How to Craft Powerful Inbound Marketing Strategies that Deliver Results

Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of E Coffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser. And on today’s episode, I have with me, Dave Meyer. Dave is the founder and president of Busy Web, a full-service digital marketing agency and platinum HubSpot partner located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has more than 22 years of experience in marketing and communications and is a national speaker and trainer for Google and HubSpot. In addition, he was the 2016 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce and is a recognized thought leader in digital marketing, inbound marketing, SEO, email marketing, and sales enablement. When not working on marketing and sales campaigns for clients, Dave enjoys relaxing with his family at his cabin, tinkering with old cars, and traveling. Dave, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me, Matt. This is going to be really fun.

Yeah, right on. So, Dave, 22 years of experience, that’s just phenomenal. It’s amazing how much our industry has evolved. What I mean by the industry, is the digital marketing side of things. I remember when the Internet just came out and I didn’t even have it in high school. And these kids nowadays are so spoiled that we punish them, just take away their wifi? How did you get started? What drew you to digital marketing and exploring this world?

In the olden days in the nineties when training up and moving through. All of us Gen-Xers as a generation seemed like our biggest thing is we’re the translation generation. So, we bridge the gap between millennials, Gen Z, and boomers. And we’re kind of the ones that can help you reset your router and can still talk, all of the speaking and stuff like that. I kind of fit that role, I started in communications and marketing and really was internal communications, public relations, and print journalism at my local university. When I started, I looked around for places and worked for a couple of PR firms. I worked for an agency that did both Coca-Cola and Jim Beam. So, our back room was stocked well full of a good evening wherever we went and it was tremendous and it was super fun. But I learned quickly that the media relations side probably wasn’t for me and I was more focused on relationships, cold calling for press coverage, and getting a number of inches or column inches worth of publicity on a DIY showdown where you hammered in nails and things in order to get favorable coverage. It just wasn’t my thing and I got into internal and then that kind of led over to the Web in 97 because I was working for a state agency and they wanted me to build them a website because I was one of those young kids that could handle all this web stuff. And so, of course, I took the reins and the rest is kind of history because then I just fell in love with marketing and technology and tools that can help people scale as much as possible using as little input or technology as possible.

Yeah, that’s a lot of fun, isn’t it? It seems to be great fun. Crafting a marketing campaign and implementing it and seeing the difference that you can make in a business. As I was alluding to the off-camera, I took a dealership from the second worst dealership in Western Caroline, where I’m from to number one. You got to bet that they were renovating the dealership, and the salespeople were wearing nicer suits. You know, lots of things were happening. I didn’t get paid any more money, but I wasn’t there for that, I was there for a case study. But the point I’m trying to make is it’s a lot of fun to see the impact that our jobs can make on the bottom line of the business.

Yes and that’s really why I love working and doing what I do because as the owner of an agency, I help a couple of hundred clients to put food on the plates of not only them, but all of their employees, and the same thing with my busy web. My agency has 23 employees. And I’m responsible for those folks. Getting a chance to help companies scale and grow and then get paid to do it. What an amazing thing.

We, as marketing agency owners, you’re really the outsource marketing department of a lot of these businesses because let’s be frank, they can’t really afford to hire you as an employee, they can’t afford you. You are too valuable, you have too much experience, too much knowledge that they can’t afford it. But, they can afford a small part of your time or sit in order to help them. So, sometimes it’s agencies we’re really the external marketing department for a lot of these companies.

Yes, and it’s fun because we fill that role as agencies and companies that they probably couldn’t afford otherwise. They’d never be able to afford the 23 people that I have, that are experts in their particular fields. And for us, we work in manufacturing and B2B services. So, for those folks, we can actually drive for about the cost of a hire like one person. Instead of hiring that one person, they can bring on our agency and we do the content, we do the emails, we do the follow-ups, we do the inbound, we know their website, and it’s all just kind of hands-off. We need somebody to talk to and work with. But once we have that and once, we forge that connection, we are their best friends because we’re responsible for driving revenue.

