In the Now: Astrid Domenico

In a tough economy, how do you position your company to thrive? Astrid Domenico knows the answer better than most. As the CEO of OpFocus, a Salesforce growth partner, she has spent over a decade helping SaaS companies focus on their business growth and unlock their true potential. 

Watch the full interview with Astrid Domenico here and read an excerpt from the interview below. 

Nowspeed: My name is Dave Reske, Founder and President of Nowspeed Marketing. Welcome to this edition of In the Now where we focus on uncovering the myths and misunderstandings of marketing and leadership with some of the world’s most interesting people. And my guest today is Astrid Dominico, CEO of OpFocus, a Salesforce.com consulting company, where she is responsible for strategy management, company operations, and many other things including business growth focus that we’ll get into today. Before becoming CEO, she was COO and before that, she was SVP of corporate strategy. Astrid, welcome to the show.

Astrid: Happy to be here!

Nowspeed: As you know, I’d like to start these conversations by smashing a myth about marketing and leadership. So, your experience was something that a lot of marketers or leaders think about, it’s just not true.

Astrid: For us, one that is top of mind as we started planning for 2023, and now it’s here already, was thinking about the response to the economy. Our clients are primarily SaaS companies, and we’re all watching what’s happening to the big SaaS company. Some of that is similar to mid-market companies that we work with on a regular basis, so whether it’s layoffs or contractions of some kind, we’re in that mix, tumbling along with our clients. So, we think about what is our strategy to ride the wave? How can we be most useful to our clients and stay healthy? And so the question comes up, do you go broader, or, this may possibly sound counterintuitive, do you go more narrow and focus in on your offerings?

Nowspeed: So in terms of having a focus to grow the business or find new clients, is it better to go broader and take whatever business is out there, especially in a difficult market economy? Don’t you want to take whatever new clients are out there to help your business grow, or do you really want to just stay narrow and perhaps go even more narrow? 

Astrid: It’s a tough one, right? We are probably going to try both. So, for us, years ago, I’m in my 15th year, we started out doing any projects related to Salesforce for literally any company. We know a lot of companies that have Salesforce are tech companies but many aren’t; one of my favorites was a pie company that we did an implementation for, so really, we would take any type of work and that, I think, is a very scrappy mentality for small companies. Why would you turn a business away? One in the hand is worth two in the bush, right? And then you get to a point where you say, are we too broad and not deep enough?

So probably five or six years ago, we worked with a specialized IT services consultant who helped companies like OpFocus and he was the one who pushed us to pick a pony. We kind of met in the middle. We took a look at the market and the data he had shared with us, and we also looked at our own history and what the team was excited to do so we said, how about we split the difference and focus on SaaS? It’s not a vertical but more like a business model so we said we’ll put a stake in the ground and say this is what we do, we focus on SaaS companies. And we went even further. And we’re writing to the RevOps, it used to be called business operations, but became very sexy in the last five-six years, and more and more SaaS companies started to build out revenue operations. So that’s our specialty and we feel like it’s pretty narrow but it has allowed us to continue to grow. 

There’s so much more to this interview. Keep listening here.