Q&A with CMO Colleen Lambros
BEYOND THE BID = A Culture of Innovation
“Passion is what we each have individually. Culture is what it becomes when we foster it collectively.”
Colleen Lambros, CMO of Auction.com, is no stranger to innovation and making a splash across the industry. As a 25-year marketing veteran, which includes 15 years with the largest privately held luxury real-estate investment company, she is one of the leaders taking Auction.com to the next level of ingenuity. Recently, she won both the DS News 2018 Women of Influence and Housingwire’s 2017 Vanguard awards. We spoke with Colleen to discuss Auction.com’s intrepid technological journey from ballroom auctioneer to online auction giant.
Auction.com: Colleen, you have spent your entire 25-year marketing career exclusively in the real estate industry. What is it about real estate that has kept you engaged for so many years?
Colleen Lambros: I have always been motivated and almost humbled by the importance that a real estate purchase or decision plays in the lives of people and communities. Whether someone is buying a home, leasing an office or investing in property, real estate transactions are typically the most expensive and emotionally charged decisions people make in their lifetime. The significance these decisions have in people’s lives is something I take very personally when I think of the work I am fortunate enough to do. The magnitude of that relationship and the trust and confidence someone has to have to make that decision is so inspiring to me as a marketeer. I have yet to find an industry that holds as much importance in the day-to-day lives of customers and communities as real estate.
Working for an auction company, you represent a different type of property. How has your more traditional real estate experience transferred to the auction environment?
Honesty, this is what attracted me most to Auction.com. I loved the idea of applying all of my experience into a vertical that holds many different challenges and complexities and is powered by technology. Auction.com is an entrepreneurial culture that truly values and invests in marketing, which has made it really motivating to constantly push the perceived limitations and innovate new strategies to grow our platform and services.
You recently led Auction.com through a brand transition. What inspired this?
As I mentioned, Auction.com’s primary focus is on innovation to better serve both our buyers and sellers. Because of this, we are always looking at ways to materially improve the experiences and performance of our platform. The brand transition was a testament to the company’s commitment to innovation through the lens of service. Everything at Auction.com is centered around our expectations of service to our sellers, our buyers, the industry and the communities.
Recognizing the accomplishments of 11 years of leadership, as well as celebrating the passion that each of our 1000-plus team members have for the business individually, the brand evolution was really an effort to authentically reflect the company’s culture of creativity and commitment to go ‘beyond the bid.’
How do you feel Auction.com goes beyond?
Currently, we are in one of the most exciting times in Auction.com’s history. The company has entered into an era of transformative innovation.
We are already the industry’s only platform that’s uniquely able and proven to successfully bring assets to auction at any stage in the disposition lifecycle. Our expertise in this space is unmatched — we have more than 1,000 employees nationwide dedicated only to distressed asset disposition.
And now our technologies will propel Auction.com well beyond the industry today. Our cutting-edge, data-driven auction experience is driven by an exclusive collection of new technologies called Auction Interact™, comprised of:
- AuctionSync®, a digital auctioneering application for local, live auctions that can capture asset-level data in real-time, automate bidder registrations, track bids, and validate funds.
- Foreclosure Interact™, mobile app features that bring better accessibility to foreclosure sale buyers, providing them with property status information, search options and very soon, remote and proxy bidding — all on their mobile phone.
- Portfolio Interact™, a business intelligence dashboard for sellers, providing unprecedented portfolio performance data and pricing optimization analysis — all with the click of a mouse.
What role does marketing play in this?
What has always differentiated Auction.com from our competitors has been our integrated auction strategy partnered with our marketing capabilities. Our investment in marketing is unparalleled. It’s been extremely exciting for me, as CMO, to see how the intersection of customer centricity, demand marketing and data science has created the sophisticated online real estate marketplace we have today.
Our immense marketing investment ensures that we capture buyers at both local and international levels, thus increasing traffic, competition, bidding and, ultimately, sales. Our data insights and modeling let us create a proprietary data recommendation engine (patent pending) that matches buyers to assets, feeding the growth of our marketplace and powering our enhanced technology platforms with even more user engagement. It has been extremely rewarding to realize our year-over-year double-digit growth in virtually every marketing metric. Even more exciting to see is how these continued improvements create meaningful results for our sellers.
We are also working toward the goal of developing hyper-localized marketing strategies for Auction.com and its local partners to attract and support buyers in local markets. Auction.com serves more than 3,100 counties across the country and we have a commitment to the customers and communities in all of those counties.
Our vision for Auction.com’s future — and the steps we have already made to actualize it — will change the landscape of distressed asset disposition industry-wide. We are actively redefining how our buyers and sellers interact and, really, this is why I have chosen to stay in real estate. There is no more exciting and dynamic industry, and the same can be said for Auction.com.