Absolutely. How do you tie that to what we do? Because I know there’s a disconnect a lot. In fact, like I was alluding to earlier, I didn’t get paid more money for what I did, although I should have but, tying what we do marketing to revenue, I don’t know if you found this to be the case. I’m just speaking from experience here and found that there’s a balance sheet and sometimes sales are on the profit side of the ledger and marketing is on the lost side. Marketing is an expense and this sale is a revenue generator. But that’s not the case. You and I both know that without marketing, salespeople cannot sell stuff because they don’t get any leads. So, what have been some of the ways for you to tie in and have the conversations with some of your clients about the value and translating that we’re not an expense, we are actually an investment?

For our clients, one of the first things that I do when we have our first conversation is sit down and we talk about, how is the revenue flow working in your business, what are your sales looking like, what you do, how many leads, how many visits are you receiving in order to work that and how many of those leads are serviced by sales teams that are just smiling and dialing or attending trade shows or whatever? And those obviously are going to stay the same. But how can we feed those leads or feed those sales teams better and give them more clickable staff to give them more intelligence about what they know about people that they’re talking to and or those leads and connections? It’s easy for B2C where you have a product that you sell, for B2B it’s more of a relationship. It’s more about how many high-quality leads you need to bring in, in order to hit the sales goals or the growth goals that you have. So, it’s simple as working the math and saying, well we need 5000 new visits to the website to get us 500 leads to get us 50 qualified leads that are sales viable. And so that’s some of the backhands are the back of the napkin math that we work on. But the other thing that a lot of company’s discount, especially when they’re talking about marketing or inbound, is if you just have a website and you don’t really look at it, you’re really throwing the money away because websites should be proactively encouraging people and getting them more excited to talk to someone. Typical B2B conversation includes more than 80 clicks before they’ll ever click the contact us form or call a company. If I don’t have enough inside of those 80 clicks to reassure someone that I’m the solution for them, know by the time they do want to call the sales team if in the high unlikelihood they do get a call, they’re like, well, I don’t even get you. But if I can have a conversation from the beginning and say, here’s everything that you need as a buyer to be successful inside of what we do for you, then it’s an easy conversation. That’s kind of what inbound is all about.

Yeah, it’s phenomenal. Like, we were talking off camera. I mean, I read the book when it first came out, Inbound Marketing, which is written by the founders of HubSpot. From the book to this day, I would recommend anybody read it. It’s a phenomenal book. It changed the conversation about marketing. They really did. They really didn’t reinvent something; they just changed the perspective of the way people should do things in regards to marketing. It was quite amazing how they took a unique position in order to tell people that they need to drive traffic into you to establish themselves as an authority. What are some of the ways that for instance, you know, I know you’re a HubSpot partner and HubSpot is so amazing in the sense of the way they do their mark? They practice what they preach. You read a blog post on something, there’s a related lead magnet at the end of the blog post for you and there are so many lead magnets that they have. My question is since that’s kind of their philosophy about providing those lead magnets, do you think that’s an intricate part of a marketing strategy that most businesses should adopt or only specific industries?

I think for the high touch and high trust businesses, it’s especially important. And by high touch, high trust, if you have a considered sales process, if you need to do a lot of research in order to make the buying decision, then it’s absolutely essential that you have backup content to help you make your case and by the way, the biggest thing that inbound probably did aside from kind of changing the lexicon about how the lead flows were, the biggest thing that they probably did is they switched the focus from treating marketing like a megaphone where you’re just trying to shout it as many people as possible to treat it like a conversation where you’re trying to engage as many people as possible and really draw them into a useful and helpful conversation. The worst thing that any business can do is to put up a website and just say, we’ve been in business for 25 years and it’s family owned and all that, without talking anything about the problems that they solve for their customers.

We need to include what’s in it for our customers and how we can help them to be successful. That comes from listening, so that’s really where the best conversations are. As I mentioned before, in B2C marketing, you can have a fantastic sales campaign or an advertising campaign that goes to a really smart landing page that guides people and gives them all the information they need. You can do the research, you can click and you can buy and you are done. With B2B, it’s much more relationship driven. And that relationship and that conversation can be built much easier using a tool in my case HubSpot, but with any sales automation software to really turn a sales conversation or a click into like a choose your own adventure program. Like, remember those books, go to page 134 to see this…

Yes, yes.

I’m trying to say, does it hurt here or does it hurt there? It’s almost more like an ophthalmologist, you’re switching through, is this what you need, or is this what you need? And then you let people vote with their fingers, with their clicks, and simply give them more of what they need. You have to think about it a lot more at the outset, and that’s why having a professional to help you with inbound is important. But once you can drive and build a real relationship that feels conversational before they ever have a conversation with a salesperson is pretty dang powerful.

