Toolio’s Head of Marketing Andrea Lechner-Becker Shares Her Secrets for Doing More With Less

Introduction

In Episode 3 of Sips with purple cork, Kelly Robb sat down with Toolio’s Head of Marketing, Andrea Lechner-Becker. When the pandemic hit, Andrea found herself in an enviable position; She was already an expert in virtual events due to her experience engaging a largely remote team. She had been executing virtual events for years because she didn’t have the resources for field events. In this episode, she shares how she has turned resource constraints and a competitive nature into a passion for making the most of the resources she has and leveraging partners and community to the hilt. 

About Toolio and Andrea Lechner-Becker

Toolio is a cloud-based Merchandising Platform that automates critical workflows, provides real-time insights, and enables remote collaboration, empowering retailers to make faster, data-driven decisions about their most important (and expensive) asset—inventory. Toolio is a global operation with headquarters in NYC and offices in Istanbul, built by an ex-Walmart team of second-time entrepreneurs and backed by top VCs and apparel industry executives.

Toolio’s Head of Marketing is Andrea Lechner-Becker. Prior to joining the retail technology start-up, she was CMO of LeadMD. There, she raised the visibility of marketing operations, making it a must-have function in all marketing teams. Before becoming CMO of LeadMD, Andrea managed an art gallery's sales and marketing, loyalty and email marketing strategy for an NBA team, the delivery team at LeadMD, and had a stint as a novelist.

Here are some highlights of the conversation:

You've been doing virtual events even before December 2020. Where did this strategy of bringing together people online for networking events come from?

“We were one of those businesses that was very well positioned when the pandemic hit. We are a consulting firm and always had at least half of our workforce remote, just due to the nature of our work. (I can't find enough people in Phoenix for the work I need, so I've always had to hire remotely.)  Virtual events were a great way to engage with our remote workforce. We use a lot of those same strategies and techniques to engage our prospects. 

Unlike other companies, we didn't have field events already scheduled when the pandemic hit. I was a one person team and I didn't have the capacity to schedule a bunch of things in Boston and Philadelphia and Miami and Chicago. The easiest thing to do was to have a remote experience that I could invite people from all of those cities to. I only had to coordinate one thing. So, my laziness set me up for success. Laziness is the birth of innovation.”

You do a lot of partner marketing. Tell me more about that.

“I do a ton of partner marketing because it basically doubles the team that's going to help me on something… and doubles my budget. Our technology partners were much more into field events because they had much larger teams but they were much less experienced putting on a virtual event. So we asked them to give us half the budget and they helped with the landing page and those sorts of things and they leveraged my virtual event expertise. So, it worked out perfectly in that they were all looking to spend the budget on virtual events but needed help executing. I had the expertise but not the budget. By leveraging partners we were able to do much more of the stuff we wanted to do.” 

Speaking of budget, what's in your 2022 events budget?

“I think it's interesting when you talk to marketers because there are a lot of data driven marketers who shit talk trade shows and summits. But the crazy thing is that if you ask prospects how they heard about you, it’s often because of an event. Live events do have a return on investment - - it just takes a lot longer. My personal strategy around marketing is to be where competitors aren't. So, to some extent the fact that some people are still not going back to live events gives you a little bit of a competitive advantage.

But, my particular strategy is still mostly virtual events. I still have a really small scrappy team but 20% of my events budget is going to those large shows and then 80% of it is still virtual.” 

How do you use purple cork events?

“We're using purple cork events for mid funnel prospects. So, we don’t invite totally cold prospects. Rather, we invite folks that have done something to engage with us. In our business trust takes a really long time to develop. So they don’t necessarily have to have taken a meeting already. Even if they attended a webinar or even registered for a couple of webinars, we will invite them to one of these events.

I've never done a purple cork event that didn't generate five times revenue for me.

The events aren't that expensive in relation to our price point. If we get one deal from an event it pays for itself at least five fold.”

We hear so much about product growth. I would love to hear more about how you engage the community in your growth.

“I am super passionate about community. I've seen a couple of really phenomenal examples of it and I’m really competitive so any time I see someone else doing something that's really great, and I can tell that it's helping build their businesses, I want to be doing that.

I'm part of a CMO group that Matt Heinz and Latane Conant from 6Sense put together. They started it at the beginning of the pandemic. Every Friday we get together as a group. It’s really the most powerful network I have ever had the pleasure of being a part of and I know it has been great for their businesses, even though they don’t ‘sell’ to their community. 

When you look at the community that Marketo has built over the past decade with their champions program - - those things work. They evangelize people on your product, and the people also grow. The discipline that you are supporting - - in the case of Marketo, it’s marketing operations or marketing automation - - gets elevated.

I have seen the power of community change people's lives. I have seen people be able to afford their first home. I've seen them be able to afford more kids than they ever thought they'd be able to. They now can afford college. These technology companies are doing more than growing their own business - - they’re also helping human beings. 

So many young people are looking for purpose-driven organizations but they think that means they need to work for a nonprofit. But if you worked for Marketo in 2018, you were building a whole discipline that allowed people to grow their skill set so they could get really high paying jobs that are very well respected with great benefits. And, that changed their lives. 

That is a mission that I can get behind so that's why I'm so passionate about creating a community. I think it's good for the business. I think it's good for culture. I think it's good for professionals. I think it's good for people learning and growing. I'm super passionate about education and by educating a group of humans and allowing them to learn from others is part of what's super powerful about any great community. Your members end up becoming the content and the reason to come to the community.

You know this, Kelly! You create great experiences for marketers to come together and learn from each other. Community adds so much to everyone's life and I think community led growth can sometimes come off a little corporate, but I have a very Pollyanna view of it. But, I think it really does help bring people together. There's obviously a lot of conversation about D&I and belonging in business today, and I think that these little communities really help. Companies that are doing that are the kind of places that I want to work.”

Watch the complete video interview here.  

Looking to engage your community or put on partner events that drive results? Reach out to purple cork today to plan an experience that your guests will love.