Martech360 Interview With Terri Herrmann, Co-Founder, CharismaQ

Our vision at CharismaQ is to create a world of confident communicators.

Hi Terri, could you tell us about your journey in the Marketing and Sales industry?

I consider myself a performance driven SaaS B2B executive leader building strategies to scale and delivering results for fast-paced start-up and growth phase enterprise software companies.

Throughout my entire career, I’ve been driven and inspired by creating meaningful connections and making a difference. Whether that is through leading and growing teams, creating brand advocates, launching and promoting new products to the market, or building an opportunity pipeline, my best, most rewarding work is tied to a greater purpose.

The two companies that had the greatest influence on my career and my decision to co-found CharismaQ were ManpowerGroup and Montage.

ManpowerGroup is a large, global staffing organization and I worked there for nearly 13 years. I like to joke that the only job I ever applied for at ManpowerGroup was the job that got me in the door. Through the company’s continued growth, I was given more opportunities for professional growth and development. The experience, education, and exposure I got at ManpowerGroup prepared me for my journey as a sales and marketing executive.

Montage was a high-growth SaaS interviewing technology company with an amazing product and culture. I joined the executive team in 2017 and helped scale the company to a $100M exit in 2019. My personal experience through the acquisition and merger to become Modern Hire was insightful and eye-opening. The culture I loved and thrived in at Montage no longer existed and after the merger was complete, I seriously evaluated what I wanted next and where I could find it.

In 2020, I decided not to go out and try to find another company that could match the magic of Montage, but decided to build it myself and CharismaQ was born. It is my personal mission and vision to create a culture of transparency, innovation and trust allowing us to win as a team in the marketplace.

What challenges did the COVID-19 pandemic pose for you and your team?

CharismaQ is a rare COVID-19 startup success story. We went from zero to $1M in funding in 15 months.

CharismaQ was founded on April 1^st, 2020. (Who doesn’t love a story about a business being born on April Fools Day during a global pandemic?) My co-founder, Katrina Cravy, and I saw COVID-19 as an opportunity to accelerate the launch of our business model. With my experience in SaaS sales and marketing leadership and Katrina’s 20+ career as an Emmy Award-winning TV broadcast journalist, we recognized that organizations were struggling to adjust to our new world of selling and communication.

CharismaQ’s launch to the market in 2020 was focused on empowering people to improve their virtual communication and sales. Just 17 days after launching our business, we secured our first customer and in our first 9 months, we helped 13 customers sell and communicate more effectively through virtual channels.

In 2020, we also took a big bet on ourselves and our business model. As two female founders new to the start-up world, neither of us took a salary and we invested 100% of our revenue into developing our minimum viable product (MVP) of our coaching platform.

In 2021, our momentum continued, and our bet paid off. We added more customers to our roster, launched our MVP and in July of 2021, secured $1M in seed round funding from our first customer.

Since our funding, we’ve hired a business development leader and a customer success manager and our next two hires will be a product leaders and an SDR.

We will begin the process of our next raise early in 2023.

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What sets CharismaQ apart from the competition?

Three things separate CharismaQ from the competition. What we teach, how we teach, and the coaches.

1. What we teach. We are laser-focused on teaching charisma. Charisma is the ability to attract, engage, motivate and influence those around you. Employers need to give their employees the opportunity to learn and acquire new social, emotional, and cognitive skills, like charisma, to thrive in our new generation of communication. Companies and their people need to be great communicators on all channels and key employees don’t have the necessary skill set to move business forward. Only 33% of employees believe their manager is an effective communicator. For those customer-facing team members inside of organizations, only 13% of buyers believe that the salesperson truly understands their needs. There is a big communication chasm that needs to be crossed. By mastering the art and science of charisma, individuals can cross the chasm.
2. How we teach. CharismaQ is a tech-enabled coaching solution with a blended learning approach. We offer a video-based evaluation, 1:1 coaching sessions, group coaching sessions and microlearning content tailored toward the individual. Ninety two percent of CharismaQ members say they can take what they learned from our program and immediately apply it to their jobs. Unlike other programs that bring in specific trainers or coaches, CharismaQ members get to choose their coach and 98% percent of members say their coach is a good match for them.
3. Our coaches. Our coaches help drive a level of accountability and true behavior change that you don’t see from other coaching companies or coaching technologies. Our coaches are communication masters, expert storytellers, and channel influencers. CharismaQ coaches have built successful careers and loyal followers and now they are teaching customer facing teams, emerging leaders, and executive teams across the country.

How, according to you, has technology in the Marketing and Sales landscape evolved and will evolve in the coming years?

Over the last decade I believe we went from high touch, unscalable marketing and sales strategies to fully automated, impersonal interactions. There is no shortage of marketing and sales technologies and we’ve become over reliant on some to do the jobs only humans can do.

