34 - How Events Have Grown Our Customers By 5X+ with Sara Kinsey, Head of Digital, Demand and Events at Gem

Sara Kinsey is Head of Digital Marketing, Demand Generation, and Events at Gem. She's been there for 2+ years. 

Prior to Gem, Sara was at Unifi Software (acquired) and Alteryx (IPO’d). Sara is a true B2B SaaS leader.

Gem was founded in 2017, has 110 people, and is based out of San Francisco, CA. They've raised Series B ($48M total).

Gem is the platform for modern recruiting. Like what Hubspot does for marketers, Gem does for recruiters and hiring teams (find, engage, and nurture top talent). It all started when co-founders Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak were working as engineering managers at Dropbox and Facebook and were using spreadsheets to track the best talent (they called them “gems”). They realized they needed to build something better.

Here's what we hit on: 

What did Sara and team focus on early stage given limited resources (HINT: they built their first significant marketing asset and then promoted it);

Events turned out to be a BIG driver of marketing sourced leads - how did they track TOF all the way to Customer;

You’re growing! What does your (marketing) team look like now;

Marketing: what’s been working well for you? what channels (HINT: heavily focused on events including webinars, demo day, happy hour, Talent Talks, round tables, etc.);

What does the team do with the recorded content from events;

Leading with need vs. leading with content;

What failure(s) have you had that have shaped you as a person;

Experimentation is key to successful marketing at startups;

How do you stay creative, keep your marketing fresh, keep from getting passive with your marketing/content.

You can find Sara on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kinseysara

Find out more about Gem: www.gem.com

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