In this episode, Michael and Sarah talk with Nicole Wojno Smith, VP of Marketing for Tackle, a platform that makes buying and selling software through the cloud marketplaces easier and more efficient than selling and buying directly.
Nicole shares why she joined Tackle, how cloud sellers and marketers can target key data points to identify top prospects, and some of the innovative tactics she’s using to create dialogue with prospects and customers.
Show Notes
Building Marketing At Tackle from the Ground Up
“The agency experience definitely prepared me for a fast-growing startup SaaS company. When you're jumping between helping lots of clients and having to prioritize time…and billing in 15-minute increments. I always still think about my day and that mindset of, OK, what am I doing for the next 15 minutes? How can I break down my time to be productive and focus.” (3:46)
How Tackle Enables Customers on Cloud Marketplaces
“Our platform helps other software companies to establish, operate, and scale their marketplace channels. And these are all the companies who work with our AWS marketplace, Google Cloud Platform marketplace, and Azure marketplaces. The marketplaces really create these easier paths of budget and contracts with millions of buyers of cloud services. (5:42)
“We encourage companies to not start with more than [marketplace] at first. You should start with one marketplace, and then look at where your buyers are buying software from.” (7:55)
How Tackle Identifies Ideal Customers
“Data should drive most aspects of marketing because if not, you're just guessing.” (9:48)
“Measures of success are going to be different in every business for your customers. But finding those traits of segmentation that matter to your business and understanding that [allows you to] see what's [in] common - certain revenue bands, industries or size of company.” (10:35)
How to Create a New Category
“We've been creating a new category with what we're doing to Tackle. A big part of that is educating [the customer] about why you should be doing this and what's behind it. And when you're building something that doesn't exist, a big key to that is using content to build thought leadership and get the SEO juice flowing.” (13:17)
“I’m becoming a big fan of un-gated content, especially when you're really building a category [...] no one else has this data so I want to give it away and let people consume it and come to us when they're ready to come to us and purchase Tackle.” (14:13)
“What we've done this year is help make the job of Sales easier by educating prospects on the front end. When someone becomes a marketing-qualified lead that's ready to pass to Sales, Sales knows they've had some education.” (14:43)
How Cloud Marketplace Listings Can Boost B2B Sales and Revenue
“Instead of doing a direct renewal deal, you might have them purchase it through a marketplace instead, because people have committed spend through the cloud marketplaces….It accelerates deals – sometimes by 30 to 50% – because you cut out that Legal and Procurement side of things.” (18:04)
“Everyone knows the B2B process can get stuck – it can drag on both sides. There's friction in that. Buyers like that it gives them faster access to the tools they need. And it makes the procurement process easier as well. And then sellers obviously like being able to tap into that pre-committed budget that the buyers have, doing deals faster, and doing larger deals as well.” (19:45)
How Did 2020 Change Your Marketing Strategy?
“Create these experiences for our customers and prospects that replicate some of what we're doing in person. I wanted to take some of those experiences and do some of that virtually...My advice for marketers is just keep getting creative.” (22:58)
“We've been doing these virtual wine events, where we have between like 20 and 30 [attendees]. A mix of customers and some prospects online. And we send everyone two bottles of wine beforehand. And we have a sommelier come on the events, and he takes people through a tasting of the bottles. And it's a combination of drinking wine, talking about the wine, and then we talk about marketplace. But it's not a typical sales pitch.” (24:48)
Full Transcript
Sarah E. Brown 0:10
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Selling in the Cloud, a podcast about the business of cloud sales and marketing brought to you by Intricately the authoritative source of digital products adoption, usage, and spend data for sales and marketing teams. I'm Sarah E. Brown, and I'm here with Michael Pollack. And we are your co-hosts.
Sarah E. Brown 0:39
Well, Michael, very excited to be here with you on the show today.
Michael Pollack 0:42
Likewise, Sarah, it's very exciting to be here with you.
Sarah E. Brown 0:45
In this episode, we're speaking with Nicole Wojno Smith, who is the Vice President of Marketing at Tackle.io, very excited to talk about cloud marketplaces with her, and ways that marketers and sellers of cloud products can succeed.
