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The Solo Salesperson is a thing of the past. The new and proven approach is Team Sales. Conquer Local heads to Amsterdam! We get to pick the brain of Peter Urmson, CEO of Spotzer. We discuss the sophistication of customers knowledge and how it's evolving. The Sales Teams need to be on the cutting edge to keep up with the trends and the changes coming from the big guys like Google, Facebook, and Bing. In turn, this makes the Sales Team a trusted advisor. Peter tells us how the message and information that the salesperson shares with the customer needs to be simple and not oversell or overpromise. Spotzer has gone through massive growth with Peter at the helm. They're focused on websites, e-commerce, SEM and SEO in 23 countries and 18 languages. Producing several thousand sites and ad campaigns a month means Spotzer needs to be incredibly well organized as a high-performing team. Peter advocates that the key to Spotzer's success is having great teams of people who are all trying to make a positive impact on the lives of their customers. It's what gives us a laser focus on quality of service and great products.   Introduction George: The latest edition of the "Conquer Local Podcast." I'm very privileged to be able to do some traveling in my day-to-day job. And I was traveling in Australia three years ago, working a scintillating tour of 15 cities in 10 days. And we were driving through the outback, and there were kangaroos and Tasmanian devils, and... No, there was none of that stuff, but we did get to see a koala and a wallaby. So that was kind of cool for a Saskatchewan farm boy that I am, but I heard this name when I was on that tour. A guy named Peter Urmson. Oh my God. I got to track this guy down, and lo and behold, now a few years later, Peter Urmson's one of my friends. He's the CEO of Spotzer. And Spotzer is this digital juggernaut that is based out of Amsterdam, and Pete runs the entire organization. He's built this machine that is growing like crazy. And we're gonna find out everything that's making Spotzer work. And Peter has some very interesting and unique perspectives. He is going to talk a little bit, I'm sure, about customer success, and how his customer service teams are serving businesses all over the world. They work in 12 different languages. And Peter's got some very unique perspectives on SMBs, and SMEs, and what their challenges are. And we're gonna ask him some questions about that in the learnings that the Spotzer team has because they're the folks that fulfill the digital services that are sold to these customers by various sales organizations in different countries like Italy, and France, and the UK, and Australia and many, many others, including Norway. So a very interesting episode is on tap, folks. I guarantee it. It's Peter Urmson, the CEO of Spotzer from Amsterdam coming up next on the "Conquer Local Podcast." Join us for Conquer Local 2019 in beautiful sunny San Diego. California's Beach City and the legendary Hotel del Coronado will play host to the most valuable Conference of the year for companies selling marketing solutions to local businesses. We have a must-see lineup of industry experts, including our keynote speaker, Kevin O'Leary from ABC's "Shark Tank." Our entire slate of accomplished speakers have been handpicked to address the top six growth problems facing all B2B companies: product, demand, sales, scale, retention, and expansion. You'll get stimulating talks, tactile workshops, and an opportunity to connect with the brightest minds in your industry, all geared toward turning your business into a recurring revenue growth engine. Plus, you can experience an unforgettable adventure on a guided tour of the world famous San Diego zoo capped off with an incredible treetop reception. We've secured deep discounts on conference hotel rooms, but they are limited and going fast. Don't miss out. Go to conquerlocal2019.com, and get your tickets and rooms today. George: It is the latest edition of the "Conquer Local Podcast." And, Peter Urmson, my good friend, is joining me from Amsterdam today. Peter, how are you today? Peter: Yeah, I'm good. Thanks, George. Good to be here with you. George: We've been planning this for eight months that I was gonna have you as a guest on the podcast. Finally, we were able to make the stars align, and I appreciate your time. Let's, first off, introduce you to our audience. You are the CEO of a company called Spotzer. And could you give us a bit of background on how you arrived as the CEO of that very innovative company? And we'll talk a little bit more about what Spotzer does in a moment, but let's talk about your career because you've been involved in the media business and in local sales for quite some time. Peter: Yeah. I've kind of been in this space all my working life, starting in Sensis, a Director of Business doing local search in Australia for 10 years in executive roles, then executive roles in similar sort of businesses in Europe. Then back in Australia, CEO of the online marketing group for a big media business in Australia called Fairfax, and then went consulting. And when I went consulting, I went to set businesses up that specialized in local search for enterprise-size publishers such as news limited. Whilst consulting to them in setting those businesses up, I did RFPs to find businesses to do fulfillment and services of marketing services for SMBs, and Spotzer won the RFPs. And the founder of Spotzer asked me if I wanted to come and run the business. So I moved over to Amsterdam, a beautiful part of the world. We've grown the business over the last four years. We used to have about 60 people. I think we're now to about 300 people, and we've got a network of about 500 freelancers. So, it's quite a sizable business now and very focused on the marketing services space for small or medium businesses globally.   Simple and Succinct Messages = Sales George: Let's talk about how things have changed in your eyes because you've been doing this for a while and you saw the transformation of these various industries. I think it's really unique that you have experience in directory, in the newspaper business, and you're working with partners all over the world. What do you think the biggest single thing is, Peter, that has changed when it comes to servicing those local customers? Peter: I think there's multiple things that have changed. I think the biggest thing that's changed actually is the sophistication of the customer and their needs. They have become very aware around the digital space. Keeping ahead of their demands and their needs is critical for the industry and the business. Back in the day, you could get away with a very basic product with some basic functionality. And that still is true to some businesses that they want that. But you really have to have cutting-edge marketing services solutions now that keep up with trends and keep up with the needs and changes within Google, changes with Facebook, Bing, and other platforms. George: So when you and your organization is out working with one of your partners, and those are media companies all over the world, and we'll get to the languages that you serve in a few minutes in some of the jurisdictions. But what's the challenges around training those salespeople to understand that, that the customer is very sophisticated. You're gonna have to have a higher level of knowledge. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing with salespeople? Peter: It's key, and it's very interesting. And, fortunately, for myself, I come from a sales background when I was at Sensis as the sales director for a few years there and ran large sales teams. And what we do with our partners, it's trying to work with them to keep the messages really simple. It needs to be very succinct and simple for the salespeople to understand the products and services that they are selling. So, consequently, it's very simple and easy for the customer to understand what they're getting. The key thing is not to oversell and over promise, but to be very factual. And we work with a number of organizations to influence that. We don't train them, and we don't absolutely do that in every instance. But we do influence them on what's best practice in the messaging that the salespeople have with their customer to keep it simple. George: I'm wondering if that training is, you just go in there one time, train them up, and they're good to go, or is it an ongoing cadence? Peter: Yeah. We have different partners with different levels of relationship type. Where we have a really strong relationship with the partner, and that the partner sees the value that we bring to the table, we will be talking to multiple departments within their business multiple times within a week or a month. And then we have some partners that don't want us to do that, and that's fine. They have their own reasons. They like to do it in their own particular way. So with those types of partners, we just try to influence where we can by providing the right types of information. What we find, though, is that sometimes the product teams or the marketing teams can sometimes overcomplicate the story, and so the sales isn't getting the real message or the key unique selling proposition of the product. So we try to influence with the product team and the marketing team as well as the sales team.   Making Sales and Building Bridges George: I think that the unique thing about your model, and maybe we should just dig into this a little bit, you are empowering local salespeople through your various channel partners. But then at the end of the day, when they buy a website, or they do an ad campaign, or working on their search engine optimization, it's actually your team that is doing the fulfillment work on behalf of that partner. And how many languages are you servicing today with that team? Peter: I think, at the moment, we're about 18 languages. George: It's an amazing business model, and kudos to you for being able to pull that off because I'm sure it's not easy. I really would love to dig into some of the insights that you're learning from that group. When they speak to an SME, are you finding that you have to answer a bunch of questions outside of, "They bought a five-page website," or are they asking that person all sorts of digital questions because they wanna learn more about it? Or is it very succinct? "No, I'll give you this stuff for the website. That's it," or is it a broader conversation? Peter: It's absolutely a broader conversation. We need to make sure that, yes, we have our processes in place to execute that sites of five or a 10-page website with a couple of other products attached to it. But we need to make sure that our agents on the phone, we call them client managers. The digital client managers, we're always training them on SEO, how to handle a call, how to talk to a call and to become that trusted advisor to the customer. Because the customer might be very good at...let's say he's a hairdresser. The customer is very good at being a hairdresser, but he knows nothing about digital. We think it’s really critically important that what we do for that business, even if it's a three-page website, that we get it absolutely right so that the website ranks properly. And we'll advise the customer on what kind of content needs to go on their website, and the things that they should be doing and thinking about in the future as well so that we become a trusted advisor. George: I was bating you with that question because the real conversation that I wanna have leading from that is, it's not just making the sale, delivering the product on a binary, you know, yes or no, it takes this village, it seems, where the salesperson makes the sale. Then you've got this team that does the fulfillment that also builds a relationship with that customer. And we're seeing that client manager, as you've called them, actually building a very good relationship with the customer. So, I guess the question that I wanna ask is, do you see that group then starting to facilitate an upsell down the road because they have the customer on a regular content call or something like that? Have you been able to make that leap? Peter: Yeah. No, absolutely. With one partner last week, actually, we just launched where we actually sell on the behalf of the partner. And the customer gets that salesperson who becomes the client manager who becomes involved in the whole fulfillment process and owns the customer end-to-end. So we look to build the trust in the customer, either from the ad set where we can have the ability to sell on behalf of the partner and carry on. Or just looking if the sale has already been made, we'll then start to advise the customer so that we can look for upsell products, and then we'll either make the sale, or we'll send a lead to the partner to say, "Hey, this customer really needs this product, and they're really interested in that." George: It's very interesting that you've been able to bridge that gap because there's a lot of organizations that are thinking about how to do that. Now, our audience on the "Conquer Local Podcast," which has over 5,000 salespeople from around the world that listen to the podcast on a regular basis are probably freaking out right now because then do you need the salesperson if we've got the customer service people that are doing the upsells? What's our answer to that question that maybe those listeners might have? Peter: Yeah. Well, I mean, we're very strategic in how we offer those services, and we work with partners so that sales remuneration isn't impacted. We don't have face-to-face channels, and we have very few by way of T-sales. We really only offer that up to partners that don't have existing sales teams. We believe that established brands with established sales teams can sell our product better than what we would be able to sell it because they have the relationship. If we launch in a new partner that doesn't have any sales capability, we will bring that to the table for them.   Welcome to the Age of the Sales Team George: I'm wondering if there's been any thought around team sales approach where the sales rep has a face-to-face relationship. We know that we're gonna need that interaction with the customer. They've got a great relationship, but what we want that salesperson doing is going and having face-to-face with new potential customers. Meanwhile, there's somebody back at the ranch that is able to offer that level of service that has some sales skills to facilitate the upsell while they have the customer on the phone, and the rep isn't concerned about it because there's maybe a shared commission or something like that. Have you seen any models like that in your travels throughout your various 12 jurisdictions, the different languages that you work in? Peter: Yeah. We pretty well operate with that model with every partner. So, our role is to advise the customer to consult them, to launch the products that they've already bought. And if we can see that they should have something else, we'll advise them of that. And we'll also send a note back to the partner to get the sales rep to get in touch with that customer because they've got an interest in it. George: Here's the biggest concern that I have, Peter, and I'm looking for some validation. I'm concerned, as a salesperson, that my customer has declared that they have an intention for something, and I'm out calling on other customers, and my service person is dealing with them. I wanna fill that need immediately, so they don't go somewhere else in the meantime. I just think that, as salespeople, we need to really stop being landlords and realize that in 2019, it's a team approach. And there are all sorts of pieces of technology or advancements digitally that have allowed us to be more efficient, and to do what salespeople are really good at, and then leave the account service work to people who are experts in that space, but just layer on a bit of the upsells into that service model, so we actually could go faster. So, is that your take on it? That's my take on it. I'm just looking to see if you agree. Peter: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our role is to advise the customer and to work with the sales organization, operations, product, and marketing to make sure that the customer has an amazing experience… and knows that they are in very good hands with people who understand the marketing services space inside out. And if our role is to also help support sales in getting through to the customer around that value proposition, we absolutely bring that to the table to enable sales as well and to support them. We take an approach at Spotzer. We just call it one team, and we go into our partners, and we say, "It's very much branded as one team. We're one team together. We can work with you. We can learn from you a hell of a lot, and we can also do things to support you a hell of a lot." But we always think about the customer experience and working together as one team. The only way to win in this business is going to be through service.   It’s All About the Service, Servizio, Dienst George: No, I agree with that. I've always admired the business that you've been able to build and the growth that you folks have had. Tell me, what are some of the challenges in dealing in 12 different languages on a day-to-day basis? Peter: Yeah. It's kind of, "Where do you begin?" Yeah, I mean, you know, it's even broader than that, or deeper than that. Yes, we're in a number of different countries in different languages. We have to have copywriters, content writers. SEO rules and approaches can have slight nuances and differences. But we also need to write SEO in a particular fashion and in a particular way. Grammar can change dramatically, so getting your quality guidelines and quality framework in place is critical across all of those languages. And then you've got the QA process, Quality Assurance, to make sure that the copywriters are writing in the right way, that the SEO is working in the right way. That you're designing the websites in the right way. If you have a pizzeria out of Italy, the pizza in southern Italy that you put on the website is very different to a pizza in northern Italy. So, you've also got all of those geographical territorial elements to consider. But we've really focused on Europe. We're in the U.S. as well, a little bit of Southern America, and we were very big in Australia and New Zealand. But, obviously, in Europe is the complexity because of the languages that somebody in Italy, as an example, might have an Italian website built, but they also want it in five different languages. So, we need to be able to provision that. Same with Switzerland. Now, there's three different languages in Switzerland. And then Belgium, you've got French, you've got Flemish, part of Dutch, and the nuances. So, there's the copy and content, but then there's also making sure that we hire the right people. Everybody's based in Amsterdam in a large contact center that we have here. The beauty of Amsterdam is it is a melting part of bringing in internationals, so we do find it easy to hire different languages here. Probably Norway has been the most challenging, but it makes life interesting, let's say.   Change is Inevitable: Embrace the Challenge to Succeed George: Well, I just find it fascinating how you've been able to grow as fast as you have and to solve for what might be a nightmare on 12 different languages. I've never asked this question in 60 episodes, so this is brand new. Let's see how this goes. Peter, if you were advising our audience, what is the thing that they should fear the most as a salesperson today? Peter: I would say the fear of change. They have to change, and they have to change really fast. I worked under a great CEO at Fairfax in Australia, Jack    Matthews. He was head of digital, and he often used to say, "Today is the slowest day in digital right at this point in time." And what he meant by saying that was that, every day after, it's just gonna get faster. And as things get faster, you’ve just got to change with that. And if you're resistant to that change, you're gonna be left behind. You're not gonna advise your customer in the right way. George: Peter, that was an absolutely fantastic answer to that question, and that was what I was hoping for. I'm very interested in your insights because you're dealing in a number of different markets, you're working with different organizations. And when you and I met three years ago, and we started to realize there was an opportunity to work together, and that we saw things the same way, we really bonded over that. That if a sales organization has some sort of change management system in place, and they hire people that are not adverse to change... So, that's the first piece, you've got to get HR, hiring the right people that are challenged by change, and they love it, and they want some excitement. And then when we're going into these legacy organizations, and we're working with people that haven't had the change for years, identifying those people that are looking for the excitement of trying new things. But with change comes an enormous challenge, and that is you need to be constantly learning. How are you helping those organizations with that challenge of, "Now we got to go to learning pretty much on a weekly basis?" Peter: I think that coming with change is being brave enough for a leadership team, particularly an executive level, to make those changes. Now, they need to drive them into the organization, and they cannot be complacent about that. And you can never underestimate the challenges that come with that as well. But keeping people in positions just because they've been in the business… you need people who know and are subject matter experts in a space. And so, it's not necessarily just bringing consultants in, it's bringing in experts in that space in. Now, I'm not saying that we're experts in everything, but we are experts in what we do. So what we try to do is just put on the table with all of our partners as a free service pretty much. "This is our experience. This is what we've seen that's worked. This is what we think would be good. It's up to you what you take on board and what you don't." We just try to influence and share our experience because if our partners are successful, then we're successful.   Conclusion George: Peter Urmson is the CEO of the juggernaut known as Spotzer in 12 different languages around the world, 300 people working at that organization and probably one of the busiest men on the planet. So, Peter, I really appreciate you taking out some time today to join us and to share your wisdom with the listeners of the "Conquer Local Podcast." Peter: No problem. It's been great to be with you, George. George: Here's your takeaways from your lesson that you just received from Mr. Urmson and his years of experience in the space dealing with local businesses. Customer service is the most important piece of this whole animal. And having a team that can fulfill a very simple and succinct solution that's been sold to the customer is the key. And we find that top performing sales organizations that are selling digital are the ones that are able to distill the many digital solutions or tools that are being used down to a clear deliverable that can be measured for the customer. And then, not hiding behind a dashboard or something like that, actually having a conversation with that customer around whether we hit the mark or there are other things we need to do to reach that ultimate goal. And Spotzer is the team in behind the scenes that are providing the service to those customers and actually jumping on the call and speaking to those customers in 12 different languages, building their websites, handling their SEO, doing their ad campaigns. So some very interesting and unique perspectives from the service side of the business, which is very important to be tied to the sales side of the business. Because if we can keep that congruent message from lead to bleed, as we say, so the lead comes in, they see some advertising, salesperson goes out and sells them something, service takes care of servicing it, and it all delivers as the ad promised, then we've got happy customers, and we have customers that have aligned expectations. Also, there is an opportunity for that customer service team, and we're seeing this more and more, to participate in the upsell. And that is when you really have a finely-tuned machine. Imagine the person that's creating the website, talking to the customer, getting the information, photos, things that they want in the website, also identifying that they need some SEO and selling them right on the spot? That's pretty cool, and I think that that would be a very interesting advancement to a sales organization. And then, keep in mind, you sales folks out there, it's the service that wins the next sale, and the next sale, and the next sale. Selling something that somebody wants, everybody can do that. You can go in and tell a story, sing and dance, make them feel good, and close the deal once. But the service layer needs to be aligned so that you can get the repeat sale from the customer. And then the other unique thing that comes from that happy customer is usually referrals from their friends and family that need the same services that you've just sold to them. So it is really a big circle where you get the lead that comes in, you sell them a solution, customer service takes care of them and aligns those expectations and delivers on them. And then you go back, and the wheel of sales life just continues. I'm George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.

Gordon Borrell built an entire business around a survey, and he's still doing it! It's 10 years running and there isn't a stop in sight. Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, has confirmed what we've been hypothesizing for a while now. The customer journey needs to have a relationship built off trust, BUT he throws in a twist. Listen and find out what the secret sauce is. Gordon Borrell is ranked in the top 2% among Gerson Lehrman Group’s 150,000 consultants worldwide and is quoted frequently in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Ad Age, Forbes and other publications. He has appeared on CNN and other TV and radio programs discussing trends and forecasts for local media. Prior to starting Borrell Associates, Gordon was vice president for new media for Landmark Communications, where he worked for 22 years. He started his career as a reporter and editor for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia. Introduction George: It's another edition of the "Conquer Local Podcast." And one of my favorite events to go to in the year is Gordon Borrell's LOAC presentation that he has at the Grand Hyatt, and it's been running now for 10 years. And we have Gordon Borrell all lined up to take us through all of the nuggets from that convention and to also tell us what... You know, Gordon, he reads the tea leaves. And he has a look at the data, and he says, "Here's where the space is going, and here's where you need to pivot your business." And he also has a tendency to attract some of the best keynote speakers to his convention. I always find it to be very informative and very educational when I go to that event every year. So we're gonna hear it from the man himself, Mr. Gordon Borrell, coming up next on the "Conquer Local podcast." Join us for "Conquer Local" 2019 in beautiful sunny San Diego. California's Beach City and the legendary Hotel del Coronado will play host to the most valuable conference of the year for companies selling marketing solutions to local businesses. We have a must-see lineup of industry experts, including our keynote speaker, Kevin O'Leary from ABC's Shark Tank. Our entire slate of accomplished speakers have been hand-picked to address the top six growth problems facing all B2B companies: product, demand, sales, scale, retention, and expansion. You'll get stimulating talks, tactile workshops, and an opportunity to connect with the brightest minds in your industry, all geared toward turning your business into a recurring revenue growth engine. Plus, you can experience an unforgettable adventure on a guided tour of the world-famous San Diego Zoo capped off with an incredible treetop reception. We've secured deep discounts on conference hotel rooms, but they are limited and going fast. Don't miss out. Go to conquerlocal2019.com, and get your tickets and rooms today. George: It's another edition of the "Conquer Local podcast." You know, it just hit me like a lightning bolt. We've obviously been doing this for a little bit over a year because I remember one of our first podcasts had Gordon Borrell on. And Gordon Borrell is back because it is that time of year where you have your massive convention in New York City and you unveil all of that data. And I had the privilege of being there when you did the unveil of all the data around your survey. So, first off, welcome back, Mr. Gordon Borrell. Gordon: How about that. What an honor it is for me to be here. Thank you, George, and you do have a great podcast. It is indeed an honor to be on this. You're doing some great things. I've heard quite a few of them, and you're really helping the industry from an educational standpoint. So, thank you. George: Well, we appreciate those comments. It's great guests like you that help us to do that because you are out there doing the hard work getting the insights. And I found some interesting things as you were rolling through the rollout of the data from your survey. So, can we set the table for the survey, and can you tell us about how long you've been doing it? And just for new listeners who may not be familiar with Gordon Borrell and the great work that your company does, can we kind of get a little bit of a back story, please? Gordon: Sure. We've been around for 18, 19 years or so. We've been doing surveys and research for that period of time looking at local advertising and tracking the trends in advertising and marketing expenditures. The survey that you're referring to is the Local Advertiser Survey that we do annually from April until July, and it's the largest survey in North America of local advertisers. It's about 44 questions, and it's a huge amount of insights and information from the local business industry about what they're doing, what they're planning to do with their advertising and marketing expenditures.   The Giant Toy Box of Advertising and Its Treasures George: You know, that is very valuable information for a local seller. Imagine going into the customer and knowing what, you know, furniture stores in markets that size are spending on social media advertising. So can we dig into some of the insights from this survey that you saw when you were speaking to those advertisers because I think it's very valuable for salespeople to know what the poll says of businesses in the markets? Gordon: First off, George, the survey itself is now, what, six, eight months old or so because it ended in July. But we also do a monthly panel of about 2,000 advertisers. So, we kind of filter the results and look at it over time in how things have changed. So, overall, the trend that we see, I guess the two most important things that I can tell you out of that survey are local advertisers are expanding the number of types of media that they're buying. So in a given year, they typically buy five and a half, on average, different types of media. So it might be Yellow Pages, newspaper, radio, social media search, you know, etc. There are 5.5 on average that, pretty consistently, they have bought in a year's time. For some people, it might be direct mail. And others, they'll buy direct mail. They buy radio or this or that. It has now expanded to eight. So they've increased. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it really is. They have expanded to eight different types of media that they buy in a year. Now, this is the really shocking and scary thing that we saw on the most recent surveys. They are cutting the number of companies that they are buying from five to three. So they're cutting out two. And what that tells us is that they are definitely looking into the giant toy box of advertising, you know, marketing technologies that they have and go, "Wow, social media boosting posts? Let's do that. Let's do something on Twitter. Let's shoot a video of ourselves and cut it into a 15-second pre-roll and do some YouTube advertising." So they're certainly adding that type of stuff. But they are cutting out the dumbest punk companies that they have been dealing with that are just saying, "Oh, that social media stuff doesn't work. Radio advertising is bigger than anything else, or newspaper advertising is the best." So they know those people aren't really telling the truth. Those people are just trying to sell advertising. George: So it's interesting. You know, we in the industry, we call it, you know, the reduction of vendor clutter. But what it really means is that the advertiser is looking to a trusted provider, and they're saying, "I can get it from Joe. I don't have to deal with Suzy or Tom over here who I don't even think are telling me the truth. So I'm just gonna go with that trusted local expert." You know, we've been talking about this for quite some time, but the data is starting to support that or continuing to support that. Gordon: It is, George, but it's just a little more complicated than that. And I'm actually just learning this from my Executive Vice President of Research, Corey Elliott, who's the guy who's at the center of all the surveys that we do. And he was just sitting with me this morning telling me that, "You know, you think it would be they're going with the person whom they trust and the trusted brands. But while that is important, that is not the most important thing." And this is kind of shocking because, George, you and I have always felt with lots of other people that, "Well, they're gonna buy advertising based on trust." You could have the most trusted, nicest, kindest, most wonderful person walk in that door. If they didn't have the right products to sell, and they didn't know, and that's the key, and they didn't know about your business and let's say you're a furniture store, and they didn't know, you know, how to sell an ottoman, you know, the best marketing tips for selling an ottoman, and they didn't have the right product, you know, maybe they were selling only Yellow Pages, well, that's not gonna work. So, in the end, it's the combination of things. Yes, it's the trust, and yes, it's the relationship, but, man, you've gotta have the right products, and you also have to have some knowledge about the business.   