Episode 10 Transcript | Jen Janke of Vasion

Peter Stevenson

Welcome to By Subject, a silicon slopes brand and marketing podcast. I’m your host, Peter Stevenson, and I’m here with my co host, managing partner at Modern Eight, Alysha Smith. And our guest today is CMO of Vasion Jen Janke. Welcome.

Jen Janke

Thank you. Hi, happy to be here.

Peter Stevenson

So nice to have you here. So well, we talked a little bit outside, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about your background, where you grew up, what got you into marketing, where’d you go to college, all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. Give us the background.

Jen Janke

I feel like this is a job interview.

Peter Stevenson

It is. Tell me about your if you do well enough, you can take over the hosting. Oh, no, you’ll be great.

Jen Janke

So I was actually born in Logan, Utah, while my dad was going to college up there, but we quickly moved to Wisconsin when I was young, and I grew up back there where he taught at the University of Wisconsin.

Peter Stevenson

Wisconsin is amazing.

Jen Janke

Yeah. Grew up there, but my grandparents both live in Southern Utah, so we came out here every summer and spent the summer on the ranch and hung out.

Peter Stevenson

You hung out on the ranch all summers?

Jen Janke

My grandparents had a fruit ranch, so we’d come out and spend a month or two in the summer just picking fruit and chasing the hogs and picking the eggs out of the chicken coop.

Peter Stevenson

That sounds idyllic.

Jen Janke

Yeah, it was a great place to grow up, but then back in the Midwest, also super friendly, small town, cows everywhere type thing.

Peter Stevenson

That’s fun.

Jen Janke

So I called two homes Wisconsin. I grew up in Utah. I’ve lived here since 2003.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jen Janke

Long time.

Peter Stevenson

And then where did you go to college?

Jen Janke

I also so USU at Go Aggies is really big in my family, so I went up there for my undergrad and then I ended up doing my MBA at the University of Utah.

Peter Stevenson

And what it was your undergrad in?

Jen Janke

Marketing. Marketing, yeah. You say that so reluctantly. No, marketing is just something I’ve always wanted to do.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Jen Janke

I didn’t know why, but that’s just I had it in my head and that’s what I wanted to do, and so I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.

Peter Stevenson

So you got a degree in marketing. You went and got your MBA from where?

Jen Janke

The University of Utah.

Peter Stevenson

And in like an emphasis on marketing kind of thing.

Jen Janke

Yeah, back then they did a really consolidated version of an MBA. If you had a business background, you would go three semesters, so year and a half, but you couldn’t work. It was super intense, but you just got it done. So studied entrepreneurship and marketing. That’s the emphasis. It was a great time. Met awesome people who also helped me get some of my first jobs from that.

Peter Stevenson

So you did that right after college at USU?

Jen Janke

No, I took a little, like, two year break.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jen Janke

Not a long break, actually served an Lbs mission and then came back. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

So tell me a little bit about what that first marketing job was. What was the first foray into marketing?

Jen Janke

So I was thinking about this last night when I saw your list of questions, and I was thinking, oh, I know, but then I thought, again, no, it’s not that. Back when I was twelve and 13 in Wisconsin, I actually had a paper route.

Peter Stevenson

You did?

Jen Janke

I did. That’s how old I am. People read the paper and every afternoon after school I’d go on my paper route. And I quickly learned that there were two sections. I had the apartment section. Those people moved in and out really quickly, so I didn’t get to know them. But then I had a whole neighborhood of just, like, elderly people, and I figured out if you figure out your audience and know who they are, and you put their paper up on their front step instead of putting it in the driveway. I would make bank on tips at Christmas, and then pretty soon I was getting tips on, like, Valentine’s Day and Easter and all of that. And it was just from that one little block of those elderly people who appreciated that extra little.

Peter Stevenson

So it was the extra service and the extra care and love that you.

