Alva COO Flashcards
Tell Me A Little About Yourself
- I’m a pretty down-to-earth, Southern-bred guy from North Carolina driven by two great forces:
1) To live as passionate and purpose-driven a life as I can and
2) To accomplish as much as I can within the field of technology – which, I believe, is the defining industry of our time - What that’s translated to, though, from a purely professional lens is a track record over the past 6 1/2 years of helping companies grow by breaking critical ground
- I started as an appointment setter and quickly worked my way up to eventually leading an outbound sales team (in many ways sales found ME)
- And what prior bosses and colleagues will tell you, is that whether it’s a small SaaS platform or a large research organization, I’m a force at winning new revenue,
diversifying customer bases
and helping both my colleagues and our clients really root for our success
Why looking to leave?
- I joined Qualia because I knew from my previous role that the identity-resolution space was heating up as brands and agencies were increasingly seeing this technology as a must-have rather than an outsourcing expense
- Naturally, with such a saturation of companies in the mar-tech space there would be a lot of consolidation and m&a action
- And, honestly, I wanted to be a part of that
- I was at a point in my career where I wanted to test myself and feel what it’s really like to have your work and efforts contribute to a company that’s successfully sold
- And over the last month, partly because of some of the initiatives I spearheaded, that’s exactly what happened as we were acquired by a seminal data-technology firm
- But I’m full of youthful energy and hungry for more success, so I’m hunting for my next big opportunity to build on what I’ve learned
What are you looking for in your next role?
- I’m looking to be a part of something that’s really going to transform its space because of its uniqueness
- even set the bar for others to follow
- What I’m after is the ability to meaningfully contribute to that growth story, to be a force that helps to make that happen
- On a practical level, I think this means a company that can tap into my specialized experience of selling underdog products into enterprise businesses,
building consensus across an organization and
leading those tough strategic conversations with C-Level leaders - From my conversations about Alva, and all the research I’ve been doing so far, there is no doubt that I recognize those key elements here
(which is why I’m grateful to have this conversation)
Tell Me About Qualia
- Not sure how familiar you are with the space but Qualia delivers what’s called consumer identity-resolution technology
- Essentially, we solve for one of the most expensive and resource-exhausting challenges in the eco-system:
The inability for brands and brand-advertisers to seamlessly recognize a consumer as he/she hops between different screens, user-personas, browsing environments throughout the day
*Our machine-learning intelligence plugs into your raw audience or visitor data to map each user to all additionally owned devices
and to deliver in real time a truly reflective view of your audience so you can make better decisions about how you target or influence them
Who do you typically work with?
- Because a huge part of my job is having conversations about something that is both highly technical and also very sensitive to a company: namely their audience identity
- I’m responsible for a lot of consensus-building
- This means that I touch the CTO, CMO, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Head of Data and Analytics, but also the Head of Digital Marketing, and Consumer Insights team
- I’m often talking to about 3 teams on average at a single company
Some Clients?
- Banks: BNY Mellon, Capital One, SoFi
- E-commerce: Air BnB, StitchFix
- Fintech Companies: Prosper, LendingClub, Marlette Funding
- Several consulting companies: Axiom, BCG
What experience do you have in reputation intelligence or reputation management?
- My experience extends all the way back to my undergraduate days at Yale when I worked in Politics
- Obviously, a crucial element in politics is the level of public integrity and trust people attach to your name
- Working with both politicians and research institutions, I gained a fundamental understanding of both how to project the way you want to be seen, and how to maintain it
- When I turned my sights to business, I applied this knowledge with a new enthusiasm because I was galvanizing start-ups to grow
- In my role as a business development leader, it was vital for me to always know what our customers think about us, to solve glitches rapidly, and to reward loyalty
- Because what they say about us is what fuels our growth
- So whether it’s a trade intelligence platform, or a research agency, I’ve always had to be active and cognizant about the strategic influence reputation has in powering the company’s growth
What does Alva do?
*In a world where consumers are more fickle than ever before about the brands they support, as well as generating massive segregated data trails,
you equip companies with a solution for analyzing reputation metrics and harnessing actionable insights from them
*You have a proprietary technology that takes the work out of gathering the mountains of publicly available content, categorizing, scoring and contextualizing it using a highly-efficient and profoundly logical model so that the most well-informed decisions can be made with stakeholders in sight
Alva’s Mission
*help Customers make better informed
decisions based on genuine intelligence
*to consolidate expensive, segregated, reactive
services into one global platform
Sales Style?
*Well, I think first and foremost, there is a distinct philosophy at the core of me that defines what I do.
*And that is, I don’t see sales as just a transactional experience where I’m pushing a product
*I see it instead as an opportunity to develop a human connection where I’m genuinely trying to help you be more of an asset to your company
*And so whether it’s selling to the folks at Univision or a team at Time Inc, I actively choose to not be some buzzword-happy mouthpiece and lead instead with questions that I know these folks are responsible for answering every day:
Where is the value of our business migrating to?
What blind-spots are we not covering?
Where can we win against our competition?
*Genuinely connecting with them, I’ve found, allows them to articulate why they need to work with you
*And it also creates evangelists of your brand in the marketplace
Looking for?
*Target-driven
*Face-to-face solution selling
*Relationship-building acumen
*A typical engagement starts by generating interest at Corporate Affairs Director who acts as a
champion, before escalating through the enterprise primarily across Risk, Marketing, Strategy
and ultimately the CEO. We follow a land and expand model utilising multiple budgets within
the enterprise. The ultimate aim is to obtain global and multi-departmental contracts.
Greatest Strength?
- It may sound like a crazy answer but honestly it’s the way I communicate with clients, and the way I speak to them
- When you have a genuine interest in something – including an intellectual fascination with it – you can speak from a place of conviction and authenticity
- Having that as a starting point and as the overall energy of your meetings allows people to see that you are authentically trying to help them and work together with them
Weakness?
Trying too hard with a single client (marketsmith example)