Training to Stay Ahead George: So does that mean that, as a local seller, you can't just be pigeonholed into one thing I think is what you're saying. You need to have access to all the products because even if you have the trust if you have the absence of the products, you're gonna lose the deal. Gordon: I think that the dance is to stay ahead of the advertiser in terms of market knowledge. And the market knowledge right now, they're teaching themselves because they suddenly have these tools available to them. They can build their own graphics, whereas 15, 20 years ago, it was really harder to do that. But now they can, and they can place their own ads, whereas 15 or 20 years ago, it was impossible to do that. You had to go through somebody. So, they have graduated from, we'll say, high school with, you know, some marketing knowledge, and now they're in college. So you damn well better have a college degree and be working on your master's to stay ahead of them. George: You know, that speaks next to something that we have been talking about in lots of episodes, so let's really dig into that. When you're working with your customers who are media organizations and agencies and you're talking to sales leadership in that group, I'm sure that learning and having that culture of constant learning, who are you seeing that are doing a really good job of that in helping to teach their reps? What are some best practices there? Gordon: Well, it's always hard to name names because, you know, whenever I do that, I get calls or emails and people say, "What about me? You didn't mention us." Or, you know, I get smartass sometimes, and I'll mention somebody who's not doing a good job. So, hell, let's just name names anyway. There are a few companies out there that we see doing remarkable jobs in training the reps, and some of them are cable companies. Cable companies are getting cable systems roughly the same amount in digital advertising dollars as, you know, a broadcast TV station does in the market. These guys are actually pretty good at training. They're kind of like radio folks. You know, they're really, really good at selling. So you take a private company like Cox Communications, both on their media side and their cable side, and they do a phenomenal job of training. And then you look at some of the smaller radio groups, not quite the bigger ones, but the smaller ones, and they just get it, and they understand it. And you have to look at, you know, all other groups: newspapers, Yellow Pages, etc. across the board. But I would say that the difference is particularly with those who have multiple outlets, somebody that has a corporate level or company-wide training program that really keeps up with things, keeps up with the certification, maybe the digital certification and the other, you know, certifications like the radio advertising bureaus, you know, radio certification program and local media associations. So it really is the companies that have invested a significant, not a small, but a significant amount of money in training and, importantly, keep those training programs updated every single year because terminology changes and market conditions change and things like that.   Stop the Tear Down, Start the Frank Discussion George: We talked about the number of products that people are buying from groups and things like that. Are you seeing anything around, you know, what they don't like? And I remember last year, you launched into the podcast by saying that advertisers were pissed off. And I loved that statement, by the way. If you were to put one statement over what they don't like from what you saw in that survey, do you have any of those nuggets that our reps can take back and say, "Boy, I better stop doing that because clients hate that?" Gordon: Yeah. Stop pissing on other media and try to make yours look better. The advertisers tell us in comments. I've got a deck that has comment after comment after comment just to drive this home. And I was in West Virginia a couple of weeks ago doing it with the West Virginia Broadcasters Association. I said, "Look, don't go in and tell them the myth that radio reaches 98% of the population in any given week." They know that to be a lie. Well, maybe it does but not your station. Don't go in and say, "Newspapers are better than everything else." Don't go in and say, "Digital media sucks." So you don't go in and you tear down the other medium. You really have to come in and say, "Well,..." you know, and exhibit the market knowledge that everything works in unison. Outdoor works. TV works. Radio works. Yellow Pages work, particularly in small markets. So the one thing that the advertisers are really fed up with is this false consultative sales approach where you come in and say, "Hey, I don't wanna sell you anything. I just wanna ask you some questions. Tell me what your needs are. Tell me what your points of pain are. Tell me what you'd like to do." And so let's say you're a radio sales rep, right? George: Yes. Gordon: And then you say, "I'm going to come back, and then I'm gonna give you some recommendations." Well, guess what you're going to come back and recommend as the solution? Radio advertising. They see through that. If you're in the advertising sales business, it's a really good time to be smart. George: How do you feel about that line, "I'm not here to sell you something?" Gordon: I think advertisers see through that. I think there's gotta be...it may be true that you're not on that visit, but I think it's too time-worn now to use. I think you have to take a bit of a different approach. I think you have to say, "I wanna help you with your marketing needs, but really, on this call, what I'm here to do is try to find out a little bit more. I've got some information that might be able to help you. But if I'm really gonna be able to serve you, I need to be able to ask some questions. And I'm earnest in wanting to help you. I really think I can save you some time or money, or I wouldn't be here." You know, drop all those defenses, drop all that attack mode, drop all the false terminology, and just be frank with them. George: No, I appreciate you validating what I was asking there because I find that when a rep walks in and says, "I'm not gonna sell you something," does a bullshit needs analysis, and then comes back to try to sell them something, you've lost all credibility. You know, "Yes, I am an advertising consultant, or a marketing consultant, or a digital media consultant, and what I'm here to do is to see if there would be a fit between our two organizations where I would be able to help you with the products and services that I have. And, yes, those come with a price attached to them," and just be open with the customer because the trust is the most important piece. And when you break it, you can't get it back. Gordon: Yeah. I completely agree. If you can't say, "I'm not here to sell you something ever," then you shouldn't say it. I mean, that's sort of a test.   Breaking Through the Noise George: And what are you finding in your surveys around these needs, customer needs analysis, the CNA, the dreaded...you know, I'm gonna come in and ask you a bunch of questions. Is there any comments in there from your advertisers that you've surveyed around those because I'm sure they're being inundated by those bloody things? Gordon: Yeah. There really are. And, again, it does speak to the suspicion that the advertisers have that these folks are coming in on a sort of a consultative approach, but they are gonna come back and sell them something. You know, I don't know how you get around that other than to say...just be honest with them to say, "I think I have a whole set of marketing opportunities, some of which you may not be aware of, that you can take advantage of. But on this call, I'm really just here to find out whether we actually have the tools that can help you, I kind of think we do, but I'm here to ask you questions." So, you're basically saying, "I'm not gonna try to sell something on this call, but I'm probably gonna come back and try to sell you something." That's really important. You've got to know that these advertisers are absolutely besieged. The number of sales calls has doubled for the average advertiser to 24 a month in the past three and a half years. So, they're just being barraged by all of this pressure from all of these media outlets. Here's a fascinating fact for you, George. A lot of people don't really know this. But, you know, we're assuming that the Yellow Pages industry is dying and that newspapers are dying, and, you know, nobody's listening to radio anymore, and nobody's watching TV. And that's all a bunch of crap because, right now, there have been some Yellow Pages books that have gone away and there has been. And we hear a lot about them, but it's just overemphasized. Some daily newspapers that have gone to online only have, you know, folded with two other papers. But still, there are about 1,300 daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and there are phenomenal amounts of other media, 10,000 radio stations, 8,000 weekly newspapers. So when you look at any individual market at province or at DMA, there are more than 100 locally-based media outlets on average. Even a really small market might have 30 or 40. And the advertiser is just shutting down and saying, "That's too much noise." So, it really is incumbent upon a company that wants to survive or, you know, grow again to just have a really, really, really smart sales approach. There's gonna be so much effort based on training that sales staff. George: Yeah. We do the count of media organizations. Then we also have every piece of marketing technology that has been built have their own sales team that is hammering the phones and emails of those SMBs trying to get them to buy their bespoke solution as well. So, again, to be in that top one or two is the most important thing that you need to do when you're dealing with your prospects and that top of mind awareness that, "Yeah. I understand your business, we've built some trust, I'm going to see if I can get the product set that matches your needs," has never been more important than it is today. And it's good to see that your data is supporting the things that we're trying to train as we speak to people on the "Conquer Local Podcast." When you look at the entire survey based upon the previous ones that you've done and the data that you've gathered, is there anything else that's really glaring that jumps out at you from the information?   Getting Together and Educating Gordon: Well, a couple of things. I'll go back to what I said, you know, at the very beginning. It's those two things that just keep going round and round in our minds that they're expanding the number of choices but decreasing the number of companies that they deal with, therefore, they're using a little more DIY stuff. Plus, you know, what I said earlier in that is that they just really want a very defined sleek marketing person to help them out, and those are the ones who are going to win. I think, George, the other thing that we are seeing when we look at these surveys is these businesses, they're beginning to learn from the DIY stuff that's put in front of them. And we do it ourselves here at Borrell Associates. We go, "Well, we can just design this ad ourselves. Hey, we just put a post online. And you click this button here, and, you know, you can boost it for 100 bucks." So we're learning rather than having to rely on somebody else to farm it out to. That, I think, is one of the more important things, is to realize that the class or the education of the advertiser themselves continues to increase. However, I wouldn't classify them as extremely educated. They still need that. They still show up in droves. When you say, "We're gonna have a digital marketing expert or some marketing expert come to town and talk to you about SEO and getting seen by the search engines and social media and things like that," they still come out in droves. So their educational needs are still high. But realize that as they come to these meetings that everybody seems to be holding in the markets, and as they do their own stuff, that their education level is getting, you know, greater and greater. So it's getting a little tougher to serve them. George: We really appreciate you taking some time from your schedule to join us on the podcast again this year and give us the insights that were shared with your crowd in New York at the beautiful Grand Hyatt, which has been recently renovated, which was kind of nice to see. But I also wanted to offer our congratulations to you on 10 years of having that event, and I think it's a great event, media executives from all over North America and, in fact, the world. You know, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about the journey of your convention. It's a monumental accomplishment that you and your organization have had, and congratulations on that. Gordon: Thank you. We did start in 2009. The first one was in this time of the year, spring of 2010, and we were surprised, George, at the first one that we held. We didn't ever think we'd be in the conference business in any way or wanna hold one. So we said, "Well, there's really a need because the trade associations for radio, for television, for newspapers, for the directory industry, Yellow Pages, will hold their conventions or their conferences, and then will have a little section on digital. And if you go to it and you really know a lot about digital, you go, "Man, this is weak crap. Man, this is not good." We thought, "We'll get everybody under one roof, and we'll just have a local online advertising conference. It's gonna be about local, it's just gonna be about online, it's gonna be about advertising, and it's gonna be all types of media. The very first one that we had was sold out. We were shocked. It just spoke, I think, to the need for everybody to understand this new marketing space, not from a monolithic view. It really is a completely different medium with a completely different set of capabilities. And if you don't understand that, then you're gonna shortchange yourself. Having said that, George, I'll tell you one thing. The hotel was renovated many, many years ago. Now, it's being torn down. So this was our last event at the Grand Hyatt. We're gonna have to find another place to go to 2020. George: Well, I'm sure there's all sorts of hotels that would love to have that chunk of business that you bring to town every March. Of all the people that spoke this year, what was your favorite presentation? Gordon: Well, the favorite presentation is, to me, it's always the presentation by comScore. We've traded off between Nielsen and comScore. We've usually had Gian Fulgoni, who's the Co-founder and Chairman of comScore, this year. He had retired, and he offered Sara Hofstetter. And her presentation is just absolutely stunning. We like research people because they have great insights, and they talk about what's going on irrespective of, you know, what they should be promoting because their company is a certain type of company. No, they're truth-tellers. So, in that presentation, what we saw was a lot of information on OTT and how that is growing or over the top video. It's basically the transition of the internet from a read medium to a viewed-and-listened-to medium. The growth of podcasting and all these audio devices and the growth of video-viewing is turning the internet really into a multimedia event, and a lot of the ad dollars are flowing in that direction. So that phenomenal, you know, sudden uptick in growth, and the vast expansion of TV programming to the digital venue was really remarkable.   Conclusion George: Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the podcast. I always feel that, you know, as a gray-haired old sales guy, I always learn things when I listen to Gordon Borrell. So I appreciate you bringing that insight and being a guest again this year. And we wish you all the best in the days to come as we move through 2019, and good luck finding your new location for the convention next year. Gordon: George, thank you very much for having me, and thanks for doing this for the industry. It's a great podcast. Thank you. George: Well, probably one of my favorite public speakers to see him live, Gordon, commands the stage, presents very, very well, and he knows his information inside and out as you can tell. But what I found from that presentation as really interesting is sales and marketing to SMB is harder than it's ever been because we have all of this confusion and all of this noise that's happening with all of these entities that are calling on the prospects. So, it's never been more important for the rep to be more educated. And also, Gordon touched on the fact that those customers are using DIY solutions, and they're becoming more educated. So it's really interesting crossroads that we're at, and it speaks directly to what our core foundation is on the "Conquer Local Podcast." I've said this in past episodes. When I first entered this space seven years ago, and I started working with sales teams, and I remember being on a sales call with a young lady. She was about 55 years old. She'd been selling for a number of years. I was looking kind of in the mirror. I'm like, "Oh, here's somebody, not that young of a salesperson, and they know how to sell their legacy product. But we really need to come up with a way to help them sell the new digital solutions they're going to need so they can stay relevant." There's a lot of young smart people out there that are charging into business with a ton of education. They're very tech savvy. They're not intimidated by digital. And our job here at the "Conquer Local Podcast" is to help all of the salespeople, whether they be brand new salespeople, and they have to learn how to develop relationships, and they learn how to have to actually communicate with people and do active listening. And then we've got old salespeople like myself that need to learn new tricks, but new things that they can deliver to that customer to solve their problems. So I really appreciate Gordon's insight because it's backed up by data. And the data points that everything that we've been talking about on the "Conquer Local Podcast" is more important today than it was a year and three months ago when we started this thing. So, thank you, Gordon, for all of those insights, and we wish you all the best as the months continue here in 2019. We are coming up to summer, is just around the corner. We're trying to plan what we're going to do during the summer. And producer Colleen and I have been brainstorming, and we got saying, "You know, what haven't we covered? What do we wanna look at?" We'd like to get your feedback. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn or on the Conquer Local LinkedIn channel and give us some ideas as to what you might like to see us cover as we move into...well, we're maybe gonna call "The Summer..." we'll come up with a fancy name for it. I'll leave that up to the Colleen to come up with that. But we're going to do a series in the summer months that is all gonna be around teaching. We'll bring some people in that are great sales coaches to those episodes, but we're looking for your feedback first. So please reach out to us on LinkedIn on the "Conquer Local" page or on my page, George Leith. Oh, by the way, my name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.

You asked for it, we listened! We are bringing back our coaching episodes. George Leith is a mad man that truly ENJOYS cold calling. Our wicked host, George Leith, breaks down cold calling this week. He walks us through George's Top Tips for being successful when making cold calls. He goes through how to handle the rejection when a prospect flat out says—no. He draws from his experience and tactics on how to win the "Unicorn" or the "Whale" that you've been dreaming of closing. George even tells you how to get rid of the "ums" in your pitches. Listen to learn more! George is a thoroughly experienced, educational and inspirational sales and marketing keynote speaker who can enlighten your company or professional association on the best practices for transforming sales and utilizing social media’s innovative concepts to align your digital media marketing with current trends and prepare it for the unpredictable times ahead. As a sales transformation keynote speaker, author and guest university lecturer, he has a unique ability to demystify concepts and inspire businesses and professionals to understand and truly embrace the potential that digital transformation has for many business objectives including sales, business development, and marketing for B2B, non-profit organizations, as well as government institutions.   Introduction George: It's the "Conquer Local Podcast," and we're jumping back into some of what we've actually found to be the most popular additions to the podcast, and that is some coaching additions. And from the feedback that we've been receiving on LinkedIn, which is the best place to speak to us, we wanted to get into just a few of these items. The first one this week is going to be around cold calling, and what cold calling looks like in 2019. And this comes from all of the organizations that I have the privilege of working with around the world and some of the research that we've been doing into the art of cold calling. And then as a grizzled-up old sales veteran, I'm going to talk about how actually cold calling in 2019 hasn't really changed that much in the last 30 some odd years. It's all coming up. We're going to teach this week on cold calling in 2019 when the "Conquer Local Podcast" continues after this. Join us for "Conquer Local" 2019 in beautiful sunny San Diego. California's Beach City and the legendary Hotel del Coronado will play host to the most valuable conference of the year for companies selling marketing solutions to local businesses. We have a must-see lineup of industry experts, including our keynote speaker, Kevin O'Leary from ABC's Shark Tank. Our entire slate of accomplished speakers have been hand-picked to address the top six growth problems facing all B2B companies: product, demand, sales, scale, retention, and expansion. You'll get stimulating talks, tactile workshops, and an opportunity to connect with the brightest minds in your industry, all geared toward turning your business into a recurring revenue growth engine. Plus, you can experience an unforgettable adventure on a guided tour of the world-famous San Diego Zoo capped off with an incredible treetop reception. We've secured deep discounts on conference hotel rooms, but they are limited and going fast. Don't miss out. Go to conquerlocal2019.com, and get your tickets and rooms today. George: We're digging into cold calling, and how it may have changed in 2019, and what are some of the tactics you need to be using if you're going to utilize cold calling to help you reach your sales goals in the weeks and months to come. So I want to talk about the very first piece of being an effective cold caller, and that is owning the value proposition that you are bringing to the customer. It is vitally important that you have a level of confidence as you step in to do some of this cold calling. You know, they can smell your fear. So you need to be very careful that you have that value proposition nailed down, and that you have a number of different ways that that could go. You know, you've heard me talk about elevator pitches before. As you own that value proposition, you should be practicing different elevator pitches. And the best way to do this is with some role-playing inside your sales team or the sales manager. Or, you know, one of my favorite places to get practiced up is when you're driving in traffic to the steering wheel, you know, practice at the steering wheel, and get those elevator pitches nailed down with the various different value propositions. Now, adapting the message and looking for the highest conversion talk track should always be the thing in the back of our mind. So we're trying to nail the value proposition, we're working on the different elevator pitches, and then we're adapting the message.   Practice Makes Perfect Now the first place we should do this before we actually start cold calling is just doing some practicing with some trusted advisors, or some colleagues, or people who have been there, done that in the space, mentors. Maybe it might be that we could say, "Hey, I'm working on this new cold-calling technique here. I want to try it on you." Now I know that that causes some anxiety when you first start it. But after a while, you'll start to realize that this work that you're doing before you ever do it with a prospect is very, very valuable because you're also going to keep adapting the message when you start talking to your prospects. So the cold-call technique you'll use at the beginning might look completely different in a couple of months. And that's what I seem to be finding. I actually like cold calling, and that's not me just being sadistic. I really enjoy it. It's one of the things that I had the biggest challenge with earlier in my career. And, you know, one of the places where we do some cold calling is when we're at conventions, and I've learned a lot when you're working in conventions. You're walking up to people that you don't even know, and it's a great place to hone those elevator pitches to learn how to be able to pivot right on the spot, have your head on a swivel, and to just move that presentation. You know, see here's the thing. I was cold calling all day, and I got rejected a whole bunch of times. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. You are going to get rejected. That's just part of cold calling. You actually have to be embracing the rejection. You've got to be learning from every one of the rejections that you're getting. And I'm not just talking about an objection, I'm talking like an outright, "No, I have no time for you," because what that rejection is teaching you is that you don't have it nailed down yet. You've got to come up with some sort of compelling reason for that person that you're cold calling to have the conversation with you. Now, here's something that I learned a long time ago, that prospect put their pants on one leg at a time just like you did. There really is no difference. They're not on a pedestal or anything like that. They're just a human being like you, and you've got to come up with a way to connect with them. And one of the best ways to do that is to be nice, be Canadian-nice. Like, be really nice. And the person that you want to be the nicest to is the gatekeeper because a lot of times, the art of cold calling is getting by that gatekeeper to the person that you really want to talk to. And you need to be able to put a value proposition in front of the gatekeeper that they will move you to the next stage and getting you speaking to the person who may be the decision maker.   Know When to Walk Away Now, the other piece is I want you to be prepared to walk away. Part of embracing rejection is realizing when there's not an opportunity there, when there's not a fit. I find that sales in 2019 is as much about disqualifying the prospect as it is about qualifying the prospect because, you know, the one thing we don't have more of is time. There's only a finite amount of time that we have, and we want to deploy those hours against the biggest opportunities. So cold calling can be very effective at you being able to figure out which prospects are the best fit for your organization. So here's some of George's top tips for cold calling, and I have come up with just a few things. So you want to practice your elevator pitches until they're 100% um free. What um does is it takes away from whether I should listen to you or not. If you stand there, and you're searching for words, and you're going, "Uh, ah, uh," you know, that's not an effective cold call. You've not practiced enough. And then have reference customers ready to go. I don't mean names that you can use, I mean names, and phone numbers, and email addresses that you can give to people to say, "Here's someone I work with that will vouch for me." Those testimonials are vitally important in 2019, especially when we're dealing with potential buyers that know more about the product or service than we do that we're representing, and, also, it's super easy for them to do research on us. So, you want to have those reference customers ready to go. You know, one of the ways that I have found, and one of the exercises that I found, and, you know, I want you to channel your inner Alex Trebek "Jeopardy!" What a fantastic show. We've found that if you go online, there's a thing called jeopardylabs.com where you can build your own Jeopardy game and utilize that to just fire random questions out.   Ready, Set, Go! Games can Perfect Pitches And that helps you in crafting those elevator pitches and being able to deal with the various comments that are going to come at you. So, that's a great tip on being able to help craft those messages. We also have a couple exercises that we have crafted here for you. So the first one is what I like to call pitch Scattergories. At the start of each round, one player is going to either use the Jeopardy board, or spin the wheel, and come up with some random thing that they're going to have to speak about. And what I like about this is there's no patterns to it. And the fact that it's random means you got to think on your feet. So we've got a number of different categories on the wheel, we spin the wheel, we go to the Jeopardy board, and it could just be something like, you know, lead gen, and you've got to come up with some things as to how your solution can help develop lead for the customers, or, you know, SEO, and you've just got to randomly come up with some sort of value proposition around SEO. So, you get my point. The fact that it's random in the game like Scattergories, or on a wheel of winning, or on Jeopardy, or something like that gives you the ability to just have those answers off the top of your head. Exercise number two is along the same veins, I like to call it "What's Up?" So receiving some sort of a lead from a stranger. So you're sitting with your team, and they just give you, again, that random item. It's being able to deal with the random things that come at you very quickly and confidently, and then to be able to present that value proposition. It's very cool to see how these two exercises, just these two basic exercises, can help you as a salesperson or your sales team become a lot better at that long lost art of cold calling in 2019. Now, here's a great one that I was able to do with one of my colleagues here. Just recently, we went to a convention, we walked into the room, we didn't know anybody in the room, and it was, you know, $100 bills on the table. Whoever shows up in an hour with the most business cards is going to win. It's not like you can just randomly walk up to people and ask them for your business cards. You have to have some sort of a conversation, and they also don't like it when you reach into their pockets. So, you have to have some sort of conversation to get the business card, and it gives you, you know, just some really good practice in having those conversations with random folks. Another exercise that we have used that's pretty cool is called "Sitting on a Plane." So the exercise is you got two chairs, and you are sitting first class, you got upgraded, it's fantastic, and you happen to be sitting next to the CEO of the prospect that your organization has wanted for years. They are the whale, the one that everybody talks about, the unicorn, and you are now sitting next to the CEO. How are you going to have a conversation that's compelling so that they don't go into their briefcase and grab their noise-canceling headphones? How are you going to have a conversation to keep them off the noise-canceling headphones? So that is just a couple of exercises that you might want to utilize to help you build your cold calling skills here in 2019.   Conclusion The "Conquer Local Podcast," we've got teaching episodes coming over the next few weeks, but I want to talk a little bit about the survey. We are conducting a survey, the largest survey of local sales people ever conducted, and complete details are on our website at conquerlocal.com. And when you fill out the survey, it takes like 10 minutes, 10 minutes at the most to fill this thing out. And for those 10 minutes, we're going to give you, potentially, a $5,000 prize, and that is a trip to "Conquer Local" June 10th through 13th in San Diego, California. We're looking for information inside this survey on the state of local sales. And then our team of data experts is going to distill this all down, and we will be bringing the findings from Conquer Local Survey, the largest ever survey of local sales people in upcoming episodes. And I am going to be presenting all of this information when we stand on stage at "Conquer Local," the conference that's happening June 10th through 13th. LinkedIn, the best place to reach out, and to speak to us, and to give us suggestions of what you would like to see in upcoming episodes. The other thing that we're elated by is all of the suggestions of future guests, and those are coming in like hotcakes on the LinkedIn channel as well. So, feel free to reach out with suggestions of who we should interview here on the "Conquer Local Podcast". My name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.

