Jorge Solorio is the Industrial Americas Business Manager at Lubrizol Advanced Materials where he’s responsible for marketing and sales for their Corzan product line.
On this episode of the Social Business Engine, Jorge explains how he led a strategic initiative to launch an online destination centered on one dedicated product within a large company. He also discusses how he is achieving alignment between sales and marketing – and has the results to prove it.
Lubrizol is a large chemical company that started in 1928. Corzan is their chlorinated polyvinyl chloride or CPVC product – Jorge explained that it’s similar to the PVC you’d buy from a home-improvement retailer, only it’s post-chlorinated and can be used with higher temperatures.
Launching a Dedicated Web Property for Corzan
Since Lubrizol is such a big web property, Jorge proposed the launch of a separate web property for Corzan. As an end user product, the target audience is different than the one Lubrizol.com markets. The purpose of the Corzan website is to expand on topics and educate their buyer persona.
Corzan.com started as a small experiment with a WordPress property on Lubrizol.com and as it grew, eventually switched over to HubSpot. At first, management didn’t understand the direction, but once Jorge was able to provide KPIs it clicked and helped with buy-in. Sales started to get excited about their endeavors with Corzan.com when they saw how many leads it attracted. Jorge and his team found that more quality leads were generated from the highly technical content.
As the site gained traction, they amped up their content marketing strategy. A marketing firm was brought on to write content and they now publish at least one blog per week. Listen to this episode to learn where the funding for the program initially came from and how sales is involved with the blog.
The Impact on Global Sales and Marketing Team Alignment
In his role as the Industrial Americas Business Manager at Lubrizol, Jorge runs the sales team and manages marketing staff across North, Central, and South America. He says he would grade their sales and marketing alignment as seven out of ten, which is pretty good for only working in alignment for one year.
Their CRM focuses on the sales staff and allows them to communicate with marketing. When designing the pipeline within the CRM, Jorge consulted a Lubrizol sales professional to ensure both marketing and sales have ownership in the lead generation process. Jorge says he sees the lines between marketing and sales blurring, noting that marketing can be held accountable with the right metrics.
The Corzan website is still being optimized. Jorge plans to continue prioritizing education over selling with their weekly blog posts and long-form eBooks. They have plans to incorporate video in 2018 so they can “show and not just tell.” Tune into the podcast to find out what content will be included in their videos and to hear more of Jorge’s sales perspective on aligning with marketing.