Jen Janke

Gave to those people because I figured out my audience. But if you ask my true first marketing job so I graduated with my MBA in 2003.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jen Janke

Only 14% of our graduating class had jobs at graduation. And so two good friends I met at school, we moved to Hawaii and we’re just like beach bumps for six months and just hung out. Or like, why force yourself to try to find a job if there isn’t any? Go have fun, we’re young. Yeah, so we did that. But I was trying to like, okay, it’s been six months, I should be responsible and get a job. Someone in my parents neighborhood reached out and said, hey, I hear you’re looking for a job. We are a group of creators and designers and writers, and we just got laid off from Utah Business Magazine. We’re going to go start our own publishing house, one of which was a local business magazine they wanted to start up. And then we ended up doing magazines for Science Bank, a medical coding magazine, a lot of different magazines to help support and fund that local magazine. But I had a professor tell me, if you go into marketing, your first job should be in sales. Because you really have to understand how you’re passing off those leads yeah. And really understand their, their world. So I went and sold ad space.

Peter Stevenson

You sold ad space at those magazine?

Jen Janke

At the magazine.

Peter Stevenson

What was the name of the magazine?

Jen Janke

The local magazine was called Connect.

Peter Stevenson

Connect?

Jen Janke

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

And it was primarily like a Utah business.

Jen Janke

It’s a Utah business competitor, but more focused on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Jen Janke

So, yeah, I ended up selling ad space, met a lot of really great local companies, and then moved on to be like, managing director, where I was able to say, okay, here’s the stories we’re going to tell, here’s the images and photography. We need work with freelancers to write them and photographers. And I really got to understand that whole creative side of marketing, like telling the stories. I edit everything I look at now because you just get ingrained of how to edit those magazine pieces. And then I love seeing the layout and how the creative director would put all those pieces together to create like this wonderful magazine that you could touch and fill and read back to your.

Alysha Smith

First opportunity as a media buyer, essentially. And the advice that you got. What did you learn from that and what do you still use today from that experience?

Jen Janke

Oh, I hate cells and I’m horrible at sales. Feel so much for anyone in sales, but I love to be able to support them in their job and make them the real heroes. And how can as marketers, we make the sales team job easier? It’s a real sense of empathy that I learn.

Peter Stevenson

So funny. The thing you learned is you don’t like the job.

Jen Janke

Oh, no. Yeah, I was horrible, but I learned so much about it and oh yeah, now I can think back like, oh, if I was a salesperson, what would I wish I had from marketing?

Peter Stevenson

As you talked about going from doing ad sales up to the managing director of the magazine, I’m curious what the community of entrepreneurship and business was like in the early 2000s. What kind of stories were you telling? What were the companies that you were thinking about in that time? I’m curious about what the milieu of the state was.

Jen Janke

Yeah, golly, this goes back like 20 years now, but I remember meeting Josh James and he was working on Omniture at the time. Overstock was just becoming a big thing. Modernate. Randall Smith wrote a branding column for us, I think Kickstart, like some of the VC funds that were here. We’re just starting out. Greg Warnock, I remember interviewing him, just starting out. A lot of the big players you see today were making their start.

Peter Stevenson

I wonder, is that content available anywhere? I’d be curious to read some of those stories.

Jen Janke

That’s a good question. I’m going to have to go look it up.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, that would be amazing.

Jen Janke

Yeah. What’s the way back? Time machine. We can search old website. Yeah, I’ll have to go look and see if I can find some.

Peter Stevenson

That would be amazing. I’m going to try to find Randall’s old branding columns.

Jen Janke

I think I have some of the Oath copies. I kept twelve of the copies where I had like, articles in them, so.

Alysha Smith

I’ll find them fascinating.

Jen Janke

Send you a copy.

Peter Stevenson

That’s amazing. Okay, so that lasted for how many years?

Jen Janke

I said five or six years. The company grew only to about twelve people, so Super Small. So I remember putting $30,000 print bills on my personal credit card to get them printed. So you were in it, you had to be in it. So did that for five years. And then I’m like, okay, I went from Super Small, let’s go somewhere bigger and different. So that’s when I went to In Contact, which is Call Center software, to go switch over to the tech side of marketing.

Peter Stevenson

What year were you in contact? So what year was that? 2008.

Jen Janke

About then.

Peter Stevenson

2008, 2009.

Alysha Smith

Were you there when Modern eight rebranded in contact.

Jen Janke

I started just after that.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, there was stories about some of the archetype, brand archetypes being posted up around the office. I remember. John notwell told me that. Do you remember that?

