Blazent Inc.

Blazent is an expansion stage company focusing on data quality management, with the objective of optimizing business process across both IT and Operational Infrastructure.

Responsibilities

I have been responsible for all aspects of Marketing, including Product Marketing, Corporate Marketing, and Demand Generation

Product Marketing

I drove all aspects of product marketing, starting with an organization that had not had the function for several years. There was not a lot to clean up, there was just nothing in place. We began by focusing on Messaging, and typical of an engineering-driven company, the original message was feature-centric, very technical, and did not speak to business value at all. We ran through an iterative cycle that involved marketing, sales, engineering, our MSP (managed service provider) partners, customers, the Board of Directors, essentially anyone with a stake in the success of the company. The process took 2-3 months start to finish, and we ended up with a message/value prop that addressed the downstream impact of our offer, tied specifically to value at in the context of companies who were looking to expand from ITSM (IT Service Management) to ITOM (IT Operations Management). This is a big and lucrative market, and when we were finished, we were right in the ecosystem’s sweet spot. Once this process finished, we rebuilt the website, created a whole roster of collateral materials (white papers, brochures, data sheets, videos, blogs, etc.), and then moved to Sales enablement content (pitch decks, persona definitions, telesales scripts, etc.)

Corporate Marketing

We pushed heavily into the social media space, by using what I refer to as a “Cascade” execution. We write a white paper that is detailed and descriptive in business terms, then from that we are able to generate anywhere from 6-8 blogs. Each blog is then rewritten into a script,  then turned into a 3 minute video which is posted on BrightTalk. We also take each blog, break it down to ~ 100 tweets, and use a bitty address that ties back to a landing page with the associated gated content. This provided a nice execution framework for Thought Leadership, and generated several dozen high-quality leads per week (from BrightTalk).

Demand Generation

Demand generation was a combination of AdWords, SEO, BrightTalk, 3-4 major events per year (such as the ServiceNow Knowledge events), and 3-4 smaller regional events (usually ServiceNow or BMC user events). Overall we have been able to generate thousands of qualified leads per year in a highly specialized market, and we’ve been able to precisely map leads to funnel contribution, and tie that to the original spend, which gives us multiple views into Marketing spend ROI. Most of our execution is through Marketo, which is also tied directly into SFDC, for those leads that are being nurtured, as opposed to those which are categorized as raw.