John Watton of Shipserv wins marketer of the year

When John Watton took the helm at ShipServ, he already had two decades worth of marketing to the high-tech industry under his belt. He took on a tough role at e-commerce business for the maritime industry too - before he took over as its VP of marketing the company faced a problem of flexibility and scale.

Challenge

With only a small marketing team and a limited budget, Watton needed to organically create awareness, demand and a captive community for ShiServ Pages, a supplier directory, and ShipServ TradeNet, an e-commerce trading platform where ship owners, managers and ship yards conduct business online.

In addition, Watton faced the challenge of delivering high quality leads to two different sales teams. The inside dales team based in the Philippines needed a way to distinguish from a sea of online visitors 'just browsing'  to generate a steady pipeline of new opportunities. The smaller, geographically dispersed sales team meanwhile had a more strategic goal - with multi year purchase cycles they needed to foster a trusted advisor relationship and to acquire a wealth of intelligence about a prospect's web activity, interests and demographic profile.