Name: Hailey Klein
Title: Director of Marketing Communications
Company: PSNI
Location: Peterson, MN
Twitter: @PSNI_Hailey
Overtime: Klein spends her free time working on fiancé Jordan Flynn’s organic farm, Pine Creek Farm, and is assisting with the launch of its probiotic water kefir.
Why You Need To Know Her: Don’t be fooled the first time you meet Hailey Klein. Underneath that genuinely low-key and modest persona is a consummate professional determined to see her clients succeed.
The 28-year-old native of Two Rivers, WI landed in the AV industry via a unique route. Just the second person in her family to go to college, she earned a degree in marketing, communications, and journalism from the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. “I’d always wanted to be in journalism, but quickly transitioned to marketing,” she said. “I realized marketing allowed for a very creative outlet that appeals to me.”
After graduation and without any attractive job prospects, Klein went West, living off the grid in a yurt on an organic farm in Oregon. When money ran out, she did, too, returning home. A sales job with the energy drink company Zipfizz lured her to Minnesota. There, serendipity stepped in, in the name of marketing guru Kelly Perkins, then marketing and communications manager at Vaddio.
“My former college advisor ran into Kelly and asked her to set up an informational interview for me. That interview turned into the real deal, and soon I was offered a job as a marketing coordinator [at Vaddio],” Klein recalled. “On one of my first days there, I went into the warehouse and saw all the various cameras. It opened my eyes to this whole other world of AV. The rest is history.”
On to PSNI: Moving to PSNI represented a shift away from manufacturing. “Marketing for one manufacturer is so different compared to what I am doing at PSNI, where we represent 40-plus integration companies worldwide and 20 different manufacturers,” Klein said. “Now I’m experiencing the AV industry from the organizational point of view, one with so many avenues.”
A central focus of her job entails an overall responsibility to PSNI’s integrators, helping them to attract new business, to market themselves with best practices, and to organize events. Klein is a liaison between manufacturers and integrations, ultimately promoting PSNI.
“My role is exciting because we are all about bringing companies together to learn from one another,” she said. “We bring together integration companies, which frequently compete with one another, and are then open to sharing experiences. We create a format for that sharing; it’s like creating a master marketing playbook.”
How She Does It: Klein’s toolbox includes a mix of social media, content promotion, automation tools, and networking with her affiliate marketing personnel. “We learn the most from each other,” she said, “So, when we share those experiences, we all benefit.”
She also organizes a yearly marketing summit, based heavily off a yearly marketing audit PSNI performs for its integrators to understand trends and strengths of the group.
“Tracking data on a giant landscape became a real passion for me while I worked at Vaddio,” she said. “The idea of doing the audits came as a natural fit for PSNI. It’s a great way for me to show that what we do makes a difference. Marketing talk is always about content, but what does content mean if it’s not working? Now that marketing lives in the digital realm, we can track a process and see its value.”
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