Jen Janke

No, because I think I came just after yeah, they went from UCN to In Contact. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jen Janke

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting. So tell me a little bit about that experience. What was that role that you took there? What were you working on?

Jen Janke

Yeah, it was a really pivotal time in my career. Dave Olden was the VP of Marketing at the time. There was like one, maybe two other marketers there. So it was very much like the start of Building out a team, and we helped build the team. It was my first introduction to marketo and marketing automation. I remember being blown away by, what is this new system and how technology plays into marketing? So it was like a pivotal moment in my career where I’m like, okay, this is super interesting. I want to keep exploring this option. And then from there, we grew the team. That’s where I met a lot of people like Heather Hearst and people who just ended up being lifetime friends. And then you just kept building and growing in the team, and every few months you were learning something new. And looking back, that was the one thing that helped change my career, because every job I went to after that, I was always the first or second marketer, and I always helped grow the team. And that’s what I love. I love that building phase and seeing how all the different pieces of marketing come together. So I did that in contact. I went to Expert Voice. After that, they already had a B to C marketing team, but they also needed a B, two B. So I was the first one hired there to do B, two B. So again, same thing. Come in, build it out, look at our systems, processes, people, and helped grow that team out for five years. From there, I was just going to.

Alysha Smith

Say, when you built the team, are you just as much? Do you find passion in leadership and development and kind of growing the talent within whoever you hire? Or is it more yeah. What would you say is your strength around growing a team?

Jen Janke

I would have to say in my earlier career at In Contact and Expert Voice, it was more about learning everything I could about marketing and In Contact, I had an amazing mentor named Tracy Thane, and he helped me really put framework and processes around marketing. And then at Expert Voice, I had another amazing mentor named Inga Johnson, and she had just come from Columbia Sportswear. She was so big into really understanding the data and how data drives marketing, so it just opened up my world there on that side. So I was learning and gleaning everything I could for those folks at those part of my career. And it wasn’t until I left Expert Voice and made a huge jump and went to Ragnar, the running company, and that’s where I was like, okay, now.

Peter Stevenson

Miserable race right there.

Jen Janke

A great race, yeah, but miserable at 02:00 in the morning, but there that was my first chance to jump in and really be that leader. Own it and own it. And I love that. Part of the job is the mentoring. And I was so lucky to have people like Tracy and Inga in my career. I want to be that same thing for other people and pay it forward.

Peter Stevenson

What are some of the things this is related to something Alicia just asked. What are some of the things that the mentors did for you that really helped you, that you’ve taken on to as thinking about mentoring people nowadays?

Jen Janke

Yeah, it’s two sides. They help you with your marketing, but they don’t tell you how to do it. They kind of lead you along the way and let you fail and learn on your own. And they embrace mistakes. Okay. Because that’s how you learn. I think we’ve all been in our careers where we accidentally sent the wrong email to the wrong list or wrong subject line. And once you do that once, you never do that again. Right. So just learning like that’s, okay, we all mess up. It’s just what do we learn from it?

Peter Stevenson

Sure.

Jen Janke

So there was that part, but the human aspect of it, of, I see you, I see your career. I remember at one point Inga telling me, I was talking like, I want to get promoted. What’s my next step here? The usual questions. And she’s like, Jen, you maxed out here. You can’t go any further. So we’re going to spend the next year prepping and training you for your next spot. That’s not going to be here. Because she was honest with me, and that’s why she did. She helped train and prep me, and that’s when I jumped to be the VP of Marketing at Ragnar. After that, they care about you more than just the employee and what they can get out of you at that three to five years.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jen Janke

You’re at the company.

Peter Stevenson

That’s amazing. So then you jump to Ragnar again? Worst night of my life.

Jen Janke

Yeah.

Alysha Smith

And you didn’t even I didn’t even run it.

Peter Stevenson

I was in the van. But tell us a little bit about where Ragnar was then, because you seemed to jumped over to there when they were starting their growth. Right?

Jen Janke

They were actually the peak of their growth when I started.

Alysha Smith

What year was that?