Michael Pollack 0:59
It's definitely something that's highly relevant to our audience. If you look at the growth of marketplaces across AWS and GCP, and Azure, and Salesforce, and Snowflake, the marketplace model definitely is en vogue, and it's not going anywhere. And Tackle really helps customers navigate this increasingly complicated space, and help them get an edge. So I'm excited to hear from Nicole.
Sarah E. Brown 1:19
Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.
Nicole Wojno Smith 1:21
Thanks for having me.
Sarah E. Brown 1:22
Tell us a little bit about your background. And for those who are listening, we'd love a brief history of how you got to be where you are today as Tackle's Vice President of Marketing.
Nicole Wojno Smith 1:30
Sure. So, the short version is I'm a bit of a hybrid marketer; I grew up on the agency side of the house. And I was in PR before I swapped to running marketing for the agency I was at, which is focused on B2B healthcare IT companies.
NWS 1:46
And because of that, I always understood the importance of brand and content and a marketing strategy. And that's where my roots are really focused. But while I was at that agency, I started their marketing automation division, to help our customers stand up their marketing automation platforms and built demand-gen programs to really connect their marketing and sales teams and the strategy that they were doing when our agency on the PR side of the house. And so for five years, I was responsible for all the strategy and execution from the top to the bottom of the funnel for these customers.
NWS 2:20
And I really call that my first startup experience, they were eventually acquired by a PE firm and merged with five other agencies. And so after a little more than a year of that experience, I decided to take the next step. And I went to UserIQ, which is a customer success platform, which is where I got to know Sarah actually.
NWS 2:40
And I had the opportunity to start from scratch there as their first marketing, hire and build a team and a marketing program from the ground up, which was a great experience. And after about three and a half years there, I decided to take on my next challenge, which was coming to Tackle. And I joined Tackle as their VP of Marketing. And again, doing it all from the ground up again – I just I love building teams and marketing programs. And so now I say I'm lucky enough to be getting to this for the third time that Tackle.
Michael Pollack 3:12
That's awesome. I love that it's something you and I have in common. I was part of a founding team of a company called Vessel that was in the mobile marketing, mobile marketing automation space that was acquired by Marketo. And so I spent a fair amount of time in the MA universe.
Michael Pollack 3:27
And so I'd love for you to unpack for the audience. how some of that agency experience, particularly with marketing automation, do you find it comes in handy still today? And with the kind of the programmatic nature of marketing today? Do those muscles continue to get used? Are you seeing a lot of that come in handy? Can you share a little bit of that with our audience?
Nicole Wojno Smith 3:46
For sure, definitely. I think, you know, the agency experience definitely prepared me for life, especially a fast-growing startup SaaS company. You know, especially when you're jumping between helping lots of clients and having to prioritize time. And I almost feel like I've never also gotten into the mindset of like billing my time. And we were billing in 15-minute increments. So I always still kind of feel like I think about my day and those mindsets of Okay, what am I doing for these 15 minutes? And how am I breaking down my time to really be productive and focusing.
NWS 4:19
And so I think that has almost like helped me as I've gone to these companies where I've had to really be strategic on what I'm doing. And then also like, get in, really in the weeds and be very tactical, too and played those roles. Because I think at an agency, you're also doing that.
Michael Pollack 4:34
That's helpful. I think that context is really helpful. I think it's absolutely appropriate, I think relevant, particularly having also earlier my career worked very closely with folks on the agency side of things. And I think that mindset can be incredibly useful, particularly to startup – just given the diversity of tasks you have to work on the velocity with which you have to do them and your clients are always demanding whether those are internal stakeholders or your your external customers. So I think that It's helpful.
Michael Pollack 5:00
I'd love for you to unpack a little bit for our audience. What Tackle does, what do you sell? Who do you sell to, but to give our audience kind of an overview of what Tackle does.
Nicole Wojno Smith 5:11
Of course, so Tackle's mission is to make buying and selling software through the cloud marketplaces easier and more efficient than selling and buying directly.