Absolutely. So, what part then does content play and how important is it to develop a content plan for inbound marketing?

Well, the other thing that I do is I’m a speaker for Google, as you mentioned before, Matt. And without content, there’s no matchmaking in search. Google’s job is to be the grand matchmaker between what people want and how they’re going to get that information. So, search engine optimization or SEO is all about having enough content that you can prove to Google and to your eventual visitor that you are a resource that’s worthy of their attention and if you have content on your website that fills all of the stages of your buyer’s journey from consideration to awareness to purchase. There are different questions that you ask at each of those levels. If you can answer all of those questions and give Google and that person enough content that they know that you are the professional or that you are the solution for them. That’s where the magic happens.

Absolutely. Hey, have you developed a framework, or what’s been your experience in regards to what you just mentioned, different consideration stages, and matching up keyword searches? To me, it seems like the smart thing to do, but I haven’t exactly come upon a strategy or process yet for matching up that top-of-funnel keyword, a minimum of a funnel of awareness consideration, and registering a bottle of the funnel in order to do that. For instance, buy now like or write a quote or whatever and freeze top and so on and so forth. But are there any other insights you can share from your experiences?

For sure and one of the first insights, of course, is that really marketing funnels are a little outdated as Lexicon now because what does a funnel do? You dump as much crap on the top as many leads in the top as possible and then out plop something that disappears and is never to be seen again. So, inside of marketing, we want to keep re-engaging people and engaging them in conversation. So, I like to use the idea of the flywheel as an engagement process and then you go from attract, which marketers are mostly good at and they know about to engagement, which is having those conversations, doing the choose your own adventure stuff to give them more of what they’re looking for, to delight. How did we do? Can we give you more? What else do you need? Or would you mind recommending us? That can be incredibly powerful. That’s kind of my first answer. But the second thing is that as long as you think about the different ways that your customer is deciding to work with you, put that in buckets of some sort and then identify content that directly matches what they’re looking for. Not from me version, as a business like “here’s why we do this; we are the thing.” Rather it should be, here’s what we can do for you, version. That’s where it gets really important and really interesting. It’s like, what questions are they asking when they’re thinking about buying? But they don’t even know if what we do is the right solution. They need to know the kind of stats, or they need to know what other options they have, and they need to know why we’re better and how I engage them at every one of those levels. By putting that all into a CRM or an automation system, I can track it and then start measuring what’s working and doing more of that and then start cutting out the stuff that just doesn’t result in any response.

Absolutely. It’s like you said earlier, like HubSpot, the book changed the conversation and it made it customer centric rather than business-centric. Rather than saying how great of a business we are, it’s like, what problem does the prospect have? There is a customer that we can delight in providing the solution, either in content or in actual services or products that can solve that problem, which is absolutely brilliant. And the funnel is an outdated term in that regard. And I love the marketing flywheel that HubSpot has come up with or even the customer journey that I don’t even know who came right back. But that’s what people are more of a circle coming in and out at times, maybe in marketing, and they’re not there in the marketing and they’re just touching your hub and that word HubSpot is such an amazing idea of a company, and to name their product because your website or whatever it is that you’re using really does need to be the hub spot of your activities. It needs to be the central place where you’re trying to drive traffic to in a virtual state. In order to educate, inspire, convert, and so on and so forth.

Yeah. HubSpot is a great tool, don’t get me wrong. But the idea of just being as useful and as helpful to your audience as possible becomes a foregone conclusion that you want to work with them. That’s where the real magic happens. It’s like the other thing on a flywheel when people are having trouble with it, and imagine it as a carousel where you’re hopping on and off and you want to ride the horses and check it out a Merry-go-round, is a good is not, you pop in and off whenever you want. So, if I can do that and think of the ways that people need it, that’s what gets exciting for our customers because it starts feeling like a consultative conversation instead of a gross sales pitch. For instance, if we’re at a cocktail party and I corner you and I talk about my pet project like, “I went to Mazatlan last week and they have coconuts and they do the stuff” or whatever. If I’m doing that and I’m just boring you to tears by talking about me, me, and me, that’s an entirely different conversation than someone that asks smart questions and works at getting you working, chatting, and giving you what they’re looking for.

