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Jen Spencer’s guiding principle throughout her career has been to go where her curiosity and hunger to learn take her. She started out as a high school English and theater arts teacher, having chosen that career because in college she loved reading, writing, and dramaturgy and “felt really fulfilled when I was helping my floormates with their essays.” She then moved into a community engagement role at a nonprofit professional theater company, then transitioned to PR and sales and marketing. “I worked for a couple of startups, took a company through acquisition and then settled in with the agency life,” she says.
She’s now VP of sales and marketing for SmartBug Media. Sales and marketing, she says, is “very much aligned with education because in education you reverse engineer what your lesson plan is going to be — you start with the end in mind. A marketing campaign or a sales process is very similar. You start with a goal and then you reverse engineer the tactics, tools, and steps you need to put in place to achieve those goals.”
Spencer is responsible for landing new clients and also managing a sales team that onboards new clients. That process involves deep understanding of how a prospective or new client’s business functions, how they’ve approached sales and marketing in the past, and identifying the gaps and/or barriers between where they are and where they want to be. “So we get to put on an educator’s hat,” she says.
What makes SmartBug different from other agencies, says Spencer, is the way the company is structured. At most agencies, a business development team brings in new clients, who are then passed along to account managers, who service the clients by assembling teams of people within the agency to work on specific projects. The result, she says, is that clients are typically one or more steps removed from the people actually doing the work.
“I see myself being tagged on different social posts by people who I don't know, because they're reading the article on the Forbes site, they're finding value in it, and then they're sharing it publicly with people in their network.”
“At SmartBug, we've eliminated the account manager role,” says Spencer. “We assign a marketing strategist to every single one of our accounts and that person has seven to 10 years experience working within an organization. They’re responsible for inbound marketing, digital marketing, and demand generation.” The agency’s team is fully remote — there’s no office — so when the company is looking for highly skilled team members who are experts in technology platforms such as HubSpot, Marketo, or Terminus, “we don’t have to look within a 30-mile radius of an office. We can recruit from all over North America,” says Spencer.
All of the company’s business comes through inbound marketing efforts driven by content on SmartBug’s website, such as blog posts, guides, templates, and worksheets. By the time a prospect is ready to be converted to a paying customer, SmartBug knows what kinds of products and services will be most useful to them. “So we practice what we preach,” says Spencer. “What we do for our clients, that’s what we also do for ourselves.”
“I really see our partnership with Forbes Councils as part of our third-party validation efforts,” says Spencer. While SmartBug has thousands of articles, videos, and other resources on its website, “there’s power in having your advice and guidance published somewhere else other than your own domain,” she says. Forbes Councils is “a really important part of showing social proof as people are navigating their buying decisions.” She’s observed that the articles she contributes through Forbes Councils get more unsolicited social shares than the content she creates on her company’s website. “I see myself being tagged on different social posts by people who I don't know, because they're reading the article on the Forbes site, they're finding value in it, and then they're sharing it publicly with people in their network.”
Spencer draws upon questions that she frequently gets during the sales process when she’s considering topics for her Forbes Business Development Council posts. For instance, she wrote about different sales enablement strategies that marketers and sales leaders can employ to help their sales reps meet quotas. “Is that something that an individual could hire SmartBug Media to walk them through?” she says. “Yes, but they can also read the article that I've written, take from it what they need, and go implement it. And that’s my first priority.”
Forbes Councils is an invitation-only organization where top executives and entrepreneurs like you build professional skills and gain connections and visibility on Forbes.com.