NWS 5:23
And we're a software company, and so our platform helps other software companies – so that's who we're selling – to establish, operate, and scale their marketplace channels. And these are all the companies who work with our AWS marketplace, Google Cloud Platform marketplace, and Azure marketplaces.
NWS 5:42
And all the marketplaces really create these easier paths of budget and contracts with millions of buyers of cloud services. Tackle has more than 200 customers right now and we work with everyone kind of from you know, whether your pre-Series A to a publicly traded company. So, a pretty wide range of software companies that we help along on their cloud marketplace journeys.
Michael Pollack 6:05
Got it when you talk about the cloud marketplace, and just understanding Tackle's role in this, the cloud service providers, the Azures, the GCPs, the AWS's of the world, these giant businesses, they're creating these marketplaces, and Tackle is effectively providing like, uh, like a high-speed on-ramp to help us software businesses, get into those marketplaces, get noticed in those marketplaces and then grow in them. Am I characterizing that fairly?
Nicole Wojno Smith 6:32
Yeah, that's a great way to put it, that we're helping them exactly do all of that get listed on those marketplaces that you can begin selling your product on the marketplace.
NWS 6:42
And then once you're on there, really optimize your sales strategy for the marketplace, it's definitely a little bit of a different selling mentioned than just a direct selling motion. There's different you know, pricing and packaging considerations, and how are you going to get your buyers there? How do you talk to your buyers about purchasing via marketplace? And the advantages of that?
NWS 7:02
And then making sure you know, when you want to go to another marketplace? How do we help you get on that marketplace? You know, the advantages of that. So really building that marketplace strategy with our customers?
Michael Pollack 7:14
I'd love for you to unpack a little bit, you know, if you look at the kind of the proliferation of marketplaces, and if you're a software developer like we are, we're a data provider. So we are in some data marketplaces, Snowflake as a for example, we're in the Snowflake data marketplace.
Michael Pollack 7:30
For our audience, can you just talk a little bit about I know, we've experienced firsthand the challenges of too many marketplaces, we don't we're not sure which one we should invest our time in. How would you counsel folks when thinking about that? And how does Tackle help, answer and support and drive that process? Because I imagine for many software developers, that's actually terrifying, because there's these giant marketplaces. Which one do I go in?
Nicole Wojno Smith 7:55
So we encourage companies, you know, not to start with more than one at first, you know, we'll say, you know, you should start with one marketplace, and look at where your buyers are buying software from.
NWS 8:06
So that's the place where we recommend that companies start first is, you know, are they buying from AWS? are they buying from Azure? Or are they buying from GCP, or, you know, another marketplace, like Snowflake are Salesforce, so where's my baby spending their money, and then build your presence there. And for engineers building it too.
NWS 8:27
That's why a lot of people do come to Tackle instead of doing it themselves, because we really encourage that it's hard to pull your engineers off whatever their internal roadmap is, to work on something that's really not a core competency for them.
NWS 8:41
And with all these marketplaces, you know, the API is not static. There's lots of new features being released constantly with these marketplaces. So then you have to pull them off when things need to be updated with the marketplace. And that's when, you know, Tackle just does all that work for you. So you don't have to have your engineers focus on work that's not directly related to your product or making your customers happy, things like that.
NWS 9:05
And then, again, optimizing your listing, reporting on what's going on with it all that can be challenging with marketplaces, when it's not your bread and butter. And you don't do that every day. And when you have a platform to log into and give you all that information. That's again, we're Tackle plays kind of that key role.
Sarah E. Brown 9:23
Great, would love to hear how you're thinking about building your ideal customer profile, identifying your total addressable market, and also you as a marketing leader, how do you think about identifying when these companies are ready for you?
Sarah E. Brown 9:35
When they're ready to get that amazing LinkedIn notification where Tackle shares? You know, this company has just joined cloud marketplace. We're so proud of them. I love that you do that, by the way. So how do you think about all those and what role does data play and in building those as a marketer?
Nicole Wojno Smith 9:48
I think data should drive most aspects of marketing because if not, I think you're just guessing and I obviously understand that you cannot data paralysis and you can't just, you know, definitely data overload can happen.
