My name is Justin Schmidt. I am the vice president of marketing at JobSync, which is a hiring operations platform that helps high volume hiring companies do that more efficiently and simply so that they can save time, money, and still hit their hiring goals. A little bit about myself and my background. I have spent

20 years in marketing. I’m one of those weirdos that got a degree in marketing and also made that a career. And yeah, there are those of us out there.

really it’s very fascinating looking, of looking back on this. I’ve got three main phases. My first phase was e-commerce B2C. I did that at a variety of companies for probably six, seven, eight years. Then I spent a little over 10 in performance marketing.

Publishing that’s way I could describe it. I ran all performance marketing publishing content and revenue for a giant conglomerate of Media websites that people never heard of but I promise you you clicked on one of our ads and stories

And then after that, I spent the last seven, almost seven years in B2B SaaS, specifically at startups and scale-ups. So I’ve kind of done it all and I’ve been very fortunate this whole time to have been put in a position where I am either the marketing leader or the only marketer. So it’s always been kind of a 360 degree view of the discipline. And I absolutely love it. Perfect career for me.

The approach I’ve taken over these 20 years is probably 70 % the same in each of the three phases I laid out, but that last 30 % you kind of mold to the milieu that you’re in. And that’s basically thinking of marketing ultimately as an equally left and right brained activity.

where you have to understand and quantify the impacts of the qualitative work product that you’re making, right? Marketing’s storytelling and influence, which is great. We can all get really excited about writing awesome copy or coming up with the perfect positioning. But at the end of the day, a lot of the impetus for what we do is

driving revenue and achieving numerical goals. So I’ve always tried to really approach these things with an operational mindset, leaving space for the creative work to achieve those goals. 

A really good friend of mine, bit of a mentor you could say, has this great quip where if you think about any business, like ultimately what you’re optimizing for,

is the revenue generating events, the cash register going ding. It’s the wire hitting the bank account if you’re selling enterprise software, for example.

And when you think about that, you work backwards from the cash register ringing to the interaction with the customer in the cashier to the customer’s experience in the store, to whatever ad it is they saw to get them to go to the store with whatever demand creation was done to get them primed. when they saw that they wanted to go to the store and buy the product and you just work backwards from there, you can achieve whatever goal it is you’re setting.

for yourself as a marketer, but you can’t do that without really understanding both the quantitative, qualitative, left brain, right brain data and the story behind it. So really long circuitous answer to a simple question, but that’s always been my approach and in the organizational design, campaign design, goals, objective strategies, tactics, planning, et cetera, et cetera, with all of that has always been in that lens.


There are a nearly infinite amount of things that are causing me some degree of increased cortisol and brain power requirement. But if I could distill down to something snackable there’s really two things on my mind right now that are, that are challenging for me. The first is Job sync is. absolutely in a blue ocean category, meaning

There really isn’t a quote unquote category of what we’re doing and a lot of it is charting that path. Our most common alternatives are either status quo or an amalgamation of other tools or maybe it’s another category purporting to solve the same problem but just in an entirely different way. So we’re really in this do we or don’t we category creation conversation which

is a lot of the reason I took the job because it’s a awesome intellectual challenge, but it is a challenge. And thinking through the positioning, thinking through the content to represent that positioning and the channels for which to distribute that content to achieve the goals that we want to achieve is absolutely something that’s taken up a lot of time in my head right now.

I have a deep amount of envy, if you will, for fast growing Red Ocean categories. A good example this would be…

some AI infrastructure, right? Everybody needs a vector database. So you’ve got Pinecone and its competitors just beating the crap out of each other right now to do that. If you look at a lot of the digital transformation, moved to the cloud stuff that happened 10 years ago, there’s plenty of examples I could point to where it’s like, okay, now we have a defined category, 15 players in the market. It’s just about execution, right? I don’t get to live in that luxury right now.

Which is challenging, but also exciting. So that’s probably the biggest piece is that, positioning and kind of category definition exercise related to that is the fact that we are a startup and we have a small but mighty team and a lot of opportunity ahead of us and awesome product that’s creating incredible results for the customers that we have. And.


The operational grind of is a lead properly set up such that it comes into HubSpot gets sent to Salesforce at the right time. And the SLA on what a marketing qualified versus a sales qualified lead is and all that rev ops stuff, is great stuff to work on.

it still is something that we gotta do before I can get to all this other stuff, right? So a lot of opportunity, a lot of green field, but with that comes challenges, to say the least.

Marketing is subservient to sales. And a lot of people, don’t think fully appreciate that. At the end of the day, if you’re just making awesome content and people are consuming it and falling in love with your brand, but not buying anything, you’re a publishing company. You’re, you’re, doing media, which is cool. I spent 11 years in that business. love it, but that’s different than selling product. Right. Now, obviously.

There’s a big move amongst us marketers to say everyone should think like a media company. It’s a whole other podcast we could debate that and argue the semantics of it. But at the end of the day, our job is to make the cash register ring. So my prediction is that without using the word you’re not allowing me to use, it’s going to become increasingly technologically possible for us to directly tie our marketing activity to revenue results.

And we need to get very comfortable with that. And my advice to somebody going into marketing would actually be related to that in that it’s probably worth spending some time selling something before you go whole hog into marketing. Some of the best marketing education I got my entire life was selling cell phones at a T-Mobile in Long Beach, California in 2004.

That is a cutthroat business back then it was an especially cutthroat business and all the weird boiler room stuff that the other people at that T-Mobile would do to get to talk to the person when they walked in the door and ultimately activate a phone taught me more about making sure your greeting and your message ultimately lands to a sale then.

any study of Porter’s Five Forces or listening to Scott Galloway quotes about building brand or anything that I’ve done since.

LinkedIn, Justin Allen Schmidt, or if you want to inflate my ego and my Google analytics account, justinschmidt.me, which is really just going to link you off to LinkedIn or have you connect with me on Xbox or PlayStation. could maybe play some Call of Duty together or something, but LinkedIn is my first choice. And then obviously jobsync.com. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that.