Does the first call decide the fate of the sale? Is the closing call becoming due diligence? This week on the Conquer Local podcast, we are joined by Nick Roshon, VP of Sales for Neil Patel Digital. Nick shares his knowledge on discovery calls, pipeline management, leveraging sales technology, and his three-legged stool analogy for finding great sales talent. —   Introduction George: It's the latest edition of the Conquer Local podcast and we're continuing our special episodes recorded at the Conquer Local Conference in San Diego this year, and coming up next, the Vice President of Sales for Neil Patel Digital. It's Nick Roshon and he will be with us in just a moment right here on the Conquer Local podcast. George: We've got Nick Roshon with us here in our mobile studio at the Conquer Local Conference at the beautiful Hotel del Coronado. It's cloudy today, Nick, and yet it's still beautiful here. San Diego is amazing. Nick: Yeah, I'm a local and I'll never leave. I started in Ohio and San Diego is just the best place I've ever lived. It's great here. George: Well, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have a veteran of sales to join us and we want to, first let's talk about, you're the VP of Sales for Neil Patel Digital. Tell us what Neil Patel Digital is. Nick: Neil Patel Digital, we are an online marketing agency. We specialize in SEO and paid ads. Neil, many of you may know if you don't, he gets about 3 million visitors a month to his website. He has a podcast, a YouTube channel. He was named by Obama as a top entrepreneur. He's got a wealth of accomplishments, but what he's really known for is being a growth hacker. Nick: He's at the bleeding edge of marketing, trying new things, crazy experiments, just always out there doing really cool stuff. He created this agency to help bring some of those visionary ideas to anyone from an SMB to the Fortune 500. My job is to help translate all the fun, crazy stuff Neil's doing into actionable and replicable strategies for our clients. George: Well, I was very familiar with your organization. I wanted you to educate our listeners, but a friend of mine, Kelly Shelton, moved over to run Utah for you. Nick: Yeah, Kelly's phenomenal, we are lucky to have him. He previously worked at Boostability, knows the SMB space really, really well. Just a super nice guy. George: Interesting seeing, I've known Kelly for a number of years in his time at Boostability, because we partner with Boostability. I would classify him as one of the smarter people that I've ever met. Is that the quality that you're looking for in talent inside the organization? Nick: I hope so. Neil has the advantage of already having the brand and people really trust Neil, because he's been out there for 10-plus years. What Neil really cares about is less making money and more about, how do we make sure everyone gets a great experience and they're in good hands? If we didn't have really smart people, there would be a huge disconnect from what Neil is saying publicly and what we're doing for our customers. George: I think that in the world that we live in today, the business clients that we're talking to on a daily basis are looking to be educated or to have somebody that knows what they're talking about or is on the cutting edge. Nick: Yeah. From a sales perspective, we'll say the challenger sales methodology, right, of teaching people commercially, but Neil's been doing that accidentally without that framework forever. How do we turn things on their head, state things in a different way that gets people interested and curious? Even the Fortune 500 are coming to us saying, "All right, I know the importance of these things, but the rest of my organization doesn't, so help me sell this through and help me teach my organization why I need to care about things like Google reviews or title tags and all these things that are otherwise boring to the C-suite and business owners."   Teaching and Training Are Vital for Success George: It's interesting, I've been selling for quite some time and I have noticed that all of the podcast episodes that we've had with guests in the last probably 14 months, the word teaching comes up. In sales today, if you do not have an element of being able to teach and coach the prospect or the account, you're just lost, aren't you? Nick: 100%, yeah. I mean, I think the biggest rap I see sales reps make is on that first discovery call, they ask a bunch of questions and they make the prospect do all the talking, and then they don't educate or share a point of view or give them any reason to be excited. So the prospect leaves that call saying, "Hey, I just volunteered 45 minutes of my time and information, I got nothing back in return." They're probably not going to follow up with you and stay in your sales funnel, whereas, if you start in that first call delivering value and teaching them, they're hooked. They are looking forward to that next call and they don't feel like, "Hey, I just spent all, I invested all my time in you and got nothing in return." It's at least a reciprocal relationship. George: We go back to the old-school sales training where it's say you should only be talking one-third of the time. I don't know if there necessarily is a mathematical equation that you can put against that first call anymore, because you have to be leading the call, but you do need to get some information out of the prospect. Nick: Yeah, we like to say, "Wow them on every call." A discovery call, I mean, how excited would anyone be to say, "Oh, a discovery call, that's going to be awesome"? No one wakes up every day and it's like, "I can't wait to get on discovery calls with a sales rep," but how can we get closer to that? That's our thing. Whether it's a wow statement upfront or it's throughout, how do we blend that? We use a technology called gong. Have you heard of that? George: No, I haven't. Nick: It automatically joins all your calls and transcribes the entire conversation and then produces analytics at the end, so I can tell if a rep talked 75% of the time. I can tell how long it asked. It can even have code words to say, "They talked about price in the first five minutes." I don't listen to all my reps' calls, but I get alerts, and if they talked too much or were leading with price rather than value, I automatically know and I can coach them and to say, "Hey, that sounds like it didn't go very well. You should go listen to your own recording. Give me your notes, and I can do the same if you need more help." George: My background is from the radio space, and I spent about 15 years in the radio business doing play-by-play hockey and morning shows, and then I always held an account list. The air check that was done with the program manager, and I did a lot of air checks with program managers in the early part of my career, and then I started doing the aircheck. All of those skills have come back around because we're able to record the calls of our salespeople and we're able to start to look for problems. Is this something that, as VP of Sales of Neil Patel Digital, is this something that you're teaching your sales managers on a regular basis? Nick: Yeah, I'm trying to, and it's great. Neil makes it really easy. If you just listen to his podcast, YouTube, you can get sound bites to repeat, but everyone, we're always talking about, how do we lead with value? Another quote I like to say is, “If you can restate the customer's problem better than they can, then you've just won them over.” Doing that means you have to understand them first, but then be able to apply a framework or a teaching methodology to restate their problem in a more compelling way.   Navigating the Pipelines and Prospects George: Well, I was excited to get you cornered here, so we could talk sales. I'm already gathering this can be a great conversation, so let's talk about pipelines and the stages of pipelines. I see a lot of times where a rep is trying to rush things through the pipeline, because we've been doing a lot of work with media companies and it was very transactional sale. Get in the client, get the deal closed, move on to the next one, but when you're dealing with a stage sale and maybe a higher value sale with lots of digital marketing solutions in there to solve problems, if you rush it through, you might miss out on capturing more value from the customer or misaligned expectations. How often do you see that? Nick: All the time. I like talking about what we screw up more than what we do right. The biggest mistake we made early on was, we would get these really hot leads. They were like a friend of Neil's or someone that's like, "Hey," in the first call would just come out and say like, "I really want to work with you guys." And so we were like, "Great, this is a 'layup.' I'm just going to jam them through. I'm going to send them a proposal right after the first call and, boom, I'm going to get my nice commission check and move on." What we found is that, when you got too excited and you tried to speed it up, you lost those layups. Nick: There's nothing more embarrassing or painful than bricking a layup, to use the sports analogy. We've actually, I put in almost hurdles or roadblocks for my sales team, so the hotter the lead is, the more important it is you slow down. Make it so this is the easiest decision they've ever made, which means they have to go through the same rigor as everyone else, get the same level of care, if not more, and if you give that 10 X effort on the "layup," there's no chance they're going to miss that. Whereas, if you get excited and let your expectations get a hold of you, there's a chance you get sloppy and everyone loses. George: We've done a massive survey of the audience that we have of the Conquer Local podcast, the salespeople that we have logged into the platform, and then our followers on LinkedIn. What we found, it was really interesting in the data, was salespeople that have between one and five years worth of experience express that presenting and closing were two of the skills they had a big problem with, but as soon as we moved into those people that have been doing it now five to 10 years, 10 to 15, 20 years beyond, those weren't even an issue anymore. So, when you onboard a new salesperson, how much time are you spending on those two pieces? Nick: Almost none, crazy enough. My best sales rep, his name's Andrew, he's phenomenal at discovery calls. What he always tells me and told me when I first met him was, "I win or lose that deal on the first call. How I set things up, how I frame things to them, how I get to know them. The rest of it becomes really, really easy if we have a connection and I understand their problem. If I don't and that first call goes badly, then I don't care how great the pitch is going to be. I'm now chasing a lost cause." George: Wait, what you're saying then is, let's focus on the first call, getting the right information, discovering the real problem, and then the presentation, and that really takes care of itself? Nick: Right. Yeah. I like to say there should be no surprises in the presentation. At this point, you've already primed them. You've told them what they're going to get, our methodology, how we think, so then it's just the payoff. It's the formal dog-and-pony show, because everyone feels like they need that. It's part of their "due diligence," but by the time they get there, we'll have at least two to three discovery calls. Nick: On the SMB side, maybe one or two, but they're still having enough touch points that nothing's going to wow them, or not wow them, but not surprise them. They're going to know what to expect and everything ... There's no cognitive dissonance. It's like, "All right, you gave me exactly, you tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them what you told them." So the pitch is really the tell them what you told them. George: When we get to that pitch, maybe I'm reaching here, but if we do the correct discovery calls, we gather those nuggets, could we just programmatically design the presentation based upon certain questions being answered a certain way? Nick: To an extent maybe. We'll actually send out questionnaires and make sure we have a lot of information. There's definitely a formula or a playbook or a starting point, but those little touches go a long way. I mentioned we record a lot of our calls. I'll have the reps go listen to that first call, and remember little things like a pain point they mentioned, their kids, their favorite sports team, what have you. Nick: If you can find little ways to pay those off, it's really, really powerful, because then it shows ... The other feedback we got when we lost deals was, "I felt like you didn't understand my business as well as the other guys." It wasn't about, "You didn't understand SEO or your presentation was ugly and had too much clip art," or any of the things that people get hung up on, it was, "You don't understand me and my company well enough," and that happens in discovery. It doesn't happen in the pitch.   Knowing the Business and a Personal Touch Make All the Difference George: I really appreciate you bringing that up, because I believe in younger salespeople that they believe, "I've got the right solution for this person." We are going to get Re-challenge Yourself. That's the only sales book you ever read. You're going to have a really rocky road because there is that rapport that needs to be built and people want to do business with people that are likable. Nick: Yeah, 100%. George: So, when you were talking about the kid's birthdate, things you remembered about the business, are you finding that that's something that you have to teach? Nick: It's one of those things I think when you're hiring sales reps, it's better to find someone who naturally gravitates towards that, is an empathetic person than to try to teach it. It's generally people don't care about others, they're probably not going to do very well as a sales rep. So either you hire experienced people, and if they're high performers, they probably didn't get there without developing that empathy and that curiosity, but if they're new and young and fresh out of school, look for that. See if they take an interest in you in the interview. Nick: Maybe they LinkedIn stalk you and realize, "Hey, you're from Ohio originally, I saw this movie that took place there." They go out of their way to show a little bit. Or the other interview question I love is, "What book have you read? What podcast have you listened to recently? What's something that inspired you?" If they can't give me anything that they've done to go out of their way to learn and improve, then maybe they don't have that natural curiosity or spark that they'll need in sales to be successful. George: Well, how important do you think being competitive and wanting to be at the top of the leaderboard is today? Nick: It's a great question. I don't really know, other than correlation wise, pretty much everyone I've worked with is hyper-competitive either with themselves or with the other reps, myself included, even on the dumbest things, I'm competitive about it. It definitely helps. I mean, I think it's the blend. Nick: If you're strictly competitive and you don't care about the relationship and the empathy for others, then you're going to be that lone wolf rep that no one likes working with and burns out eventually, but if you're too touchy-feely and caring and not at all competitive, then all you're going to do is really build a lot of great leads and none of them ever convert. Nick: So it's a bit of a three-legged stool, you got to have the three attributes to succeed, the relationships, the competitiveness and the subject matter expertise and having two of the three you can get some results, but it's going to be limited. George: Thank you for bringing up lone wolf. I love that analogy. The lone wolf never becomes an excellent sales leader as far as a manager then. They end up selling used cars at 50-some odd years old. Nick: Yeah. George: We've seen that a million times. A phenomenal salesperson hits their quotas, sometimes they're up, sometimes they're down, but they just cannot make that transition to leading a team of people. Nick: Yeah, it's tragic. I think the biggest warning sign for me is, you just have to be coachable and I think you have to be your own harshest critic. If you are constantly thinking about, how do I do that better, there's a book, Extreme Ownership, it's Navy SEALs mentality. If you think about, even if it was out of your control, what could you have done differently, if you have that kind of a mindset, you're always going to get better as a sales rep, and you're always going to think about ways to get stronger. If you're always like, "Oh, that prospect was wasting my time," and blaming other people or taking that lone wolf approach, your results are going to be limited. If you have all that raw talent to make it as a lone wolf, think how much better you could do if you just took it that next step. George: Listen, did you pull out the Extreme Ownership by Jocko and Leif, because we are just down the street from the Navy SEAL training base here in San Diego? Nick: Well, I live here in San Diego. It's a huge military town. My wife actually works for the VA, so I am steeped in that culture to an extent, but I also love just reading about people that push the boundaries of what's possible. That gets me excited. Competitive with themselves, another Navy SEAL story is David Goggins. I don't know if you read about him, but his main mentality is the 40% rule. We have this guy, Jesse Eisler, his wife is Sarah Blakely of Spanx, but Jessie's also done some amazing things. Had him go do as many pull-ups as he could. I think he got about 40 in, then David Goggins said, "Great, we're not leaving the gym until you do 100." Nick: So he would do one pull up, walk around, do another one. They stayed there for like eight, 10 hours, something like that until he got all 100 done. And he said, "Here's the lesson, when you think you're at your maximum capacity, you've really only used 40%. You've got to grind it out for the remaining 60%." That's an extreme example, our sales reps aren't doing 100 pull-ups on a day, but when you think about, "All right, let me do one more call today. How do I just like, I think I'm tapped out. How do I go just a little bit further?" Because every other sales rep is saying, "Oh, I'm doing the max I can do in a day." So that one extra step, that one extra pull up differentiates you from the other company, the other sales rep, that's only taking it so far. George: Well, I'm definitely going to read that book. I bought 15 copies of Extreme Ownership and handed them out to all of our leaders in the organization about two years ago. Thanks to John Jordan for introducing me to that book, another guest on the podcast. Digital marketing, presenting these solutions to customers, what's the one thing, if we were just to pick up one thing that salespeople could be better at that you've seen across your organization?   What Can Salespeople Be Better At? Nick: That's a great question. I think it's really learning the craft of digital marketing because there's thousands of agencies out there. A lot of them are, from what I've heard, the sales stories are pretty undifferentiated, "Oh, I pulled some tools. Your rankings are no good. They beat the customer up. Here's why you're terrible. We'll help fix it all for you." Everyone's got a little bit of that same story. If the sales rep can show that they're able to think a little differently, actually explain technical things in an easy-to-digest manner, then they can win over that trust a little bit more and say, "This guy really knows what he's talking about," or gal. Nick: Whereas, if you're taking that sort of, "Here's what the tool said, here's what my subject matter experts said," it starts to feel a little cookie cutter. So to me it's equal parts marketing and sales, Neil's podcasts, I'll plug that shamelessly or anything else, like watch HubSpot blog, Moz blog, doesn't really matter, but the reps that are going out there to learn the marketing side of things as well, they're going to be the ones that are successful, because they're able to lead with ideas rather than with sales pressure or sales tactics or the perfect clothes or something like that. George: I creeped you before we came into the podcast and- Nick: I thought about that. George: LinkedIn is my favorite place to do that, because I think it speaks to whether somebody really understands digital space. Now, I didn't just look at you, I looked at some of your colleagues as well. Nick: Okay. okay. George: Is that something from a corporate standpoint that is mandated or is that you guys are just smart enough to know that you need to be really locked up on LinkedIn? Nick: Great questions. I wouldn't say it's mandated but highly encouraged. LinkedIn's a powerful tool and HubSpot will pull in a lot of other data to figure out what blog posts are read by Neil, where they converted, what they put in the form. So the more research you do up front, obviously the better you're going to be prepared, even simple things like looking at the prospect’s website, their about us page, their history, little tidbits like that. Nick: If you're asking "straightforward" or easily findable answers on their website in a discovery call, you're going to turn them off. They can be like, "You should have done this before." So getting to know that. And then we also have a psychographic data where we can try to pinpoint someone, are these a relationship buyer? Is this person highly analytical? Is this person really competitive? And then you know what points to touch on in your presentation and elsewhere. George: Some personality profile, like a disc or something like that? Nick: Yeah. Exactly. George: And teaching that to a young salesperson. So, of course, let's put them through it with the rest of the team to see it, but then for them to be able to take those questions out and sit across from that prospect and say, "Okay, I've got a pretty good idea what this person's all about and I know how to approach them." Nick: To the best of our ability, there's definitely a psychological component to all of it, and that's where I think discovery can be done well. Again, I'm harping on the first call so much, but you can, if you're really actively listening and not just jotting down the notes, you'll pick up on the way that they present problems and how they speak and the things that really matter to them beyond just the immediate pain point of today.   Recruiting Top Talent: A Step-By-Step Process George: As you build out the sales organization all over the United States, what's been some of the challenges in recruiting top talent? Nick: Oh, it is the challenge. There's nothing harder. We have great recruiters, most of our best reps though have come through our network. Folks that we worked with in the past, but to me, it's finding that three-legged stool analogy. It's hard to find all three, so we started to figure out, "All right, maybe they don't know the marketing space as well, but we can train them and pair them with an SME to help scale." Nick: That's really, really hard. I think the other thing that's hard is just, the hyper-competitive reps, they want to get ahead, they want to move to the next rung of the ladder really, really fast, but there's no better way to get good at your craft than spend the time and really perfect each level before you move to the next one. So some of it's aligning. George: How many interviews are you using right now to determine if that's the right person? Nick: We'll do a screener interview with a recruiter and she's looking at things on paper, making sure they check all the boxes. I'll typically do a 45-minute interview over the phone where I'm just making sure that this is a good fit for what they've done in the past. They need to be as excited about it as we are for them. Then, we'll usually do an assignment. I'll maybe give them a fake lead, or a real lead sometimes, and say, "Hey, let's have a discovery call. I'm going to roleplay as the prospect, you're going to role play as a rep here. Make stuff up if you don't know on our agency, that's not what I'm trying to figure out." Nick: We'll go through the call. If I like what I hear, I'll say, "Great, let's do an hour and a half interview." We use the Who methodology, another great book, and really go into each position, what they've done, what they struggled with, what they enjoy doing. If that all looks good, we'll sort of figure out internally, where do we still have blind spots and that's where references come in. Or maybe we'll give them a last assignment like, "Hey, now that we know you can do a good discovery and you've got good experience, pitch us, sell us something." I'll either give you a presentation or just use whatever you've used in the past. It doesn't really matter. George: You've now identified the top talent. You took him through a rigorous interview process, which is fantastic by the way, I love that you're doing that. Long to hire, long to fire. I always say, but then we go to put them on the street. What does the onboarding look like? Nick: It's interesting, we have a unique problem in that Neil's got a lot of leads, so we try to just get people into the mix rather quickly and learn by doing, with supervision of course, but after about a week or so of just, listen to the recordings of the other reps, look at the scripts, go through the presentation. That's the other reason I don't teach the pitch in the first week is, you're a couple of weeks out to building that pipeline to actually have pitches lined up, so focus on one thing at a time. Nick: Drinking from the fire hose is really hard when you're trying to learn 10 things, but if you're really focused on great discovery calls and getting to that first advance, then we'll build on that from there. So I just really focus on, here's how you're going to research a lead, here's how you're going to open a call. Here's how you're going to handle the discovery call. My scripts are pretty loose, so it's like a recommended, here's the order, spend 10 minutes on them, 10 minutes on the company, 10 minutes on the marketing challenges, and then maybe 10 minutes on qualifying. Nick: Then here's some sample questions, but it's a choose your own adventure. The worst thing you can do is wait for them to finish their answer, shut up and then ask them the next question. Listen, drill down, engage with them and not worry about the script in terms of, did I get the sequence right or did I ask all the questions in the right order? George: Is there a milestone that they have to reach before they're able to go out and start writing orders? Nick: Not necessarily. If you're joining as a NAE account executive, generally we're hiring people that are pretty experienced with the hope that they can hit the ground running. If you're joining as an SDR, BDR, yeah, then there's a bit more of a couple more hoops you got to jump through.   Conclusion George: I got a feeling we could go on for hours. I really appreciate you giving us this brief 20 minutes or so of your time. Thank you for coming to Conquer Local. Nick Roshon is the VP of sales for Neil Patel Digital. I hear that name everywhere. Congratulations on your success and good luck as you continue to grow that business. Nick: Thanks for having me. It's been a great event. I love what you guys are doing here and I would love to come back any time. George: Well, as you could tell, Nick and I love talking sales, and we were able to dig into some real interesting stories around bringing onboard new sales talent. Nick is doing a lot of that as he continues to build out his sales organization. They've got that great brand, the Neil Patel Digital brand, but now they need to staff it with a sales force. George: You'll notice that Nick is a real big believer in teaching and coaching the prospect, and the onboarding of those salespeople is that most important window where if you get them onboarded properly, they bring their customers on properly, you're able to have a happy client that then continues to stay with the organization and, hopefully, grows their revenue as you work with that customer. Great having Nick on the show this week, Nick Roshon, the VP of Sales for Neil Patel Digital on this week's episode of the Conquer Local podcast. George: The Conquer Local community is live and it continues to grow pretty much on a daily basis. It's really cool to watch this thing. It's just got a life of its own. You can join by going to conquerlocal.slack.com. We chose slack as the framework to host this community. It makes it really easy for you to spin up a channel if you want to talk about, how do I sell to veterinarians? You could do that inside the Conquer Local community, or you might find a channel that's already been created. George: There's a great channel in there with sales memes, or there's another channel where we talk about how to compensate your salespeople and the members of the community are weighing in. It's just great to get that feedback from salespeople all over the world that have already joined the Conquer Local community. It's early, we're in the early innings, but it's looking good as the Conquer Local community grows on Slack. So tell your friends, get on there, conquerlocal.slack.com. My name is George Leith. I'll see when I see you.

Every organization that is conducting business for profit is dealing with some sort of disruption and they need to be thinking about reorganization. We have a series of episodes coming at you from Conquer Local 2019 where we snagged some infamous people in the sales and digital marketing realm. Matt Dosch, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Comporium, joins us to discuss how a business reorganizes itself after transitioning to digital. Matt explains that it isn't a one-time fix but rather an ongoing notion that always needs to be evaluated. How does an organization handle people that have been there for 25 years, or employees who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, or 50s? Each cohort of employees have different things they care about, different things that drive them, and different things that are important to them. George and Matt explore the level of aptitude a leader should have by speaking to the people they work with on a day-to-day basis. Matt joined Comporium, the nation’s 13th largest incumbent telephone company and 27th largest cable company, in 1994 and has served in a variety of capacities within the enterprise, culminating in his current position. Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer, he is responsible for designing and implanting relevant business strategies, plans, and procedures to achieve short- and long-term strategic goals. He oversees business development, sales, installation and repair, and customer care.   Introduction George: Welcome to the latest edition of the Conquer Local podcast. Over the next few editions, we are going to be interviewing folks that attended Conquer Local 2019 in San Diego, California. And my first guest in this series is Matt Dosch, the COO of Comporium. Comporium is a 125-year-old broadband company, and I have had the privilege of working with this organization over the last six years and I met Matt a few months back and you know, spent some time chatting with him. He's a super smart guy and has a lot of history when it comes to the reorganization strategies that they have deployed inside the telecommunications company, known as Comporium. George: Comporium is in the Carolinas and they started out 125 years ago putting copper wires on poles and delivering phone service. And if you think about the telecommunications business, there's been an enormous amount of disruption inside that space and reorganization strategies needed to be deployed and they'd been doing it for a long time, so I think you're going to find some great learnings from Matt as I ask him questions about how in the telecommunications business they have been managing this transformation. The other thing I'm going to ask him about is I hear rumblings that the telecommunications business is getting into the digital marketing business. We'll find out what Matt has to say when we return with this edition of the Conquer Local podcast with Matt Dosh, COO of Comporium coming up next. George: It's another edition of the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith, thanks for joining us. We are live on location at Conquer Local conference in Beautiful San Diego, California, and we have the privilege of meeting folks that are attending the conference and you know, wrangling them into our studio here that we've set up at the beautiful hotel Coronado. And my first guest of this entire event is Mr. Matt Dosch, the COO of Comporium. Matt, thanks for joining us. Matt: Thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here. George: So I had a chance to meet Matt face to face a number of months ago. We actually went to a football game together. Thanks for the invite, and you know we got to talk business at the Comporium luxury suite in beautiful Panthers Stadium, and when I saw that Matt was on the Attendee List for the conference, I'm like we need to get him here as a guest, and I just want to set the table a little bit. George: You know, Comporium is a very large organization based out of Rock Hill, South Carolina. Fantastic city just over the border from North Carolina. And we're going to find out what makes Matt tick and what makes Comporium tick, as Chief Operating Officer. Matt, you're responsible for the operations of this company. And let's talk a little bit about Comporium, what is Comporium? And you know, how many customers and how many staff work for your organization? Matt: Comporium is based in the southeast, as you said, out of South Carolina. We've got a little over 1,100 employees right now, and we serve around 130,000 broadband customers. We are today a broadband first company. Our history though, we are 125-year-old telecom company. We started out as Brockville Telephone Company in 1894. George: So you know, a 125-year-old company, when I think of that and with 1,100 some odd employees, it's a very large organization, a lot on your shoulders as the chief operating officer. And we're gonna talk disruption today because you know, the interesting thing is you folks in the telecom space have been disrupted quite a while ago and we've got a lot of listeners to our podcast that, you know, maybe are media sales reps or they're running a digital marketing company and they're like, "Oh my God, things are changing so fast." But you've been dealing with that state of change as a telecommunications company? Matt: Yeah, I mean, I've been with Comporium for 25 years, and I came to Comporium in the middle of the injection of competition into our industry in the mid-nineties. And we thought that was disruptive, and then it just snowballed and got more and more and more insane. And I would say the last ten years, the last five years, change management is what we do every single day in a variety of ways. George: So for some of our listeners that may not know this, if you look back in time in the telecommunications space, you really had a monopoly in the markets. And then competition came in where you could get your telecommunication needs from anywhere? Matt: That's right. And actually, 20 years of my 25-year history with Comporium was working in the regulatory environment. So I can look back now and say I was paid to try to keep competition out of our space, but that was a train that had already left the station. So yeah, I mean through legislative changes, academically, we started facing competition like I said, in the mid-nineties. But in the case of Comporium, really it's been in the last ten years, quite frankly we were pretty good and still pretty strong up through the crash of 2008. Coming out of that, it's just been, it's just been bar the door. It's been very competitive. Our bread and butter product used to be telephone service, you know, news alert, people are taking their telephones out. Matt: So we were seeing dramatic revenue declines from telephone service. We're a cable company, the cable, the video industry is very complicated. A lot of disruptive changes from a financial standpoint for traditional cable television companies. So that revenue stream is in decline, so we are all about diversifying and finding new lines of business and a new value proposition between us and our customers.   Diversification and Community Involvement = Thriving in the New World  George: So when we talk about diversification, because you know, I think that, I love that word actually, rather than a transition of the business, you're just looking to diversify the revenue. You've made some strategic investments as well in other organizations that were maybe adjacent to what you were doing today. And I saw some press releases and you know, that's a strategic plan that you have? Matt: Absolutely. And it started really probably about 15 years ago, between 10 and 15 years ago. When we saw that we weren't getting access anymore to the most up-to-date technology. And one of the things that was coming along ten years ago was the Internet of things. And so we decided to buy into a Internet of things platform company, which is very successful and grew and was bought out and became part of the Cable MSO space. But that was sort of our first foray into making an acquisition that gave us access to technology that we wanted to provide to our own traditional customers. And we've done that several times since with digital signage, and some other companies. George: So a couple of years back, I was in Rock Hill and I had the privilege of hosting a seminar for your local business folks through the digital marketing side of your company, which is, you know, that was born out of the directory side. And I remember I was invited down to this nice building in downtown Rock Hill to do a television interview preceding the seminar that I was doing. So could we talk a little bit about that cable side of the business because in that community, that local community channel is a pretty important piece to the community, and you folks, you know, sell advertising on that and you know, that's part of the business as well? Matt: Yeah. Really it's kind of a unique little line of business, but it really symbolizes a couple of things that we think are core strengths of Comporium. One, as you say, is community involvement. We compete with the largest companies in the world. You know, we're competing with Level Three, CenturyLink, AT&T day in and day out. So you know, what is Comporium's value proposition compared to those companies? Verizon, and part of it is that we've said for 125 years, we're not selling at our customer base, we're not selling down into a market, we're selling to our friends and neighbors and we're part of the markets that we are providing service in. Matt: So that that little television station, which we put on our cable system is something that we've been doing for quite some time and we were one of the early ones to provide very, very hyperlocal news as a product differentiator for our cable system we've been chugging away for I think, 25 years. George: So I have a now-famous joke that I've made a number of times that I think Rock Hill should just rename itself Comporium Ville because of your footprint in the market. Now, the reason that I say that, when you go into downtown Rock Hill, you've got the fountains and you've got the, you know, but it's, it's more than that when you talk about community involvement, because I know that you've been donating and you've been doing a lot of things in the community and you have some pet projects of Comporium that you know, you folks are very involved in? Matt: Absolutely. And again, it goes back to that, you know, it's a family-owned business. It's a private company, 125 years old. The CEO, my boss is fourth generation. We've got fifth generation family members running around the company, young managers learning the business. And so part of our DNA as a corporation is community service. Which is both a blessing and a curse. We can talk about that a little bit, but it's certainly really, it is absolutely a part of our DNA. So whether it's things like donations and you know, we support a lot of things financially, but we also have a group of employees and retirees called the Comporium pioneers. And they're a volunteer for us to go out and do Habitat for Humanity projects and other things like that. Matt: And, and we just look for all kinds of ways to make sure that we are, again, it's sort of an old-school economic development idea, right? I mean give back to the people that made you successful. And if we invest in the community, the community will grow and that'll be to the benefit of everybody. So we've been doing that for a long time. George: So I've got some news for our listeners. The telecommunications companies are coming. And what I mean by that is there is a plan inside your organization for your business salespeople that have been selling broadband and have been selling, you know, data storage and had been selling phone systems to now start working with digital marketing solutions to help those businesses even more. Can you explain that strategic move that you've made? Matt: Absolutely. And really it started out on the smaller scale. Our entry into digital marketing probably again between ten and 15 years ago, was based out of necessity because we were a Yellow Pages publisher. And as the Internet was coming along and everything was going online, first we dabbled in IYP products and then as Google and individual websites arose, we got into the website business and we really transitioned the company from simply explicitly selling Yellow Page ads to, you know, generically providing leads for our customers. Right? And so that all moved online, that has become, and that was a very pure play within the larger organization. Matt: So if you sort of zoom out of that part of the organization, the broadband company as a whole, as I said before, we're looking for new revenue, we always need new things to bring to the table to bring to our customers. And this digital advertising has been very successful for us. And so we're moving in a bigger way into this sort of the mainline sales force of the company, so to speak. George: So for those of you listening to the podcast, you remember a few episodes back, we had a Lyndon Munetsi from Telcom business in South Africa talking about this exact same thing where they're merging together the digital services team with the telecom team, Peter Urmson when he was on the podcasts from Spotsor talked about this, they worked with Telstra in Australia. It's definitely happening in the Carolinas with Comporium. Do you know of other telecommunications companies that are doing this same type of thing? Matt: They all are. They all are. I've been very active in my career personally in national trade association activities forever, and as much as independent broadband companies are different in their markets in different their approach to the market. They're all facing the same larger macro issues. And so everybody is looking for a way again, to modernize it in the same way that we were, you know, a telephone company and now we're broadband companies as an industry, and the same way we were Yellow Page publishers and now we're getting into the digital marketing, we're all looking for ways to bring a robust portfolio of services to meet the needs of our customer, soup to nuts.   