An interview with Steve Hoechster, Director of Content & Communications at Stensul
We sit down with Steve Hoechster, Director of Content & Comms at Stensul. The Stensul Email and Landing Page Creation Platform™ dramatically reduces creation time so teams can better focus on improving email and landing page performance.
How did you end up at Stensul and what problem does Stensul solve for its clients?
I came to Stensul for the opportunity to work again with a superb Marketer and help build a professional marketing organization able to help the company dramatically and sustainably grow. It takes most companies two weeks or more to get just one HTML email out the door. Stensul's email and landing page creation platform turns a complicated, time-consuming, and often frustrating process into an easy and efficient one. Instead of taking weeks, with Stensul you get an email ready to be sent in hours. This frees up loads of time to spend on strategy that can optimize email performance and impact marketing and business results.
As the Director of Content & Communications, what are your main responsibilities at Stensul?
In my role, I am responsible for content marketing in all its forms and facets, executive communications, and external communications.
How do you lead your team to organize and improve the marketing-sales process to increase sales and enhance the customer experience?
At Stensul, Marketing and Sales - and for that matter, Customer Success as well - operate as one team. We recognize revenue generation and retention as a collective responsibility. We're highly collaborative and subscribe to the notion that a good idea can come from anyone or anywhere. We are also big on data collection, analysis, and reporting. On that, we hold to another notion: no surprises. Of course, we infuse our GTM team with the Stensul values of learning agile, team players, above and beyond, and garra, a Spanish word that encapsulates hunger, heart, and passion - and reminds us to be relentless in how we show up for our customers and each other.
At ColdFire, when we look at our clients' Marketing and Advertising strategies, they vary greatly. Some have found a single, scalable client acquisition process while others thrive on a mix of top-of-funnel strategies. How would you summarize the overarching revenue-focused strategy of Stensul, and what key elements does it encompass?
Our approach at Stensul is work smart and hard at every step of the customer journey, running marketing initiatives at every part of the funnel. The central message delivered at every level is email and landing page creation can be efficient with Stensul. That's backed up with real-world evidence of performance experienced by Stensul customers. It's worth noting that Stensul is driving a new - and better - way to create these marketing assets. In effect, we're creating a new category and with that comes the need to inform, educate, and persuade our sizable total addressable market that there are massive benefits to change the way they've been creating emails...for the last 20+ years.
What is an efficient marketing technique that you've implemented at Stensul or previous companies, which you believe is underutilized by most management teams - and why do you think that is?
Beyond being the voice of the customer, our Marketing team realized it was a customer. The use of the Stensul platform was extensive and impacted how our Marketing Operations and Demand Gen managers, Designer, even the head of Marketing did their jobs. Those four roles mapped exactly to four of our key personas. So we created the How Stensul uses Stensul campaign. Instead of talking at prospects, this campaign is all about talking with them one-on-one in a highly relatable way. Web pages, content, emails, and more were oriented to each persona to make very real connections. In brief, the campaign has struck a chord with each persona and delivered impressive results. The learning: sometimes, your experience with your product/platform/solution can be a highly credible and effective marketing approach.
Has your Marketing team experimented with some kind of cold outbound strategy (like cold email)? If yes what was the general outcome and if no, why not?
Stensul takes a person-to-person approach to cold emails, largely as a sales prospecting tool used by SDRs and AEs. When the effort is put in to understand the target and a message is crafted that resonates, this sort of initiative works. The challenge tends to be how to target, tailor, and send some reasonable quantity in a time-efficient manner.
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