Welcome to the SampleCon 2021 Highlights Series. Recorded live in Pasadena, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors, speakers and attendees at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Ted Pulsifer, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at Schlesinger Group. More about SampleCon 2021: https://samplecon.com/ Find Ted Online: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedpulsifer/ Website: https://www.schlesingergroup.com/en/ Find Jamin Online: Email: jamin@happymr.instawp.xyz LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil Find Us Online: Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp Website: www.happymr.com Music: “Clap Along” by Auditionauti: https://audionautix.com [00:00:00] Jamin Brazil: Ted Pulsifer, we are live today on the show floor of SampleCon. [00:00:07] Ted Pulsifer: Hi, Jamin. Thanks for having me. [00:00:09] Jamin Brazil: It's 2021. This is my first live event. How's it going for you? [00:00:13] Ted Pulsifer: It's great. This is my first live event in about a year and a half other than a couple select meetings, so it feels wonderful. [00:00:22] Jamin Brazil: It's just so nice to be able to see people. What do you think about the show so far? [00:00:25] Ted Pulsifer: So far it's great. This is a perfect time. I just got done hosting a panel and have done some other events we sponsored, and so it's just been great to switch gears and be a participant and start looking and observing. And it's been great. Really good conversation. A lot of new faces. I had a panel of three and two of them were first-time SampleCon attendees, which speaks about their growth. [00:00:43] Jamin Brazil: Yes, for sure. What do you think about the pandemic in terms of how it's impacted you? [00:00:50] Ted Pulsifer: It's interesting. So we sold our business to Schlesinger and actually finalized that in February of 2020, so I kind of felt like the last person to get a table at their favorite restaurant if you will. And we just walked into that, and then of course didn't see anything coming. So unfortunately a lot of the plans and everything that we had to collaborate with our qualitative business and our quantitative business sort of got put on hold, the in-person work. But a couple of advantages that we had is a lot of clients in our business that do traditionally in-person qualitative work that were interested in doing digital qual, but "maybe I'll try it later,
Welcome to the SampleCon 2021 Highlights Series. Recorded live in Pasadena, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors, speakers and attendees at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Ted Pulsifer, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at Schlesinger Group.
More about SampleCon 2021: https://samplecon.com/
Find Ted Online:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedpulsifer/
Website: https://www.schlesingergroup.com/en/
Find Jamin Online:
Email: jamin@happymr.instawp.xyz
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil
Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil
Find Us Online:
Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch
Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp
Website: www.happymr.com
Music:
“Clap Along” by Auditionauti: https://audionautix.com
[00:00:00]
Jamin Brazil: Ted Pulsifer, we are live today on the show floor of SampleCon.
[00:00:07]
Ted Pulsifer: Hi, Jamin. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:09]
Jamin Brazil: It's 2021. This is my first live event. How's it going for you?
[00:00:13]
Ted Pulsifer: It's great. This is my first live event in about a year and a half other than a couple select meetings, so it feels wonderful.
[00:00:22]
Jamin Brazil: It's just so nice to be able to see people. What do you think about the show so far?
[00:00:25]
Ted Pulsifer: So far it's great. This is a perfect time. I just got done hosting a panel and have done some other events we sponsored, and so it's just been great to switch gears and be a participant and start looking and observing. And it's been great. Really good conversation. A lot of new faces. I had a panel of three and two of them were first-time SampleCon attendees, which speaks about their growth.
[00:00:43]
Jamin Brazil: Yes, for sure. What do you think about the pandemic in terms of how it's impacted you?
[00:00:50]
Ted Pulsifer: It's interesting. So we sold our business to Schlesinger and actually finalized that in February of 2020, so I kind of felt like the last person to get a table at their favorite restaurant if you will. And we just walked into that, and then of course didn't see anything coming. So unfortunately a lot of the plans and everything that we had to collaborate with our qualitative business and our quantitative business sort of got put on hold, the in-person work. But a couple of advantages that we had is a lot of clients in our business that do traditionally in-person qualitative work that were interested in doing digital qual, but "maybe I'll try it later," they were all sort of forced to do it immediately if they wanted to hear from their customers. And we also saw the cadence, the need to hear from customers evolve from maybe quarterly to monthly, and in some cases daily. We ran a ton of surveys around COVID and started doing a lot of qualitative events on change of purchase habits, everything, parenting across the board. So we actually saw it as somewhat of a business accelerator.
[00:01:49]
Jamin Brazil: So interesting. You've got a lot of - thinking about Schlesinger as one of the big names inside of the industry from both a size and also from a reach perspective and just the fact you've been around so long, how is it working for them?
[00:02:04]
Ted Pulsifer: It's great. It's really interesting because we went from this seven- to eight-year-old startup that was really based on technology and did a lot of work in one sort of segment of the market, which is online consumer and B2B, and then found ourselves part of a 50-year-old organization that was started by our CEO's mom in her house. And so just to live that experience of the best of the old, the best of the new. And so now our - some of the positives that we have is we've got a lot of relationships, a lot of qualitative customers that we can start working with and bring them value from t...