Change Management - Everything Old Is New Again, with a Few Adjustments George: So folks, you know, giving you the background with Matt and his work at Comporium and some of the changes that they're making, I want to shift gears a little bit now and just talk about some of the learnings that you've had from making those transitions. Because I get asked all the time by folks, you know, how do I go to work tomorrow knowing that things are gonna change? And I don't even know what the future might hold. And you know, how do I get used to change management? And I believe that you folks in the telecommunications have been dealing with change management for quite some time. Now my parents would probably the last people to get rid of their landline, and I think they just did that here recently. They have two cell phones and have had them quite some time. And you know, we're Scottish. So my mom was like, you know, "Why are we still spending that?" George: But it was really hard for them because it was part of their DNA. You've been dealing with that for quite some time where people were getting rid of that line and moving into the cellular space. Then we've got your cable part of the business that's been transitioning and inside all of that are people and there's 1,100 people that have to deal with that transition and you've been doing it for a long time. What, you know, what are some of the things that you bring to your management style and the way that you're running the company to help deal with that change management? Matt: Well, yeah, we can talk about that for quite some time. I guess the external forces driving what you're talking about are multi and varied. They go to technology first and foremost, the technology is completely accelerating the pace of change and changing everything that we're doing. And with technological change comes increasingly sophisticated customers, quite frankly. And so what the customer is looking for from us initially as a telephone company, now it's a broadband company is changing. And so all of that lands on the shoulders of our employees. Right? And so, you know, I think the first way I would start talking about the answer to your question is everything that's old is new again. We went through this cycle about, let's say ten years ago where we said we need to get more aggressive, we need to start selling and stop just taking orders. We need to get out in front of our customers and really talk about what we can provide for them. Matt: And what we've learned is that while that's successful, and that was probably a necessary thing for us to do, we've really come back around to, it's all about relationships, right? And again, comparing us to our competitors, to the Verizon's, the AT&T's of the world. One of the things that we believe gives us a leg up when it comes to developing customer relationships is being honest, being there for the long-term, solution-based selling, talking about solutions and that kind of stuff. So it really has come all the way back around. We were perhaps by necessity a little too focused on passive customer service at one time, order taking. Then we kind of rushed headlong into we have got to be a sales organization and now I think we're kind of calibrating in the middle. We need to be a sales organization, but our success is gonna come from embracing our like historic qualities, if that makes sense. George: So at any point in time when you're making these transitions, and maybe we could use the, you know, the landline portion when you move to being broadband ... And I noticed that you said earlier in the conversation, "We are a broadband company," and I find that a little funny, you know, when an organization is making a change when they say things like that. And I see that happening a lot in the media side of the business. But you know, would you say that you reorganize the business or you have reorganization processes in place? Matt: We've done, I would say two different things. We have explicitly reorganized our sales groups two or three or four times along the lines of what I talked about, where we swung, nobody is incented strongly enough to actually sell. And so we ran in the direction of, you know, really incenting the acquisition of new customers and throwing all of our commission structure into new customer acquisition, a little too much perhaps. And realized that we were forgetting about, you know, the value of our existing customers and nurturing those relationships and so we've kind of swung that back and as we've done that, you know, there've been position title changes, commission structure changes and quite frankly people who have come and gone as we've sort of calibrated a little bit. But I think we've landed in a really good place and we still have a lot of people that have a very long history with us who can speak authoritatively about our products and services and what we're doing. So that's certainly one angle. George: The interesting thing when I walk through the halls of your organization, I've been in a bunch of buildings, I'm sure there are others that I haven't been to, I've probably been in about five different buildings and I'll get introduced to somebody and they'll be like, "Yeah, I've been with Comporium for 22 years," and, "I've been with component for 25 years." You've gone through a number of transitions of the business and yet these people are still there and when I look inside media, they're like, well, we had to move those people out that couldn't adopt the new things. And I'm like, okay, hang on. We're looking inside telecommunications and you've been able to get those folks to do other things. How is it possible? Matt: I guess one example of that perhaps is I talked about explicit organizational change and some people succeeding or failing within the sales force, but in becoming a market-driven organization and we gave a lot of lip service to that for a while. I would say in the last five years, we're really getting good at knowing what that means, being a market-driven organization, a customer-focused organization all the way through the organization, not just in the sales force. So kind of to your point, because of the nature of the sophisticated customer that I was talking about earlier, a salesperson with our product portfolio can't have infinite depth of knowledge about each one of those products, right? And so the salespeople have had to get used to talking about products to a certain extent and then bringing in subject matter experts as necessary to do things. George: So like a sales engineer? Matt: Exactly. But what that's meant is that everybody else in the organization has had to get more comfortable with that sales engineer kind of role in order to support with the sales groups were doing. And we're starting to get good at that, and I think that is going to be the key to our success going into the future. Not just tinkering with the salespeople, but the sales process as it touches the entire organization. George: So you know, sales engineers is a really interesting thing I can think of right off the top of my head, five organizations that have done a poor job at that, that I know. How have you been able to make that work? Because the rep feels like they own that customer and you want them to, and to know that customer inside and out. Now you're saying, "Okay, now you've got to bring in Coleen because she's going to speak about this solution that we have and she knows it better than you do." So how have you been able to make that work? Matt: Well, let me start off by saying that I've been with my company 25 years, the first 20 had absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about. So I was dropped into this role five years ago and I had the benefit of watching how all of these different groups interacted with each other, sort of from a dispassionate distance, right? And so when I landed in my current position, and the first conversations I had were with the salespeople in saying, everybody says we're sales oriented. We're really not. The engineers think all we're doing is doing this so that they can build a better network. The accounting people think this is all just about, you know, filling their ledgers, right? I mean everyone feels that way, right? I mean, it's organizational, you know, psychology or behavioral psychology of some sort. Matt: So to really pursue the point that you're describing, you know, it had to start with, look, the sales guys need to earn the respect of the other people in the organization. Not that they didn't have it, but they need to think everyday about bringing, speaking with authority and backing up what they're saying about the expectations of where the market is going. And that takes a while. But as it happens, and as they are proven correct about customer desires, customer needs, where the market is going, where we need to invest in products and so on, over time, people understand that and then everyone wants to get on that train because they understand that that makes customers happy. It brings more customers to us. And so I don't think it's something that you can pound the table and mandate, but once you start creating that level of trust, so to speak, and it starts permeating your organization, then you're doing something. And I think that's what I'm starting to see now.   Adjusting Management Style to Generations Is the Name of the Game  George: So let's talk a little bit about management style, in today, we've got our generation Z folks, we've got our millennial folks, we've got you and I in the baby boomer space. How does your management style change depending upon the person that's sitting across the desk from you in those various age groups? Matt: Yeah, I mean that is the name of the game of my job right now. Right? I mean, we've got people with 45 years of experience and we are desperately, you know, trying to hire new talent and people right out of college and people in college for some sales positions. I think the key is to loosen the reigns a little bit as a telecom company, a 125-year-old family owned telecom company, that checks about five boxes that say central command and control, right? And so, and again, you can sort of speak management speak and say, you know, we want empowered employees, we want this and we want that. But it's really hard to do that and it's really hard to change, you know, sort of, it shifts the direction of the aircraft carrier so to speak. But I think we are, you need to just empower people. Matt: And part of, you know, when you talk about millennials or generation Z or you know, when we bring on salespeople in particular, you know, they're already speaking the language of LinkedIn and their own sort of personal brand. And so it's a matter of linking up our corporate brand with their personal brand and allowing them to do their thing and to build their lead funnel in a very personal way that is very, very, very different than the way things have been done, you know, a generation ago. And you sort of have to just sort of take a deep breath and sit back and kind of watch that happen. And when it does happen and when each salesperson who is being researched by their prospects before they even make the phone call right, kind of a scary place to be that, but you just have to sit back and let it happen. And that's where this success comes in. George: Let's talk about sales and I know as COO, and I saw it the other day when we were in Charlotte at that event you had a bunch of your big customers there and there you were talking to customers. How much time do you spend talking to your customers? Matt: As much as my sales team needs me to, because of the nature of the business, and again, because we're in our community, it's not so formal, but I'm just involved in a myriad of grasstops organization, economic development organizations, philanthropic organizations. So my day to day role is more from that standpoint and putting a face on our company in a more organic way. You know, I think we're blessed to be outside of the Charlotte Metro area and Charlotte's booming. And so we have a lot of businesses and just residential people moving into the area and a big sophisticated business moves to town and you can sort of almost see them looking over our shoulder sometimes saying who's Comporium and how do I get to AT&T or where's Verizon and that kind of stuff, which is valid, right? But when we explain to them, you know, "Well here's who we are. The CEO lives in town, the CTO lives in town, our engineering department is in town. So if broadband is a mission-critical part of your business, then do you want to be a number with a multinational corporation or do you want to be able to pick up the phone and call the COO, the CEO, the CTO who all are neighbors of yours?   Conclusion George: That's a very compelling argument. And so, you know, just being out and about in the community is sort of my low key way of hammering that message home. Well I really appreciate you taking some time from the beach. Last year when we did our convention in beautiful Banff, Alberta, We did a number of these interviews and, and I find it to be, you know, I'd have to go all the way to Rock Hill to, to corral you in your office. So it's great to have the conversation, appreciate your partnership over the years from your organization, been big supporters of ours. And you know, I definitely, every time that I speak to you I learned some things about reorganization and the strategies that you're deploying against that inside the Comporium organization. So thanks for joining us on the podcast. Matt: Thanks for having me George, it's been great. George: Well what a great episode. I really enjoy speaking to Matt. He's a really humble guy and he's been doing this a long time and he runs a great organization. You can find out the level of aptitude that a leader has by speaking to the people that he works with on a day-to-day basis, and they speak very highly of Matt and his leadership at Comporium. Now if we look at some of the takeaways, you know, 115,000 businesses count on Comporium on a day-to-day basis and he is competing with some of the biggest companies in the world. Multinational companies that know telecommunications inside and out, they can put great pricing on, they can do, but the competitive advantage of Comporium is their people and their footprint in the marketplace. It was interesting to hear him talk about the business salespeople and how they're going to be bringing along digital marketing solutions to help solve more problems for their clients. George: They're thinking that it's going to be something that'll help differentiate them in the marketplace and give them a leg up on those big multinationals that they're competing with. But you know, the thing I want you to take away from this, Conquerors is that every single organization that's out there, that is conducting business for profit is dealing with some sort of disruption and we need to be thinking about the reorganization. And you heard what he said when I asked him the question about how does he handle people that have been there for 25 years? How does he handle people working for him that are 25, how does he handle people that are in their thirties because each one of those cohorts of employees have a different thing that they care about and a different thing that drives them or is important to them and you know they've done a lot of work inside Comporium and Matt speaks to that inside that episode to make sure that they are building a staff of that 1,100 number. That's a massive organization, making sure that they are delivering so that those employees can deliver for their customers. George: Great episode. Really appreciate Matt taking time out of the Conquer Local 2019 schedule to join us here in our remote studio in the beautiful Hotel Coronado in San Diego. Upcoming episodes, we are going to be talking to one of the smartest guys in the SEO space, and I can't wait for that. That's on the way. Plus we're getting ready to move into fall and you know it's the middle of summer right now, but I would like to get your feedback and you can come join us in our new Conquer Local community, which is on Slack and we're going to give you information inside this episode on how you can join, but what we're hoping inside the Conquer Local community on Slack is that you will be able to post questions from our various members. You'll be able to post information or links to documents or links to other podcasts or links to, you know, white papers and blogs that you're reading. George: We really wanted to grow from you, the listeners of the Conquer Local podcast. We've been Beta testing it here for the last little while. I actually belong to a couple other Slack communities. I found it's a great way for the community of Conquerors to come together and to share information. And this was my friend Mike Giamprini from 411.ca over a year ago asked me, he's like, "When are you going to get a community? It'd be great to have all of these people come together and share their information." So we're hoping we're going to be able to accomplish that. Producer Colleen has been working really hard to get it ready to go, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. We are going to be doing a lot more around the Conquer Local community to help the Conquerors worldwide that are a part of this ecosystem that we have built. So thank you for joining us. We appreciate your support. As always, my name is George Leith. I will see you when I see you.

The secret sauce has spilled! Sales prospecting tools and techniques are revealed to help Conquerors Conquer Local. Chris Montgomery, CEO of Social Ordeals, has come a long way since he first started using Vendasta's products. Chris is proud to be a Vendasta Partner and ready to share his wisdom. Chris and George explore different sales prospecting methods, how to attract the right kind of salesperson, and a few tips for the agencies and entrepreneurs of the world. Chris is a serial entrepreneur and knows what to do and what not to do when it comes to building a successful digital agency. Chris is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with over twenty-five years of sales, marketing, and digital advertising experience. He has worked with companies from their early stages of development, as well as late-stage ventures.  Chris was the founder of 411web.com, co-founded Digicities, and was responsible for the sale of the company to AmericomUSA. Chris is an innovator and uses his experience to take a realistic approach to how businesses unfold in the marketplace.   Introduction George: It's another edition of the Conquer Local podcast, and joining us on this week's episode, Chris Montgomery, the CEO of Social Ordeals from Burbank, California. I've known Chris for a number of years, he's one of our strongest agency partners around the world selling the platform and working with customers. Boy, I'll tell you, he really gets involved in the day to day operations of his business and he understands his clients very, very clearly. I can't wait to dig in to what makes a successful agency with Chris Montgomery, the CEO of Social Ordeals coming up next. George: It's the latest edition of the Conquer Local podcast. We're coming to you from the beautiful Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California as part of Conquer Local 2019. These are special editions of the podcast because we get a chance to corral some of our attendees that I've been wanting to talk to for a while. Joining us in our makeshift studio is Mr. Chris Montgomery, the CEO of Social Ordeals. Chris, thanks for joining us. Chris: Yeah, thanks for having me. George: You know, we've known each other for a number of years. I will say that Chris is probably the most successful agency that we have in the United States using the platform, and congratulations on that success. It's an interesting story how you arrived as a Vendasta partner about three or four years ago. Chris: Yeah. You know, I kind of took a break. I sold the company, thought I was semi-retired there for a little bit, got bored and made some bad investments, had to get back into the marketplace. I came across Vendasta literally on my couch one night and then turned around and became a partner. Sold my first customer from that exact same seat about a week later. George: You know, you and I met face to face at a restaurant in Marina del Rey, California here a few years ago. In that meeting you said to me, "I'm not following you on Linkedin. I'm not going to connect with you on Linkedin." What was going on with that? Chris: Well, that's a funny story because I had a lot of Vendasta people want to connect with me on LinkedIn, and I felt that, you know, I didn't want anybody knowing what I was using to get the success I was getting with my clients. The success that we got at Social Ordeals was solely off Vendasta products. That's all I sold. So I didn't want anybody to know the secret sauce. George: So interesting. That's changed a little bit. You know, what changed? Chris: I realized how hard it is to do. These sales aren't easy. At that point, it didn't matter to me if they knew about Vendasta because I've been doing this now for six years and you've got to be dedicated and make sure that you're putting your all into it. George: So I really like that we were able to have this conversation because I think what you've identified, and I've been saying this for quite some time, we have a white-label platform. That means you put your brand on it and it becomes your own thing. But the software is vitally important to help solve the problems of the customer. But it's all in the way you position it and feed it as an agency to those clients and the level of service that you provide and the way you set the expectations and the way that you understand the solution.   Understanding the Technology You Sell Is Essential George: The one thing I've always admired about you is you dig deep into the software. Like you know that thing inside and out, and we're hearing from you on this isn't working right or this could be better if we do those kinds of things. How important do you believe it is for our audience to understand the technology that they are selling? Chris: I think it's really important. I think understanding how the products work, how it's going to unfold in each industry, 'cause it will be different for each industry. I think it's important. I think the flip side of that is if you're understanding the product, you've also got to understand your client and understand their needs. If the product's not working properly, and I'm going to a client and saying, “I'm the expert with the best strategy,” then I think I get a little stressed out if the product's not working the way I need it to work. Chris: So Vendasta has been phenomenal with that and the product has always been strong. So that side has been easy for us to manage. George: When I arrived at a software company, my background is in media sales, I owned my own business for a while and I didn't really understand agile software development and what that whole concept was about. I have a much better, you know, thanks to Dale Hopkins, the CTO and the folks in the R&D department that I get to work with on a daily basis. I understand it. I think iterative improvement is a really cool thing because we’re saying, "Okay, here's the thing that we have and we get feedback from the customers." You being the customer of Vendasta, but then your customers are giving you feedback too saying, "Hey, I'm a veterinarian. I want to do these things. It doesn't quite work properly for me," but yet we're able to iterate on that with that feedback loop and to continue to improve that. Chris: I think that's strong for on the agency level to be able, if we don't have the solution, to be able to have ... I always say that I have the best technology partners behind me because I feel like I have my own programming team. If there's something that my client needs or it can work better, that's a powerful thing for me to be able to relay that to my client.   Going Up: How Products and Passion Pair to Offer Solutions George: You've got a great story, and I don't know if we want to dig into specific solutions, but I do want to tell a story about the elevator repair gentleman that you're representing. So it's one of your clients. We went for lunch here a few months back and you told me the story, and it's really stuck with me. To be able to rank for elevator repair in Los Angeles, California on the first page, how are you able to do that? Maybe give us a little background with the client. Chris: You know, it started with the fact that we are utilizing all the Vendasta products, and he quickly rose up in his first nine months into his number one position in San Dimas, California. The client was happy for a while until he realized he couldn't really put ROI on what he was doing. He said, "Chris, I love everything you're doing here, but guess what? There's no two-story buildings in San Dimas, so it doesn't matter. Nobody's searching for me in San Dimas." So he's like, "I want Los Angeles. I want Pasadena, I want this." Chris: So what we did was searched Vendasta's marketplace. We found a great product. One of their SEO products, SEO Network, and we turned around and just took the keyword that Google uses, what I call their proper search. So elevator repair was their category. There's no other category underneath that. What we realized by taking Elevator Repair Pasadena or Elevator Repair Los Angeles, that it rose up all of their keywords and all of their markets. Within three weeks we were number one on Google, Yahoo and Bing and all of those markets. George: You know, it's an amazing story. When you speak around working with your customers, I noticed something and I'd like our listeners to take this one piece away. Chris is super passionate about helping those clients and I think that's a big reason why you've had that success. Chris: Yeah. I love seeing a problem and then being very confident that the products I have will help solve that problem. That's the biggest part of sales is when you have something that you sell that doesn't really work, with these products it works. So all I have to worry about at that point is just understanding my customer and getting them to trust me to be their digital adviser, and the rest is going to fall into place because the products work. George: So this story of how you found Vendasta on the coach, technically eating some potato chips too I think is part of the story, and now 2,000 businesses that trust your agency. It's an amazing story but it definitely hasn't been easy. Chris: It hasn't been easy. I've gone through a lot of sales reps training. I still sell on a daily basis. I'm constantly in sales meetings. I jump on save calls if it's a customer ... I think you have to take the passion into it. If I have a client that I know the products are helping them and working them, and they're canceling, I'm the first guy that I'll get on and get onto a save call, but not just a save for a client that's spending a couple of hundred dollars. The fact that we're losing a relationship bothers me, and I want to understand why. If they're going somewhere else, I want to explain to them, "You're not going to get anything different going to anywhere else. The grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence. Tell me what your needs are and let's figure out what we need to do."   Road to Success Paved with Trial and Error, Hard Work and Long Hours George: Well, it's a great lesson for those that are ... maybe you come across the podcast and you're considering getting into digital marketing. Like, hey, this looks like a great thing that I'm going to do. I think it's important that people understand that there is trial and error. There's no silver bullet that's going to just make you a millionaire overnight. The other piece is there's a lot of hard work that goes into it and a lot of long hours. If you are prepared to make that investment, there definitely is a profitable business model there and a great business. When we're talking about your customer base, how important are strategic partnerships? Chris: They're a big portion of my business now. What I've realized is that there's a lot of businesses out there, either web hosting companies that aren't offering upsells, website companies that want to offer upsells, but they don't have the manpower to do the work on the back end or even membership groups that want to add value. Once you strategically partner with them and give them a piece of the action as you're going along, you're going to get a consistent lead source coming from them. I think it's the future. It's basically a paid referral coming through. George: So membership groups, the first thing that comes to my mind is Chamber of Commerce. In my immediate career, I've always worked with Chambers of Commerce. A great thing, I actually was President of the Chamber of Commerce in my hometown for a while. That's not really what we're talking about though. We're talking about other sorts of organizations rather than a Chamber of Commerce. Chris: Right. So we're talking about businesses that are offering, that are selling products, that could be a company that has eye doctors that's selling them their products to do their glasses or dentists that they're selling the teeth whitening products or supplies for them to be able to do that in house. George: So in our largest survey of local salespeople that's ever been conducted, and nobody's told me that they did a bigger one, so we're just going to call it that. But we just recently completed this survey of the number of salespeople that we have inside the platform and the listeners to the podcast. We sent it out, we got the survey back, and the number one thing that salespeople were having a problem with was cold calling. What this membership group does for you in the strategic partnership, and I'd like our listeners to really understand this. It's not called anymore now because when Chris makes the call to these customers, he leverages that membership group to warm it up a little bit. Chris: That's exactly what we do. Now we're going in from that cold call. It's not a cold call. We go into a warm call with introducing yourself and we're being referred in, so now they're already open because they have a great relationship with that strategic partner. So they opened their doors to us. A lot of people don't trust the digital side of things because there's not a lot of people that are giving them great products out there. So when you have a great product that's offered over here at Vendasta and the marketplace products that are there, you're able to go in with some confidence and gain that business. George: Well, let's cover off that other piece a little bit where you hit on something that I think is really important for people to understand. There is a ton of snake oil out there, and when we go in to talk to a prospect, they're a little jaded and they're testing you. They're really looking for somebody that's going to stand behind what they're doing, are you going to be here in six months, are you going to be there to answer my questions if I have them. That's been a big part of your success as well because you're standing behind the solutions that you're selling. Chris: Yeah. You know, I stand behind the solutions, but I focus on my own reputation. Like I make sure that I go out there and if I've got clients that, you know, as they're utilizing the service, I want them to give me reviews. So we pride ourselves that we've got several hundred reviews, five-star reviews online. I tell a client when they ask me about a competitor, I usually pull it up online and notice that they're at a 4.3 or a 4.4. I tell them like, "Hey dear customer," if they question a contract or whatever, I'd come in and say, "Listen, you're not going to be my first bad review. I've gotten nothing but five-star reviews online and I'm not going to bring you in the door, I get it that there's businesses out there that have taken people for SEO and they've taken them on different things," so we pride ourselves on our reputation. We get past that because- George: I think it's a really important point. I have said for a long time, it blows me away the agencies and media companies that are selling digital marketing services, and when I Google them and I have a look at them and do a little bit of research of late, you look horrible online. You guys have done a great job of that. I also noticed in your social posts you're amplifying the positive comments of those customers and highlighting them, you've got their permission to do it and everything else. It's a great marketing tactic, it's the old testimonial in a brochure thing, but you're just using online and all the tools that you say your customers should use, you use yourself. Chris: Absolutely.   Dedication and Experience Make All the Difference George: If you were to give advice to a new entrepreneur, there's been a number of new entrepreneurs at this event, but for the first time, the last couple of conventions that we had, we invited customers. In this one there actually are some prospects that have been in the pipeline, and I'm sure you've talked to some of these folks that are thinking of getting into the space. If you were to give one piece of advice to a new entrepreneur that's entering into digital marketing, what would that be? Chris: You have to dig deep and make sure you have the dedication. You've got to come into it for the right reasons. If you're coming into it thinking that you're just going to have a $1 million business tomorrow, it's not going to work. You really have to care about your customers. George: I've got one more for you. You covered that off. Is this a million-dollar opportunity if you run it right? Chris: It is if you put the dedication in, you have to put the dedication in. If you're not doing that, you don't care about your customer, then it's not a million-dollar business. George: Piece of advice that you would offer when it comes to attracting the right talent because you haven't done this on your own. You've built a team to do this. You have advice on some tactics to find that right group of people? Chris: You have to find the passionate sales rep out there that's not necessarily worried about a commission because the rest will come. You'll get those good people as you get down the road and you find the passionate people that enjoy sales. George: So we hire a rookie salesperson and what I've found is that they have a tendency to rush the deals. You spend a lot of money getting a great lead in the door, and if that rep doesn't have the experience to make sure they set the proper expectation, you might burn the lead and lose the value there. So how have you overcome that? What sort of training regime do you have in place for the reps? Chris: I now go after seasoned sales reps. I don't go after rookie sales reps. I recently hired a guy that came to me. He had been selling rocks for 13 years, literally selling rocks and sand to construction companies. I quickly hired him, my COO, my CFO was like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "This guy has been selling rocks for 13 years with the same company and turning million-dollar deals." I go after nothing but seasoned reps now, and I spend the extra money for it. I don't want that $30,000, $40,000 a year guy. I want that $60,000 to $80,000 a year guy that's going to bring me results and I don't have to train him how to sell. I just give him a good product that he can stand behind and know it works. So I don't go after the rookie sales reps anymore. George: So the reason being, I'm reading into this, I don't know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask the question. It's cost you too much money to go after rookies, or has the business reached a point where you can just buy those reps rather than build them? Chris: Yeah, I mean it's easier to get that rep, that experienced rep than to train rookie sales reps to try to figure out the process. George: You've been at this for a while and I know that you are selling on a regular basis. What sort of prospecting tool or method are you using to go out and talk to those new customers? Chris: The snapshot, the snapshot's everything, without the snapshot you're setting the stage now with these customers with a snapshot tool, but what I like to do, and I teach all of my sales reps to do is we don't go out there, I don't look at a snapshot until I have that client ready to go. I want to discover the snapshot and what's in the snapshot with the client in front of me. It's more organic. So I teach my sales reps how to go through the Internet and to be able to go and find the things that they're going to look for on Google, but we do it in real time and discover it with the client. So sometimes I'm surprised, I'll get a client that may be great. I had a veterinarian the other day that was number one for veterinarian in their market, but then I turned around and said, "That's great, but what about dog vaccinations or cat vaccinations?" Chris: They weren't part of that mix, so I completely go off the cuff with a client and I really want the client to understand that I'm coming to them from an organic place and a truthful place, and let's go discover it together. How can I help you?   Conclusion George: Well, I really appreciate you taking some time out and joining us. There's definitely some learnings inside our conversation for those that have been in this space for a while. You can learn from Chris because he's been doing it for the past number of years, or if you're a newbie and you're just getting started, you can learn from some of those hard lessons that you've had over the last few years. But congratulations on your success, and we really appreciate the partnership and looking forward to the upcoming next four years if we get to work together. Chris: Yeah, I'm excited. I love Vendasta so I'm excited for the next four years. I will definitely be here. George: What a great episode. We could go on and on and on with Chris. It's really interesting hearing his stories from the front lines. You know he understands the products and solutions that he's delivering to his clients probably better than most. He's dogfooding those products. He's using them on a daily basis. He knows what works and what doesn't work, and he's not afraid to say, "That's not the right tactic. We're going to move or we're going to adjust." That analogy around the elevator repair company in LA and wanting to get ranked in the market and what they had to do. You know, you really can tell that Chris loves seeing a problem and knowing that he has the products and solutions to solve those issues. So we'd like to thank Chris Montgomery, the guy who's doing it every single day and he just keeps growing his business year over year. It's actually quite impressive. George: More episodes to come. We release every week right here on the Conquer Local podcast, but not just that, we've got this amazing new community, and the Conquer Local community is living on Slack. Go to conquerlocal.slack.com to join today, and the community continues to grow pretty much on a daily basis where we get new members and then those members are able to create channels or to answer questions or ask their own questions of the Conquer Local community. So join today. It's at conquerlocal.slack.com, we'd love to get your feedback. Talk to producer Colleen or myself on Linkedin. We really appreciate those comments. Keep them coming as we continue to help salespeople around the world in the local space conquer local. My name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.