Absolutely. You just reminded me of some BNI meetings I was at, I used to be a BNI member. The people who are most successful were the people that talked most, listened most, and asked the most questions of other members. John Maxwell once said, everybody’s got this medal around their neck that says make me feel important, and the more you do that, the more successful you will be and I think that applies to even be in business with your customers. I don’t want them to think about how great you are and how they started everything. You also alluded to earlier the fact of sales and marketing, we talked about those two things and preparing the leads for sales and I noticed you have a core topic on your website, class marketing. Can you elaborate a little bit on strategies to stop making marketing departments and sales departments enemies and more so having them come together to close more deals like you’ve alluded to on your website?

I’ll be delighted. So, the big thing and if you remember the Glengarry Glen Ross movie, coffees for closers, all that stuff and you know, people complaining, “oh, the leads suck and I hate the leads blah, blah, blah”. Your sales team is telling you that all the time and what’s marketing’s response to that? Well, “salespeople are just lazy, they don’t pick up the leads, I give them brilliant leads. I got 95,000 people that visited my website last month”. Half of them were crap and the sales team is right but we don’t hear each other as much as we should. So, this marketing idea is that sales and marketing really need to be one department. We’re all on the same team, we’re on team revenue.

You’re right actually.

If you’re not working towards revenue, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Your sales team is in front of the people that you’re trying to reach every day. If they’re listening and if they can tell you, you know, half of the people that I talk to, their biggest concern or their biggest pain point is X. If a marketer can write something that answers that pain point and gives that to the sales team, it’s just super, super easy to get that in front of the right people and to have that person feel heard.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting. I’ve done both of the dealerships. I started on the cell store and did marketing. So, I understand both challenges of the job, I guess for marketers it’s frustrating when you see salespeople are not working well. You know, I would look down at the window and they would say they weren’t selling any cars and I’d be like, “you’re playing with each other on your phones and playing tag and I’m like, What the hell, you guys aren’t even working the leads. Do you think that someone’s just supposed to come in and put their credit card down and be what we call lay down to buy a $30,000 vehicle? I don’t think so”. I worked so hard when I was selling cars and I was the first guy in and the last guy out in regards to that. And you mentioned the CRM, it’s so important to use a CRM. I know a lot of businesses, and it’s astounding to me don’t have a CRM yet. I think the adoption of it is becoming more and more so as a reason why HubSpot and other similar companies are growing in existence, but how can businesses get started with a CRM, and then how can they get their salespeople actually use the damn thing?

Now we’re talking about the fun stuff. This is half of the conversations I have with business owners, by the way. They’re like, “I don’t get the whole CRM thing”. Or, I ask a sales team, how do you guys get leads right now or how are you keeping track of it? They are like, “well, I have post-it notes in an Excel spreadsheet”. So, the cool thing as you alluded to, Matt, about CRM is that it’s become ubiquitous and very easy, so there are very good tools that are available for not a ton of money anymore, like HubSpot stance free. It’s hard to be free when you’re talking real stuff, right? I can send emails, I can track every email that I send, and I can keep all of my leads in a bucket and make sure that I’m following up with them across my entire sales team for free. So, if you’re not doing that, your price is not an issue anymore by the way salesforce and keep an in all the other big ones all have freemium versions as well. So, if you don’t like HubSpot, that’s completely cool. But you don’t have an excuse to say it’s too expensive. The next thing that comes in with CRM is when people think it’s too complicated or that it’s cruddy or it’s just hard to use. Well, that was true ten years ago, but right now I can scan every business card that I get at a show as soon as we’re back into in-person full-time. I can go and the HubSpot app lets me scan all of my business cards. It does OCR recognition and it puts all of those contacts in and it lets me do a one-click connection with people on LinkedIn so that I can stay up to date and I can give them more interesting information. Every single email that I send automatically hooves up every conversation that I have. So, if I go away on vacation, my co-seller or the other person in my sales team can pick up that conversation or if they talk to someone else at the front desk of my business, I know exactly what those conversations were. I don’t have to call Bob or Bill or Mary. I can just see from the record that you were talking about X, Y, and Z products. We can absolutely help you with that and here are the three things that you need to know. All of those tools are super easy to use now and even the paid versions of HubSpot, which in an order bump up in different sizes, you have the free versions all branded, powered by HubSpot at the bottom of every email. The $25 a month version is completely branded for you, but it’s just limited to some automation and then once you get to the point where you need a paid version, it’s literally your decision would be either I’m going to hire a sales assistant or I’m going to pay for the pro version and pay a third of what I would have for the person.

