Ali Schwanke: Spotlight on the expert

Our “Spotlight on the expert” series digs deeper into the stories of our expert contributors. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Ali Schwanke is founder of Simple Strat, a marketing and sales consultancy and a Diamond HubSpot Solutions partner. She’s the host of the popular and long-running HubSpot Hacks series on YouTube and more recently launched a more general series on marketing challenges, Marketing Deconstructed. She’s also, of course, a contributor to MarTech.

Q: You’ve published 19 articles with us, more or less monthly, so we’re getting close to a two-year anniversary.

A: That’s cool, I didn’t realize it had been that many.

Q: How did you get into the marketing space? On LinkedIn, I see a company called Leading Resources.

A: Yes, that was my first actual marketing role. The thing that got me into the space in general is that I had started a photography business and discovered that I liked people and creativity and solving problems, but I did not care for the nights and weekends schedules that the photography industry drove. So, I started to do photos for businesses and websites. That was before people decided it was great to have your own photos, so I was competing with the likes of Shutterstock. Creative and business came together when I got into the start-up community around 2012.

Q: You were a freelance photographer for over nine years.

A: It was a good way to make some extra cash and I figured out a lot of things about marketing your own business that paid off. As a marketer, when you spend your own money to market your own services you become aware of the ROI much faster.

Q: Take us on the journey to starting your own business.

A: I was really fortunate to have an experience at that Leadership Resources company. The owner also owned a magazine; I was operations director there, did a lot of graphic design, but was also in charge of selling advertising. I got to see how a business was run because I was at a company of like 20 people. I learned about the operation of business and not just the discipline of marketing.

That led me to an agency. There were a lot of things about the world that were changing at that time and the folks that I was working for did not see that. For example, I had pitched the idea of a blog and was quickly shut down because people would never read what was written for the internet. I couldn’t continue to work in a space which didn’t have a sophisticated understanding of how marketing was changing.

I went to a start-up weekend and pitched a concept I’d been working on — a mobile app for health and fitness — won the start-up weekend and basically had the opportunity to quit my job and have no money! My first lesson in product-market fit: The go-to-market was [aimed at] people who feel the pain; but they didn’t pay the check. The people who could pay the check didn’t feel the pain. A good idea, but the path to revenue was very challenging.

Ali moved into marketing consulting under the name Schwanke Marketing, then in 2016 launched her current business, Simple Strat.

Q: You said the world was changing during this period. What big changes were you seeing in the marketing space?

A: People were using the internet for a lot more things than before. There was a rise in tools that would take all the things you were storing in your brain as a sales or marketing team and make them actionable for the whole team. Salesforce was helping us, not merely to automate, but to categorize information in a way that made it easier to act on. HubSpot was a baby in the ecosystem at that time. There were sales tools and there were marketing tools; they came together in about 2016 when HubSpot really leaned into their CRM. That’s when I felt we’d made the right decision in launching this company.

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Q: You mentioned using Salesforce; there are many platforms out there. Why did you hitch your wagon to HubSpot?

A: The thing I noticed about Salesforce is that it was very good at the sales components, but it was challenging to use as a marketer. You needed a lot of development talent. The ease of use could not be activated quickly and marketing needs to activate quickly. We had looked at a couple of partner programs and ultimately chose [HubSpot] as the one we would pursue. So a good due diligence effort but also being lucky, being in the right place at the right time.

Q: Tyler Samani-Sprunk, CMO at Simple Strat (and also a MarTech contributor) — how did he come on board?

A: He and I met up when a fellow peer suggested we had coffee. We had not met prior. We discovered we were aligned in our shared vision of what we were hoping to build. We blend well: He is a very technical process-minded person, I’m a very entrepreneurial problem-solver. I think those two skills have come together well.

Q: What happens when HubSpot makes some announcements or product changes that you are skeptical about? Does that put you in a difficult position?

A: One of the most challenging things as HubSpot partner is believing in the roadmap for the products but also doing what’s best for our clients. For instance, we tend to serve the zero-to-500 employees and not much of the upmarket enterprise. A lot of the announcements HubSpot has made in the last month come to the upmarket enterprise. We have to be a little bit shrewd in what we recommend to our clients versus what HubSpot says is amazing.

Q: Have you thought of taking on additional partnerships?

A: I do see a lot of opportunities in Salesforce partners absorbing smaller HubSpot practices — and vice-versa. Our future role is either growing through additional partnerships or potentially being acquired.

Q: I think everyone agrees that your podcasts are very good. Did you find you were a natural at that?

A: My first thing in high school was trying to get them to do a radio show; so I’m making up for lost time.

Q: Finally, what interests do you have outside marketing technology?

A: In our morning standups we have a question of the day and recently that was, ‘If you did not work in your job, what is a hobby you have that you might do full-time?’ The joke among the team was ‘Ali doesn’t have any hobbies, she does marketing and technology all the time.’ The two things outside of work I love, I’ve gotten into gardening and plants — I’ve got probably 45 plant babies I’m taking care of. My boys play sports so we’re traveling around playing baseball and soccer. Beyond that, running and hanging out with my dogs.

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