Is your presentation different every time? Why? If you have something that's working, why would you change it every time? Our extraordinary host, George Leith, walks us through the importance of having a talk track. They can also be called a value propositions. In this episode, we're going to discuss writing talk tracks and building compelling value propositions. Talk tracks get a bad rap of being a way to keep a salesperson in a box.  A talk track isn't an "insert name here" and run through a presentation like a robot. The purpose of a talk track is to identify problems and then work on writing a talk track on how your product or services solve those problems. By finding a sense of urgency or finding things that are critical for various reasons, you can start thinking about that when writing talk track. George is a thoroughly experienced, educational, and inspirational sales and marketing keynote speaker who can enlighten your company or professional association on best practices for transforming sales and utilizing social media’s innovative concepts to align your digital media marketing with current trends and prepare it for the unpredictable times ahead. As a sales transformation keynote speaker, author and guest university lecturer, he has a unique ability to demystify concepts and inspire businesses and professionals to understand and truly embrace the potential that digital transformation has for many business objectives including sales, business development, and marketing for B2B, non-profit organizations, as well as government institutions.   Introduction George: It's the Conquer Local podcast, our sound engineer tBone, we are in the sound lounge beautifully appointed studios here in beautiful Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with producer Coleen. George's Top Tips. I had John reach out to me on the LinkedIn channel and he said, "How do you write the scripts?" I think there's a lot of... people get really freaked out as salespeople to go, "No, I'm not using the script. I don't need a script." Does that mean that your presentation is different every time? Because that's just freaking weird. If you've got something that's working, why would you change it every time? Now, we have to have some personality and that doesn't mean that it's something... You can't walk in as a robot and go, "OK, here is a presentation. What was your name? Insert name here. Oh, yeah, Joe and what..." You can't do that. That's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the script. George: Gib Olander, our EVP of Product calls it vignettes. Ed OKeefe, our EVP of Marketplace likes to use the term lyric. I like to use a term that was taught to me by one of the smartest sales managers in the business, Craig Diebel, from Fort Worth, Texas. Everything good comes from Texas, and he asked me to come into his offices, beautiful downtown Fort Worth and help them with their talk track around digital marketing. That was five years ago, and I've been using that term ever since because I believe that this is the missing piece for salespeople, it's writing a talk track. I think it's also called a value proposition, and we're going to talk all about writing talk tracks and building compelling value propositions. Here's what it's not; here's what it's not; it is not what marketing gives you. It's not what the product team gives you. George: The product team builds up a product and they come up with a value proposition, they put on a one-sheeter, they maybe build some nice animations or maybe they write a video or some email marketing or they do some Facebook stuff, and they do some crazy marketing things. And they never put it in front of actual customers and see their eyes roll back in their head when they don't understand the words and there is not a lot... I'm not saying all organizations, just most come up with all this great stuff over here in a bubble that has not been tried. They're like, "Oh, we had trusted testers." Who are they? Then they show you the list of trust testers, you're like, "Oh, yeah, those people don't even sell anything." I want to put it in front of real people, and I want to get the real story down. George: I'm not saying you don't need marketing because I'm a big believer in marketing and I love it, it's called air cover. It gets in there way before I come in with the street troops. Softens the enemy up, gets them ready to say yes. You do need marketing, and I love animations. Who doesn't love animations? Family Guy, boom, it's great stuff. But what we need to do is we need to get across from the customer and we need to test what works in the presentation and then we need to keep using it. That's the key to it. I remember when we first started building out inside sales inside our organization, hired a consultant, brought him in, Butch Langlois, good buddy of mine, Toronto, Ontario. But Butch told us something that they found when they were building up their inside sales team was that if you changed one word in the script that you knew was working. George: So a script that was written by somebody that run sales organizations, is good at telling stories, and good at building the sales story, and then that person actually takes the script that they've written and uses it a thousand times and closes a bunch of deals. If some close rate comes of it, now you know you've got a script that works and you can use that script. But if you change one word, it may change your close percentage by 10% or something like that. That's how important it is to find the proper value propositions that are resonating with your prospects. In its simplest terms, a value proposition is the positioning statement that explains what benefit you provide your prospect and how you do it uniquely well. That's the definition. What we need to be doing is describing the target, the problem that's solved, and then how we beat all the other people that deliver those solutions.   Use the Four U’s to Build Your Talk Track George: Let's dig into how we're going to build those value propositions, or as I'm calling them, talk tracks. Because in digital marketing, you've heard us in previous episodes where we talk about the marketing stack. That businesses need a new marketing stack. I really liked that positioning because they probably haven't even thought about it as a stack, and then you can start to work your way through the customer journey that they have. Not their customer journey with you, but their customer's journey with the business person. You've heard me... let's cover it again, there's the awareness stage, that's all the advertising, then I got to be able to find you because I'm starting the research stage. Consumers are going to 15 different places to research the things that they're buying. That's where reviews and social come in, and then we've got the website where the transaction could occur for an e-commerce business, or maybe that's where we request more information or fill out a form and become a hot lead. George: Then we have the sale itself and then we have the opportunity to build loyalty and to build that raving fan that we can upsell. Here's the talk track, that's the talk track around the customer journey for small or medium-sized business. When we start working on that value proposition, we want to talk about the four U’s. Here come the four U’s, the first is the problem unworkable? Does your solution fix a broken business process where there are real measurable consequences to inaction? Meaning, again, there's some fear of loss. Will someone get fired if this thing isn't solved? Now that's a pretty compelling reason. If the answer is yes, if we don't fix this problem, somebody's going to get fired, usually, the person who could be getting fired becomes your internal champion if you've got the solution to the problem. George: As the common theme of, the Conquer Local podcast, needs-based selling, figuring out what problem you're able to solve uniquely for that customer is very important. Is fixing the problem unavoidable? Meaning you've got to fix this problem because there's some sort of governance or regulatory control, or if you're not... Is it driven by a fundamental requirement that it has to be controlled or solved by? If that answer is yes, then the group that is impacted by that will likely be a champion. For those of you in Europe or maybe you are listening to us in California or in South Africa, GDPR, or this privacy act is something that we are going to have to start solving. We're going to have to solve it inside our organizations and we're going to have to start solving it for our businesses. Finding the people that are impacted by privacy and GDPR, those folks would likely be your champion. George: Is the problem urgent? Is it one of the few priorities for the company? If you're selling to enterprise organizations, you'll find it hard to command the attention of the buyers, they were the C-Suite, if it isn't an urgent problem. We're trying to figure out those various problems with the four U’s. The other one: is the problem underserved? I find this in marketing space where they are doing some sort of marketing; they're doing some sort of promotion; they're doing some sort of listings management, SEO, something like that. But it really isn't being done right. It's more calls than not that I'm on where we're trying to unseat some other organization that's dealing with it. It's very rare that we hear, "Oh, no, the group we work with is amazing. We've got this group, they knock it out of the park."   Identifying the issues is BLAC and White George: No, I've just done a call with a 932 location restaurant chain the other day. We were talking to their head of marketing and they're on their second listings provider and things are going not very well for a second time. In my mind, the problem isn't being solved, and in this case, it's underserved. I love these types of prospects because if you can come up with a great talk track and some case studies and some testimonials or some advocates that can say that you're really great at solving this problem, you get a really good opportunity with that. You want to qualify the problem, and this is the black and white tests. Get ready, here comes an acronym, BLAC is B-L-A-C, blatant, latent, aspirational, or critical. What you're looking for is the biggest white space. We're going to put the graphic inside the materials that we provide with the episode, but I found this online and I'm like, "Whoa, this is some great stuff." George: You're looking for the white space. On the left axis of this graphic, you have blatant up in the top corner. It's like boom, it just hits you right in there, it's right there, there's the problem. You got latent, you don't really know where it is. You got aspirational, oh, it would be nice if we could change this, but nobody's going to die if we don't. You've got these latent problems that are aspirational. Well, it's tough to get those things sold and solved because it's really just not that important. The one that you're looking for is the one that's in the top right-hand corner of the graphic. If you're looking at the graphic now, you see where I'm coming from. Where you've got that's where the biggest white... you're looking for the biggest white space and if the white space is around a blatant problem, that you could say, "You've got a blatant problem over here and it's critical that you solve it." George: All right, now we should write a talk track or a value proposition around that. A few of the exercises that I would like you to go home and try, or if you're at home, stay there and try them is I want you to identify some problems. And then, yeah, I want you to work on writing a talk track on how your solution set solves those problems. Here's the problem, I need more customers. Now that probably is an aspirational thing and it's not something that's really urgent or critical. I need more customers. Now, what if you had bought a whole bunch of bananas and those bananas were nearing end of life? The product or service that you are offering, it's a product called bananas and you've had them for a while and now it becomes more urgent that you have to sell those bananas. Because they're going to rot or you're going to have to just donate them as a food bank or something like that. George: That's where it changes from selling. It'd be nice to sell a product or, no, I have to sell the product because it's about to come to its end of life and it's going to cost me some money. By finding that sense of urgency or finding things that are critical for various reasons, we want you to be thinking about that when you're working on those talk tracks. Here's another problem, I have a slow website. You're working with a customer, you run a needs analysis, you run a snapshot report, you find out that the prospect has a slow website. You can go to that customer and you say, "You have a slow website and here's some things that we could do to improve it." You see that there's your talk track that you've written and the value proposition is, "We're going to work on your website." But unless you connect some sort of urgency to that conversation, it is actually a latent problem, it's not a blatant problem. George: If you could prove to that business person that they were losing business because they have a slow website, you see where I'm going with this and with these exercises where you could just say, "Here's the things that I'm trying to solve for the customer." But if you tie some urgency or tie a critical need or tie a buyer persona that has a critical need to it, now you're able to write a value proposition that will give you some action and a faster action than, "No, I just need some more traffic to my website." Like that is latent, that is aspirational. It's going to take a long time to move that forward. It's not just about writing the value proposition of how you solve the problem, but it's also about attaching some urgency to that value proposition. That's an art, and it's something that needs to be practiced over and over and over again. It's going to be different for different types of customers.   Conclusion George: That's really the thing that I love about sales is there's no two presentations that are exactly alike. You're like, "Oh, I just went and did the same presentation I did three days ago." No, if you've done it correctly and you have done the needs analysis, you've written the talk track that solves it, it's going to be unique every time. Then the other thing is based upon the type of person that you're dealing with, you're going to have to be a chameleon. It's one of the most important skills that a salesperson can develop, is that ability to be a chameleon and to pivot the presentation or the value proposition based upon whether it is a blatant or a latent need, or whether it's an aspirational problem or critical problem that you're solving. When you see the graphic that we've attached to this, it paints it very clearly. George: We also put in there a couple of these exercises where you come up with what the problem is and then you work on writing a value proposition with that lens of blatant, latent, aspirational, and critical. Value propositions, writing those scripts, those vignettes and talk tracks will help you be more effective when you go out to try and conquer local. These are George's Top Tips. My name is George Leith, I'll see you when I see you.

Building a winning sales playbook is no easy endeavor, but we have you covered. This week's guest is an expert at building them. Matt Sunshine is a Managing Partner at the Center for Sales Strategy, a sales performance consulting company that helps sales organizations attract, retain, and develop the highest performing salespeople. Matt's extensive background in the broadcaster space brings a fresh feel to the Conquer Local Podcast. Matt walks us through how to build a winning sales playbook with a three-step process, he shares his tried and tested three key elements for hiring a sales team, and he shares what is happening in the broadcasting space and explains the why they are getting into the digital marketing stack now. Matt’s areas of expertise include growing sales organizations, finding and developing sales superstars, sales process, lead generation, inbound marketing, and digital marketing, and he is a featured writer for one of the top sales blogs in America and a regular contributor to leading business blogs and magazines such as Inc., Sales and Marketing Management, Sales Hacker, and Entrepreneur. In 2012, Matt developed and launched LeadG2, an Inbound Marketing company that helps businesses establish thought leadership and lower lead costs. LeadG2 has earned the premier Hubspot recognition as a platinum Certified Partner and is the largest inbound marketing company serving the media industry in the world today. He is also the author of “Getting Prospects to Raise Their Hand” and Forbes magazine lists Matt as one of the 20 Speakers You Shouldn't Miss The Opportunity To See.   Introduction George: It's another edition of the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith. We have this week Matt Sunshine, and Matt and I had the privilege of meeting about five years ago. We were on a panel for the Reign Summit. I can't remember the city that we were in, might've been Vegas. And when I met Matt, I realized this is a veteran broadcast sales executive who has been involved in an organization for quite some time, like 20 some odd years, called The Center for Sales Strategy. And Matt actually took it over as the founding partner back in 2015, and we're really privileged to have him on the show. One of the things that I'm sure Matt is going to talk about because I've seen him speak a number of times at conventions, what he talks about is you don't just need a guy in a bag going out and doing cold calls and customers. George: Now you need a more robust sales organization where you might need a team doing lead gen. You definitely still need reps that are out talking to customers. You might need to look at some inside sales or telesales, and you're going to need somebody looking after client retention. It's really interesting to see broadcast moving in that direction. I keep hearing it more and more and more as we travel and we speak to executives in the broadcast space. So you're going to get some radio and some television sales 101, I'm sure, as we speak to Matt Sunshine from The Center for Sales Strategy, coming up next on this week's Conquer Local podcast. George: Super excited to have Matt Sunshine from The Center for Sales Strategy joining me on the Conquer Local podcast this week. Hey, Matt, how you been? Matt: I'm good. How about yourself? George: I'm doing really well. I was thinking back to when you and I first met. I think it might've been around 2015. We were at a Reign conference on a panel together... well, we've seen each other in passing from time to time, so I'm glad that you were able to make it onto the podcast. Matt, working and heading up The Center for Sales Strategy, you want to give people the quick overview of your experience and how you ended up here as the managing partner of The Center for Sales Strategy? Matt: Sure. Yeah. So the Center for Sales Strategy has been around for about 35 years. We're a true sales performance company. We help media companies, radio stations, TV broadcasters. We help them to make sure they hire the most talented people, give them a system, a process to have sales success a repeatable, predictable process. And then we ensure that they have tactics in place to ultimately drive revenue. So we think of that sales performance formula as talent plus training plus tactics. I mean, my experiences prior to ... I've been at the company since 2006. Prior to that, I was the group director of sales for Susquehanna Radio for about 15 years. So I've been in business a long time and love what I do now at The Center for Sales Strategy as one of the managing partners. And we have great relationships with the clients that we work with. George: Well, you know why I asked producer Colleen to reach out to you is I heard your name in passing a couple of weeks back at the Texas Association of Broadcasters. I'm like, "Yeah, I need to get Matt on the podcast," because I'm looking to ... I'd like to learn from you a little bit around your unique perspective because you've worked with broadcasters for a long time. You've been in the broadcast industry a long time. There really, in my sense, seems to be a shift where these broadcasters are really adopting digital sales to local customers. It seems like if you're not doing it, you're really missing the boat in this space. Would you echo that? Is that what you're seeing? Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of nice. I mean, the reason why most of us got into this business, at least on the sales side, is not necessarily to sell our product, but really to help businesses grow, right? I mean, that's why. That's the motivation. We all got into it because, fundamentally, we want to work with businesses, figure out what their desired business results are, and then bring them back a solution that'll help them to get the results that they need. And so the more resources that we can bring, the more we can help. And there's lots of research out there. Gordon Burrell has research out recently that talks about people are buying more and more products, right? I mean, they are. They're not just buying TV or buying radio or buying newspaper, they're understanding the customer journey, and they're saying, "You know what, we've got to reach people in lots of places, and we have to reach them with the right message. And if one person can deliver that, well, that's just fantastic." So, yeah, broadcasters are adopting this quickly and many of them are doing a really good job. George: So it isn't something, though, that we saw five years ago. There wasn't that adoption. Do you think that's because radio actually was growing in the traditional revenue lines? Matt: Yeah. Right. I mean, it's like everyone has a good plan. What did Mike Tyson say? “You can have the greatest plan in the world until you get punched in the face.” And I think that's what happens. When business is good, people don't feel like, "Oh, I don't need to add this so quickly. Business is good." But then all of a sudden, when business gets a little wobbly or you're not seeing the growth that you expected, you're seeing dollars starting to go to competitors that are doing some of this, I think you jump on the bandwagon. You say, "We'd better get in this space." So, yeah, there are some early adopters that have a little bit of a first-mover advantage, but I think people are catching up.   Building a Winning Sales Playbook George: Well, I've talked to lots of folks in broadcast space over the years, and I echo what you were saying earlier, that the real pain hadn't been there yet. There was that saying that flat was the new black. They're just happy to be flat with revenue when you're looking across the street and the newspaper company had been bleeding. But what I was hoping we could dig into is, you seem to be having an enormous amount of success right now in building out a winning sales playbook for these broadcasters. Is there an easy ABC to what goes into that winning sales playbook? Matt: Boy, I wish it was an easy ABC. The most simple way to put it is this, it's two-part, number one is you have to have the best people, and you have to have a system in place for identifying, what are the jobs that we need, what are the must-have talents, what are the must-have experiences, are they a good culture fit, and identify. If you get the right people, you're off to a good start. The second thing that you have to do is make sure that you're organized correctly to have success. If you look at sales departments these days, salespeople are maybe going on one new business call a week, maybe two. And that's not because they're not working hard. It's because they have a lot of other things that they have to do. So maybe we need to fix the way that we're organized. Matt: Wouldn't it be great if salespeople could go on three new business appointments a week? I mean, if you have 15 salespeople, they're all going on one new business appointment a week, that's 15 new business appointments. Well, what if you had 10 salespeople, but you reorganized yourself and you built the apparatus so that everyone could go on three appointments per week? Now as a station, you've gone from 15 appointments to 30 appointments all because you reorganized. And by the way, if someone's doing three a week, they're probably being better at it. So I think the playbook is: get the right people, organize yourself correctly, and then install a repeatable, predictable sales process that everyone adheres to. The old days of winging it and just being charming and having good relationships, that's very 1900s. George: Well, and you're going to lose the business at the end of the day because the customer is .. let's talk a little bit about your experience around customer expectations. And I'm sure that you've been talking to people in all sorts of different market sizes, but it's not just the large DMAs, it's customers everywhere that are demanding more out of that trusted advisor that they have. Matt: That's exactly right. We need humans. I do think we need humans, and I do think relationships are important. But I think as a business owner, you care if your business is getting the desired business results that it needs. And what I've seen happen recently is relationships be flipped on people so that you hear business owners say to someone, "I've known you for a long time. You understand that I don't need ... I can't buy you on this one. I need to go with these guys because their solution is actually going to get me the results I need. And I know you don't understand because you and I have such a good relationship." Business owners love relationships just like everyone else, but they also have a responsibility to their business, and we got to be in that business. We got to be in the business of helping business grow. George: So for our group that subscribes to the podcast and listen to us every week, we've got salespeople and sales managers and VPs from all over the planet, and I'm very privileged to have this audience. I was hoping that we should get some words of wisdom from you, Matt. What are some of those key tenants that you are teaching sales leadership when they're out there looking for the right talent? Because that first thing you came up with it, I'm glad you did because I really think that that's one of the big hallmarks that we need to address, is we need the best and the right talent. So what are we looking for when it comes to talent in this space? Matt: So I think we need to get better at defining what we're looking for. Most of the time, this is how the conversation goes. I'll get a call from a sales manager or VP of sales, and they'll say, "Hey, Matt, I'm looking for a salesperson. Do you know anyone?" And I say, "Okay, well, tell me what you're looking for." They'll say, "You know, someone like a good sales guy." And I don't know what that means. Let's define what we're looking for. Is this person going to have to be calling on a lot of retail accounts? Are they going to be working with ad agencies? Are they going to be the type of person that's going to be doing more customer service work? What type of operation do you have? Do you have someone who does lead generation, or do they need to do their own lead generation? Matt: So number one, identify what you're looking for. Then we have to say, "Okay, what are the required talents, skills, and experiences that someone will have to have in order to have success?" We have some clients that love taking on people that have no experience because they have a good onboarding system. They have the time to train them. We have other clients that, honestly, they don't have enough time to do that. So they need to hire someone with experience, and that's okay too, but know what you're looking for. So understand what you're looking for. Get a really good job ... we call it job analysis. Do a really good job analysis. And that would be, what does the person have to be able to do around here to be successful in plain English. Then identify the talents, skills, and experiences that you need for that position. We would tell our clients to use a talent assessment. I think those are really important, but then also look at the skills and experience and don't settle. Don't bring someone in. And the other thing is, I'd make sure that they're a good culture fit. Do they fit with your environment? George: Well, I know the risk there, and I am glad that you brought it up because the risk there is you sacrifice your culture to put a warm body in the chair, and if it's not a good fit, and especially if you're trying to up the game in the talent that you do have in the organization. So I agree with every one of those points, and thanks for bringing it up. I think they're very, very valuable. But I run across sales leaders and organizations that are saying, "Well, I've got all these people that have come in. They're probably younger, it seems, and it seems I have to teach them how to build a relationship." Are you seeing any of that, where they may be really good tactical and they understand the space and they're technically savvy, but they just don't have those relationship-building skills? Matt: Yeah. I don't see so much the relationship like you're saying, but here's what I do hear, which is similar, that they don't have the business acumen, and they don't have the, and this is a buzzword but we all know what this means, they don't have the executive presence. And I think that's kind of sums up what you're saying. And you got to practice with them. You got to role-play. And role play... I wrote a blog article once, and I said the worst four-letter words in media sales, role and play, right? Because it freaks everybody out. But it's just practice, and you've got practice with people.   