Jen Janke

2018. Okay, so they had just hit there’s about 50 different races. They had just gone global. So started like a UK race. Out of the 75 people in the company, like 25 to 30 of them were marketing. Right. Because it was a very different fill, because it’s all marketing driven and race operations were the two main departments. So I was surprised when I got there to have such a big team. But then they weren’t doing some of the basic things like Google Analytics wasn’t set up right. They didn’t understand email marketing and how to segment your database. So in a sense, it was like going back and taking everything I learned from the previous jobs and implementing it. I just happened to have a big team.

Alysha Smith

Was that unanticipated? Like you were surprised?

Jen Janke

I was kind of surprised because I saw them. I ran their races. I actually had siblings who worked there as race directors and I didn’t realize, like any company, you don’t realize what’s under the COVID So you get in there, but great, great brand, amazing brands, super stickers everywhere. Stickers everywhere. And super passionate fans. I think one of the coolest things I was able to do there is we had 500 brand ambassadors throughout the world, unpaid, who would just go out and rep Ragnar for us just because they loved it so much. And so we would gather those ambassadors together once a year and just to fill that energy of I mean, you don’t get a chance to work for a brand like that where they have people working for free for you just.

Alysha Smith

Because I’m a brand geek. Can you summarize why maybe they had such a brand cult following? I mean, is it just the race? What else is it?

Jen Janke

I think for them, it was like the status. They were part of their local running community and they liked that status of being like, hey, look at me, I have a connection to this Ragnar, to this brand. I mean, we also gave them a lot of free gear, free entry into races, but overall, I think it was like just that status symbol that they got and were recognized by a brand that they loved.

Peter Stevenson

That’s why everybody puts their sticker on the back of their car.

Jen Janke

I know my husband thought for the longest time that Ragnar was a rock band before yeah, he met me. He didn’t know it was a running brand because he’s like, what? Running brand has stickers all over the car?

Alysha Smith

They also do a really good job at photographing, like just along the race. I remember I ran it only once and a friend had sent me a really nice picture of myself and she’s.

Jen Janke

Like, Is this you? I was so proud.

Alysha Smith

I posted it immediately to Facebook and so I think they do a good job, at least showcasing and highlighting their athletes.

Jen Janke

I think that’s the beauty of it too. For those of listeners out there who don’t know, ragnar is either like a 200 miles road race or we also had trail races where you’d camp in one spot and run three loops, but it was 24 hours straight. Someone’s always running. But that was the whole point, is to show you places that you would never go on your own. Those backwoods of Kentucky or along the Seattle Washington coast to the cliffs of Dover in the UK. It gave you a reason to travel somewhere, to meet with a group of friends and do something really hard together in that sense of triumph at the end.

Peter Stevenson

That’s amazing. Over this time, it’s been about ten years from your start to when you land at Ragnar. So tell me a little bit about the technology change. You mentioned Marketo when you first got to in contact. So where did you see Marketing over those ten years? What was the biggest changes? Was it technology? Was it social media? What were the things that were really driving the most conversions from start to finish in that time frame?

Jen Janke

I think it’s how we have used the technology that has changed the most. So if you look back years ago with Marketo or Elqua Part Out, whatever they’re all called now, it was so novel to be like, I’m going to assign you points or a score based off of your digital activity and that’s going to mean you’re ready to talk to sales, right? We still use Marketo that way today, but it’s not the primary purpose anymore. You’re going to be ready to talk to cells because you’re ready and you’re in that buying cycle and we’re giving you the right content and letting you engage in that content and read and come into us. Now you raise your hand and say, I’m ready to have a chat with cells. And it’s not all about just artificially. Like, I think you’re ready because you have 52 points, right. You still use Marketo in this exact same technology, but it’s actually how you use that technology. So our goal at Vision today is to just pass off high intent leads and those are people who flat out request a demo because those are the ones that convert the fastest. And it’s not because marketing says you have enough points, right? Yeah. The technology is still basically the same. It’s just the strategy we use and to make sure that we’re giving you the right info. So when you are ready to buy, you’re right there and you raise your hand, not us raising your hand on the back end of technology, but we forget about it because we always talk about marketing as leads, leads, leads, and those are still important and leading indicators of where your pipeline is going. But it’s making that shift as a marketing industry and then helping sales see that shift of why we may have less leads this year, but they’re all very qualified leads and they convert at the highest rate possible.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Alysha Smith

Makes their jobs easier, I would think.