NWS 10:01
But I definitely like to look at at least our customer data each year and analyze kind of our customers, their demographics, their geographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, and really kind of look at which of our customers have been most successful with Tackle.
NWS 10:19
And I would look at that as like they've been having transactions in marketplace, and they're moving into more marketplaces. So it's not just like, oh, they have the most revenue. So they're a great customer. No, it's that they're seeing transactions in marketplace. So they're successful.
NWS 10:35
And, you know, your measures of success are going to be different in every business for your customers. But you know, finding those traits of segmentation that matter to your business and understanding that and then, see what's common about those, are there certain revenue bands, industries or size of company?
NWS 10:53
And then I want to understand, okay, how can we target more companies like that, for some of these account based efforts that we're looking at, and to help build really that ideal customer profile so that Marketing and Sales are aligned on who we're looking at, as well, as we go into profiling these customers and these marketing and sales efforts for the next year.
Michael Pollack 11:14
You made a great point about the data and the data being kind of the direction driver to some extent about where effort gets allocated, right, that the marketing is art and science. And perhaps the art to your comment is kind of guessing at times, which I think goes a little bit with the territory.
Michael Pollack 11:32
But I'd love for you to share a little bit about what is the data that's most relevant for you in your role, when you think about Tackle having a fairly sophisticated and robust ABM program?
Michael Pollack 11:43
What's the data you utilize to identify companies who maybe should? be in a marketplace, but aren't yet? I'd love for you to kind of educate our audience on some of those key data elements you utilize to be able to accelerate your efforts.
Nicole Wojno Smith 11:58
I definitely don't know that our ABM program is robust, advanced yet, I hope we're gonna get there, but just starting the marketing team this year, I still feel like we're in the early stages.
Michael Pollack 12:08
But you know, things I will use to identify a company that, you know, maybe isn't a marketplace, but would be a good fit to get there. I'll say like, you know, are they a SaaS company? Are other companies like them on marketplace? So you could look at something like G2 cCowd and identify, okay, some of their competitors might be on marketplace. So why aren't they on marketplace yet? So that's a good identifier for us as well.
Michael Pollack 12:37
It doesn't necessarily matter as much about like, what revenue size they might be in, as long as you know, they have something that is a transactable offering. So a product, that's an SaaS product that can be sold, and they would be a good fit to be on marketplace and work with Tackle.
Sarah E. Brown 12:52
Great thanks for sharing that. You know, thinking about your strategy, let's dive into ABM. What's your approach to content and social and community? How do you think about galvanizing your target customers and your current customers, I know you've done a lot of work to build that out, we'd love to hear what you've done. And maybe if you have any advice or tips for cloud sellers, and marketers who are listening who are potentially interested in replicating those results,
Nicole Wojno Smith 13:17
We've really been creating a new category with what we're doing to Tackle and a big part of that, I think is educating about why you should be doing this and what's behind it.
NWS 13:29
And when you're building something that doesn't exist, I think a big key to that is using content to build thought leadership and get the SEO juice flowing as well. And we've done that through a lot of different mediums. So we've used blogging, and we've used social, both organic and paid. We've done a lot of webinars and brought in different people from across the industry to talk about not even just marketplace, but on topics that might be you know, relevant to marketplace that our audience would be interested in. So like we had a great panel where we brought in different CRMs talk about how they've seen success in selling. And you know, obviously some of it was tied to marketplace, but some of it was just tied to success in sales.
NWS 14:13
We've done third party-podcasts like this, external speaking opportunities, and then we just published a big report on the state of marketplace and we did it ungated and becoming a big fan of ungated content, especially when you're really building again a category that no one else has this data so I want to give it away and let people consume it and come to us when they're ready to come to us and purchase Tackle. instead of you know making it hard for someone to read and consume our content.