Practice Makes Perfect George: Well, it's interesting. When I arrived at a SaaS software company years ago, coming as an old warhorse in the media space, I remember that I was taught very early in my sales career, which is when you think back to 1989, 1990 the training programs weren't that robust in broadcast. You basically just got the yellow pages thrown at you in a one-sheeter and said go get them. But I do remember I had a really great sales leader that kind of took me under my wing and he said, "When you're driving to the sales call, practice the sales call over and over and over again because it is a little intimidating to practice inside with a room of your peers." George: But when you talk about building that culture, wouldn't you rather have a culture of people who, after salesperson X gets off the phone with a prospect, salesperson Y leans over and said, "If you just said it a little bit differently, the customer would understand what you were saying. You kind of got bogged down in the ..." Offer that advice as teammates. So it used to be we'll just build a sales team and just put systems in place and have them slit each other's throats until we get a winner out of it. And having that more collaborative culture, do you see that being something that's really a recipe for success so you can build that environment where they can practice? Matt: Yeah. So here's my advice on how to make practice a reality. And when I introduced this in media companies, radio stations and TV stations, afterwards, everyone always likes it and salespeople actually like doing this. So here's what we do. First of all, you got to remember salespeople, their experience with role-playing has been this, you're not doing your job correctly. So you need to role-play, right? It's almost a punishment. Because you've done it wrong, you must need to role-play. So we need to get rid of that thinking, and we need to make practice part of our culture. Just like your favorite football team or baseball team or soccer team, they practice every day. We need to practice every day. The second thing is that when we practice, what we get feedback on is what we did right. And we get feedback on what we did right. I'm talking a ratio of five to one. Five things you did right, and one thing that you could do better. Matt: And our criticism needs to be specific. Generic feedback is the worst type of feedback. "Hey, Matt, you did a great job with that." That means nothing. Tell me what I did a great job with. Give me specifics. Give me five really good things that I did, and then you say, "And you know what, here's something you could do a little bit better." Well, now I'm listening. But if all you do is tell me all the things I could do better, well, then I feel awful and I don't ever want to do this again. The last thing about role play, it's never a sneak attack. It's never, "Hey, Matt, can you come in my office and sell me this pen?" I mean, we're not doing that. We have to be more professional. We need to say, "Hey, every Tuesday in the sales meeting, we're going to role-play. You're going to ... I'll tell you a day in advance the type of business you're going to be calling on and what part of the sales process we're going to practice." It's got to be more professional and less personal. George: Well, and I also think that salespeople and sales managers that are listening to the podcast need to be understanding that the groups that are eating your lunch are doing professional training and coaching and development pretty much on a daily basis. And what I mean by that are all the inside sales teams, and it's primarily right now coming from the SaaS space, where they're phoning into your auto dealer customer 10 times. They're getting a ton of calls every week from different companies that are trying to sell to them. And it's a very professional process, and they're listening to the calls, and they're coaching. And so we need to get that into the environment. I've found that organizations are very open to it. Matt: We work with a company that has an inside sales team. They do practice twice a day. They do practice in the morning before the day gets started, 8:30 to 8:50, 20 minutes of practice in the morning. And they do it after lunch at one o'clock, from like 1:00 to 1:30. They practice role-playing objections. They practice role-playing how they open a call with someone. They practice role-playing how they finish the call. They practice every day, twice a day, every day. George: How important is it when we develop up this winning sales playbook to be an expert in the products and tactics that these reps are selling? Because you mentioned earlier that our customer base is asking for more products and buying more products, so I'm in. I'm the sales manager or the sales rep, we're in. How well versed do they need to be in the products and tactics and solutions? Matt: Yeah, I think, so part of the sales playbooks that we build for people, that's part of it, right? It's not only what the play is, but what are the products? So they have to be expert in it. I mean, if they're not, then they're going to look foolish. Knowing your product is table stakes. Now, the problem that we get is once people get so focused on their product that they're more focused on pitching their product than they are at solving a solution. I have seen some broadcasters where they have some products that are more complex, more complicated, and they have an expert on staff and that person's available to do an assist, go on a four-legged call. That's a good short-term solution. But truthfully, you're limiting your capacity to do business to the amount of calls that that person can go on. George: Well, we like to call those barnacles. And I just actually had a lobster in New Hampshire this weekend that had a barnacle on the claw, and it reminded me that we coined that phrase, you've got the expert, and then the rep won't learn how to do it for themselves. Matt: Exactly. Right. It doesn't work. It's a short-term bandaid, but actually it causes more problems down the line. Salespeople need to know their products. George: So what you're saying to me sounds a lot like we've got to up our game from a sales management coaching standpoint. Matt: Yeah. And I'm a big believer in the sales playbook, that way everyone is consistent and we know what we're doing. It's not fair if someone goes out and does it wrong, but they were never told the right way, shown the right way to do it. It's not fair. But, yeah, we need to up our game. I mean, managing people is complex. George: Well, and we constantly need to be learning on that, and that's why we have resources like this. And that's why we're great to have guests like you. One of the most successful examples of inside sales has to be the Townsquare Media Group. And at last year's Burrell event in New York, Tim Pirrone, the guy who runs that whole thing and built it from the ground up, spoke that they're getting close to $50 million run rate. I'm sure that you work with lots of organizations that are attempting inside sales. Do you think that inside sales is one of those revenue motions that broadcasters need to look at? Matt: Yeah, and we work with Townsquare, so I'm familiar with that situation. George: Well they've been very, very successful. Matt: Very successful doing it. And we have a few other clients that have inside sales going on too. If you set it up the right way, it's a really good addition to an outside salesforce. I don't think it's an either-or, I think it's an and. George: And what about the salespeople that say, "Well, I just don't know if that client has the kind of budget as far as building out a lead gen team." Is that another area where we take some of that headcount and we move it into some different revenue motions that you're recommending? I'm kind of reading between the lines here, but you mentioned lead gen earlier. Matt: Yeah. So I look at a sales organization. I say, "Okay, we need to have dedicated resources to customer acquisition, and we have to have dedicated resources to customer retention." Right now, we kind of all employ the lone wolf style where every person does everything. But I think that if we thought about it as, are you in the customer acquisition team or the customer retention team, we would be better off. And if we looked at it as a customer acquisition team, then we probably would say, "Okay, we need a lead gen team to supplement the leads coming in it." Matt: Let me say it this way. If we were calling on a business that had a really, really good product and had a really good success rate of helping their customers use their product successfully, and they even had really good salespeople to sell the product, but the only thing that they were struggling with is their salespeople didn't have enough face-to-face interactions with potential customers. We would recommend to them that they do marketing. We would say, "Oh, you know what you need to do? You need to do some marketing, some advertising." Yet, when we look at our business and we say we have really good products, people that use our products get really good results. We have really good salespeople, yet they don't have enough new business appointments. We say, "Oh, you know what you need to do? You need to go and cold call more." It just doesn't make sense. We need something at the front end to help. George: Well, and I used this with a broadcast group here recently. They had a station in Waco, Texas, and I said, "Why don't we go online and look up SEO expert in Waco, Texas, to see if you guys rank?" And they're like, "Oh, you should put in radio station." And I'm like, "No, not if you're going to sell digital products and services. You need to be ranking for SEO expert because that's what the businesses of Waco, Texas are looking for." Matt: Right. Exactly. We just need to eat our own dog food. We just need to do what we would tell our clients to do. And I'm not saying that salespeople should be relieved of finding their own prospects or getting referrals. I think they should do all of that, but we should be able to supplement it with a lead generation program because that's part of customer acquisition.   Conclusion George: Well, we always like getting people like you, Matt, that are working with organizations throughout the US and Canada on a daily basis. And I've always been bullish on the broadcaster space, maybe because that's where I came from. But one of the reasons that I've been bullish on it is we always ... in the broadcast space you had to think outside of the box, and you had to be creative, and you had to solution sell, especially in radio. That was the way that it was just done. And I've been waiting for the moment that radio stepped up to the plate and said, "I'm going to start to add other products and services into the mix." And it's good to hear that you're validating what I've been hearing on the street, that that movement has been started. And for some people, they've been at it for, like the Townsquare folks, they've been at it for a number of years, and they're seeing the fruits of their labors. If people want to get a hold of you and learn more about how you might be able to help out their broadcast organization, how would they go about doing that, Matt? Matt: Best way is just to email me directly at mattsunshine@csscenter.com, and I'm happy to talk to anyone. I'm passionate about this subject and I want to be a resource and be helpful to anyone listening to this podcast. I'd love to do that. George: Well, and if you ever see throughout any of the organizations out there the named Matt Sunshine and The Center for Sales Strategy speaking at one of these conferences, that is a session you don't want to miss because Matt brings real tangible insights from the field and from groups that he's working with on a daily basis. So privilege having you on the show, and we'll let you get back to the beautiful city of Nashville, Tennessee, where you are today as we record this podcast. It's one of my favorite places. So go enjoy that. Get yourself some ribs. Enjoy it. Matt: Thank you very much. George: Well, Matt is great at laying out that strategy on how to build a winning sales playbook. Here it is again. You need the best people in place, and that is figuring out what the best experience is, are they the right culture fit, or what culture fit are you looking for, and then what job do you want them to do? Because there's more than just the job of a sales rep with a bag, going out and seeing a customer inside these organizations. And that brings us to number two, which is organizing the sales teams the right way. There are certain individuals that are better at account management then are at acquiring new customers, so why reinvent the wheel? Why not just build those specific teams and have those people do what they're really good at and what will help your organization, and the individuals in it, win? George: And then look for a repeatable, predictable process. And we're talking about this for broadcast organizations. I'm loving it. It's all the things that we've been pontificating about over the last few years coming true. That in this world that we live in, in 2019 and soon to be 2020, we can build predictable, repeatable sales processes if we just follow a few key tenants. And he really spoke in that episode about key elements for hiring, and we haven't really talked a lot about that on the podcast, but I think it's so true. We define what we're looking for, figure out what the talents are and the skills and the experiences necessary to meet the objective of the position, and then don't ever settle. Don't ever bring in somebody that might be good enough. Make sure that you keep looking until you find that person that is the perfect culture fit. George: Now in a lot of broadcast organizations that aren't big enough to have HR departments, that's going to fall on you as a sales manager, you got to take the bull by the horns and do your recruiting yourself. But if you are working with the HR department, make sure that they very clearly understand what you're looking for and what problem you're trying to solve in the hire that you're making. I find that even in my day to day, if we work very closely with HR and not see them as somebody who's trying to block us, we've developed a relationship there, we might just get a lot better talent in the pipe. So another great episode. There are key takeaways for everyone, regardless of the space. Matt was specifically talking about the broadcast space because that's where The Center for Sales Strategy has been anchored, but they also work with magazines, newspapers and cable co's. Everybody else is talking to local. George: For those of you that are in other industries, I might point out that there's another group of people out there banging on the doors and they're good. There's a good group of salespeople out there that are learning some new tricks. So just keep that in mind, that you need to be constantly improving and upping your game as there's never going to be less competition than there is today, I always like to say. It's just going to be more, so put that expectation of one day there's going to be less competition. We are always looking for great comments on the podcast or even suggestions on how we might be able to improve. I can take it. I got broad shoulders. So keep reaching to us on LinkedIn. We had some great conversations with folks over the last couple of weeks that are discovering the podcast for the first time. We'd love your referrals. George: And when producer Colleen does her thing on a weekly basis where she posts our weekly podcast, we would welcome your shares on social media. If you could share it on LinkedIn or on Facebook or on Twitter so that other people can find the Conquer Local podcast where we're helping salespeople all over the world conquer that local day-to-day sales with SMBs. My name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.

The average SMB is worried about staying open in today's competitive market. The Google Guarantee can help. Justin Sanger, Chief Revenue Officer at OMG National, provides insight on what the Google Guarantee means for SMBs. Sanger refers to it as a game-changer because it has an overall effect on how SEO keywords and pay-per-click ads function. An SMB doesn't always to hear the gritty details of lead measures and tactics, they often want a salesperson to cut the chase to know how it is going to affect their business. SEO has been changing at a rapid pace being at the will of the Google algorithms. Sanger shares how dealing with a fragmented and crowded landscape can hurt your agency and speaks to verticalization.   Introduction George: It's the next edition of the Conquer Local Podcast, and this week we're bringing you a 25-year sales veteran. There are very few people that have been involved in local search for longer than Justin Sanger. He is currently the Chief Revenue Officer of OMG National based out of Boca Raton, Florida. They run a fantastic business there at OMG national, and very lucky to have Justin heading up the revenue side of the business. So we are going to bring him into the studio and get him on the line and ask him a bunch of questions about what he saw over his career and what he thinks are some of the big takeaways for sales organizations and salespeople to be dealing with in today's day and age of local sales. Justin Sanger, the CRO of OMG National coming up next on the Conquer Local Podcast.  George: And joining us now on the Conquer Local Podcast. Justin Sanger. Hey Justin. Justin: Thank you, George. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with everybody today. I've been in the local advertising sales marketplace for about 25 years; it's unbelievable the amount of change that's taking place, and at the same time, how little things have changed. In today's marketplace, I think more than ever it's really important to understand your customer. We are dealing in a very crowded, fragmented sales environment. The average SMB has adopted local advertising and marketing as part of their mix, but the competition is fierce. The average SMB is approached every week with a new sales tactic or a methodology that they should be using. So how do you cut through that crowd? How do you differentiate yourself from a sales perspective in today's environment is critical. Justin: My belief is it's all about knowing your customer. There's a couple major trends from a sales perspective in our space that are essential. One is verticalization, and that is as the marketplace matures, it is becoming more and more important that we understand the unique characteristics of the industries that we service. Every industry has these nuances, these special characteristics from a customer acquisition and retention perspective that ultimately affect product performance. So as I said, there's a lot that changes and that hasn't changed. A lot of the tactics are still the same, George. We're still talking about the same base set of tactics, the same base set of... Even from a destination perspective, it's the same names, the same faces. In that type of environment, what happens is the maturity starts to take place in terms of how we understand the unique characteristics of each industry. Justin: With the hundreds of industries out there, those are the means by which a product works or does not work. The nuances associated with a particular industry. I think as the marketplace matures, products are going to continue to become verticalized. The one size fits all approach simply is not going to work, certainly in this next decade. I think the other major trend is performance, and it's being able to focus on the transaction. Talking about tactics, talking about methodologies these days, it's hyperbole. Really all that matters at the end of the day is transactions. Our phone calls, our customers. It's really important that from a sales perspective one's able to cut through the chase and talk in terms of the transactions, talk to in terms of revenue with customers. For me, those are the two overarching trends within the marketplace that any salesperson should be hyper-aware of. Any sales call that they go on, any time that they have an opportunity to interact with the customer, they must really think about those things and get to know that customer if they think that they're going to be successful selling to them.   Predicting and Monitoring Performance A Winning Combination for Clients George: Well, I think you hit the nail right on the head there when it comes to this vertical approach because I believe that organizations that are staying very horizontal are going to have their lunch eaten all day long by a competitor that that goes vertical on them, that really understands the challenges that that business is facing in their industry. Now on this performance piece, it's really interesting. You've been doing this a long time, you've been working in this space for a long time. Being able to call out the performance early and make it simple, because the business people that I'm talking to, they're like, "Yeah, it's great that you're using all these tactics, but get it into something that I can look at and see if it's working or not." So you're saying let's get it down to whether they got some leads. Are you finding that business people are really understanding lead measures and lag measures when it comes to that performance monitoring? Justin: Well I think you raised some really important points. I can tell you that I feel in today's marketplace from a sales perspective we spend way too much time talking about tactics. The customer's educated enough to be dangerous. But look, I've been studying this marketplace for over two decades and it's still complex to me. The average small business is worried about putting food on their table, keeping the doors open, getting payroll. To expect that talking to them about the idiosyncratic nature of one tactic versus the other in today's really complex marketplace is a mistake. I see this happen all the time, George. The salesperson feels like they're obligated to demonstrate their knowledge or authority over the space by talking to them about how something works. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Justin: You have to be able to cut to the chase, and the more you can predict performance, the better you're able to make sales. I mean look, we're in a day and age wherein verticals have become predictable to a large degree, and I think we're going to talk about this a little bit more when we talk about Google Local Service Ads and selling on a fixed cost per call basis. Even from a search engine marketing perspective, we understand now what your average cost per click is going to be. We understand what your average conversion rates are going to be. We understand what the reputation world looks like in one vertical versus another. We as providers need to continue to dig deeper to make those performance trends predictable from a sales perspective. Justin: So when you're walking in meeting a new client, you have to be able to say, "Look, if you spend $500 with us, businesses like yours are likely seeing these types of returns." What else is there to talk about at the end of the day and what matters more to a client or prospective customer than that? And 20 years in this industry, we should have knowledge at hand when we approach any client and we have to do our research. If it means doing your research because you are a horizontal play, then do your research. You have to be able to differentiate yourself like that in this marketplace, George.   Be Prepared for the Next Game-Changer, the Google Guarantee George: Some great learnings, Justin, as you've said, you've been doing this for quite some time and it has changed somewhat, but I think the ability to take and give a very clear, concise story to the client that they're winning or losing and that you understand the space and the challenges, or at least you're prepared to listen to what the challenges are, to figure out a way to make your solutions fit into that is vitally important. You teased it, I was really hoping that you could help us with this. In the United States, Google has launched this thing called Google Home Services or Google Local Services, and I know that you've been dealing with it for a while. There's a bunch of our listeners because we're reaching now salespeople in about 20 different countries that are saying, "Wow, is that coming our way?" Could you give us a bit of an overview of what the Google Home Services or the Google Local Services are? Justin: Yeah, I'm happy too because it's a game-changer. In the local search landscape, we haven't seen a tremendous amount of innovation. We've seen a number of major algorithmic changes, from Hummingbird to Pigeon. We saw RankBrain, we saw Pasa, we saw a lot of different things which impacted search results and how they're derived. But we haven't seen anything of the likes that we are now seeing with Google Local Service Ads. Google Local Service Ads is the ad unit itself, but the program is called Google Guarantee, and it's a game-changer by all measures. It's the first time that Google is saying that I'm going to start taking a vested interest in the results set that I display to prospects. And they do so through their Google Guarantee. Justin: For Google, it's no longer enough to make sure that a searcher gets the right answer. Now they want to give the searcher the definitive understanding that who they're going to work with is backed by Google, and Google is putting $2,000 in insurance behind their search results. So the Google Guarantee program, which is being rolled out and scaled right now, is available to organizations that demonstrate that they are solid. Whether it's through the right insurance, through background checks, through the right reviews. They are putting these advertisers through this due diligence, this program, to determine if they qualify. And if they qualify then they could run the Local Service Ads. Here too, it's a major change because now what Google has done is they've moved outside of this open bidding dynamic marketplace in AdWords and said, look, we're going to fix the cost for inventory across the board and not only that, we're going to charge advertisers on a per-call basis. Justin: So they have a fixed cost per call on a geo vertical basis. That's what you get as an advertiser. So the complexity to a large degree is removed. You're no longer having to compete in the same manner that you did before with AdWords or form organic perspective or even from a local pack perspective. It really comes down to how many calls do I want to receive if I qualify for this service if my organization has the characteristics that Google is looking for? What's so dramatic about this, George, is that you can't ignore it anymore. When you look at Google Local Service Ads in a mobile environment, for example, it's 100% of the screen view. In a desktop environment they sit on top of AdWords, they sit on top of the local pack and certainly organic. So this inventory now has taken the market share away from the tactics that businesses have been spending years trying to achieve in one fell swoop. It's a sea change no matter how you slice it and dice it, whether it be how you pay for inventory on a call basis or Google saying, "Hey look, I'm willing to back these businesses up with my own dollars." George: It definitely does sound like a game-changer. Has it rolled out completely in the US to your knowledge or is it kind of a phased thing that they're doing? Justin: They've been rolling it out in phases for over two years now. It started as locksmiths in a few cities in California and they continue to roll it out across the United States. There are 20 active home service categories where you can purchase local service ads today. We have partnered with Google here, so we actually have insight into the categories that are coming out next. There is dozens of other categories that are right behind this. We've gotten to a point wherein if you are operating in a category where there are local service ads, you have to pay attention or you're going to get lost in the shuffle because your competitors are in there and they're stealing your clicks and they're getting the calls. Justin: It started, and I don't think there's any stopping this. And we see the impact. It's not only my organization at OMG, we're hearing this across the board, wherein people that have been doing really well in AdWords, in paid search, are saying, "What happened to my inventory? Why are my clicks going down?" And if you look at the search, all of a sudden local search results have arrived on the scene, and that's exactly what's happening. So about 20 verticals, it's live, from plumbers to locksmiths to pet groomers to HVAC and a lot of things in between. They're onto something here, George.   Conclusion George: Well Justin Sanger is the chief revenue officer at OMG National and we really appreciate getting your insights. I think you're bang-on with those two items that you're referring to, so thanks for validating what we've been saying over the last couple of years. Really get that verticalization into your sales organization and really be solving the problems of the vertical of the business that you're speaking to. And then talking about performance right out of the gate and the ROI that is available to that person that's spending money with the organization. And then thanks for giving us that overview of what you're calling a game-changer. Google Local Services and the Google Guarantee. It's definitely something that sales professionals need to be keeping an eye out for in the coming months. Justin Sanger, thanks for joining us in the Conquer Local Podcast. We appreciate it. Justin: Thank you George. I look forward to seeing you. George: Well, it's like Justin and I have been talking for years together. Well, we actually have, but he really has hit the nail on the head. Verticalization. So if you walk in and you're talking to a tow truck driver and you understand their business inside and out, you should be able to articulate the value that you're going to bring for that vertical. You should know that industry inside and out. That's who's really going to win at the end of the day. It doesn't mean that you can't have a horizontal approach and then go and have a solution for a real estate agent and then have a solution rather for a dentist. But when you are sitting across from that prospect, you better be able to tell the story and have the talk track as to how you're going to solve the challenges that that person in that vertical are facing. So verticalization. I couldn't agree with anyone more than I'm agreeing with Justin on this one. George: And then that performance piece. If you remember back to some of the masters sales training editions where we talked about building a presentation, we call out how we're going to measure whether this thing is working right at the beginning, right when we're setting the stage as to what strategy is going to be in, what the tactics are going to be, and how we're going to measure success. Justin really hammered on this that it's a secret sauce. Showing the client how you are going to measure whether this is working or not is an important piece where you really set yourself apart from the other people that are calling on that client trying to eat your lunch. So having that performance right out at the top of the discussion and then keeping it top of mind as to how you're going to prove that this is working and show true return on investment for the client is vitally important. George: And then the Google Guarantee. This local search piece that Google is bringing in with Google Local Services. There's 20 active categories today. I'm sure they'll be looking at adding other categories. And as Justin mentioned, this started in locksmiths and dog groomers and things like that, but now they're starting to roll it out, these other 20 categories. The other thing is, keep in mind if Google's putting $2,000 in a guarantee behind this, this is definitely something that's here to stay and it really is skewing results for current advertisers that are not adopting this new tactic from Google, so definitely something that you should be taking a look at if you haven't investigated it up to this point. Really is a game-changer. We're hearing it from lots of sales experts out there and Justin is dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, so you've got some great insights from him as to how this is going to be impacting clients all across, not just the United States but all across the world. Justin Sanger, our guest this week on the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith. Thanks for joining us. I'll see you when I see you.

