Shawn Herring: Using the freelance economy to bridge a growing skills gap

Joined in studio today by Shawn Herring, the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Torchlite Marketing: Torchlite is a SaaS marketplace that connects businesses to digital marketing experts. While other tech platforms exist to help companies find freelance talent, Torchlite is the first platform that allows companies to manage, collaborate with and evaluate that talent. It’s a single application that provides businesses with visibility into freelance campaigns across all digital channels – online, email, mobile, advertising and social media. Discussion guide from my conversation with Shawn Herring: 1. The “marketing playbook.” 2. Using the freelance economy to bridge a growing skills gap. 3. The race to create tech with the newest bells & whistles has resulted in a shortage of employees who possess skill sets specialized enough to actually utilize the latest advances in their field. 4. What is the Torchlite concept / How does it work? 5. What was involved in putting together the platform and the experts? 6. What is the business model? 7. How are you reaching potential customers? 8. What is the plan for the next year or so? About Shawn Herring: A dynamic and enthusiastic leader, Shawn built and managed the global demand generation team at ExactTarget. His team helped increase return on investment across all marketing channels and was instrumental in ExactTarget becoming one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world before being acquired by Salesforce.com. Shawn holds an MBA from Indiana University and has previously been in marketing roles at Harlan Laboratories and Roche Diagnostics. In 2015, Shawn co-founded Torchlite Marketing, a SaaS Marketplace that connects businesses to digital marketing experts who develop, manage and execute campaigns through a collaboration platform. ###