NWS 14:43
And I think that's been a big factor of what we've done this year, is helping make the job of Sales easier to educate on the front end. So that when someone is coming into the funnel and you know requesting a demo or they've reached a certain score and HubSpot, and they become a marketing qualified lead that's ready to pass to sales, that Sales knows is they've had some education on what is marketplace and why marketplace and that they are ready for that conversation and that they're not, you know, someone that has no clue of what we do, and they're really not educated at all about
Sarah E. Brown 15:22
That makes a lot of sense, you know, something that we talk about it Intricately is, you know, often a barrier in education is companies don't even know that product adoption usage, and spend data that Intricately provides exists.
Sarah E. Brown 15:33
They're still relying on firmographic data, they're potentially going blind trying to make decisions without data, which of course, no one on this podcast does. But I'm curious, you know, as you're thinking about that education gap, what's that "A-ha!" moment or key piece of insight that you wish your prospects knew before they they talk to you or talk to your sales team? And what are you trying to teach them? before they get to that stage?
Nicole Wojno Smith 15:56
I think we're still trying to teach them a little bit that there's more to Tackle than just hoping you get listed on marketplace. That marketplace really is a strategy that has to be accepted by your whole organization, and that they have to be brought in on that as well. And I think our new website that we launched, the other month does a better job of addressing that.
NWS 16:19
And there's pain points of what goes into that of making it a really key initiative that people have to be bought in on and that it's not just on, you know, on Alliance's or BD's [Business Development] heads to own. But that, you know, you have to involve Sales and your CFO and CEO even in this initiative. But I think that's still something that people, you know, may hear someone say, well, I got listed on marketplace, oh, I should get listed, too. But it's not just about the listing. It's about, you know, going beyond that, too.
Sarah E. Brown 16:47
Can you say more about that? What do you mean, by going beyond the listing?
Nicole Wojno Smith 16:50
A little bit of what I was talking about earlier that you can't just list on marketplace and expect to see success – there's not a ton of drive-by organic purchases on a marketplace. So it's about investing, and how are you going to drive that traffic there, to your listing.
NWS 17:08
So that's a little bit of a Marketing effort there. It's about educating the sales team on how they should be bringing buyers to purchase off marketplace. So there's different ways that that works for people. So you might take a deal that you're talking to during marketplace with certain types of offers, instead of doing a renewal direct deal, you might have them purchase it through marketplace instead, because people have submitted spend through the cloud marketplaces.
NWS 17:39
And because there's more cloud usage there. So they might want to burn down and use that committed spend on the marketplace. And so, you know, they you find out they have committed spend on the marketplace, you can say, well, purchase us instead through marketplace. And oftentimes, those deals then turn into, you know, maybe a three-year renewal versus a one -year renewal, because they have so much spend there that they can utilize.
NWS 18:04
And same things with a lot of the deals: It accelerates deals for sales teams, sometimes by 30 to 50%, on average, we see, because you cut out that Legal and Procurement side of things. You can utilize longer standard contracts that the organization already has in place, because they've, you know, done it through their AWS or Azure or GCP, though. And so then you're cutting out those legal headaches and red lines that happen when you're just buying direct and doing those deals.
Michael Pollack 18:34
That's helpful. I'm curious, just to, you know, this is from a past life for me, but the analogy that I think of when you're talking to this is, if you deal in the grocery business, you could try and sell an item yourself through a website or through farmers markets. Or you typically might go to a distributor who would help get your product into the grocery store, you'd potentially pay their distributor for that access, and you'd probably pay the grocery store for shelf space.
Michael Pollack 19:01
But theoretically, you get a much larger market to go after that's the compelling argument to get your item, a physical item into the grocery store, is the argument for Tackle pretty similar to that that the size of these marketplaces is just so much greater into your comment of there's so much less friction potentially once you get into them. Is that analogy appropriate? Am I characterizing that fairly?
Nicole Wojno Smith 19:23
That's a really good analogy. Yes. And I've heard someone say something similar to that before. So I love that analogy. And it is it's many buyers on it like some that you wouldn't know about some that you would be familiar with. So you're opening you up to more buyers and then yes, less friction when you are finally on marketplace and selling.
