Channel99 is a cutting edge B2B performance marketing platform founded in 2022 that unites marketing and finance teams to more effectively improve the value of their marketing investments. Channel99’s platform helps B2B companies gain more meaningful and accurate insights into which investments reduce dollar inefficiencies, lower customer acquisition cost, and more predictably exceed sales pipeline numbers.
CMO Nani Shaffer started at Channel99 a few months after its founding. Though Nani has held different marketing roles at companies such as Demandbase and Ontra, she describes marketing operations as “the love of her life”. So, it came as no surprise that one of her earliest priorities after starting at Channel99 was making sure that there was a strong marketing operations backbone in place. “Implementing Marketo and creating processes early on was a no brainer”, Nani said. She understood the importance of a strong foundation on which to build a robust demand generation engine, and started thinking of how to get the ball rolling.
"Implementing Marketo and creating processes early on was a no brainer"
Nani knew the steps she needed to take, but realized that to establish the company’s foundational marketing and sales processes and strategy would require a level of bandwidth she didn’t have. She knew she needed outside help, and gave Nomad a call.
Nani had worked with Nomad previously at Ontra, a legal workflow automation solution, so she knew Nomad had the platform and project management skills she was looking for. On top of Nomad’s technical and executional expertise, the flat-rate monthly fee model made Nomad easy to onboard and work with, qualities that were paramount to a rapidly growing company such as Channel99.
"Within three days, we went from our initial chat to signing; it was such a quick and easy process"
It was off to the races from there. Nani remembers that “within three days, we went from our initial chat to signing; it was such a quick and easy process”. In that time, Nomad assisted in the purchase of Marketo, gained access for the team, stood up the instance and implemented the initial sync between Marketo and Salesforce. Nomad enabled Channel99 to be able to launch demand generation programs at a moment’s notice with the appropriate infrastructure in place.
Nomad started to help Channel99 set up their sales and marketing operations processes to power the company’s demand generation engine, including creating website forms, coding email and landing page templates, setting lifecycle stages in Salesforce, determining benchmarks for the company to measure performance against and setting a reporting architecture. About Nomad’s first few weeks, Nani said, “there were things that immediately needed to get done that were at the core of everything we do and that all required bandwidth that I personally didn’t have. It was nice to be able to trust someone for those tasks”. Following the initial configuration, Nomad works with Nani to execute on the company’s marketing initiatives, including day to day administration work, such as email launches and campaign operations, as well as ongoing strategy work such as data governance and reporting.
Nani said she didn’t feel like Nomad even had an onboarding period because of how quickly and seamlessly the team got to work. She says, “being able to Slack Nomad makes all the difference in the world. I truly feel like the Nomad team is my team; there’s no difference there”. Finally, Nomad’s transparent flat-rate model makes it easy for her to budget and have complete visibility into the future.
"I truly feel like the Nomad team is my team; there’s no difference there"
As CMO of an early stage company, Nani’s to-do list is huge. She is always working to prioritize many initiatives and has her hands in a million projects at once. The one area that “doesn’t keep her up at night” is marketing operations, because she knows she has Nomad to take care of it.
Nani says Nomad “functions on autopilot” with the relationship “not requiring a lot of work from [her] end”. Nomad provides proactive recommendations on all things marketing and sales ops, using the team’s collective expertise and broad experience to flag things Nani “doesn’t even know to think about”. Nani says Nomad “has [her] implicit trust on all things marketing tech stack and processes because the team has been through it hundreds of times”. She’s grateful to have Nomad to build out Channel99’s marketing ops function, and knows she wouldn’t get access to Nomad’s level of expertise with an in-house hire. She believes Nomad’s expertise and proactive approach to driving projects forward is helping to “future-proof Channel99’s marketing function”, and she looks forward to continuing to grow her org with Nomad’s support.
Nomad is Chris’ partner for all things sales & marketing technology and process. To anyone considering working with Nomad, Chris has this to say: “there seems to be a niche that is in real demand and Nomad fills that very well with good people and personalities. Nomad doesn’t just have process expertise and technology background, but also good people, and those three things together make the real difference”.
Nani says...[Nomad] “has her implicit trust on all things marketing tech stack and processes because the team has been through it hundreds of times”
