Giovanni Sanguily took a circuitous career route before founding TriDigital LLC, a personalized marketing services company in Plano, Texas, that works with IT providers. Sanguily started as a comic book artist before landing a job as a sales rep and then director of sales for an IT service provider. Next, when working for Microsoft and Intel teaching MSPs to sell cloud and managed services, he dusted off his creative talent and started designing his own marketing materials.
IT providers heard about Sanguily’s talent for marketing, and a side business was born. That quickly turned into a full-time venture, complete with the proverbial office in his garage.
Two years later, TriDigital has 21 employees and marketing clients all over the world. So what is Sanguily’s secret? “We pride ourselves [on] being a company that markets the human quality. We don’t believe in marketing solutions and services. If you’re a vendor, then you can market the tools.”
The business owners Sanguily’s clients want to reach don’t know what technologies they need. “It’s not like they go to sleep and have a dream and say, ‘Hey, you know what the answer to all my problems [is]? Virtualization! Why didn’t I think of that?! Let’s find a company that does it.’”
Yet, IT providers’ websites look like they are marketing to one another. “Everyone can copy your solutions stack,” he says. “But what they can’t copy is your culture, your vision, your values, [or] your people.” So each client project is customized. A photographer takes images that show off the client’s infrastructure and people, and a video shows the passion the business owner and employees have for what they do.
This, says Sanguily, finds the people who share the client’s vision and passion. And that strategy has paid off. “We’ve built a proprietary web-based application that tracks leads with ConnectWise, Autotask, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and everything else. The leads are a result of both online [and] offline strategies, including direct mail and events, and we put it in this platform that captures their leads and sends them to their CRM or PSA.”
Every marketing plan is customized based on the goals of the client. Many clients sign up for a month-to-month engagement, which is $5,000 per month and includes a redesign of the client’s website from the ground up, creation of an annual plan, execution of campaigns and blogs, direct mail collateral, white papers, and so on. Then, says Sanguily, at about the three-month mark, clients generally upgrade. “Once they get ROI,” he says, “the hose goes off and they say, ‘I want to do three times as much.’”