NWS 19:45
And that's why buyers like it too. I mean, both buyers and sellers like everyone knows you know, the B2B process can be kind of stuck sometimes of buying software. It can drag on both sides. There's friction in that. So I mean the buyers like that it gives them faster access to the tools they need. And then it makes the procurement process easier as well. And then sellers obviously like being able to tap into that pre-committed budget that the buyers have, and then doing deals faster and often doing larger deals as well with that.
Michael Pollack 20:17
And so to play that out, in it, think about the grocery store analogy, you know, in a situation where you're fighting for shelf space as a product in the physical world, this problem I would imagine is potentially bigger or magnified in the digital world that as these marketplaces grow bigger and bigger, standing out, potentially gets harder.
Michael Pollack 20:38
It's hard to walk down the virtual aisles of the AWS or GCP, or Azure or Salesforce marketplace – I'd love to understand how Tackle solves that – but I'm more curious about your opinion about how do you stand out in that crowded marketplace? That, again, it's like a virtual marketplace, and it's growing incredibly fast. What worked a year ago may not work today, how do you think about that? How do you address that?
Nicole Wojno Smith 21:01
So I think again, it kind of goes back to, we don't see as many people just going on marketplace and saying, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm gonna go spend $30,000 or $200K or so I mean, there's purchases that go up to eight to 10 million on marketplace. And just on a whim, just because I saw this software, it's usually more you know, it's happen because of a conversation. And then they're going on there and making that purchase.
NWS 21:26
But I think to stand out, it's really a lot that happens is because of the relationship that the company is building with the cloud provider as well. So, you know, once you are making these deals and having spend, then go through marketplace and the marketplace team start to take notice of you. And so, you're building that co-sell relationship with AWS or with Microsoft and with Google. And over time, then they're also directing people to you and you're getting more traction with your listings, like you may be eligible for webinars with them, or certain funds and things like that.
NWS 22:02
So I think that's a big part of the motion to is starting to develop the co-sell relationship with the cloud providers, which again comes from, you know, the spend, and what's going on and everything with your listing. So that's what I've seen a lot, as well.
Sarah E. Brown 22:17
As we're, you know, getting close to the end of the podcast, I would love to hear as a marketing leader, who is navigating unprecedented time, how is 2020 changed your perspective on what it takes to be successful selling in this industry into your target markets? And do you have any advice for cloud marketers and sellers who are listening who are trying to be successful?
Nicole Wojno Smith 22:35
Right now, I think it's just really forced me to get a lot more creative on events, and strategy and what I can do to really stand out in this space right now. I'm sure like, everyone, I had a packed in person event calendar with conferences that we were supposed to be doing this year. And when that all was cancelled, it's like, what are we going to be doing?
NWS 22:58
Instead, you create these experiences for our customers and prospects that replicate some of what we're doing in person, I actually didn't get to host any in-person events this year. But I had gotten such good feedback about what had happened in our previous in person events. And I really wanted to take some of those experiences and do some of that virtually.
NWS 23:20
And so that was really what I built some of the marketing plan around was, how can we do that, instead of just having a big webinar where we have a 20% attendance rate, and it's on a zoom, which is what we do those two, don't get me wrong, like, I'm still doing webinars, but I still wanted to see how we can have some really awesome and creative events. And so yeah, I think just thinking outside the box, that was stuff I would not have planned at all, if it wasn't for all the curveballs that 2020 threw at me.
NWS 23:51
And so I think my advice for other marketers is you're thinking about, you know, the rest of this year, early next year is just keep getting creative. You know, find out what has made your customers tick, what they like about your brands, and what they kind of crave and ask them directly. And I think just getting feedback from people has really helped me with making these plans and getting these things together of what we decided to do this year, instead of just going off of, you know, my own playbook of what I would have normally done. So asking questions definitely helps. And customers always have great answers.
Michael Pollack 24:27
It has been obviously a unique year 2020 in more ways than one. But does anything jump to mind for you as a wildly creative event you think you've put on or you were invited to or you attended if you if you have to think back on the year and you're like, oh, wow, that one that thing in particular was awesome? Anything that jumps to mind you want to share with our audience today?