Exactly.

It’s the easiest conversation.

It’s a no-brainer.

It works smarter, not harder, right?

Yeah. Exactly. Like, the things that you can do with marketing automation, I would never brand myself as a marketing automation expert, but I learned a lot about marketing automation and the things you can do are just unbelievable. In regards to, like we were talking about marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads or at least we’re alluding to it. You can literally get that contact in there, and I don’t know if it still works anymore, but, you know, creating a user ID and matching that up in the CRM and then knowing who they are. The point I’m trying to make is you can assign points to how many things they clicked on and do not assign them to a salesperson until there’s a certain amount of points, visits, conversions, or whatever that happens. It’s just, it’s unbelievable, you can literally take someone from a funnel or a process member of a lead magnet and then warm them up and then move them over and keep warming them up until you offer them the free consultation and then get them into the free consultation, it’s all automated yourself. Your website literally becomes a salesperson and people don’t understand that, and it just blows my mind away and you’re talking about how when you leave and you go on holidays. Like I worked with one business, a Powersports dealer and he was running his entire service department and sales part department based on one person.

Oh, gosh. Yeah.

Not a big operation, but he’s doing like 2 million a year, maybe even more, and when that guy either took the day off or was sick. They ended up having pissed-off customers, and I’m like, looking at going, “you got an operations problem in your body, it’s not a market problem. Do the hell with getting more traffic, you’re seeming to pissed off more people. You know, because you see these negative reviews and you know why they’re talking about this stuff and it’s like you got to solve this problem first before anything else. That’s one of the benefits of CRM, right?

Yep. It’s easy to keep track of every interaction, it’s easy to score and to give different weights to different things like visiting websites may be worth one point, filling out forms worth five points, responding to an email worth one point, actually clicking on and going to the landing page is probably worth three points and setting an appointment, going to the appointment link and booking a time to chat is probably worth ten points. For whatever over seven points, the sales team needs to call that person within the hour. And you also mentioned MQLs and SQLs, the job of marketing is to generate MQLs or marketing qualified leads. What is that? It’s a visit or a click. It’s people that have responded and interacted with your website somehow. What happens from there is either more back and forth via the Choose Your Own Adventure kind of stuff that I was talking about before via sales and marketing automation or a lead gets picked up because it gets to a certain lead score and then the sales team looks at it and says, “Is this person actually real”? and that’s a sales-qualified lead. At that point, the sales team needs to give them a call and then the cool part is where this marketing thing comes back into play, marketing is working on building the best MQLs as possible. Sales are working on getting the SQL verified and telling marketing, these are great leads or these aren’t great leads and here’s why and then we’re working together and brainstorming to say, Okay, well, what else do they need? What are those pain points that your prospects are asking about? Or What are the biggest concerns that they have about working with us? Let’s figure out a way to talk about it and maybe let’s get that into a sales sequence so we’ll tell them right away, you might be concerned that our product is too expensive. Here’s where we save you money and we can be more helpful in inserting products or inserting things that we can do for you here. You know, we’re faster to market, we’re higher quality. You never get fired for hiring IBM, right? Whatever that is. All of that is super helpful and that only comes through concerted and considered conversation where you’re actually working with each other and using a system to tell you, if you don’t have a CRM, there’s no way you can do marketing because everybody’s just kind of shooting from the hip and winging it and that’s just gone. The best example I have, which is actually the reason why I started getting into inbound marketing through the busy web, is we were doing a bang-up job for a client, we were doing marketing, we built them a fantastic website and we were doing some advertising and they were getting like 80 leads a week out of all of our website. Now we are doing fantastic because we agreed that we only need to do 50 so we were way overshooting our lead score. Three months into the program, the owner calls me and said, I’m furious. This is awful, I hate it and I’m not getting a single sale out of it. I’m waiting for money on fire. You guys are awful. I was like, wait a minute. Let’s talk about this a little bit and help me figure out what’s going on. Then I thought about it and I was like if I’m giving you 80 leads a week, what are you doing with those leads? They are like, what do you mean? I’m mailing them a brochure and nothing’s happening. That’s all they were doing, mailing them a brochure. So, you know, just keeping on with what you’ve always been doing isn’t going to work and certainly just kind of spraying and praying and or doing things that probably shouldn’t be done at all. And thinking that’s your entire sales process is a surefire way to fail.

