Sales Tech Journey
Tell us about your journey into Marketing and Sales Technology. How did you arrive at Jun Group?
I’ve always been fascinated by technology and building things. I started my career at the age of 17 when I served as a technical consultant for SONY. Through that engagement, I met my partner, Mitchell Reichgut, and together we built the foundation elements for Jun Group. I’ve been working here ever since.
What is Jun Group and how do you differentiate it from other advertising platforms?
Our name, Jun, means truth. Jun Group is a mobile advertising company that reaches over 100 million people across devices with beautiful full-screen video, rich media, social media, email, and display ads. We connect you to the right people using location, Personal Identifiable Data (pii), and polls, then we track results all the way to purchase. The world’s best-known advertisers trust Jun Group because everything we do is brand safe, viewable, and transparent.
Customer Success
How different is Customer Success for advertising companies compared to other service and technology providers, for instance, IT SaaS and Cloud?
Brand advertising is famously difficult to evaluate, and our customers have different success metrics for each campaign. “Awareness advertising,” for instance, can be important to lifestyle brands like beverages or clothing. These companies need to stay relevant and be part of popular culture.
Other companies, like quick-serve restaurants, expect to see lifts in foot traffic to their stores. Our platform is designed to consistently deliver tangible results, such as high completion rates and clicks after watching a video. Our ability to do this at a high level is one of the key things that’s made us successful over the years.
How do you differentiate—Customer Success vs. Customer Service at Jun Group?
The two go hand-in-hand because the time and effort we put into each campaign are reflected in the performance. Ultimately, though, we spent years building a platform that consistently functions at a high level. So while our clients appreciate the visible support: responsive account managers, timely reports, etc., the long hours spent by our tech and product teams behind the scenes are just as important to their experiences and their results.
How have these changed in the past 5 years with the arrival of Automation and Content Marketing tools?
As you might imagine, our technology is always evolving and Automation makes everything faster and more reliable. No matter how advanced we get, however, the human factor is always important. We’re proud of our products and process and yet people are what makes Jun Group great.
What are the core strategies you focus at Jun Group for Global business development? How does it impact your revenue channels?
A few years ago we made the decision to focus our business in the US. While there are certainly big opportunities in the global marketplace, we’re expanding rapidly here and look to continue the trend into the foreseeable future.
Which business groups are using your product?
Jun Group serves Fortune 500 brands across a number of vertical categories as well as major media companies. Our biggest clients are in CPG, pharma, consumer electronics, travel, fashion and beauty, and media.
Which geographies have been the fastest to adopt your product offering?
We’ve been fortunate enough to develop strong relationships all across the US. We have offices in NYC, Chicago, LA, Orange County, Boston, and Bentonville, and our teams do business in just about every major US market.
What role does Customer Success play in retaining these customer groups and the consolidation of the market?
As the industry matures, the focus is increasingly on performance. We welcome that, of course, because it’s always been one of our great strengths. Our clients have a lot of choices and it’s up to us to prove ourselves on each project.
Sales Vision
What is the Sales culture that you represent? Why is it important to build a Sales-focused culture for any business?
Jun Group’s culture is all about truth and transparency. We train our salespeople to cut out the adspeak and hyperbole and just have honest conversations with our customers. The power and simplicity of this message is one of our biggest assets. It sets us apart because Jun Group is more than just a company, it’s a brand.
How do you achieve this culture-balance at Jun Group? What percentage of this is driven by the application of technology, reporting tools, and coaching?
The technology is an outgrowth of the culture—it’s the physical expression of everything we believe. We went about building the company a certain way. We didn’t cut corners, we took our time, and we made a lot of difficult decisions that were in line with our core beliefs.
Tell us how you achieve the Marketing-Sales alignment. How does it impact your targets?
It comes back to the simplicity and power of our brand message. Truth is something that’s easy to remember and it’s emotional. If you took ten of our team members aside and asked them what them why they work here ten out of ten of them will tell you that it’s the culture of honesty.
Tell us about your Product Strategy and your vision into building high-performance data-driven teams.
We build teams the same way a lot of sports coaches do: We find the best available player for each position. We’re open-minded about non-traditional backgrounds and we value brains over experience every time. The result is a bunch of intelligent, motivated people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Products come from constantly learning from our clients. We need to understand their needs so that we can anticipate them and build products that solve their problems before they know they have them.
Expertise with Automation and AI
How do you leverage AI and Automation for Sales performance at Jun Group?
We have a unique way of helping our clients reach the right people with their digital ads. We ask questions, such as, “Do you own a cat?”
We then use AI to analyze the positive responses and help us identify millions of cat owners.
What are your predictions and observations on the “Role of Chatbots and AI Conversations” influencing sales journeys?
As chatbots become more sophisticated, we see them playing a larger role in digital marketing. We’re still in the early days right now and one can already see the promise.
My Sales Magnifier
How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Sales Technology leader?
The rate of change in this industry can be overwhelming. We’ve succeeded in listening to our clients and analyzing their needs. AI tools can be beneficial when they’re used properly, and we’ve found the applications that best serve our clients’ needs.
Which events and webinars do you most occasionally attend and why?
We find the best value comes from participating in working groups within our industry’s leading trade organizations. We like the offline conversations and the discussions that come from setting standards and grappling with the challenges that affect all of us.
Your advice to other CMOs and Sales professionals in the ad tech industry—
Many companies in our industry don’t spend enough time developing their own brands. Widgets, updates, and technical solutions can’t compete with the emotional power of a clear brand message.
Tag a person whose answers to these questions would like to read from the industry?
Carl Fremont of Wavemaker is an industry legend and I always appreciate his perspective.
Thank You, Corey, for answering all our questions. We hope to see you again, soon.
Certain is the leading enterprise event automation platform that helps data-driven marketers and event professionals integrate rich buying signals and attendee insights into omnichannel marketing campaigns to improve sales and marketing results and deliver event ROI. Certain partners with hundreds of companies across tens of thousands of events with millions of attendees.
Bill Hu joined Certain from Layer––a provider of messaging software for apps––where he served as the vice president of sales, leading go-to-market sales strategies and tripling revenue growth in one year. Before Layer, Hu was the regional vice president of sales at Gainsight, and director of sales for cloud-based sales performance management software company Xactly, where he led the highest performing team, helping drive company growth from $5M to $75M in annual recurring revenue. As a first step in moving Certain’s sales strategy forward, Hu plans to expand the sales team and welcome additional enterprise representatives to build the organization to scale.
