This week we feature Sofia Quintero, Head of Growth at Geckoboard. Geckoboard is a hosted status board that collects business information and summarizes it for easy understanding and interpretation.

In this interview, you can read more about her work at Geckoboard, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as her advice for budding marketers.

Your location: London.

Your favorite gadget: My iPhone and my Pebble watch.

You start your day with: Coffee and honey.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Using my commute to get work done.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: QuickSprout, Andrew Chen, Clarity

“We help individuals and businesses to access the data they need when they need it.”

Describe an average day at Geckoboard?

We don’t really have any average days at Geckoboard. We’re very focused on specific goals and metrics, but what we do in order to reach those goals changes every day. I’m currently doing a lot of content planning, scoping projects in different areas and finalising details for the launch of our new marketing site. Normally everything starts after our daily stand up.

As a marketer, what are some of your favourite productivity hacks?

There are a couple of things that have worked very well for me so far. The first one is that I’m lucky enough to be a morning person, and waking up around 5:30 am gives me a couple of quiet hours to plan the day before going to the office. The second thing is probably delegation. I found that using services like fancyhands.com helps a lot. I tend to delegate as many tasks as possible and concentrate on only a few things during the day. My final hack is definitely the way I try to distribute the day. I try to do most meetings and creative work in the morning and leave large blocks of time in the afternoon to finalise work that requires high levels of concentration. It’s hard to keep this routine every week but that’s what I’m aiming for most of the time.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3–5 tools you use?

At this point we are transitioning to Hubspot to run the majority of our marketing activity, it’s early stage but for instance, we use a combination of Hubspot’s email marketing capabilities for drip campaigns, and Intercom for in-app communications. From a data perspective we’re trying to move to a single view of our customers data and that means working with tools like segment.io to integrate and consolidate the data we’re gathering from customers at different touch points.

How does Geckoboard stand out amongst its competitors and how do you convey that in your marketing messages?

We help individuals and businesses to access the data they need when they need it. Helping people to communicate data effectively is our core business and that requires a special focus on simplicity. The way we convey this in our marketing messaging is by using language that everybody can understand — we don’t believe in jargon or over complicating things.

Data can be scary for many people so we try to empower anyone who’s willing to learn and start the journey of making the most of it. We don’t over promise anything, our communication is open and honest. Becoming data-driven is a journey, not an overnight transformation.

How do you drive traffic to your site and what top 3 strategies you’ll use to convert people trying the app into paying customers?

Inbound marketing is at the core of what we do so content partnerships are a successful way of driving qualified traffic to the site. In terms of conversion, from a marketing point view we believe that using social proof is a powerful tactic. We talk to a lot of customers and showcase success stories across multiple verticals and company sizes. We help potential customers understand the value of data communication through personal stories from professionals just like them.

We have also put a lot of focus on customer support as a part of our marketing efforts. We believe that exceptional customer experience can fuel not only retention, but also word of mouth. Again, social proof and recommendations have been a source of growth for Geckoboard from the very beginning.

Geckoboard has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the multiple dimensions in which customers perceive value from Geckoboard. We have a number of very interesting use cases and we actively try to translate those insights into product improvements and the refinement of our core messaging. We fundamentally use customer language and try to convey what they perceive as benefits in the simplest way possible.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

My best advice would be to get to know yourself very well. Knowing what time of the day you have the biggest boost of energy, how long it takes you to immerse yourself in a task and knowing your core skills is very important. It’s easier and more effective to concentrate on what you’re good at instead of trying to make up for your flaws. Waking up at 5:30 am won’t hurt you either.

A big thanks to Sofia for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you check out Geckoboard.

The ‘How Marketers Stay Productive’ series asks marketers their tips & strategies for staying productive. Every month we’ll feature a new guest and the tricks that keep them working smart. Know someone you’d love to see featured? Email Us.