Eddie Casado, Affiliate and Technology Partnerships Manager at Convert.com, an A/B testing tool, joins the podcast to explore the world of B2B marketing and conversion rate optimization.
Eddie highlights how Convert.com is carving out a distinct space in the A/B testing world, emphasizes the challenges B2B marketers face, particularly around internal bureaucracy and slower adoption of testing strategies, and why agility remains a key differentiator.
Mike and Eddie discuss the critical role of curiosity in navigating today’s marketing landscape and how Eddie’s diverse background informs his approach.
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About Convert.com
Convert is a privacy-first A/B testing and web experimentation platform built for fast-growing businesses and agencies. Known for its robust integrations, flexible experimentation framework, and ethical data practices, Convert helps teams optimize digital experiences without compromising user trust.
About Eddie Casado
Eduardo “Eddie” Casado is a systems thinker, builder, and connector who thrives at the intersection of growth, product, and partnerships. With an MBA and years of cross-functional experience, he’s known for turning ambiguity into traction and having a strong bias for action.
Curious by default and strategic by design, Eddie shares his wins, experiments, and lessons in public, helping other operators’ level up. He’s drawn to honest conversations about what works (and what doesn’t), and brings a deep respect for data, people, and long games.
Currently leading Affiliate & Technology Partnerships at Convert.com, Eddie is most energized when creating repeatable systems, learning from peers, and unlocking compounding results through aligned collaboration.
Time Stamps
00:00:17 – Guest Introduction: Eddie Casado
00:00:43 – Eddie’s Career Background
00:03:40 – What Makes Convert.com Unique
00:06:59 – Maturity in MarTech and the Role of AI
00:09:23 – Challenges in B2B vs. B2C Marketing
00:10:35 – The Need for Improved Conversion Rates in B2B
00:14:04 – The Shift in B2B Customer Behavior
00:18:04 – Convert’s Marketing Strategy
00:22:32 – The Role of AI in Marketing
00:24:26 – Best Marketing Advice and Career Tips
Quotes
“B2B needs to realize that people are not on LinkedIn to be sold on.” Eddie Casado, Affiliate and Technology Partnerships Manager at Convert.com
“The more value you can provide, the more top of mind you are. At the end of the day, the more consideration you’ll have.” Eddie Casado, Affiliate and Technology Partnerships Manager at Convert.com
“I think we’re just tired in B2B. We’re tired of getting pitch slapped. We’re tired of getting AI slapped with a generic message.” Eddie Casado, Affiliate and Technology Partnerships Manager at Convert.com
Follow Eddie:
Eddie Casado on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddie-casado/
Convert.com website: https://www.convert.com/
Radiate B2B on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/convert-com/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Eddie Casado at Convert.com
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Eddie Casado
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Eddie Casado. Eddie is the Affiliate and Technology Partnerships Manager at Convert.com. Welcome to the podcast, Eddie.
Eddie: Thank you for having me.
Mike: Well, it’s great to have you on. I’m really excited. Before we get into talking about Convert.com and what you do there, maybe you can give us a little bit of background about your career and what’s actually led up to your current position.
Eddie: Of course, happy to do that. So I started my career, I would say very early in my life. I was just mentioning that I had a background in music and audio. So I started in radio as a radio host and producer in my hometown in Venezuela. And, you know, there I discovered advertising as well and doing jingles and cutting up music, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s where my passion kind of ignited. Soon thereafter, you know, I was already a musician, so I had a strong background in music and everything that needed to do with creative and just that I’m very creative by nature. So I, you know, I started my career thinking that I could be, you know, an engineer and live off of having a studio. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Although I did have some success in that arena, I got nominated for a Latin Grammy back in 2013, and I won a Latin Grammy for assisting an album for Alejandro Sanz back when I was living in Miami. But I soon realized that what I wanted to do wasn’t just that. And, you know, I started going to school in communications, then learned and reignited that love for advertising and then went all in and got my bachelor’s in advertising and sociology. started my career doing account executive at an agency in Miami called Hispanic Group. And yeah, and then just another agency tapped me in and I started doing social media. Well, this is 2014. I got to live tweet the World Cup for ESPN Deportes. And yeah, but, you know, I started doing social media, doing digital. And little by little, I started dipping my toes into more things. And I started doing paid when, you know, you wanted to do just page likes campaigns. and evolved from there on to do product, to do product marketing, analytics, more advertising, Google, PPC, et cetera, et cetera. I can’t sit still. I’m very curious. So anything you put in front of me, I want to learn and I want to master. And yeah, and then little by little, I then landed at Mouselo, which was my previous role. I was the head of growth marketing there. led the company. I was the second marketing hire, 12th marketing hire in the company, left when we were more than 50, double digits in growth, and then came on the opportunity of joining Convert, which is an A-B testing platform that helps experimentation professionals in the conversion rate optimization space to improve conversion rate across their journey on websites.