Oh, totally. I mean, sending them the brochure is smart, in my opinion, for the very reason that it gives you a reason to phone them. Right? For instance, we are Sam here from Sam Smith Motors? I’m just curious, we sent out a promotion with a coupon on it, and we sent out a newsletter with you on it. It may look like a brochure the other day, we just wanted to make sure it didn’t get lost in the mail.

Right. But that’s what they missed. They didn’t apply any of those strategies. That was the end of their sales process. So, like, was there some miracle that you thought was going to happen after you mailed this thing? But, yeah, so that’s the other half of the conversation and if you don’t have marketing conversations where you’re working back and forth and saying, you know, we’re sending out all these brochures and to have the marketing team say, well, wait a minute, what’s happening with those brochures? And the sales team needs to call after we send out that brochure. Or here are some things. Here’s a coupon, here’s a discount, and here’s some other thing to follow up on. You need to keep thinking about how else you can engage that person in conversation in order to get them to make the decision to buy.

Some of the ways that sales marketing does that, for instance, you know, I’m alluding back to the car dealership because it’s one of the major things they have. But maybe the marketing person should sit in on the sales meetings.

Yes. Have your marketing team do ride-along with sales or it’s easier in today’s world to just listen to the calls with HubSpot. I actually record every call that I make and our marketing team listens in on those sales conversations. All they have to do is go back to the recordings and the other cool thing is the HubSpot version that I have and again, you spend more for the Pro-Level versions, whatever, but my version actually transcribes every call I make. So, if I have a specific product that I’m looking for that I’m having a conversation about, my marketing team just needs to search for the product name and they’ll get every conversation that I’ve had about that product and they can see how I’m handling the objections of people and come up with some bit of smart content to either help solve that pain point, get in front of that person earlier, or give the salesperson something to hand them when they’re concerned.

Yeah. Absolutely. What about vice versa, though? How can sales connect more with marketing? I mean, we’ve talked about how marketing can understand the sales side of things more, but what about flipping the conversation the other way?

Right. So, the biggest thing that marketing wants to know is what I’m spending all this time on working. So, sales need to give people feedback or needs to get the marketing team feedback to say, it seemed like when this person called me or when I answered this thing, they know that they had downloaded this white paper, but they had no idea what we were talking about or they had a completely different idea about what we do than what we expected. Right. So you need to give your marketing team feedback to say this is how that message was actually received. Or when you sent out that last email, I got half as many calls as I normally do after we send out a big push. So, the message that you sent didn’t land with the people that we were trying to hit, or more likely it landed, but with the wrong people. I was trying to get in front of the owners and you got me in front of tacticians. You got me in front of the line people and they can’t make decisions. So, I need you to executive this up a little bit. Talk a little bit more about ROI. Talk a little bit more about whatever those key things are. Also, Personas get beat up a lot in marketing because people think that it’s kind of window dressing on what you do but you actually need to come up with a good idea of who your ideal customer is and make that as clear as possible and keep thinking about what their objections are, what what’s going to make them open their eyes a little bit wider and start nodding and smiling? And especially where do they spend their time? Are they on Facebook? Are they tweeting or are they doing the latest craze on TikTok? Where are they hanging out? And that’s where you need to as marketing, start filling out and adding content into those spaces.

Absolutely. You triggered my memory, don’t ask me where I read it in my years of doing this, too. But it was a story about this product and this person marketer was pitching this product to the president and vice president and they’re like, “Oh, no, Sally wouldn’t like that” and they kept going on about Sally. As the person finally asked who Sally was, it wasn’t even a real person. It was their persona.

I love it.

No dialed in

Yup.