Jen Janke

Yeah, but we still use marketo, we still have some scoring, we still use it for emails, we still track everything, but the strategy behind it is different. So we’re pushing content out on LinkedIn to give them the full piece of content, let them engage, let them read everything, let’s forward it on to your team. Let’s just not always stick a lead gen form in front of it. Just we can get you a point, right? Yes.

Peter Stevenson

Rather than we’re going to pass off everybody over 50 now, we can actually get them to call us and say, hey, I want to talk.

Jen Janke

Yeah. So that, I think, is the shift is not necessarily the technology, but how we use the technology.

Peter Stevenson

It’s really interesting. Okay, so you’re at Ragnar. How long were you there?

Jen Janke

I was there three years. I actually left two months before COVID hit, and then that’s when they unfortunately had to lay off most of the company because races just weren’t happening anymore.

Alysha Smith

Have they picked back up?

Jen Janke

They have a little bit. Not as full force as before. And they recently got sold to another fitness brand, so I think they’re going to make a strong comeback. Now that COVID is over, people are getting out and you’re going to run it again. Oh, man, I loved it. But 200 miles for two days?

Peter Stevenson

How many times have you done it?

Jen Janke

I’ve ran probably like 15 different 15?

Peter Stevenson

Do you have 15 stickers on your car?

Jen Janke

For me, the fun part was no matter who you were, CEO or front receptionist desk, you had to go out and work two races a year.

Alysha Smith

Oh, really?

Jen Janke

You were out there setting up cones and signage along the way or checking runners in. You had to be really ingrained in your customer. So the best way to go out and serve and work them. Yeah. Those were the hard days because you’d work 24 hours before setting up and then you wouldn’t sleep again. You wouldn’t sleep from Friday till Sunday.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Jen Janke

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

That’s unbelievable.

Jen Janke

It was exhausting, but so fun.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

I mean, that camaraderie, that ability to cheer people on. Yeah. It’s a great experience, I’m sure. So you worked for a really great brand and where did you go next?

Jen Janke

So next I jumped back into the tech world and went to a very small startup called Chargeback. There’s about 50 people when I started and it was classic. I got hired because they just got some funding.

Peter Stevenson

Right?

Jen Janke

Yeah. Again that had one marketing person on the team. I came in to help grow and build out that team. It was a software to help retailers manage credit card chargebacks. It was kind of like an antifraud software because on the front end in your shopping cart, we can detect if we think it’s a fraudulent purchase, but oftentimes things go through and then as consumers, we might try to charge it back to not have to pay for it.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jen Janke

So it was a really great software to help on that back end fraud shopping. The goal was to sell it in two years. We actually sold it in just over a year.

Alysha Smith

Wow.

Jen Janke

So I had a crazy year where we were just building and growing the team and then got to be a part of that acquisition process. And we got acquired by a company called Sift out of Silicon Valley who did the front end fraud. So it was a really nice pairing to have front end and back end fraud all under one software.

Peter Stevenson

Good acquisition.

Jen Janke

Yeah. But it put me out of a job.

Peter Stevenson

Right?

Jen Janke

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

And this was in the middle of the pandemic. Okay.

Jen Janke

So I also worked with an exec team and a marketing team that I really never met in person because I was there such a small amount of time. All during COVID All during COVID I started two weeks after COVID hit. Yeah, it was a crazy year.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. I’m curious what building a team I’m sure you hired during that time frame, what was that like for you as a leader? How did mentoring come into play during that time? What was that like?

Jen Janke

Luckily for us, we were all in the same boat, so everyone was figuring it out. And it wasn’t like you had half the people in the office and half remote, because that’s actually a harder set up. We would just do the classic stuff that everyone tried, like the marketing coffee chats or the happy hours, or we actually did a lot of all hands where we would just play like Jeopardy or any type of game because again, there were only like 50. I think we only grew to like 80 people total. So you got to know everyone and see everyone on the screen. So you just quickly adapted to that environment and so everyone was in the same boat and you figured it out together. That’s also when you could start, the limits on who you could hire suddenly just changed in your mind, it didn’t matter where you were. Yeah. That’s where you really could start meeting people out of state as well and expanding that diversity on your team. Which was huge because I think before we all felt like we had to be confined within an office.

