Richard: Hi Juan how are you today
Juan: Im good how are you
Richard: doing good doing good. I guess I'd like to know a little more about your role and where you work. Give an introduction to yourself as a PR professional your current position and so on.
Juan: Uh my name is Juan Parra, I am the head of marketing at Accelo uh basically my role consists of managing one, everything that has to do with communications and distribution channels towards all of our gamma of clients. Work very closely with sales so our communications are always coordinated in terms of the events that we are putting out there the marketing pushes that we are putting out there and kinds of work and uh last but not least is working with the success team to ensure that the content that we are putting out there is not just good for the new and upcoming clients but also for the existing clients that are looking to get more out of our platform.
Richard: ok and do you mind just kind of explaining a little bit of what Accelo is and what it does?
Juan: yes Accelo is a professional services automation platform and what that means is that we integrate the core modules that companies, small business to big enterprise companies use to run their businesses and that includes CRM, project management, customer services, retainers or contract management and we do this because we found that there is a gap in-between the tools that our users use on a every day basis we found that users in the professional services sector use between 5-7 tools to run their businesses and by minimizing the amount of tools having all of those teams working within one same platform and leveraging the data that is created in each one of these tools their team can run more seamless you can emphasis in optimizing business practices and ultimately make more profit.
Richard: Great ok so as a marketing director over at Accelo what are your responsibilities and how do they integrate with just marketing and your overall business objectives
Juan: so my main responsibility is hit our main goal which is keep the pipeline healthy and by pipeline I mean not just traffic that comes into a platform but traffic of users that ultimately convert into our sign up process and then ultimately convert into paying clients and thats a very broad and general answer but on a day to day basis I make sure that all of our marketing mix is working on point and that we are hitting our targets that we set for ourselves daily weekly and monthly and at the same time make sure that the sales team has all of the collateral to ultimately sell and ultimately close those sales and I have mentioned before I also work with success to make sure people aren't just happy coming into the platform but that they stay happy throughout and we do that by leveraging case studies by enhancing our community that we build of our VIP users who are like our top guys that are always there to give us referrals to talk to new clients who have questions or who don't necessarily know how to customize the platform its not just a factor of us teaching the new users but its also a community of other users where that can be enhanced
Richard: Ok and what kind of methods of communications do you use through your organization. What channels and what do you find most effective?
Juan: Thats a very interesting question and it's a very interesting question for us because we are a start up and as a startup we live and die by every dollar that we put into marketing and communications public relations and so on and so fourth and when we started or at least when I started with the company a year and a half ago we basically did not have any marketing. So it was our task to figure out what was going to be the best marketing mix for the company and we started going through a very traditional route where we would do digital marketing through Google ad words and other channels and then we did public relations by doing it some work in house and then some work with a pr agency that we hired and what we saw was that the pr agency was really good at publishing a lot of our content but in terms of bringing in traffic that convert for us it was not happening and it wasn't because there was it was any pr bad pr it was because the users that we have that we bring into our platform they are usually they talk to each other within this niche culture we are a professional services automation platform so that means we work with lawyers and we work with same time accountants and at the same time digital agencies and digital marketers and they do not live in the same places so we had to shoot very broad to gather couple here a couple there and so what we did was we decided to stop going the pr agency route and bring the pr in house and we did that by leveraging our users we actually before Nov of 2015 the company was known as AffinityLive and its what was the name of the company for over three years and at that point we had decided that the platform had evolved enough that it deserved a new brand and a new identity and as a core value of the company the company stopped being a company about its product and started to become a company about its users therefore it wasn't about marketing our features it was about marketing the user experience and how users are actually going and taking advantage of the platform and ultimately growing themselves. So we setup ourselves a project where we basically leveraged all of our users and asked them hey it would be great if you could talk to us about your experience with Accelo and not just using the platform but overall experience in the culture within your company and how Accelo has actually helped your company grow. As a result of that campaign that we pushed out we had about over thirty people writing about us and that ultimately converted into an up in traffic because of word of mouth and extended distribution of communications of we grew our traffic buy 150% in the last 6 months and we have grown our pipeline by 202% since we started doing that and that is our current push that we are doing really hard is leveraging our current users to get more.
Richard: Ah thats great! I guess how have your public relations practices effected the reputation of your organization? Do you think that that gets across to your clients the way that you're doing it and if so how do you measure the success?
Juan: Yes so I just spoke a little bit about the rebrand and the rebrand was very key for how our consumers perceived our company. Before the name with AffinityLive the name itself was not an appealing name the reason that it wasn't appealing was because when we decided to take not hat name, that was about four years ago, we were making a play for the cloud and back three years ago there was no such thing as the cloud. There was this thing that some people didn't know what to call some people were calling it the cloud Microsoft was doing a push for live and so on and so fourth and we took a gamble and said lets add live to our name so that translates to people but as we know today the cloud is known as the cloud and not as live or as anything else so the name itself became obsolete and so it was not a name that was good for us. So as it was very interesting because even though we had a great platform and all the new features that anybody could ask we were still perceived `as an outdated company in some ways therefore we decided to go with a rebrand. The rebrand itself was a very big it was mostly a pr move that we did. We had decided to go with a shorter name that was a lot more appealing and that was put together with just a good name like Accelo but attached to it a nice logo that had new colors and that looked very attractive and that was flat so it was going on modern trends and what we did for our rebrand was we did a press release we like I said we leveraged our clients and so at that point when we did the rebrand and what we saw was nothing but good opinions and good blog posts about the brand. Now people perceive us as one a more approachable company two a company that is on par with our competitors out there and third a company that people can relate to and I think that was the biggest key for us was before people saw AffinityLive as a tool now people see Accelo as part of their core business and they are taking it like it is Accelo is starting to become a verb instead of just a noun right and thats what all companies strive for at least at the start up level. I guess to summarize all of that is that Accelo with its new name and with its new brand and with good PR behind it has become a company that right now we are seeing our competitors have taken notice of us and they know that we are a big player within the realm of PSA and we are seeing that on our growth numbers, we are seeing that in the amount of interaction that we see on social media with people talking back to us saying we love Accelo, Accelo is great this is what I have been waiting for all our lives and ultimately it has been a success.
Richard: Great thats great to hear. Thank you for all your insights. I have one more question after all of my serious questions. Whats your favorite color.
Juan: My favorite color is blue and funny thing about blue is that blue was our main color in the company before and our colors were black and blue so when we decided to do the rebrand, when we sat down with the designers they came up with a new gamma of colors a new color scheme and within that color scheme there absolutely no blue and to make matters worse I had just painted a wall in the office that was blue. So I was like no no no no we have to do something about this, we have to put blue in there and after a lot of back and fourth I was able to put a little line of blue within that Accelo logo and that made me very happy.
Richard: there we go so the blue in the logo we can chalk down to Juan
Juan: Yes (laughter)
Richard: Alright Juan well thank you for your time. Thank you very much and uh you have a great day!
Juan: Sounds good, thank you man!
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