Converting Leads Part 1 was all about the prospects, and we're now diving into Part 2: Converting Leads, with existing clients—selling after the close. George is back with Part 2 of Converting Leads on this episode of the Master Sales Series. You’ve closed the deal, you’ve won the sale, it’s time to celebrate, right? Yes, but there’s still work to be done. George explains the concept of looking at existing partners whose accounts are still active and treat them as a lead. Treat them the same and establish regular rhythms of communication and keep building the relationship. As stated previously, always be adding value. The biggest take away is to generate advocacy - turn happy clients into your best sales resource.   Introduction George: The long-standing battle, leads, they're good, they're bad, too many, not enough, marketing's winning, sales is winning. How do we get everybody to win? And what I would like to now think about, let's not think about us as salespeople or let's not think about as marketers, let's not think about us as agencies, media companies, whatever we are as an organization, let's think about the customer. Let's become customer-obsessed. I've been assigned a new role in 2020 and that role is to embody the voice of the customer back to our organization. As organizations grow in size, more and more people are touching the customer and we've built our business around being customer-obsessed. All you have to do is talk to one of our long-standing customers and they will say, that is the very best organization we've ever worked with. So my boss sits me down and says, "You know, you got a big loud voice, you're a blowhard, you got broad shoulders, go out there and work with our customers, which is what you're good at and come back and help our organization in the way that they deal with customers." So this entire episode is dedicated to this year of the customer and being very customer-focused, and I wanna talk about our existing clients. I'm gonna talk about the people who feed our kids. They're the ones that are paying their hard-earned money for whatever sort of solution that we are delivering to the client. Coming up next on the Conquer Local Podcast. Colleen: We are counting down the days to Conquer Local 2020. It's the must-attend conference for companies selling digital solutions to local businesses. This year we are driving growth, two days before the start of the Canadian F1 Grand Prix in Montreal. Our keynote speaker, co-founder and former CRO of HubSpot, Mark Roberge. At Conquer Local you get to learn from an incredible lineup of industry thought leaders. Network with our most successful partners, vendors and Vendasta experts and participate in hands-on workshops and leave with concrete takeaways that you can implement in your business strategy. For our loyal podcast listeners, we wanna give you $300 off your ticket with promo code, podcast 300. Book your tickets today at conquerlocal.com. George: There's an enormous opportunity within existing customers because these are the people that become repeat customers, you renew the contract, number two, if you position yourself as a trusted local expert, they just phone you and ask you questions about the space that you're in and I love that. I've always, it took me a number of years in my early sales career to figure out that, that was an important piece to being seen as the one that had the great ideas and could come up with the creative plans and could navigate this world of marketing. And even back then, in the Stone Age, when I started the horse and buggy days when we walked two miles to school every day on shards of broken glass uphill, even in those days, it was super confusing to the customer. I met one of my long term customers last week, and they said, "Those things that you and I used to talk about 20 some odd years ago, we still struggle with them today." And that's where some of our best relationships come from, those of us with old gray hair or, but those are the problems that we've always had as business people is who do I trust? Who's the person that's going to give me the straight goods? At least 90% of the time, that's the people that we like doing business with. And the reason that we trust them is because they have a track record of delivery. So when we look at what we were doing weeks ago, or whenever you listened to that previous edition, where we talked about leads, we’re gonna deploy the exact same tactics against existing customers, review the notes.  George: One thing that I like to do is I have all my best customers in my, I have them as a Favorites tab in my phone and I'll go through them. I'll click on those influencers and I'll go, I haven't talked to so and so in a long time and I'll just pick up the phone and dial them. And I might get through and I might not get through but I'll tell you what I always do, I always send a text message saying, "Hey, I was just thinking about you. I wanted to message because I've got something that I think is important that I wanted to talk to you about, call me back anytime, it's not pressing." And again, that's like, yeah, I wanted to talk to you, but it's to deliver some value, it's not just to see how you were doing, not if you've working with them for 10 years, they named their kid after you, you were their godfather for their baby, then you could say, "Hey, I'm just checking in to see how the family is and can't wait to have a bourbon with you." But as you go through that list of favorites, it's just that whole thing of making sure that you are top of mind and you're keeping that prospect, who now is your client top of mind as you go through your day to day life.    Always Do Your Research George: Keep double-checking your research, Owler is a great tool. Also inside reputation management, not that we like to talk about our stuff, but let me tell you inside reputation management, you can set up reputation management account, go into the Mentions tab, put in all of your customer names, put in all of the prospects that you're or the clients that you're dealing with. And when something happens like they release their annual earnings, or that person gets a promotion and a press release goes out, that reputation management account just pops up that information to you in the Mentions tab and you can have it delivered in your daily digest, I use it all the time. Whether you use that tool or not, we'd love for you to do that, 'cause we're trying to feed our kids but just find a tool that will allow you to creep on those people that you are dealing with today, so you can find out the things that are going on. It'd be so great to just be on that next call with a customer and say, "Hey, I just noticed that you got a promotion, congratulations, that's really exciting." 'Cause they're probably not gonna get on the call and say, "Yeah, I got a promotion." But by you knowing about it, it's almost expected. Isn't it almost expected?  George: Now, I went off Facebook a year ago in my personal life and I have been meeting up with some friends. And I just happened to last week meet a friend who I've known for 10, 15 years and then I hadn't talked to for 15 years. The conversation was like, "So tell me what's been happening with you?" And they're like, "Well, don't you know?" The expectation was because of social media, that you just knew what was going on in their lives. They had another baby and they've opened up four or five new businesses and they're just kicking ass. Now if they're on LinkedIn, because I believe LinkedIn is critical to a person running a business, I should know that. So my point is, is there is this expectation from your client who is paying you, and depending upon how much they're paying you, for you to use some sort of tool to know what's going on with them, or maybe even with their competitor. So the next time that you have that, call, you could say, and this is where your research comes in important, where you say, I know this customer so well, I know who their three competitors are, I know that, that competitor, just increased the value in their offering, I better call and help.  George: And this is where we get out of that mentality of I'm gonna drive my product and service down their throat, to hit my budget, to achieve my goal. And you start thinking about how your solution and the things that you offer inside your stack can help that client achieve their goal. It's a total shift in mindset where you're focused on the outcome of the client. If you take care of needs analysis, and you take care of presentations, and you take care of putting enough effort into the deal to move it through the pipeline, the closes will just take care of themselves but it all starts with research. It starts with developing, where am I going? So you think of your existing customer base is an amazing set of leads, that's what you need to think of them. There's more money there. What we hope when we're converting leads out here in the wild, is we can get a couple more in that act like those ones, we want the repeat customer, we want the customer where we can add value, we want the customer where we can get more things installed. Now is it self serving? Sure, it is a little bit self-serving because we know from data points across 200,000 businesses that we've been tracking for over three years, that those businesses that have more than four things that they are being delivered by a partner have some sort of managed service layer over top of them, have a regular touchpoint with the solution that you're delivering, either opening an email, answering a phone call for a QBR, monthly strategy call, they have a 30 to 40% higher retention rate than all the other customers out there. George: So by delivering more value, which also was selling more things, by having more regular touchpoints with that client, you have a longer lifetime value from that customer. You have a happier customer, you have somebody that's more apt to ask you for things when they have a need to rise in their business, because you are the holy grail is to become the trusted local provider.    Learn the Best Way to Contact Existing Customers George: Now, make sure that you're making the call. We remember back to our first episode, we talked a lot about this where I find people just give up too quick and when it's with an existing customer, this is the crazy part, some of the biggest clients that I've been working with for the longest period of time, who I know trust us, who I know find enormous value from our solutions, I have to phone them the most times to get them on the phone but they're also the busiest and they probably don't need me. They're like, no, I gotta go over here and do this deal. I gotta work with this team, I just let go this Vice President, I gotta get into this market and help them succeed, I can talk to George anytime. And that's when you have something of enormous value that will help that customer meet some need that they gave you, maybe eight, nine months ago, and the stars have aligned, your manager comes to you and says, "Yeah, we have more of these, "we've gotta move this inventory." Does that ever happen to you? Where it's like, "Hey, we've got excess inventory here, we're prepared to offer it at a lesser price." And the people we should do that with is our existing clientele, where we know that they have this need that they mentioned to us months ago and now the stars have aligned and I can help them with that.  George: So, when I talk about making the calls, emails, text messages, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever your preferred method of communicating, I've got a whole corpus of customers that I only talked to through WhatsApp. They're European, they're in Africa, that's the way that they like to communicate. I send them an email, I could wait a year to get a response. I sent a text message, I might get something back but I send a WhatsApp, I know they've read it and I usually get a response quite quickly. So, utilize whatever tool you need to do to make the contact with the client but don't give up too quick on this.    Find What Is Important to Your Customer George: And then when you don't close the deal, it's okay. I think part of the relationship that you have with the long term customer, and the value that you bring to that long term customer is to say, "I just wanted to revisit this idea "and see if things have changed with your organization." If it's something that you feel very strongly about, and I'm gonna tell you something that I feel enormously strongly about and I've I felt this way since we invented it years ago. I'm looking back and I don't really think that responding to reviews as an agency on behalf of a business was a thing. I think it might have been happening randomly but I think that the very first time was about 2011, 2012, where we really got it into a repeatable model, where organizations were able to take it out and make it a multimillion-dollar line of business. And I'm gonna keep bringing that up over and over and over again, to my partners if they have not captured that, because anybody that is using that, I'm watching them make dollars, I'm watching them keep customers, I'm watching them drive more value. So this is one of those things where I have yet to have research to tell me that I'm off base on this. In fact, all of my research shows me that this thing more people should be doing it. So I just keep bringing it up over and over again, even when people have said, "No, I don't think it's a fit. "I think it's too expensive. My customer base won't pay that amount."  George: And you know what just happened a week ago, someone that I had presented that line of business to, for four bloody years, finally came forward and said, "We need to do that." Because their star is aligned, the things inside their organization aligned to this and it might be, we need more incremental revenue to hit our goal. And in these customers, I think it's really important to dig really deep into what is a win for them.  George: One of my elevator pitches that I like to use in this and to those of you that I've worked with that are customers will know you've heard this for me, Christmas is coming and we're gonna arrive on December 23 and I'm gonna phone you or maybe we'll be lucky enough to be sitting face to face, having a bourbon, celebrating the year. And what is the sentence or sentences or paragraph that you would like to say to me, where together, we crushed it? And then let that just marinate with the client. It's like setting, I wanna understand what their goal is, I wanna understand what a win is for them and then I'm gonna go to work and I'm going to align everything and the resources at my avail and for those of you that are either just starting an agency, and it's one person or those of you that are working for some of our biggest customers, you have never had a bigger opportunity, because you have this marketplace that exists with more and more things being added to it all the time, where you can go and dig in there and bring items out and say I can help you get to that goal. But you need to understand what that, whether it's a big hairy, audacious goal, or it's something that they're trying to achieve this year. I really would like to know what that three-year window looks like for that client. And if it's somebody you've been working with for longer than maybe a week or a month or a year, you can start to have those deeper conversations and I'd like you to audit the conversations that you have had with existing customers.    Are You Treating That Existing Customer as a Lead George: So let's go back to this, are you treating that existing customer as a lead? All right, here is one of the other wins. If you take care of your existing customers, you drive more incremental value, you solve more problems, you become more mission-critical, their retention goes up by 35% but here's the other piece that happens, they now become advocates for new business. So remember back where I talked about the testimonial that I was able to give a prospect, wasn't me it was somebody in the organization was able to reach out to this customer that loves us and get them on the phone with somebody that was considering loving us. But what happens when you go to a conference? What happens when they sit down with a group of their peers that they don't compete with? If you've done an amazing job, they will bring your name up at that.  George: Again, a week ago, LinkedIn message comes through from somebody I haven't talked to for five years. We finally get on the phone and I wanted to talk to him, great guy and I said, "Hey Bryce, good speaking to you." He says, "You know, I've been talking to a couple of organizations, and all they keep talking about is you." Now, it wasn't me, it was our organization but that's what I'm talking about, is that advocacy, it's like, you should probably talk to X, those folks know what they're doing. You turn your happiest customers into the very best sales resource that any of us could have, our referral engine. And that comes from doing a great job, but it also comes from keeping that top of mind awareness and it comes from doing things like, sending out little reminders and newsletters, other communications that you can deliver through your marketing team, holding networking events to build an authentic community, or maybe even going as far as your own conference, where you bring your biggest customers in and they can just mingle with potential customers. So think about that as the, that's the big win out of all this. There are a number of other wins but that big win is where you just get the referrals at the end of the day.   Conclusion George: So one of our goals this year was that George would do a better wrap up of the topics covered in episode and I always like to make producer Colleen happy, so let's do that quickly. Number one, review your notes, or any files you have on the client, so the client here, we need to also double check our research and make sure we have some sort of a tool that is giving us the information on that prospect, what's going on inside their organization. If they're large enterprise deals, you'll need to do further research. Make sure that you're setting a clear objective and delivering value for the new solutions that you're bringing forward and keep bringing those solutions forward unless you have new data or new research that points you in another direction. Item number four is, keep deploying the effort, whether that's calls, emails, texts, links, LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp, whatever it is your preferred communication is and sometimes change it up. You've just been texting and you're not getting the response or just emailing and not getting the response, change it up a little bit. Number five, when you don't close, make sure that you keep bringing that value forward. So the stars haven't aligned yet and that's okay. The other thing is, you may not be closing the new opportunity, because you need to bring more people into the deal.  George: Now on an enterprise type deal, I have a new saying, not new for some of you that have been doing this for a while but I talk about it all the time, it takes a village. So that's when you might wanna bring on another resource to the call. I was working with our friends from Videobolt yesterday and they have done a number of improvements to their platform and I was talking to Corey Saban and the team there and I'm like, "Why don't we go back into some of the groups where we have already talked about your brand, but the things that you've done to innovate, have improved the experience and probably tick off the boxes that they had." They're like, "Oh, if this then we would move forward." So we didn't get a close when we brought it up a year ago, they've now innovated on their solution, I wanna present that again. And if we know something like SEO, for instance, is really important to them, and they're working with another vendor, I'm going to constantly bring up the things that we have just to keep it top of mind, in case they wanna make that change.  George: So just keep on it because you may not close it today but if you keep delivering that information to them, the stars may align. Don't just touch base or check-in, always have that plan and deliver that value. And then the final thing is, you want to generate that advocacy, turning your happy clients into your best sales resource. So while the best salespeople can make it seem like sales skills are built into a person's DNA, these sales skills actually do take time, strategy and practice to develop. A lot of times when you were listening to a master sales training episode, it's something that I struggled with recently. And that's why I have those stories of, this just happened last week and this just because it spurred something where it's like, we need to get back to those basics. This stuff right here, not rocket science. I'm sure there's a lot of times you're listening you're like, "Yeah, no shit, Sherlock that's something that I should be doing." But what I'm hearing from season experts, is it's great to be reminded.  George: What I'm also hearing from team leads, it's great to be reminded so that they can take it to a meeting with a beginner, because those team leads and those coaches are working with new reps all the time, they're like, "Oh, I really should talk about how to work with a prospect or how to work with an existing customer to expand our reach." So, we want to work on improving these skills, that's what the Master Sales Training Series is all about and we appreciate you joining us today for this episode, which was all about taking those existing clients and putting that prospecting mindset around them, treating them as leads, and extracting more value from those customers but also solving more problems to have a longer-term lifetime value from that client. My name is George Leith, thanks for joining us on the Conquer Local Podcast. I'll see you when I see you.

Different segments of digital marketing can work independently, but adding a video marketing strategy can enhance and make them stronger. We speak to Brian Albert, Founder and CEO of Videobolt, in Florida this week. Videobolt has a history of helping businesses grow by producing high-quality videos and pass it along to SMBs who can't necessarily afford it.  Brian shares the two questions you should ask yourself before hitting the record button on your camera to create a video for your brand. He explains how to overcome objections, how to use video to your advantage during the pandemic, and why turning on your camera is a must for remote meetings. Videobolt.com is the leading provider of spokesperson videos to businesses of all sizes, as well as an innovator in the personalized video space. Brian also founded thelaw.tv, a pioneer in lawyer video marketing. Prior to entering the business world, Brian was a television news reporter and anchor in New York and Florida (where he interviewed multiple presidents and Fortune 100 CEOs), as well as an attorney. He has more than 25 years of programming experience and is a skilled video editor. Brian is a graduate of Columbia University, where he played on the ice hockey team and the University of Miami School of Law. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and expand your knowledge in the Conquer Local Academy.   Introduction George: It's the "Conquer Local" podcast. Hold onto your ears and open your eyes. We're gonna talk about video today, but we're going to do it with audio and a podcast, it's gonna be a lot of fun. We're bringing in a video expert all the way from Jupiter, Florida. His name is Mr. Brian Albert, the CEO and co-founder of Videobolt. He brings about 20-some odd years of video experience in the television industry and then working in the platform of coming up with an affordable way for businesses to use video. And his expertise in the space is very deep. And we're gonna teach you about why you need to be considering video, not only for your customers, but how you can get better at video in your world, and how video is touching everything that we do, and it's changing the way that we do business. Brian Albert is coming up next, the CEO and co-founder of Videobolt.com on the Conquer Local Podcast.  George: Another edition of the Conquer Local Podcast, and I know this is audio, you may be listening to this on your morning run, you might be listening to this while you're driving down the highway, but we're gonna talk all about video. Video killed the radio star, and Brian Albert is joining us, the founder and CEO of Videobolt from Jupiter, Florida. Brian, how are you doing today? Brian: Good, George. Thanks for having me. George: I was trying to think back to how long you and I have known each other, and I'm really impressed with the technology and the platform that Videobolt has put together. Can you give us a bit of an overview of your technology and what was the impetus of the creation of your company, and a little bit about some of the organizations you work with? Brian: Sure, well, we decided to build a platform that would make it quick, easy, and affordable for businesses of every size, local businesses, small businesses up to Fortune 500 companies to produce video content with the frequency that's required. Now, how my background played into it, I started off as a lawyer and I was a solo practitioner in Miami. So I have that small business background, I did that right out of law school. And lawyers are amongst the earliest adopters of a lot of technologies, including video. So I was on that side of the game for a little while. Then I went into TV news, and I was a news reporter for seven years in Florida, in New York, and in a couple of other small markets. And I started off just when the whole one-man-band or MMJ multimedia journalist concept started to take shape, where instead of sending out a few people to a news report with a videographer, a reporter coming back to an editor and a producer, and potentially a sound person, one person's going out and doing everything. So, what you learn and what I learned when I was at NY1 News in New York, which essentially invented one-man-band journalism is, you have to find ways to get things done with less. And that's what we've done with Videobolt. We found ways to produce high-quality videos with less, and we pass along those savings to the small businesses that desperately need video to communicate with their audience, but previously couldn't afford it. George: Oh, it's so cool that you bring that up because I remember watching television at that time, and I was in the media business at that time, and it was like, boy, it looks like that reporter might be running the camera at the same time as they're doing the report, and they had that like a headset. It was pretty cool. It was a big departure from what we were used to. So, it's interesting that that was the thing that kind of spurred you, that we needed to come up with a better way to deliver video. Now, let's talk about the importance of video.   The First Impression of Your Business: Storytelling Through Video George: As we were preparing for this broadcast, I was thinking about the last messages that had really made it into my brain. And I'm pretty sure that nine out of 10 of them all included some sort of a video message. This is really the norm, isn't it, to impact a viewer, or a listener, or an audience? If you don't have video, you're really missing the boat. Brian: Absolutely, and video is a part of everything. One thing that a lot of businesses don't understand what the video is, they think video is a standalone tool. You can have a website, you can have Facebook marketing, you can do SEO, and you can do video. Those other things can work independently, you can just have a website and the website will work. You can just do Facebook marketing and that will work, you can just do email marketing, that will work. Video itself, it's not a platform unto itself. It's something that you integrate into everything else, and it makes everything else better. If you just produce a video, but you have nowhere to put it, you have nowhere to distribute that video, you won't have success with videos. So what businesses need to realize is video is something that enhances everything else they do. So, if they have a website, they're doing social media landing pages, email marketing, Shopify, Google Business, anything that they're doing, they can use video to better connect with the audience on those platforms. George: I was trying to do some ribs the other day, and I've got a new smoker, and I'm horrible at it, and I watched 21 videos on how to make ribs. They still sucked. I think I need to go to school, but that's just one example of the use of video as an education tool. And then we've got... when I look at your video arsenal and the thing that you're able to build with your platform, you can do a lot of things. I wanna talk about the spokesperson video, where you've got the news anchor talking about a product or service. It's a really cool way to add authority, I think. Brian: Yeah, so we came up with that idea because one thing we recognized after working exclusively with lawyers for the first seven years we were in business starting in 2008, we learned that a lot of those lawyers don't belong on camera. So, we then looked at what are ways that... It's just something, someone has to say it, so- George: My mom says that I have a face for radio. Brian: If you have a voice, then go do the radio thing. So, the lawyers weren't all ready for prime time. They didn't belong on camera, but they needed to do videos. So, we would get all kinds of dopey requests like can you just do the animation for me or the whiteboard video? Because that was the default. If you weren't going on camera, you’d do that. So we came up with the idea of the spokesperson videos, and these are all professional storytellers. Some of them are actual spokespeople, some are news anchors, some are actors, some are just people who have other careers, but are great communicators on camera. And what they can do is they can help to tell the business's story in a professional way. And that's what's so important. We see a lot of businesses taking the DIY approach with a video. That works sometimes, and it doesn't work other times. And they do that typically to save money or because of the perception that they'll save money. And one thing I always ask businesses that I'm speaking with that decide to go that route is what else in your business did you decide to do by yourself instead of hiring a professional? You don't layout your own office, design your own logo, build your own website, create your own letterheads, print your own business cards, manage your local area network, run your own SEO campaign, but you'll hold up your iPhone and shoot a selfie video with bad lighting and poor audio and think that that's an acceptable representation of your brand online because you think it's cheaper. So, what we did is we tried to find a way to make businesses' video production more affordable, but to keep it professional. So the way we do that is by using these spokespeople, and we keep it affordable because we have them in the studio all day long. They're here anyway. So if a customer places an order for another video, we already have people in the studio who can tell that story in a professional way and get that message out quickly because the frequency of video content, like with any video content online, is so critically important. You have to stay in front of your audience, and by making it easy for businesses to get video out quickly and with the frequency they need at an affordable price, it's allowing them to stay ahead of their competition. George: Well, I'm glad that you brought up that point around, professionalism, and you've got three advocates right here in the studio, my longtime friend and Sound Producer, Mr. T Bone, who is one of the best in the business. And you can tell by the Quality Producer Colleen, and even in the work that we've been doing with the podcast, it's like, God, we really need that theme song that we have to pay a licensing fee for. I actually am quite a good musician, I might be able to play my recorder over here and do a theme. We could just shoot it on our iPhone, we don't need... And it's like, yeah, we could do all those things and it's going to be shit. And we wanna do a professional show. So, we've got this audience of the Conquer Local Podcast that sell to local businesses or managed sales teams. And I'd love to get your feedback and your experience on how do you take that prospect that says, you know, my brother's gonna do it, or my aunt's gonna do it, or I'm gonna do it myself and articulate the value. I think you got to it a moment ago, but I'd really like to hear the Brian Albert pitch on why do I need to spend a little bit more money or have a little bit more rigor and thought around what I'm doing to deliver that message. What is the... For the sales teams listening and sales reps listing, how would you deal with that objection of, I got a guy, my brother's gonna do it? Brian: So, one thing is just to look at what your competition is doing. And that's something that you can do now that you couldn't do a few years ago, definitely not five years ago and 10 years ago, because the competition wasn't necessarily online with video. But if you look at what your competition is doing, that should be your baseline. That should be your minimum standard of video production. And most businesses, most small businesses, have competition that are doing really good video online. And you don't want to be the one that is completely missing the boat because you think that your nephew can use his iPhone and iMovie to shoot videos that are going to be out there for the world to see as their first impression of your business. And that's what video often is these days, it's the first impression of the business. So, when you're selling video to a small business, you need to make sure they understand the importance of a video. First of all, the importance of how people are seeking out video. And they're watching video like you mentioned with making the ribs, no one reads anymore. Everyone's searching for a video online, and that's typically the introduction to the business. So, do you want your nephew producing the video that is introducing the business or do you want a professional doing it? Now, one of the objections, or one of the reasons why you typically have that objection, oh, I could do it myself, or I know a guy who can do it, the reason that objection typically exists is because of the perception that video is expensive. Video does not have to be expensive. We're not the only company that's doing affordable videos, there's a lot of other companies that have found ways to maintain the level of professionalism and to bring the price point down. That's what businesses need to look for. We've moved past the day where you couldn't get in the door with a quality video for less than $10,000, which was the case a few years ago.   Remote Work: Adapting to Video Conferencing George: So, we're now coming through this event that shall go nameless because it has probably been mentioned too many times that has really changed business completely. And I don't know if you've been noticing this, but what I've been noticing is, all the things we've been saying for the last six years are now more important than they've ever been, and if you really don't jump on the bandwagon, the wagon is not just gonna run you over, it probably has already run you over. So, how do we position video, and what is the unique selling proposition in this new remote world, and online world, and e-commerce world. And, am I missing the boat that this probably is even more important than it has ever been? Brian: It is more important because we're all remote, and we're not getting in front of our customers anymore, we're not getting in front of our employees. And one thing that's important is that video isn't just for communicating with the outside world. Businesses are increasingly using professional video to communicate with their own companies. And that's important when your own company is no longer working in the office with you. So, when you're looking at well, how do I use video now, why is video more important now? Couple of things come to mind. First of all, you need to use video to talk about what your company is doing to keep employees and the public safe. You need to talk about whether any recent changes impact your current operations. You should also be discussing how you're handling refunds if you've had closures or cancellations, and what your customers, your employees, and anyone who you're trying to communicate with can expect from you in the weeks and months to come. And then you can use video also to stay top of mind with prospects. If you're selling to anyone, whether you're a small business, large business, you need to stay top of mind with prospects, and video can help you do that even more so in a world where no one's really meeting face-to-face anymore. George: Well, it definitely is a skill set that people need to learn. And I remember talking to a Conquer Local guest alumni, Mr. Greg Ryan, who's the CRO of ThriveHive, which is now part of the Gannett Corporation. And we were talking just after the whole COVID thing kicked in. He leads a sales team that primarily has been going face-to-face with the customer. And we said, how is the whole remote transition going? He said, "I didn't realize how hard this would be to get salespeople to understand how you do a screen share." And, when you unpack that, you're like, yeah, if the rep had been used to face-to-face calls their whole career, and now you're saying you got to use... And it's funny because we record these podcasts on Google Meet. We all use Zoom. Like it's just, you say Zoom like it's... But there is a group of people who've been delivering products and services in a different manner that don't even know that this is a thing, and then what are the best practices? When you start to teach them things like, well, you know, it's probably a good idea to wear pants because you might stand up during the video, or what's in your background, like, what is that picture, or what's going on? All just small little things that you are talking to your frigging customer on the other end of that video call, or what if you just don't even put your picture up there, you don't put the video on on a video call, is that a negative? And all of these questions have come up, and then when we start doing a thing like I call, film review, where you watch the sales reps call now online, there's this... Thank God I worked in the radio business for years and was subjected to air checks and had done a number of airchecks, so I had a skill set to be able to coach people on that. Where are we gonna go to get the best practices on how to communicate remote? Brian: So, I don't know if there's necessarily a best practice that applies to every company. I'm starting to see things, to see practices coalesce together. The thing you mentioned about, do I have to go on camera if this is a video call? That's something that I've seen change a lot over the last few months. Before COVID, before remote working and business shutdowns, I, like you, was doing Google Meets all the time. And I would very often log on to those meetings, and I would have my camera on by default because it's a meeting. Why wouldn't you put yourself in front of that person, but then the other person wouldn't, and then you start thinking to yourself, well, am I now at a disadvantage because they see me and I see them? So then the default is you turn the camera off and no one has the camera on. Since the shutdown, I've noticed, first of all, I always keep my camera on. And I've noticed that everyone who I've done a Google Meet with has kept their camera on as well. People are getting more comfortable with it. People are realizing that we're not going to be meeting in person for a long time, so why don't we just treat this as an in-person meeting? And with something like Google Meet, and video conferencing, it can be. And I've had meetings that were as effective as in-person meetings that were thousands of miles apart, and because we can see each other. So it's just one way that people are adapting to video in the current environment. And that's live video, but prerecorded video as well. Businesses are becoming much more... they're much more likely to embrace it. They're starting to understand the importance of it. And we've seen no shortage of new ways that companies are using our product since the shutdown began because everyone is looking at video and saying, what more can I do with this platform? Because I need to continue to communicate and find new ways to get in front of people.   Conclusion George: So, the one thing that I wanted to make sure that we were able to articulate on this broadcast, there's a lot of talk around e-commerce. And at the moment that we're recording this podcast, yesterday Shopify released their Q2 results. And it's unbelievable what that company has done, and right place, right time, great technology, great leadership, all of those items. So, it's all this stuff around e-commerce, right? Can I book online, can I do... can I conduct a transaction online? But also I wanted to make sure that we made our audience aware that video, although it's been around for a while, it has never been more important and it's not just coming up with a spokesperson video. It's just the way that business is going to be done in this remote environment. It is vitally important. Brian: Yeah, and what businesses need to be doing when they decide to step into video the first time, or if they're already doing video and they are evaluating their strategy, they need to ask themselves two questions. And these are questions that too many businesses that do video don't ask, and this is why they very often go astray with their video. These are basic questions, but you don't see a lot of businesses doing this. You need to first say, what do I want to say in my videos? And who do I want to say it to? It's two very basic questions, but if you don't know what's your message and who is your audience, your videos will fail. You need to ask those questions first, what's my message; who's my audience? If you understand those things, your videos will be successful because you will be saying the right things and saying them to the right people. And then as long as you use them in the right places, and remember going back to the beginning of the conversation, video on its own doesn't do anything, but it makes everything else that you're doing better. So, if you have those two things down, what am I saying, who am I saying it to, and then you look at where you have an audience online, whether it's your website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and use the videos there effectively, your videos will be successful. George: Brian Albert, CEO, co-founder of Videobolt from Jupiter, Florida, joining us. Probably one of the top experts in video today. I encourage you to go to Videobolt.com and have a look at the platform. There's definitely something there for you and your business, whether you are a single proprietor, and you're just trying to build your personal brand. Or if you are a large organization, I encourage you to understand the power of video. It is definitely a game-changer. Brian, thanks for your time today.  Brian: George, great to be here. George: Great learnings from Mr. Brian, Albert. I am sure that you are loving that feedback. Number one, video makes everything work better. You can have a website, you can have social, you can do email marketing, but imagine if you plugged in a first-person video in there, and did it in a way that was creative, and did it in a way that was professional. Also, there is a risk to using your iPhone that has a smudge on it and bad audio because you haven't cleaned the speaker in 10 years where the microphone is. And there just is a risk in doing that really cheap knockoff video stuff. I like the organic part of it, and it's really transparent and everything else. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's professional. And then, how video is touching everything that we do. You have been on more video calls and video presentations in the last 90 days than ever in your career. I'm pretty sure that that bold statement is true. And Brian has given you some tips about what he knows from coming up with great professional video delivery. So, the key takeaways, video makes everything work better. Be very careful when you're doing those organic, do it yourself selfie videos, isn't necessarily the professional view, and the professional brand that you want to be presenting, whether for yourself or for your company or for your clients. And then finally, video is touching our lives everywhere. And I love the analogy that he's using about his own experience on doing a video presentation. And I've noticed this as well. I've always had the video on, and then your prospect turns the video off. So then you turn the video off, but now we're living in a time where everybody is using video, and more and more times, it's like we call it heads-up internally, but you have to have the camera on. And then what do they see? Is it all the background that isn't professionally done? Is it the fact you didn't comb your hair in three days? Is it the fact that you're wearing the same T-shirt because you're working from home and you're a bit of a slob? All of those things now are coming into view because we are doing business differently, and video is touching everything. I like the fact that he loved my rib analogy because I'm probably underestimating the number of rib videos that I've watched on YouTube because now it's actually kind of funny to listen to the accents and to watch the different techniques. But think about it. If you think about the things that you're considering buying, the things that you've already bought, there is at some point you went to your search engine of choice and tried to find a video that would show you what you were doing wrong, or how you could improve the things that you're doing. It just is ingrained in our lives, and we need to embrace it. Plus, you need to be selling it. You need to be that trusted local expert that is delivering a reliable video solution to your clients and helping them with their... Like, they might believe the only thing that they learned is that, oh, we should do first-person selfie videos 'cause they're organic, and they're awesome, and they're transparent. But yet it's not converting, and it's not working, and it's not driving more revenue for them. So, Brian's takeaways from this episode will really help you in positioning the video motion that you are going to deliver to your customers. And then don't forget about learning to use that same video motion for yourself. It is the Conquer Local Podcast. This episode, all about video. We hope you enjoyed it. My name is George Leith, I'll see you when I see you.

