"LoadSpring offered remote access to critical apps starting over 20 years ago….long before the cloud was called the cloud."
M7: How do you keep the people of your organization engaged, inspired, and eager to grow? How do you get inside the heads of your customers to keep pace and grow with them?
SW: One of the powers of marketing is being able to make an impact at the highest level and align marketing for our customers utilizing their company’s priorities. In this sense, I can inspire and support non-marketing colleagues to meet customers’ needs better than the competition – leading the way with a new vision that is powerful and achieves goals.
Customers’ needs can change in a second – as we’ve seen over the last few months, these changes happen quickly and dramatically. The challenge is remembering that our solutions are not just a desired product, it’s a desired experience. We are constantly thinking of how we can create the best experience possible and delivering outside the norm. Our customers expect us to innovate and use our 20 years of experience to share what we have perfected to inspire them, by first listening to them. Listening to our customers is where we start and where we continue. We strategically look to be our customers’ Sherpa … helping to determine strategies that meet their corporate goals.
M7: One Cloud Platform: Infinite Business Solutions. Can you elaborate on this?
SW: Our cloud solutions put our customers’ business at the heart of our solutions, so people have the flexibility to work how they want, where they want without worrying about managing operations that we offload for them. Instead, we provide hosted and business intelligence solutions that enable their business growth. Just as each company is unique, our solutions are flexible enough and innovative enough to enable them to scale their business with our leading-edge technology.
Our proprietary LoadSpring Cloud Platform is our enabling technology that enables customers to DO MORE and GET MORE from their cloud solution. This solution empowers innovation for our customers by reducing the burden on internal IT and automating critical reporting so they can focus on innovation initiatives.
"Today CMOs need reporting that demonstrates a direct correlation between marketing spend and results."
M7: Recently PRC Software has partnered with LoadSpring Solutions as its exclusive hosting partner. When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, LoadSpring Solutions makes a good number in a given year. What role, as Chief Brand and Product Strategist, do/will you take on those?
SW: Our LoadSpring Cloud Platform is more agile and flexible than other off the shelf solutions. The vendors and partners we work with, understand this, and want to Saas enable their applications. We become their cloud solution. Our speed and performance make it the perfect platform to deploy their apps, knowing that all the best features of their apps will shine and perform flawlessly. Our integrations are seamless. A partnership with LoadSpring is exactly what works for our partners’ business and for our customers’ business.
M7: What is your most effective digital marketing strategy at LoadSpring Solutions for reaching out to buyers across the world?
SW: Strengthening decision-maker relationships through nurture campaigns that listen to where they are in their buyer’s journey. We also listen to who they are listening to within their organization. Those may be their department heads. They are also part of the buyer’s journey. Their problems may start with one department, but ultimately they affect all. Our digital marketing campaigns are the glue that brings them back together by addressing the questions unique to each so they can understand how we can help to solve their problems.
M7: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work - what day to day processes have you had to re-tool to be able to pull them off remotely? What does your remote tech stack look like?
SW: To LoadSpring our employees are number 1. They are the drivers to our success therefore their safety is our key priority. We have had a work from home policy for years so 100% of our team had the technology to work from home for years. The transition to 100% work from home was easy. What is hard is keeping the culture, our culture, from falling away when people do not have an office space to come to and share. We already had tech, like video conferencing, to keep connected but now we use it more and make people turn on their cameras so we can still see each others' body language which makes people feel more connected. Also we initiated a Video conference happy hour for our teams so we can all feel connected in a personal way. This was a game-changer.
"What is challenging for a niche player, in a market dominated by giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, is the ability to digitally compete."
M7: What Marketing-related challenges do you meet every day? How do technology and collaboration tools encourage you to defeat these?
SW: Our number 1 challenge in marketing was to develop a direct correlation to business results. Marketing in the past was always about brand, awareness and market share. Today CMOs need reporting that demonstrates a direct correlation between marketing spend and results. It took us over a year to develop an executive dashboard that can show what opportunities were developed by lead source, what quotes have been created by lead source, as well as closed deals. In addition, we currently are working on tactical KPI reporting so we can see early, in the buyers journey, what is impacting their buying decisions and what content they are interested in. We analyze and review and then make changes.
Technology has become the foundation of our marketing department. From Smartsheets to keep all projects on schedule, to Marketo for marketing automation, and of course linking Marketo and our CRM and financial systems to get the reporting mentioned above.
M7: Given the changes in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace, what are the key “climatic” changes taking place in your industry? Economic? Demographic? Competitive? Marketing? Technological? Environmental? Public Policy? What systematic approach are you using to monitor these changes?
SW: I would start by talking about the cloud market. LoadSpring offered remote access to critical apps starting over 20 years ago….long before the cloud was called the cloud. We are a niche player in the cloud market as we focus and have built a team of experts for Project applications. What is challenging for a niche player, in a market dominated by giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, is the ability to digitally compete. I cannot outspend these players for digital marketing, SEO ownership, etc. We have to be more agile, more crafty to compete. We are constantly reviewing our strategy and tactically executing outside the box ideas.
The global pandemic has probably touched and affected all these areas. By communicating clearly, staying calm, demonstrating empathy, and thinking long-term to take appropriate decisive action, we set a new standard of focus that can better monitor inevitable change. As leaders in cloud project management solutions, this has been core to our culture and our innovative solutions from the start. And, we continue to create a better pipeline for information, ensuring less friction as change takes place. We have been able to provide lines of communication that are always open and haven’t missed a beat moving our workforce from out of the office to remote and safe work environments while staying in constant contact with our customers with zero interruption of service.