Melissa Burdon couldn’t be happier that Selligent has stated its intentions to strengthen its presence in the United States. The director of marketing optimization for Extra Space Storage—which fields its own team of data scientists creating custom solutions—says the Belgian provider offers the precise personal attention that most big marketing stacks do not.
“We have one big marketing cloud provider that tries to push every tool they have on us without necessarily being aware of whether we need it or not,” Burdon says. “Selligent makes sure they have a one-to-one relationship with the client. We have an account rep who is always coming up with potential solutions specifically for us.”
Burdon came to Selligent through Extra Space’s relationship with email marketing company StrongView, whose acquisition by Selligent was completed this week. Company CEO Andre Lejeune used the occasion to lay out his American game plan, which is to focus on mid-market companies seeking “the ease of use and rigorous data stewardship demanded by underfunded European marketers and the enterprise-class scale and sophistication demanded in the United States.”
Lejeune (left) said that, unlike the large enterprise providers, Selligent is used to serving European companies that have smaller budgets than most American enterprises, but customer bases that are just as big. Selligent’s sales efforts will focus on “relationship marketers,” not CMOs “like marketing giants Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce” do, said a company press release.
Another one of Selligent’s American strategies, according to the release, is to focus on the human element of marketing and Burdon thinks the company will have an impact in that regard. “You don’t necessarily get the best results from the bigger guys. With several big vendors we work with, we feel we’re just a number to them. That’s not the case with Selligent,” she says.
Selligent’s U.S. headquarters is in Redwood City, CA.