Peter Stevenson

Whoever was here locally that could drive to the office that day.

Jen Janke

Yeah, exactly. So I think that was a lot of a big shift for everyone that luckily continues today, because now we have employees all over the world, and you get that diversity of thought and experiences and background. Even if you’re headquartered here in Utah.

Alysha Smith

I love that you can do sort of hire for the expertise, more so than a person to fill a desk, which is so nice, and such a great opportunity to expand that diversity in your team, as you mentioned.

Jen Janke

But again, I feel like is it odd to say something was easier during COVID It was easier to be virtual when everyone was virtual. It’s the hybrid thing that we’re having to experience today. Like, how do you mesh that in office world with the virtual?

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Jen Janke

That’s actually harder than all virtual.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Alysha Smith

Setting expectations versus trying to be flexible.

Jen Janke

It’s a hard or on a Zoom meeting, if you’re in the conference room with five other people, it’s really hard to hear if you’re the two people on Zoom remote.

Peter Stevenson

I had one of those meetings this morning and technology problems and all that stuff, and half the meeting was over before the Zoom people got to join, and it was crazy.

Jen Janke

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Well, that’s super interesting. So you go and you help build this team and lead to an acquisition. Hopefully that you got some payout on that acquisition. And so what did you decide to do next?

Jen Janke

So, luckily, I had been doing a little bit of consulting on the side for this company called Vasion that I’ve never heard of. They had an interim CMO, and the CEO just wanted to help give him some guidance and coaching, and so asked me to just come down and help him look at the plan, build out the team. It was the classic. Like, he was over our channel partners, but also wanted to try to take over marketing as well. So the CEO wanted to give him all the support he could try to make this successful. So I started doing consulting there, but headquarters are in St. George. So I was like, this is fun. I got to go down, see warm St. George in January. February. I thought it was a consulting gig. Loved everyone I met, wrapped it up, was driving home, and the CEO called me. He’s like, yes, did you want to come work here? I’m like, no, because I knew we were undergoing this acquisition. I was like, no, I’m pretty good, but let’s just keep talking. So we just kept talking. He was very sly, and it’s like, Just meet our CRO. So I met our CRO and his name is Jed Beck. And we hit it off so fast in the interview. Like, I’ve never hit it off with a head of sales like that before. We joke and say we’re BFFs. And so there was something special there that as a marketer to meet someone like that on sales. And then I met the rest of the exec team one by one, and they are the. Nicest people I’ve ever, ever worked with. And there was something special there.

Alysha Smith

You said yes.

Jen Janke

I said yes. So I literally had less than a week break between no. The cell of the chargeback went through my first day of vision.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Jen Janke

So I had like an overlap of a week of trying to handle both.

Peter Stevenson

Wow.

Jen Janke

Yeah. So I got extremely lucky on that. And yeah, evasion is this little company out of St. George, Utah, but we now have offices in UK, Germany, Philippines, Lehigh, and just trying to make our mark on the world.

Peter Stevenson

Tell us a little bit about Vision. You said people have never heard of it. So help us understand who Vision is, what you’re trying to accomplish, what are the real brand goals?

Jen Janke

Yeah, so the company has been around for at least ten years under the name Printer Logic. So if you’re in the It space and you have to deal with printers well, let’s be honest, anyone who has to deal with printers knows how frustrating it is to manage that. What I didn’t realize before starting there is a lot of the print management solutions were on Prem. They hadn’t moved to the cloud yet. So Printer Logic was the first to move to the cloud. And the tagline is and was eliminate print servers. And if you said that to your It persona or target audience, you could immediately see their face of like, are you serious? I can eliminate print servers? That’s at least 50% of their help desk calls are all around printing.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Jen Janke