Mike: Well, that’s amazing and a really interesting career. Very varied. I love that. You’ve mentioned a little bit about what Convert.com does. So I’ve got to say, there’s a lot of A-B testing tools, a lot of optimization tools. So why is Convert special? What do you do that’s unique?
Eddie: So what I have to say is that with the sunset of Google Optimize, which was the go-to tool, which was free, you know, belonged to Google. And with that sunset, Convert has actually taken center stage as one of the go-to platforms, if not the go-to platform. for experimentation professionals. And what we do really well is that we came about as an A-B testing tool. Our founder, Dennis, started this as a personalization tool and then little by little hashed out a lot of features and ended up creating a product that focused on empowering experimentation on web services. So we have been here since the beginning. which is a lot to say considering that as fast as they come, they also go when it comes to new platforms, as you’re mentioning. So I think that what we do really well is that we have a superb support team and a very stable product that has been battle tested through the years to provide the best experience not only for marketers and CRO professionals, but also For customers that are unknowingly being part of experiments that lead to better experiences, right? Most of the tools, I mean, now with technology you see it less and less, but a lot of the tools often don’t realize the impact experimentation has on the user experience. And that’s something that Dennis and the team have been focusing a lot on, having anti-flickering technology, not affecting loading speeds, making sure that there are these things in place so that whenever you’re joining a page, you know, you don’t experience anything. You know, that flickering of like, oh, there was one page, and now there’s another page. That doesn’t happen with Convert. So that’s what I can say on the surface, strong team, strong culture, bootstrap, been around for ages, super stable, which are things that customers don’t realize how much it impacts when they establish a relationship with a platform like Convert.
Mike: I love that. I think it’s an indication now we’re getting more and more guests from MarTech companies talking about the importance of quality, reliability, good support, rather than just throwing lots of new features. I think it’s a real positive reflection that Martek is becoming mature. Do you agree? I agree.
Eddie: I think that maturity is also one of those things that it’s hard to pinpoint when you’re ready for a tool or to experiment. Most of the time, this maturity comes at a huge loss, which is not having time. And sometimes you’re stumbling into a new technology because of the needs of a company, etc, etc. So that’s I think that yes, we’re maturing in more tech. The problem is that technology is advancing so fast that our maturity levels are not catching up as fast as technology. For example, in my day-to-day work, I am embracing AI as much as I can. You know, it’s great, but the moment I learn one LLM, there is a new one out there, or there is a new thing that I have to learn. There’s a genetic AI and tomorrow is going to be a new thing. So I literally don’t have enough time in the day to mature through the things that I am learning, which, you know, I think it’s the rule of the game. especially for when I’m a generalist, even though I know things really well, like paid and strategy and those things, I’m a generalist at the end of the day. So I try to know as much as I can about something so that I can speak about it. That’s kind of my threshold. So when I can speak about it comfortably, I feel like, OK, I know this enough to move on. So at least that’s how I keep up.
Mike: I love it. I think it’s a great approach of dealing with all the change we’re facing in marketing. I’m just interested. I mean, you mentioned ConvertNow is one of the go-to tools. I mean, who would be your customers?
Eddie: So our customers are companies, small business, mid-market, and enterprises, although our sweet spot is in small business and mid-market. experimentation professionals, that is CRO professionals, conversion rate optimization professionals, people that are dealing with optimizing experiences, right? When you get to the bottom of it, our customer is just looking out to improve their conversion rate. That is our customer, which is very, very broad if you think about it. Because at the end of the day, what I found, at least in my experience, is that growing right now, unless you have a huge pocket, it’s really, really hard because it’s so competitive out there. And the things that will make you succeed are things that are often overlooked, like having a strong brand, having strong positioning, knowing how to talk to your customers. having the right product market fit and targeting the right personas and companies. Those things are unfortunately so for a lot of companies, not the first thing that they look at. So they rely on paid and they rely on this other, let’s call it synthetic methods for growth. that at the end of the day, come back and bite you because you are shackled. You are essentially a slave to paid. You’re essentially a slave to other activations that are not necessarily feeding your organic growth. So when that stops, everything comes to a standstill. So having that challenge of not growing as fast because you need big pockets or deep pockets and not having the patience or the, well, not maybe the patience, but the, how do you call it? The runway to effectively invest in these things that are slow burning. Then you look at, okay, so I’m getting this traffic, which is how this all started, by the way. This is how Dennis started out. He had his own business and moved to Mexico and the 2008 crisis hit in. And all of a sudden he lost 50% of the traffic for his business. And with that, his revenue, And he needed to figure out a way to convert two times more than what he was doing before he lost all that traffic. That’s how it started. So that’s kind of the crux of the issue. Companies that are essentially looking out to improve their conversion rate because of some of these challenges that they’re facing. Now, there are other companies that are more mature and most likely bigger that have or are looking into promoting an experimentation culture within the company. And that’s when a big company will actually reach out to convert experts or specialists or CRO people, heads of digital, and set up a program in-house. And that’s when we would come in.