Nicole Wojno Smith 24:48
We've been doing these virtual wine events, where we have between like 20 and 30 [attendees]. A mix of customers and some prospects online. And we send everyone two bottles of wine beforehand. And we have a sommeilier come on the events, and he takes people through a tasting of the bottles. And it's kind of a combination of drinking wine talking about the wine. And then we talk about marketplace. But it's not a typical sales pitch.
NWS 25:20
And actually, the Tackle people don't talk very much our customers have come on, and it's not prompted, we don't tee them up with anything, they just start talking about marketplace and why they've seen success on the marketplace. And we're doing one next week for some revenue leaders to hear how they've had success in marketplace. But again, I think what's made them so great is because it's not us talking about ourselves, it's other people talking about their success in this area. And that's what it's just made it really casual and fun. And we've gone over time on all of these and had to be like, okay, events gonna be over soon, our songs got to leave. But just people are having a great time. And we've gotten such great feedback about these.
Michael Pollack 26:04
I love that I think that's awesome. As I've canvassed and talked to other founders and other leaders across Marketing and Sales, you know, it's interesting to hear the, the range of things people have come up with from, I've heard of people doing Zoom magic shows, which I thought was pretty interesting too, wine tasting, I think is also a great one.
Nicole Wojno Smith 26:23
But, you know, an activity that effectively synthesizes a roundtable dinner, right, an intimate dinner, something for a lot of our customers who are leaders and want to interact with their peers. You know, normally, we'd host an intimate dinner in a couple different cities around the world and trying to recreate that as an interesting challenge.
Michael Pollack 26:42
And so I guess my last question just for you would be, and maybe these happy hours accomplish it, I would guess that your best advocates are your existing customers who say things like, hey, I didn't know how impactful the marketplace could be until I got into it. Is the whole focus around some of these events, really being able to enable that constituency to broadcast that? And is that has that been as effective as you've thought it would be? Or maybe less? So? Can you comment there?
Nicole Wojno Smith 27:08
Yes, I think our best advocates are definitely our customers. But it's also surprised me, but we had someone on the last one who had just actually closed a deal with us probably less than a week before. And they were already like shouting Tackle's praises on a wine event: oh, my gosh, this has already made our life so much easier. I was very surprised at that.
NWS 27:31
But I think it is it's just, it makes it very helpful to have people there that can share their experiences, and maybe not even have you know, this has made it easier with Tackle, but just I think success they've seen of, you know, opening up a new revenue channel and sharing things like this too, for my organization I needed to get on board or here's like tips and tricks I've learned along the way. And I think just opening it up to a real conversation because our prospects talk to Tackle obviously about Yeah, here's what we need to know, we understand this and they they've had enough sales calls with us.
NWS 28:07
So I think it just makes it feel more real that we're opening it up and letting them talk with other people who have been there done that with us. And they're getting to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly, and we don't censor any bit. You can't talk about that. We just let it flow, and with wine, a lot more real conversation flows.
Sarah E. Brown 28:25
Somehow, I'm surprised by that. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for sharing insights, how you enable your customers and your prospects to advocate on your behalf, sharing about how you think about data. And of course, sharing how Tackle is approaching success in marketing and sales. For folks who want to learn more about you and your work. Where should we direct them to?
Nicole Wojno Smith 28:43
You can direct them to my LinkedIn profile, it's Nicole Wojno Smith, and they can also visit the Tackle website at Tackle.io.
Sarah E. Brown 28:53
Fantastic. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
Michael Pollack 28:55
Thanks, Nicole. We appreciate it. And we're looking forward to chatting with you soon.
Nicole Wojno Smith 28:59
Thank you for having me.
Sarah E. Brown 29:00
That's it for us. This episode may be over. But we can continue the conversation on Twitter with the #sellinginthecloud. On Twitter. I'm @SEBMarketing.
Michael Pollack 29:08
And I'm @MRPollack.
Sarah E. Brown 29:10
Thanks to everyone for joining us for this episode of selling in the cloud brought to you by Intricately, the authoritative source of digital product adoption, usage, and spend data for cloud sales and marketing teams. If you like the show, head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And please give us a review. We appreciate it. Until next time.
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