So they created this really great solution to remove infrastructure, simplify your life. And then right before I started, they went along, they changed their name to Vision and are creating this digital transformation software. I remember interviewing with them and meeting them and being like, what do you mean by digital transformation? That’s such a vague word. And the easiest way to explain it is it’s all about simplicity and how do you remove those manual processes and remove paper and have an integrated workflow. So a lot of teams will use like Monday and then DocuSign and then Google Storage, and you have to have four or five different systems to fill different gaps. The Vision solution will automate it and connect it all in one integrated platform. You could use your printer to scan something that will trigger an automated workflow, that could trigger Esignature, that will file it away and store it and OCR it so you can tag it and easily find it again in the future. We often replace four or five different softwares with just one software because it talks and integrates to each other and connects to your salesforce or whatever your other business software is. So it’s removing infrastructure and removing manual processes, removing paper. So classic example of where I get frustrated is when you go to the doctor’s office, how many forms do you fill out with paper and you put your exact same name and your address on like five different papers. We can just give you the clinic, a digital form. You can fill in your name once and it will pre populate it across the ten different documents, trigger workflow, send it to billings, send it to your physician, whatever you need. It will pop up a signature for you to sign it, and it’s all set and ready to go. I heard a case study last week where we literally eliminated an office building full of paper. Then they had to store. And you think in this day and age, who has paper? A lot of people.

Alysha Smith

They do still.

Jen Janke

So that’s where we’re moving towards. And then we’re connecting the printer logic piece that platform are still printing so that if you need to print it in the beginning or pull it out of storage and print it, it’s all connected on one single platform.

Alysha Smith

And do you have specific industries that you target now for that product?

Jen Janke

Yeah, it’s healthcare, financial services, government. Think how many paper government has. My favorite story on the vasian side of removing paper is when COVID hit the city of Indianapolis had a lot of rental assistance, money that they needed to distribute. People were in need, they needed to pay rent, and they had all those funds to release. But their old manual paper process would have taken them months and months. Vision was able to go in within a couple of weeks, create that whole online process, electronic form signature. You would fill it out as an applicant saying, I need rental assistant. It would trigger an email to your landlord to sign your paperwork, which would trigger another email to approve the funds and release it. And they were able to hand out millions and millions of dollars in a matter of weeks to help people stay in their houses. During COVID Technology can be used to do some really good things.

Peter Stevenson

And are you helping to streamline processes too, like going into a company and essentially consulting? This is how we think we can update your workflow and move from this program to this program, that sort of thing.

Jen Janke

Yeah, because we actually use the product ourselves within our own companies. So to get like a PO approved, we use the Vasia workflow that will help us get the right approval and sign off. So we actually go in and say, like, hey, here’s how we use it on the marketing team or finance team, or have you thought about this or that? Because it’s a very customizable tool to adapt. But we also have pre built playbooks. So if you know, you need this scenario, here you go, you’re set to go. Cool.

Peter Stevenson

Sounds like you’re good at understanding your product.

Jen Janke

Yeah, I hope selling. Yeah. And we have to use it right? So we figure out the pain points and the bugs and fixes. And so we kind of have that same experience our customers do. So we’re constantly making it better for us and for them.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. I’m curious about were you there during the rebrand or before? That was before your time.

Jen Janke

Yeah, I started, like, six months seven months after the rebrand.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. I’m curious about that process. I remember when you rebranded and I was curious about the reason behind it and what the goal was, but it sounds like it was a product. You’re going to be bigger than printers.

Jen Janke

Yeah. We wanted to not be known as just print management. We wanted to create a new space. So the word invasion is also like, you’re creating this new world or this new land. It’s like, not the invasion part of it, but that’s the goal is how can we help companies get to this new space? And our mission is just make digital transformation attainable for everyone. Whether it’s the patient end at that doctor’s office or the back end admin staff at the doctor, it really benefits everyone, all users.

Peter Stevenson

What are the biggest hurdles you’re facing right now in marketing? You’re in St. George. You’re running the team up here. What are some of the hurdles that you’re going through in this new landscape of post COVID marketing?

Jen Janke

We’re in a little bit different space because we’ve hired, like, 24 different people in the last year, including three people two weeks ago. So on the marketing team, our challenge is just as each person is added, you go from being generalists to specialists. And I feel like every month we’re reintroducing someone new in a new process and figuring things out on our end. It’s how do we keep the plane flying on the air and then building out a whole team at the same time? Right.

Peter Stevenson

Your specialty, as you heard.