Mike: I mean, that’s really interesting. I think, you know, your story about Dennis outlines the real benefit of maximizing that conversion rate on the website. I think, you know, the perception is, and maybe this is true, maybe not, that perhaps B2B lags behind B2C, particularly B2C e-commerce, in terms of, you know, running A-B testing and really using CRA. Do you think that’s fair?
Eddie: I would say it is. I would say it is. And I have a few ideas as to why this happens. B2C is known to be faster, less red tape, smaller operations, more agile. The bigger the company gets, the more red tape it adds. It’s inevitable, just because you have to keep status quo. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. You can’t shy away from it. As much as you want to be agile, as much as you want to run agile, The reality of it is that at the end of the day, a bigger operation requires more guardrails. Whereas in B2C, which are often smaller, I’m not saying that all B2Cs are the same way. There are B2Cs that are huge, thousands of employees. But it’s just a matter of how B2B and B2C starts when they are starting the business. And unfortunately for B2B, they lag because it just requires more muscle to put together something like this in motion. If you’re B2C, and maybe I’m wrong, but at least in my experience. It’s different on how you come across experimentation and do experimentation. But I fail at putting together an experimentation program for a company that wasn’t growing. The traffic wasn’t there. SEO was taking a long time to cook. We weren’t able to grow our traffic for the past year. And I just said like, hey, listen, if we can’t grow the traffic, we need to grow our conversion. So let’s set up a conversion. I called it, what was it? A conversion hub inside the company. And I just need this tool so that I can run this experiments and get this out of the way. And I wasn’t able to achieve that. And I had been spending a lot of time in that company. Like I had already built the credibility and the capital to say, like, this is the bet that is going to take us to that next level. And unfortunately, it wasn’t a huge company, but it didn’t take off because stakeholders didn’t believe in that. Stakeholders weren’t looking for something like that. Because it meant that somebody in the team had to now take care of another vertical within the team. So it’s just, that’s just, you know, the, how do you call it? The share game. You know, you pull one share and somebody falls and then somebody else takes it and it’s just like, you’re dancing around and it’s hard. Whereas in B2C it’s more normal to have this kind of environment in which everybody’s wearing the same hat and everybody’s trying to sell and everybody’s trying to do the same thing. So I think, and also the fact that e-commerce is inherently set up to do experimentation and A-B testing, it’s just one of those industries that you can’t go wrong with it. Whereas when you go to SaaS, It’s not the same without adding the extra challenge of having enough people visiting the site and running enough experiments with enough time to get to something that is statistically significant. And now I’m getting a lot into the details, but that’s just my thinking is that it’s just easier because operations are smaller, maybe easier to adopt new technologies. easier to find out what is the next thing to do in order to improve. Whereas in B2B, everything needs to go through the channels. And in B2C, you can make the argument that they also need to go through channels. But in my experience, having done freelancing, having been involved in operations that are smaller, it’s just easier. They hire you to do something and they trust you to do it. In B2B, it’s slightly different depending on the type of culture that you’re in.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think the bureaucracy in B2B marketing teams is always a challenge. There’s always more of a fear of losing what you’ve got rather than a hope of gaining more. I mean, do you think that actually B2B is going to change? I mean, we’re seeing a lot of research saying now that B2B customers are spending less time with sales, more time, you know, doing what’s called self directed research. So do you think B2B companies are going to realize they have to improve these conversion rates now, because that matters even more than it did before? They have to improve marketing, in essence.