The next evolution will bring humanity back to sales and marketing. At CharismaQ, we’re working to find the right blend of quantity and quality for our marketing and sales outreach.

How do you envisage CharismaQ evolving, in the years to come?

Our vision at CharismaQ is to create a world of confident communicators. As the workplace continues to evolve and as the need for interpersonal and social skills coaching continues to grow, I see CharismaQ growing and evolving alongside the forward-looking, innovative customers who choose to partner with us.

Our product roadmap is centered around the modern learner. The modern learner wants to acquire marketable skills and are looking for a structured, yet dynamic program that allows coaching and learning to happen in a variety of ways.

CharismaQ will have a direct impact on employee engagement and individual performance. Through our coaching we will give our members the communication skills and confidence they need to drive measurable business outcomes.

How, according to you, do innovative technology solutions impact the traditional Sales and Marketing funnels?

I think the biggest impact on traditional sales and marketing funnels is not necessarily technology solutions, but the ever-changing landscape of prospect and buyer behavior. The buying process is about “the jobs to be done” and not about a linear process or a funnel. Buyers do more than 70% of the research on their own before ever engaging with a vendor. The status quo and buyer indecision are the two biggest reasons vendors lose. As vendors, we make buying overwhelming and complicated, not easy and frictionless. As sales and marketing teams we tend to become product and process peddlers instead of visionary problem solvers. There is a big difference between selling and winning.

The technologies that will have the biggest impact on sales and marketing will be those technologies that give us the greatest insight into buyer behavior, meet buyers where they are, and allow for meaningful interactions that build buyer trust.

Could you name the Top 5 apps/platforms that you use for marketing?

For CharismaQ and where we are right now in our journey, it’s all about making pragmatic investments and laying the foundation for scale for our next round of funding.

1. As you build a business from the ground up, you always look for your greatest point of leverage to create brand awareness and generate opportunities. Given my co-founder and I have over 40 years of collective experience and connections, we leveraged LinkedIn to generate prospect meetings and tell our story. Because both my co-founder and I built our careers on being good humans and paying it forward, we built our sales pipeline pretty quickly.
2. Our business just turned two and eventually, our networks will be exhausted. One of the first things we did was create our ideal client profile (We like to call them our zebras because everyone knows a zebra when you see one.) We use Zoominfo to find our zebras for prospecting and marketing sequences.
3. For a company our size, Hubspot is the perfect CRM and marketing automation tool. As a CRM, we enroll Zoominfo contacts into sequences, we manage and log all prospect and customer communication and gain insight to our opportunity pipeline and sales process. We also leverage workflows for marketing campaigns.
4. Moz. Moz Pro can help you define, implement, and monitor your keyword and SEO strategy. There are other more robust tools out there, but for the small startup that doesn’t have a lot of cash or resources, Moz is an extremely user-friendly tool that can give you the insight you need to begin your SEO journey.
5. Google Analytics. Paying attention to your website analytics is extremely important as you build your demand generation strategy. How many people are visiting your site, how long are they staying, how many pages did they view, and who converted. As we build our strategy, we are trying one marketing experiment at time and monitoring the impact of the investment.

Could you name one other personality that you would like to see featured here?

Gracey Cantaloupo, CMO, Mentorcliq, Gracey.cantaloupo@mentorcliq.com

Your top pick for a book on marketing that everyone should read?

Wow. It’s so hard to pick just one. Every marketer who aspires to be an entrepreneur should read Shoe Dog, a memoir by Phil Knight. I think of Nike as this iconic, global, giant brand in the marketplace and when you read Phil’s journey, there were key moments where Nike almost didn’t make it. The reality is Knight had a brand vision, and a feeling he wanted associated with his company and products and even through adversity, he never lost sight of it.

As a Marketing Leader and Entrepreneur, what is the one piece of advice you would give to those who are budding in the industry?

Be open and see opportunity through success and failure.

For many years, I followed a very hierarchical path in sales and marketing. I moved from manager, to director, to VP. I was responsible for only brand marketing, then digital, then demand generation, then all things marketing and revenue operations.

I thought my next logical step would be CMO of the SaaS company I helped grow and scale. We had a very successful exit and merged with another company. The culture changed, the leadership team changed, and I didn’t get the job. I was crushed. I decided then, it was no longer the right place for me.

I used this as an opportunity to learn. I asked why I didn’t get the job. I identified my gaps, worked with a coach to help close them and decided it was time to use my experience and expertise to start my own business. If it hadn’t been for the culture shift and me being turned down for a promotion, CharismaQ never would have been launched.

Early in my career, entrepreneurship was never a path I saw myself taking, but I feel so thankful and blessed that I was open to see the opportunity in front of me.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur with an idea that just won’t leave you alone—it’s never too late to start! As co-founders we were both in our 40s when we decided to make the leap. It’s definitely not easy, but we’re still running like we’re in our 20s…most days.

Thanks Terri!

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