Jen Janke

I love it. It’s a lot of fun. I told the team that we have to have a break. We need, like, six months of working solid together. And it’s been a lot of fun because things are starting to click and roll and we’re starting to get it going. For us, it’s all about scalability. How do we not build processes and systems that work now, but how they have to work in two, three, four years? And just getting the team to think bigger is the challenge. At the moment, we’re talking about localization. This morning, we have to start translating into German and French and everyone’s like, what’s the fastest and cheapest tool? And I’m like, no, what’s the best tool of another month? Is not going to hurt if it helps us in the long run.

Peter Stevenson

It’s amazing.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

This is time for your question.

Alysha Smith

For my question. Let’s see. Let’s have you give one hot marketing tip. It could be even, like, your best takeaway from your years of experience that you would love to share with the audience.

Jen Janke

Yeah. I think the biggest learning I’ve had the last year at Vision is figure out what other people think is success. So talk to sales, talk to your CEO, talk to your exec team. What do they feel is success? And make sure you hit that out of the park, because you can still say, like, well, marketing, I’m going to have this goal. And this goal, you can still be working on it, but unless you hit that, what is success in marketing? You won’t be able to hit your long term goal of how you want marketing to be. So for example, if you want to be on the revenue marketing side but everyone still thinks that you need to be on the lead side, you kind of still have to give in a little bit and say, okay, I’m going to help get those leads in. So they kind of build that trust and credibility, but the whole time on the back end we’re going to be building out for that revenue, optimizing for revenue too as well. So I think I jumped the gun on moving too fast, evasion and not taking that step back. Oh, the company thinks marketing is here, I want it to be here, but if I’m not hitting what they think is at first, then they won’t see all the other good stuff that you’re doing. So making sure you get that agreed upon metric of success for your 1st 6912 months at any job doesn’t matter certainly what job or what role you play because that’s what kind of you have to build that credibility.

Peter Stevenson

I’ve been fired from places when I didn’t do that.

Jen Janke

But I think as marketers were stubborn and we’re like, no, this is how it should be, this is how I want to do it.

Alysha Smith

You hired me for yeah, you hired me.

Jen Janke

Exactly. But you can still do that. Yeah, just do the other part too.

Peter Stevenson

Well, we come to our final and my favorite question, tell us some restaurants that we should go to here around the Valley. OOH.

Jen Janke

Can I give one in St. George?

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, okay.

Jen Janke

If you’re in St. George, go to this bakery called Farmstead.

Peter Stevenson

Farmstead.

Jen Janke

You walk in and they just have amazing displays of beautiful and delicious pastries and sandwiches and a group of chefs I believe came from Vegas to start it in St. George.

Alysha Smith

So go to where is it in St. George?

Jen Janke

Downtown St. George, kind of like by the city hall in the main square area. So try that.

Peter Stevenson

I love that little city hall area.

Alysha Smith

Is that where the Thai restaurant is in that area?

Jen Janke

Yeah, kind of over there, yeah. Let’s see. So I live up on 9th and 9th in Salt Lake. They have a lot of cute little shops and restaurants but like Pago is a great little date night. We go to Monarcha a lot in downtown.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, yeah.

Jen Janke

If you like libera tacos. Yeah, that’s the one on State, right? Okay, yeah, that’s delicious. What is it? Edison House or Edison Street has it’s edison street, but it’s called franklin. Yeah, that’s a cute little it’s an old building that used to be like a theater on the sketchy part of salt lake 100 years ago.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, edison street is the best.

Jen Janke

It’s a cute little street with lots of restaurants on there. Now check that out.

Peter Stevenson

I like Franklin Ave a lot. It’s the new concept by the same folks that do white horse and whiskey. Oh, is it the same ownership group and yeah, I really am excited about what Edison street is going to be over the next couple of years.

Jen Janke

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Well, thank you. So let’s go. Thanks so much for being here, and we’ll see you around silicon slopes.

Jen Janke

Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

Bye bye bye. Subjects is production of modernate agency and silicon slopes. Executive producers are Alicia Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and producer is Dave Meekum. Video Production by Connor Mitchell development Production by Eric Dahl production Management by Shelby Sandland Original music composed by Josh Johnson. Website designed by modernate. Please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.