Eddie: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s the truth. It’s the hard truth. We’ve neglected, and I consider myself part of that bunch, we’ve neglected the fact that people are not consuming content to buy something. They are looking for value. What I found on social, what I found in my strategies is that the more value you can provide, the more top of mind you are. And at the end of the day, the more consideration you’ll have. It’s just a simple funnel. A lot of the B2B companies nowadays are just trying to sell you from the awareness layer. They’re just trying to sell, sell, sell, because they need, again, back to that bureaucracy that you were talking about, they need to justify the person. They need to justify the channel. They need to justify the numbers. But there are some things, like there are some things so hard to justify that you can only do it if you turn everything off. And I’m known to take risks, and I’m known to be bold, and I’m known to be the one that says, what happens if we just decide to shut everything off? And thankfully, I’ve had people around me that have been like, yeah, let’s just do it, see what happens. And I can tell you, two out of three times that I’ve done that experiment, I’ve found that my marketing is not just affecting the channel, but the overall marketing strategy and impact. That means organic searches, direct traffic, referral traffic, social traffic, etc, etc. It’s just not attributed properly, which is, you know, the issue of our for this decade and the decades to come. But it is having an impact. So back to back to your question. B2B needs to realize that people are not on LinkedIn to be sold on. Also technology, again, technology comes back and it’s a great help, but it’s also a detriment to our ability to actually sell. I cannot tell you how many times I get pitch slapped on LinkedIn by just accepting a connection request. Cold email stopped working. Apparently now cold calling is taking off again. And I don’t know if it’s a fad or I don’t know if it’s somebody trying to, you know, fuel that stream. But I think it’s just they’re tired. We’re bombarded every single day with useless content for my moment, for my persona, really bad targeting. Again, there are so many bad examples out there of targeting that I’m getting ads from not a clinical trial, but a pill for something. And I go in because I get really frustrated when I see these things. And I go in and I try. So what is it targeting for this? And it’s just like anybody in Latin America. I was like, OK, so whoever’s running this account, man, it’s don’t really know what they’re doing. You know, so I think we’re just tired in B2B. We’re tired. That’s my feeling, at least. I’m tired of getting pitch slapped. I’m tired of getting A.I. slapped with a generic message. I’m tired of the calling. Hi, dear. You know, like that’s not the way you do business. You know, I’m tired of that. So whenever I accept somebody, if I get pitch slapped, I just call it out and say, OK, I’m not interested. But that takes time. So. That’s what I would say. We are tired of getting sold on and we just want value. That’s why we spend time elsewhere. That’s why we spend time on Instagram, on TikTok and these things. And we level up outside of the normal channels.
Mike: I mean, that’s really interesting. I think, you know, anyone in marketing who’s on LinkedIn has, you know, had these endless pitches. I think I get about three a day from lead gen agencies. It’s unbelievable. I’m interested to know then, given all this, what’s your strategy at Convert for growing the business and attracting new customers?
Eddie: So what I can tell, I’ve only been at Convert for a month now, this is May 29th. And what I can tell you is that before I joined Convert, I knew what they were doing and I knew the people in the company. I knew Dennis, I knew Trina, at least I knew some names. So the strategy for us is to build value. And it goes along with our company ethos and our culture. If you go onto our website, you’re going to read about Holacracy. You’re going to read about our culture. We’re doing conscious business. You know, we don’t want every business. We want the business that’s right for us and for our customers as well. So being that selective, I think allows you to be, branding-wise and positioning-wise, a little bit smarter and competitive. We can’t compete with Optimizely. You know, they’re an enterprise-level tool, which we’re not, and we are not pretending to be. We don’t want to be an enterprise-level tool. We don’t even have enterprise account executives. If an enterprise wants to sign with Convert, they just can go into the website and buy it. No red tape, no book a demo, no nothing like that. There is a demo available if you want it. And I think that speaks a lot about how we’re doing marketing as well. We’re still high performance. We still want to hit the numbers, but we’re doing it consciously. And we want to track their right type of businesses to us. So the marketing strategy over the past, I would say five to 10 years have been all about positioning. And I can’t tell you how many times it’s so easy right now to talk to people now that I’m in partnerships. I thought it was going to be harder because when I was in growth at Mousel, it was really hard to get people to engage. It’s so easy to do it now with Convert just because they have built that recognition on the market. They have built that authority, that legitimacy in the market. So the strategy is positioning a lot of content and value above all. that could encompass the whole strategy. Value above all. Trina, who’s the CMO, it’s all about value. Like there’s nothing we do for a sale. It’s all about value. And again, improving that consideration stage. In fact, we’re actually, part of my joining the company was also because of the prospect of contributing to the bottom of the funnel as well, which is what I’ve been doing over the past five years, because they’ve been focusing a lot on building the tofu and mouth. Right. So there is so much consideration. So everything has been about positioning a lot of partnerships, strong technology partnerships, strong community as well, understanding what they need, just being there for them, being human. You know, at the end of the day, it sounds cliche, but that’s what I’m finding that their success right now, outside of having a strong product and a strong positioning in the market, yada yada. It’s just the power of value, just providing value. Right now, we’re about to release a new agency report with Craig Sullivan. We interviewed more than 30, 33 agencies, 250 people actually contributed to the report, and we’re just going to be releasing out. No, you know, no gating, no nothing. It’s just value. The current state of CRO agencies for 2025 and the next years. So it’s all about providing value. At the end of the day, whenever agencies, which is another big part of our ICP, or conversion rate optimization professionals choose a tool, They want to know who they’re getting in bed with. They want to know whether they can rely on them, if they have somebody to talk to. And that’s how the marketing strategy has been unfolding over the past few years.
