SalesTechStar Interview with Geoff Rego, CEO & Co-Founder at Hushly

Geoff Rego, CEO & Co-founder at Hushly talks about his tech entrepreneurial journey and biggest learnings in B2B Marketing and Sales in this QnA:

Tell us about your professional journey so far Geoff (don’t forget to include your hobbies)! What’s the best part about your role at Hushly and what’s the most challenging part of it?

I am a serial Martech entrepreneur. Oracle acquired my previous marketing automation company, Market2Lead. I’m back solving a universal problem for all B2B Marketers which is visitor-2-contact conversions. B2B Marketers spend billions of dollars driving prospects to landing pages offering marketing assets like white papers, ebooks, analyst reports etc in exchange for prospect’s contact information, submitted via a registration form. Unfortunately, 97% of website visitors abandon registration forms or intentionally lie on them. The interesting part of my role as a co-founder and CEO is to conceptualize a simple solution to this multi-decade problem, attain product-market fit and most importantly build an army of happy customers. The most challenging part is building a profitable company with happy customers without raising a penny in venture capital.

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What are some of the top lead generation strategies that have worked for you in the past, could you tell us about them?

We invest in both traditional marketing (events, direct mail) and digital marketing strategies, that include inbound and outbound. Primarily we use intent data to make informed decisions about which companies are in-market now on key topics we care about.  We then use a variety of digital ad channels to serve content to those in-market individuals and accounts while at the same time doing other outbound tactics.   One of our most powerful lead generation engines is our customers.  Unlike most software companies, Hushly is a GDPR controller so for all our customers we manage the opt-in / double opt-in data for them and hence Hushly gets millions of Hushly brand impressions from visitors on our customers websites and landing pages which results in inbound Hushly demo requests.

When it comes to B2B/Tech Marketing and Sales, what are some of the top challenges you see teams face (especially Sales) and what are your top 2 tips for them to tide over them?

Most buyers abandon marketing registration forms or intentionally lie on them to remain anonymous. The hidden-sales cycle is real. B2B buyers remain anonymous in the dark funnel and are mostly done with their buying process before reaching out to sales leaving sales-reps to compete on price.

One tip that works is to use an account based marketing approach to better align your marketing motions with your selling motions.  What we’ve found is that alignment coupled with better use of technology creates a higher win rate.

The second tip is to completely change the content experience for customers so you can increase their ability to educate themselves about your company, value prop, solutions, etc without putting up unnecessary friction such as a form box in the way.  For example offering personalized content for those accounts you’re targeting increases lead conversions and for one of our customers its increased by as much as 120%.

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Can you tell us what your smartest Sales/Marketing hack has been so far?

The smartest marketing hack for us has been partnering with companies such as 6Sense, Bombora, ARM Treasure Data to help them operationalize their intent data for joint customers so those customers can increase ABM lead conversions at scale through a better personalized content experience and lead conversion technology. This has led to our enterprise customers seeing as much as a 14X increase in close won from our leads.

When it comes to defining/adopting a tech stack (martech/salestech stack): what according to you are the five top points users should keep in mind?

Before deciding on technology business users should first identify the business process and define KPI’s for business success. Once defined then and only then should business users look for provisioning technology that can achieve business outcomes. Take the time to listen to what the vendors are doing now and what their vision of the future is that they’re building towards. Look for common synergies where there are multiple partnerships in place to build a more holistic approach to whatever it is your business goal is.

What are some of your 5 “must-haves” or “must-dos” for early users of sales tech tools?

B2B Marketers should have a growth mind set. They should be willing to try different experiments on a quarterly basis. Fail fast and learn from these experiments. The things that work best they should continue to expand on and do more of, the ones that don’t they should quickly exit.

Your biggest learning so far in Sales?

People buy from people they trust, even if you’re doing ABM.   Someone is not buying from an account or company they are buying from you or your sales person.   You need to have credibility, integrity, and just as important have a solution that solves their business problem.   Always lead with value.

Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!

Nancy Nardin (Smart Selling Tools). Nancy is a sales thought leader focused on sales productivity tools.

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Tell us about some of the sales/salestech/or other industry events that you’ll be participating in as a speaker or audience, in 2020!

B2B MX in Phoenix, Adobe Summit in Austin, SiriusDecisions Summit in Austin

Any other parting thoughts? Perhaps on work-life balance, Sales, career tips etc?

Today B2B Marketers spend $92 to drive traffic to landing pages and only $1 to guide the traffic to convert to leads. This is marketing malpractice. I would rather change the mix to ensure I can capture more and higher quality leads from existing traffic than spending more money to drive more traffic.