That they knew exactly what their market wanted based on this finely tuned dialed-in persona right over time. They created it to the point where they knew what their customer wants and I sometimes think business owners think that’s useless, but it’s not. It’s like, I don’t care if you’re a plumber or if you’re a renovator or a hairstylist, you need to know the problem is of your target market, who they are? It’s so easy, to be frank with you, I know I keep talking about the car industry, but it’s so easy in that industry. They take it for granted because like everybody who buys a car you literally got to give them your driver’s license, you give them your credit history. I know what you did for a living. All that data is right, CRM. When I wanted to learn who bought the entry-level sedan that we were selling, I just looked in CRM, but it’s mind-boggling to me, Dave, that the owner and the manufacturer didn’t have that data. And we’re talking about a very large manufacturer. It’s just surprising to me. My eyes were opened up.

Yeah.

And how much work it is for us to do.

Right. And with great power comes great responsibility. So, we have to not be creepy and we have to add to the conversation as much as possible as marketers and as sellers. A lot of times people will come to me and just ask, “Hey, can I just buy a list?” Like, well, you can but as you mentioned before, a list is just a great way to piss off the most people as possible in the shortest possible time. That’s called spam. I’m in Minneapolis and the hometown of spam is Austin, Minnesota.

I didn’t know about it. I just know a little bit about it. I have a few cans of the actual real stuff in my car, which is wonderful.

So digital spam is not good and all it is something that you don’t want, right? So, if I send you an email that has nothing to do with you that missed your mark, and you are not interested in this thing or this product or this service, that’s spam. The way that you solve for that is you make sure that your communication is as targeted as possible on reaching the people that you want and what they are asking for. What are their needs? What are their wants? What’s the content that they’re looking for? They just keep giving them more of what they want.

Yeah, it’s more about providing value with sales embedded into the messaging rather than just the street sales hard-hitting by my stuff now. So you can provide value in the form of information because we are in the information age. That’s a way better way of going about it, isn’t it?

Absolutely.

Is there a balance that you found between recommending to companies how much the balance between the amount of communication that’s informational, promotional, or maybe embedded versus how much should it be just straight promotional?

I’d say there’s a rule of thumb, but it’s different for everybody and you need to be testing and measuring to make sure that you hit it right. The one easy answer is it shouldn’t be 100% about you and it shouldn’t be 100% promotional. What I find engaging and what seems to work for most of our clients is about half of what you do should be engaging content, interesting, informative, the fun stuff, the things that when you have a conversation with someone, if it’s your mother-in-law or friends that you haven’t seen in a long time, they ask you, “hey, what do you do?” And you tell them that one thing that makes them say, “Oh, cool, I didn’t know that”. That’s engaging content. So, half of what you do should be engaging. The next 30% should be educational. And educational means presenting information that engages people or that they need to know as a part of their purchase process. Now, how much time does it take to get my solution involved? What are the actual steps to on to installing? If you’re doing B2C, what does the unboxing of that product look like or whatever? And in the final 20% can be asking people what to do or telling people what to do. The calls to action and or the self-promotional stuff. What to do next. So, again, it’s a kind of a rule of thumb, but if half of what you do is designed to collect their attention or attract them, 30% of what you do is designed to reassure them that you’re the solution that they’re looking for by educating them. And then the last 20% is just telling them, here’s how to buy. That’s a pretty solid conversation. Now, again, if we go back to our buddy at the cocktail party, if I’m spending the entire time talking about me and me, that’s bad. Likewise, if I flip it and I just sit there staring at you while you’re talking to me, and I don’t ask any questions. I don’t have any conversation. That gets creepy, too, right? So, what’s a good conversation? Well, it’s a mix.

You need to have some engagement.

Some talking, some listening, and some asking good questions.

Absolutely. Hey, it has been an absolute pleasure having you here.

Thanks, Matt.

It’s been an absolute pleasure. What’s one takeaway you want people to get from this episode?

I think the biggest takeaway that I want for people that are either in sales or in marketing is that you need to work together and you need to use a system. Let technology do some of that lifting for you. CRM is a great solution. If you don’t use it and if you’re ignoring your sales team as a marketer, or if you’re ignoring your marketing team as a salesperson, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to just crush it and to really help your customers.

Absolutely. It’s your team’s revenue. You’re on team revenue. It’s been an absolute pleasure again. How can our listeners get in touch if they choose to do so?

The easiest way to check us out is at bizzyweb.com or you can find me at Dave1Meyer on all of the major socials.

It’s been an absolute pleasure. Again, I’ll make sure to put that information in the show notes. Thanks for coming on today.

Thanks, Matt. Have a great day.

Yeah, you as well.