Mike: I mean, that’s really inspiring. I guess one of the questions is, we touched on marketing technology earlier, and clearly it’s still advancing very, very quickly. Do you think with the advances in MarTech and particularly in AI, actually focusing more on the human side and the value is actually going to be a differentiator? Or do you think the power of AI and mass customization is really going to move it much more to automation?
Eddie: I was having a conversation earlier about, you know, the role of AI. And in 2016, I was working for a company called Vertigo Music, part of Tiny Horse, which was an agency spearheading influencer marketing when it started, you know, when it was just, I don’t think they were even called influencers at that point. And I remember working on this project and there was nobody working in analytics or attribution. And being the curious guy that I am myself, I said, I’m just gonna leak this, right? And I became quickly ingrained into the team and development team, learned how to write user stories and acceptance criteria and all these technical things in order to get this platform set up. And I was really good at it, it was second nature to me. But I was really bad at asking the questions. I was bad. I was really bad. I didn’t know how to put a report together. I knew what I wanted to measure, but I didn’t know what questions to ask myself. And I feel like that’s the same way that it’s the same thing that’s happening with AI. You know, it’s great at digesting information, but the prompt is everything. That’s why you see so many prompt engineers and this type of titles and people like talking about prompting. because it’s all about what you feed it and how you steer the conversation one way or another. Tools have always been there and they’re going to continue to improve. But I think it’s going to take, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s going to take a lot of time before they can achieve the same level of critical thinking that we have, considering the sum of our experiences. So for me, it’s going to be a mixture of the two, obviously. Being at the front of technology and innovation, especially when it comes to AI or otherwise, is going to set you apart. But the way you do business and the way you actually manage your relationships, at the end of the day, is what’s going to make the biggest difference of all, if you ask me. At least that’s my thinking today. That’s my opinion today.
Mike: That’s fascinating, a really thoughtful approach, I think, to the changes in technology. I mean, Edius has been amazing. It’s been really interesting. Before we go, there’s just a couple of quick questions we like to ask everyone. So the first one is, what’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
Eddie: You know, I’ve I’ve had great colleagues and I had I’ve had great leads, but I haven’t had a lot of mentors, you know, that has stuck with me. I mean, I’ve moved around so much in terms of my life that it’s been hard, but I keep my relationships around. But there are two things I can I can say is actually one in growth, do things that don’t scale. It’s always like that, that mantra you come back to. And it’s just like, hey, I did this thing and man, it’s hard to do. It takes time, but God, it works. So I think that’s the best piece of advice. I don’t even think it’s advice. Nobody gave it to me. I read it somewhere. And it’s just, do things that don’t scale seems to be true, even today.
Mike: I love it. That’s very different to what a lot of people say. And I think it’s very true. Sometimes the things that don’t scale really are the things that move the needle. The second question we love to ask is about careers in marketing. So what would your advice be to a young person just starting out in a marketing career? Be patient.
Eddie: Be patient because things take time. You can easily get a lot of imposter syndrome by just scrolling through Reddit or LinkedIn or anything because of everybody’s achievements. But for one achievement they’re sharing, I guarantee there are 20 failures. So be patient with yourself, pace yourself, and also have a plan. Know where you wanna go, know what tools you need and what skills you need to get there, and just keep trucking along. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. So be patient, be humble, be gentle with yourself, and yeah, there are a lot of advices in there, but the main one is be patient. That encompasses it all. And especially if you’re launching a campaign, be patient. Some things take time. If you’re running ABM, be patient. If you’re running paid, be patient. So be patient.
Mike: I love it. Eddie, thank you so much for your time. I’m sure you’re incredibly busy, having just started only a month ago at Convert. But thank you for giving your time and those amazing insights. I really appreciate it. Of course. Thank you for having me again, and I look forward to being on call again and sharing some more insights. Fantastic. Thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
