finding efficiencies wherever possible.

We use HubSpot for content creation, publishing, and organic promotion. We leverage AI analytics in our own Traffic Cloud™ platform to monitor performance, uncover trending topics, and forecast the value of future content campaigns. We also use Traffic Cloud™ to determine what sites to promote our content on, and where there are opportunities to re-route traffic away from our competitors’ posts.

We produce a wide range of content ( both, web and social) for the whole year. We create blog articles, eBooks, webinars, case studies, and videos. We have had a lot of success capturing new leads with our eBooks and webinars. And, our case studies continuously push opportunities over the line for us.

Customer Success and Technology Insights

From a tactical standpoint, we have a standard audit system where we revisit the automation stack. We are constantly reviewing new technology, but we will perform an official vendor audit once every 12 months.

The technology involved impacts our customer building and partnership model.

Technology is a critical aspect of everything we. One thing in particular that we are focusing on is using machine learning (within our Traffic Cloud™ platform) to identify patterns between items that are purchased together within a single visit, or the sequential order of purchases across multiple visits. We use these insights to further refine our personalization efforts (for both us and our customers) in outbound marketing messages, retargeting offers, predictive lead generation (or merchandising for our customers) etc.

Understanding what a customer will be most receptive to next improves the experience for the shopper themselves and I’ve seen it drive as much as 3-5X increases in AOV and conversion.

The technology we use directly impacts the customer acquisition and success rate.

The biggest advances in technology are allowing us to identify where qualified buyers are 3 steps before they reach our competitors. With this knowledge, we are able to step in front of that traffic, engage those highly-converting customers, drive revenue, and ensure their marketing spend delivers the highest possible return.

I see sales and marketing technologies unifying or evolving together to deliver higher ROI to CMOs.

Absolutely. The continued alignment of sales and marketing teams will be critical in delivering ROI for leaders of revenue generating teams. Technology is making both sales and marketing more personal, more relevant, and more effective. But that requires even greater communication between teams as consumer expectations get more and more rigorous.

Teams have to align with more than just messaging and branding. It’s now becoming a highly choreographed ballet, where playbooks must take every aspect of the customer journey into account, including messaging, timing, purchasing factors, buyers and their sphere of influence, all across channels and across teams.

Even with technological enablement, this is still a difficult dance to execute, and it will take the unification of sales and marketing tech to make it easier for teams to execute.

Advice to the MarTech Industry

Never be complacent. We work with some of the best customers in the world, and these top-performers are always striving to innovate. They want the want the latest and greatest technology to help them get more new customers and to help them deliver the best possible customer experience.

Thank You, Shawn. We hope to see you again at MTS.

Also Read:  Interview with Julie Lyle, Chief Marketing Officer, DemandJump