Did you know that Conquer Local has its very own Digital Marketing Academy? It's a game-changer because the SaaS industry changes under our feet. We have Jacqueline Cook (Jackie), Chief Strategy Officer at Vendasta, on the podcast to discuss the strategy behind the Conquer Local Academy. After some research and listening to digital marketing agencies and entrepreneurs from different areas of the world, there was a realization that there was a need in the space for a digital marketing academy. It needed to be all-encompassing of various digital solutions that intertwine frequently. The Academy is built into a culture that embraces a community that agencies and entrepreneurs can grow and learn in. People learn differently; some learn by reading about it, and some want to watch videos at 2 am. The Academy was created to accommodate different learners in the way they want to learn and on their time. Keep the conversations going in the Conquer Local Community. She works with the CEO to shape Vendasta's long term strategy and to align both the culture, organizational design, and company metrics toward those long-term objectives. Jacqueline works across a number of diverse teams to execute cross-functional initiatives, collect and share key customer insights, and test new initiatives to drive Vendasta's growth levers. She is also the General Manager of Vendasta's high-growth mid-market customer segment, which currently contributes over half of the company's revenue and includes marketing, sales, success, support, and four product teams. Most recently, Jacqueline played a major role in Vendasta's $40M growth funding round, which marks the single largest technology investment in the prairies since the Canadian Venture Capital Private Equity Association (CVCA) started collecting data in 2013. Jacqueline is an alumnus of The Next 36 Entrepreneurial Institute, Canada's premier entrepreneurial leadership initiative. During the program, she co-founded and was CEO of Triumf Mobile Rewards: a tablet and Smartphone-based platform for small and medium-sized businesses to customize their own loyalty rewards programs. She has been a speaker at events such as Tejo Talks, sponsored by Canada's Embassy to Portugal as part of Web Summit, TEDx UofS and WE DAY, and has represented Canada at the 2010 G8 and G20 Summits, the 2010 APEC Summit in Japan, and at the 2011 G20 Young Entrepreneur Summit in France. Jacqueline has been a recipient of CBC Saskatchewan's Future 40 under 40 and a YWCA Women of Distinction Award and serves on the board of Co.Labs, Saskatchewan's first technology incubator. She was recently named as one of Betakit's Canadian women in tech worth watching.   Introduction George: It's another edition of the Conquer Local Podcast. Joining us this week, Jackie Cook is the Chief Strategy Officer of Vendasta. We've been getting a lot of questions around what was the birth of the Conquer Local Academy. What was the birth of this community concept where we have the podcast, we have the conference? We have now this resource called the academy and then forums. A place for partners to go and ask questions. We're gonna bring in Jackie, she's responding for this at an executive level in the organization, and we're gonna drill her. We're gonna ask a whole bunch of questions around what problem were we trying to solve. And I think that will really help our listeners understand what the resource of the Conquer Local Community and the various modules are and how you might be able to use that to benefit your organization. Jackie Cook, Chief Strategy Officer of Vendasta on the Conquer Local Podcast.  George: Always like getting Jackie Cook on the show, Chief Strategy Officer at Vendasta. And we're gonna talk strategy today. Jacqueline: Let's do it. George: And I'm excited to talk about this strategy because it's something that you're super passionate about. Let's set the stage. The stage is your 30,000 channel partners spread all over the world, dealing with four million local businesses or end-users. And sometimes it might be like herding cats. So how do you build an ecosystem where that group of channel partners feels supported? Do they have places where they can go to collaborate? They can, I really believe that this kind of sets the stage as to what we're going to talk about today, doesn't it? Jacqueline: Absolutely. George: How big of a problem is that for organizations as they start to scale and they have this two-tiered kind of customer base that they care about. You care about the reseller channel that you're using, and then you care about the end-user? It's not that you care about one more than the other, but it really, it causes this huge pain point that needs to be solved, doesn't it? Jacqueline: Yeah, and I think part of that too, is there's just so much more cognitive load on that. For customers who have been direct channels, for companies who have a direct channel, you teach one customer. But with what we do at Vendasta, it's learning what are those best practices. Then teaching those to our customers and training the trainer so that they can employ what we've all learned to their customer group. So there's just so much information, and even hearing from our partners’ feedback of how do we keep up. And between the confines of nine to five, the hours that you're open like I wanna learn, and I wanna understand more. But it's unrealistic to think that I can sort of be handheld when there are better tools to learn and to digest some of that information. George: Now the interesting thing is the term LMS, learning management system, is thrown around that acronym quite a bit. And one of the things that you and I have talked about over the years wouldn’t it be great to have a place where we could take something that we teach on an ongoing basis and make it scalable. So that people could come. Because, and the challenge that I've had where I've been training people face-to-face, and we did a lot of that work in the early years. You're sitting with a group of sellers, you get to the end of a lesson that you're teaching and you go any questions? And no one puts their hand up. Because you don't wanna look stupid in front of your peers. It is typical, although there are questions. So how do we put that learning motion into a place where there's a safe place for them to land. To ask what they may perceive as a dumb question? Jacqueline: Yeah, well, and I think that's the beauty of what this academy provides. I've been learning lots from both Sanjay and Cal who are instructional designers. And to think that every learner learns the same way is totally bogus. Some people like to learn by doing, and they wanna dive right in and try it themselves and then ask questions when they get stuck. Some people want to understand by reading and methodically digesting data in sort of a linear fashion. And other people want to see how it's done, watch someone do it. And so in the academy, we've incorporated elements of each one of those styles. But the beauty in being able to take the training in sort of out of the day-to-day conversations is then our team gets to be way more consultative, on how to apply that knowledge. It's not just about transferring that knowledge to our partners because our partners are busy, and they don't have eight hours a day to just sit on a phone call and go through everything soup to nuts. But those that really want to dive deep can do it on their own time, at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning, if they really wanted to, and spend the time to really dive way deeper into concepts that are way more applicable to their business and they can apply in real life. So that's what's been really exciting about this.   Game Changer: Kickstarting the Conquer Local Academy George: Overused term alert, game changer. But I really believe that the ability for multiple users to be able to go somewhere to learn at their own pace. To learn the very latest information because we live in an industry where the world is changing under our feet. So you have to have that constant cadence, but it's a safe place. It's a place where they can go and I wanna go back to something you said. You have these two individuals that you brought onto your team that are instructional designers and they're teachers by trade. Did you ever think you'd get to a point where you would be hiring teachers to support a software company? Jacqueline: It's so cool, George. We hired teachers; we've hired police officers; we've hired all of these, I'm-not-in-tech type of skill sets that are so relevant, so applicable. Teaching is about, our VP of design, Bryan Larson, the master of storytelling, the master of experience, he is a teacher by trade. And I don't think that's a weird coincidence. I think that's, there's really something about being able to communicate a concept in a way that someone understands in the least amount of time and friction possible. George: Now I wanna make sure that we get some lessons from Bryan on how to tell that story. Bryan is probably one of the best storytellers that I've ever met. And part of it is the work that he does ahead of telling the story to get prepped for that. But it is cool, I was listening to a podcast over the weekend and it prompted me [to think], “Oh, by the way, I need some budget because we need to get a psychologist on our sales training team to help people when they're going through a slump.” Jacqueline: You've been watching "Billions" again, haven't you George? George: Absolutely, he's one of the most important people in the C-suite on that show. But it's interesting here I am as a sales leader used to have this lens of, no get off your ass go talk to customers, that's how you sell more. And then we interviewed Jason Forest, a few podcasts back where he talks about the fact that sales is such a mental game. I think I'm gonna misquote this but it's something like this, there's no other business in the world where we get punched in the face all week long. And then you have one win on a Friday, and you're like, "Wow, this is the greatest job ever." But the rest of the week has just been failure after failure after failure. So it's interesting as we look at the skill sets that are needed to pull this whole thing together. What was the impetus or where was the analog when you were thinking about we need an academy, or we need more than just an LMS? Jacqueline: Yeah, I think that's really important to go into George, I'm glad you asked that question. There was a perfect storm of events brewing. So on one hand, as you obviously and many of the listeners know, Vendasta raised around $240 million in the summer of last year, and that was to accelerate the growth of our organization. And what that meant is we were going to be going from about 300 to about 500 people in the span of under 12 months. And so, especially in the sales organization, rapid growth in bringing people on, and sales you can't, as much as we try to systematize it and create a process around it, you gotta know a lot. You gotta understand our customers deeply, you gotta understand our products deeply, the market deeply, how to support our customer experience or customer journeys, there's a lot to ingest. And the biggest fear in that acceleration path was taking some of our top members off the front lines in order to train the next crop and we simply couldn't do that. To decrease efficiency and attain the targets that come along with raising a big round like that. It just didn't make sense. And so on one hand we had, how might we grow Vendasta at the pace we need to hit this next milestone. At the same time, what we were noticing was that a certain segment of our customers as we sort of move down market and brought on different types and segments of customers, they didn't often operate at the traditional nine to five, Monday to Friday. A lot of them were either moonlighting or overseas or out-of-office hours. And so to give them the support that they needed, was just unrealistic in a one-to-one method. A third compounding factor was, this is really interesting too and we've seen this for years is when we say something to our customers, with the most endearing intentions. We’ll tell [them], “Hey, if you'd send out these freemium solutions, and incubate and marketing automation.” They'll take it with a grain of salt, understandably as I do with any software partner that I use. But when another customer of ours tells them that exact same thing, it's amazing how they employ and how they trust. And so part of the academy and the community is also about how do we get our partners teaching new partners how to be successful with the Vendasta platform. And for us to really just get out of the way. And the last thing I'll mention. And again, this is a perfect storm of all these events was there was this thing called the COVID pandemic that happened. And just like every organization around the world, we were forced into a remote work style. And our partners were forced into a remote working style. And a lot of them, unfortunately, had business slow right down to a halt. And so what we saw is this increase in engagement really is from our partners and for their customers who also had closed signs on the doors. They said, I finally have time to learn this stuff. I finally have time to understand what my digital doorway looks like. Or as a partner understand what my stack looks like and really where I can be taking advantage of efficiencies or cost savings. And so we put really all hands on deck not just to create remote tools so that they could continue to operate remotely, but also so that they could learn and soak in all of the knowledge that we had been building and that we'd been making available to them and their customers over the last three to four years. George: We've been interviewing a number of people during the COVID time and one of the things that this forcing function that COVID was for organizations was the ability to stop the whirlwind. And I'm quoting from "The 4 Disciplines of Execution" Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, Steve or Sean Covey, not Stephen Covey. Great book around, same basic principles of John Doerr's "Measure What Matters". But it's this idea of you've got your job, and your job is the whirlwind. And the whirlwind keeps you away from the things that you know you need to do, which is I need to go digital with my organization so that we can conduct transactions online. I think a lot of businesses wanted to move towards e-commerce. But the whirlwind kept them from doing that, they were doing other things. Then there's also this thing of, well, I should learn more about what I could do to better serve my customers through digital marketing, but the whirlwind sucks me in it. And as business owners and entrepreneurs, I think that those business owners have two whirlwinds. They've got the whirlwind of their business and the whirlwind of their family life as well. And then what's left over is this learning component. So COVID comes along, we got lots more time on our hands. We actually are learning ways to be more efficient. You think about sales reps getting in a car driving across town, client declines the meeting. You just wasted the commute time, the meeting time, everything and you're sitting here going oh over COVID I was doing remote meetings and I was able just to stack them in and talk to way more people. So it's really interesting how this, you said we had this event that occurred.    Learning at Your Own Pace in Your Own Way: A Recipe for Success George: What are you finding in the early iterations of the academy around feedback from learners? And what are you, 'cause there's two customers here. There's the learners and then there are the people that are delivering the information. And I think there's frustration on both ends. The people delivering the information and doing the teaching are saying, and I've said this, this is why we did the podcast for God's sakes. If I have to train on the customer journey one more bloody time, and so we were like, oh, I'd like to learn the customer journey. Listen to these five podcasts, where one I pontificate. The other four, we bring in experts that validate why the customer journey is so, it's scalable. Jacqueline: Yes. George: But it's more than scalable, because scalable is our win. But for the learner, it gives them the ability to learn at their own pace. Jacqueline: And in their own way. George: In their own way. Jacqueline: At their own pace, but also on their treadmill or when, or the other brilliant thing, and we've had a lot of feedback right at the beginning is now I don't have to train my staff on Vendasta. I can plug brand new people into this ecosystem. And that frees up time in my day to do things at the strategic level as well. And a lot of this was so yeah, selfishly, it was really about, how do we scale this but more than that, and it was way more than that. It was how do we teach people, take all of this tribal knowledge inside of the brains of George Leith and inside of the brains of frontline folks that have worked with tens of thousands of partners. And share that in a way that people want to digest. So it's really about, I can grab off the shelf what I care about, rather than I have to sit here and just listen to whatever the person teaching wants to tell me about. George: Well and one of the other big challenges in this space that what I like about having a hub or an academy that you can put the content is that the bloody stuff changes. And one of the challenges we had is we're going to go over here and we're gonna do this course. And then the very day that you get the course finally produced and populated, wherever you're gonna put it. Google changes their algorithm and everything that you have in there has to be redone. And that is a struggle for the teacher. And it's a struggle for the learner. That was another problem that we believe we've come up with a bit of a solution through this methodology in the system. Jacqueline: Yeah, and that's always held us back from this. You know that, George,  is like why do we bother putting in the effort if it's just gonna change right away? Hello, that's why we're in this space. That's why we're all in this space, is because it moves so quickly. And we can keep abreast of these things and we can share that knowledge so our partners can keep abreast of all these solutions and changes and ecosystems. I mean, that's why local businesses and large businesses and massive enterprises need help with this stuff is 'cause it's not static. And it does change frequently. So yeah, we did get a lot of pushback internally just on what happens if this becomes out of date? Well, at least it's this current, and at least we have something because the alternative is nothing really. George: Well and the alternative is confusion. So first off, now we've got these lessons, okay. I'm a big proponent, as you know. But then, there was another magical thing that kind of occurred when we gave this ability to have a forum where the various people that were taking the courses could start to interact with the very people that develop the courses or would be developing the next course or others that had taken the course and start to have that communication. And that really was the ah, the magic moment for all of us when we started seeing these layers of communication. And I think it made us respect the level of responsibility that we have for our customers because you could just see how serious they take everything. And we knew that, but when you read it, and you see the comments, and then you look at the timestamp, and you're like, that was at 3 a.m. That person was either in South Africa and it was their morning, or they were really up at 3 a.m. losing sleep over this question that they had. And that's why they reached out into this community or this forum. Jacqueline: We've had almost, so we've had over 3,000 learners, I believe, to-date. We've had over 100,000 hours logged like, the amount of engagement in the academy has been tremendous. Because again, people finally have the opportunity to learn but what you're hinting at is those community forums, and we've launched now the ability for our partners to connect in a safe way and to share best practices and to speak to each other on what they're learning. And that was always something that we were totally divided on is some of us are like, wow, they might compete against each other. They might be in the same market, they wouldn't wanna share best practices 'cause whatever. But it's the exact opposite, and really I think a lot of this came from our Conquer Local Conferences. We had someone and I can't remember which of our partners said, as soon as we launched this community it was now rather than once a year, I get to connect with the Conquer Local community every single day, 365 days a year. And one of the proudest moments I think of this is one of our partners asked for help on, does anyone have any tips on sales training remote teams? And like four partners just, yeah, I've done this here I could, connect with, DM me, yeah, I've also done this. And they're just willing to help each other and they're willing to share their war stories. And maybe they compete, there's just so many businesses out there that need help with this stuff that the pros and the positives and the ecosystem overall is outweighing anything we were worried about before. George: Well, and it was I remember speaking to Amy DeLardi who is one of our partners. She's okay with me saying her name on the podcast. And Amy has been in the web development business for 20 years. And she has customers that know her and love her in the web development business. But she knew that she needed to solve more of their problems. But she knew for a long time, and then when the community and the academy arrived on the scene, she said what I really needed was that push. Was others who had been there, done that and what it meant to their business. And she said by having those case studies and really having those conversations, it removed, I talk a lot in training about removing the fear of the prospect. And the reason why people don't make a decision is the fear of making the wrong decision. So then they just are setting this place where they don't make any decision. And they're really hurting themselves. And what we're hoping to do with the courses is to remove some of that fear. I don't know this oh, they're in the course now, the question is answered. But then to have that learning validated by actual street level experience, seems to really be the missing piece. Because we had YouTube channels for a long time with lots of training, I can go back and find a Jackie Cook webinar from six years ago. But it didn't necessarily mean that that learning was leading to motivation. And I'm quoting Sanjay, where he said, that you can teach him something but doesn't mean it motivates him to take some sort of action. Jacqueline: Totally, yeah, totally. And I think too some of the feedback we've got, especially in the academy is you guys release so often. Like we have 19 software teams, and they are tasked now on weekly sprints. So they release often, there's always, and it's never fast enough if you ask Brendan King, right. But to our partners, sometimes they, as much as they read our newsletters and they keep abreast on what's coming. To be able to digest that in a very structured way on their own time has been really helpful for them to identify like, wow, you mean I have this whole CRM or I have these remote book me now tools or I have all this for free? What, I didn't know about that before, but people are busy like they don't have, I delete emails all the time. I just, can't keep, so the academy specifically is the place that you can see what's really there and we've kept up to date through a sort of academy-first release model, as well as now the community you can see what's worth really looking in and diving deeper into.   Problem Solving: Forming an Ecosystem to Help Partners George: So in the strategy that you had for bringing forth this academy, the forum, the community, where do you think you are in the problem you're trying to solve? I know it's a bit early, but I think it's important for people to understand that this isn't a game changer overnight. It's a game changer that is going to have a lifecycle. And where do you really think that you are in that lifecycle today? Jacqueline: Yeah, so the first problem we wanted to solve was, how might we allow our partners who have a little bit of downtime to take advantage of this downtime with them and their staff, and to teach them about the Vendasta platform? The second problem we set out to solve was how do we bring in experts from around the ecosystem and around the world, people that know way more about way more things than we do to help these  partners of ours be successful. So it's really about bringing in external thought leaders into this academy. So you're gonna start seeing way more of that. Next, it was how do we connect and create these magical collisions of our partners to share their own knowledge of what they're learning with each other. And start to sort of highlight some of the partners that are thought leaders and have been with us for a while or are totally new, and they're just killing it and finding new tactics and innovative ways to take the solutions to market that we've never considered. I think next is, and this is an evolution. I don't think this will ever stop. We're always gonna be building this community but something that I'm seeing on the horizon and we're all seeing is there's an appetite to leverage each other's expertise and skill sets. Take Amy for example, or anyone that sells, I just sell websites. But I really know that I need to get into SEO, but it's not my skill set and I don't have the expertise there or even something further like online security solutions or accounting, G-Suite. Things that my customers are asking for, that I don't quite have the capacity. And so this idea of peer-to-peer sharing and being able to hire out the knowledge of the peers in the Vendasta ecosystem is something that, I don't know, it's starting to take waves and we're seeing these collisions and I think we can help enable it. George: Yeah, not to oversell because I never do that. But of all the initiatives that we have driven forward together over the last six some odd years. It's the one I am the most excited about because of the ability to see the comments from the user and how it's really changing the game for them.    Conclusion George: That's really where I see the game changer, the game changer, that old sales training thing of, you gotta focus, if you're gonna land a plane, they teach you right out of the gate to focus on the horizon. Because if you look at the ground you crash every time. It's the same thing of outcome based, if you think about the outcome that you want for your customer, and you're aligned around making them successful, the bonuses just happen, the quota attainment just happens. It's a crazy thing, there's a lot of work that goes into that but if you think about that, if your goal is to make that person successful, and that really is the underlying tone of all of these various, there's a lot going on here. There's a lot of brainpower, there's a lot of technology, there's a ton of money that's being spent. It's a big part of the hiring plan where we're fortunate we were able to raise the money to be able to invest, but when you see the result at the end of the day of the learnings, it really is a cool thing to have a look at. Jackie, always a pleasure having you on the show. I know that there's been a lot of questions around the academy, the podcast, the Conquer Local Conference, and the forum and how it all ties together with the platform. We're gonna have this as a resource now where we can send people to hear that vision. And the banter that we've had about why we did it and where it's coming from and what we're trying to accomplish. I guess now, the next thing is, what if people wanted to offer suggestions? What if they wanted to get a hold of you or any of the team on ideas that they have to help us evolve this massive resource? Jacqueline: Well number one, I would say join it. I can't stress enough how brilliant it's been for all areas of our organization. Our product managers are in the community. Our product marketers are in the community, our sales teams are in the community, people are watching there because they see we've actually got rid of software tools that had other channels for customer feedback, and we're only using the community. So if you wanna get to the right eyeballs on Vendasta task manager and how to improve it, that is the place. As a community overall, I would always love to hear from you guys at any time about the direction or what we could do to make it better or things that we're not even thinking about. I mean, send me a quick email, jcook@vendasta.com. I'd love to hear any feedback. It's evolving, be patient with us as we figure this out. We're just doing it again in the idea that this is a year where our partners really share with new partners and existing partners, their success, their triumphs, and we just get the heck out of the way. And we listen and we support and we do whatever we can. But it's really about you guys and making you successful. So any feedback you have on that we're dying to hear it. George: Chief Strategy Officer, General Manager of the Mid-market division of Vendasta, Jackie Cook joining me on the Conquer Local Podcast. Thanks Jackie. Jacqueline: Thanks George, take care. George: Always a pleasure having my colleague and friend Jackie Cook on the Conquer Local Podcast. And a lot of requests to understand more about the online academy. The fact that we are embracing e-learning inside that academy. And to build something that really will enable our partners to be industry-leading in the way that they solve their customers' challenges. The community forum is going to be that place where you can go ask other organizations that are dealing with the exact same things that you are. And we're really excited about the early feedback that we have been getting from our partners around the world on the value that they're finding from the academy. But as Jackie mentioned at the closing of her comments, we really value the feedback and we take it very seriously. And we wanna understand where we need to go to solve as we move forward. So feel free to reach out to Jackie or to myself. And we look forward to getting that feedback as we continue to groom what the Conquer Local Community and its various tenants will look like as we move forward in the years to come. Thanks for joining us on this week's Conquer Local Podcast. My name is George Leith, I'll see you and I see you.

The Lighthouse Strategy is all about how companies can hone in on a particular niche that they aim to serve. Their niche could be anything ranging from restaurants to dentists to real estate agents. Dennis Yu, CEO of Blitz Metrics, is our guest this week on the Conquer Local Podcast. One of the most requested topics for the podcast is how to acquire new leads. When it comes to lead generation, this is the strategy Dennis recommends to all agency owners, regardless if you've got an established business or are just starting on their own. It's called The Lighthouse Strategy. Who is Dennis Yu? Dennis is an internationally recognized lecturer in Facebook Marketing and has spoken in 17 countries, spanning 5 continents, including keynotes at L2E, PibCon, Conversion Conference, Gultaggen, and Marketo Summit. He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, CBS Evening News, and co-authored "Facebook Nation" - a textbook taught in over 700 colleges and universities. When he isn't spreading his expansive breadth of knowledge, he can be found eating chicken wings, playing ultimate frisbee, and spinning wild metaphors with the enthusiasm of a thousand raging fires. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.   Introduction George: It's another edition of the Conquer Local Podcast, thanks for joining us. We're bringing on one of our longtime guests and friends, Mr. Dennis Yu will be joining us in a few moments. Dennis has been pontificating recently about a lighthouse customer strategy. What is it? What is the lighthouse strategy? How do I execute the lighthouse strategy inside my organization? Why do I care? Why is it important? We'll get into all of that and I'm sure Dennis will take us off on some tangents because he has some of the very best metaphors in the industry. The one and only Mr. Dennis Yu coming up next on the Conquer Local Podcast.  George: The man that needs no introduction to the Conquer Local Podcast listeners Mr. Dennis Yu joining us once again. Hello Dennis. Dennis: Mr. George, How are you? George: I'm doing really well. I was thinking back as to who I've done the most interviews with over the years, and it's you, without a doubt, of all of our guests and it's Mr. Dennis Yu. Even back in the radio days, I don't think that I've done interviews with anyone more than I've done with you, so you know the drill. So we won't even get into how we're going to do this let's just talk about lighthouse. And you know, the interesting thing about lighthouse, and I'd like you to explain it your strategy to our listeners, but I've been talking to people that have been attending the Conquer Local Academy and have been consuming some of the material that you've been producing, and all they're all about the lighthouse strategy. So I'd love for you to dissect that for us today for our listeners here on the Conquer Local Podcast. Dennis: So real brief the lighthouse, is the client that does the selling for you. And if you're lazy like me, then you want them to do all the work so, when we got the Golden State Warriors, an NBA basketball team as a client, that gave us a bunch of other NBA, and professional sports teams as clients right because it draws others because it's a demonstrated example, that's taught publicly, executed step by step that other people can see, where you can repeat a process to achieve the same results. Right? George: So, in other words, this is the testimonial that you need or it's the case study that you need when someone wants to know if you know what you're doing. Dennis: But it's more than just a testimonial 'cause do you really trust testimonials that you see? George: No, not at all. Dennis: Why not? George: Because they could be made up. Dennis: Now what happens if they are saying it. And it's being promoted by... Let's say we're for example we're doing something with driving leads with Facebook ads, and we have the COO of Facebook, talking about our case study on stage in front of thousands of people-- George: Now I believe it. I believe that. Dennis: Okay. George: I'm with you. I'm trying to get along. Dennis: Even with deep faith, George: So, what is the difference then of a lighthouse client, and the testimonial thing that we were just talking about where some people are skeptical of testimonials? Dennis: Of course they are because most people's testimonials are forced. It's called a testimonial... By the way, never ever. When you go to someone's website, or if it's your website and you're an agency, and it says testimonials, and you can see five or six of these things, you don't really believe it because testimonials are the same as like hold my finger like I'm not gonna do that. Right? You know what you're gonna get, right? This is an advertisement I'm gonna try to mislead you. No thank you. So what is it that makes lighthouse different? It's believable. But believable for five or six different reasons. One is it's in the voice of that actual person, or customer or client. And it's not in a sales way it's value-driven, it's being taught step by step like a recipe like it's one thing to show a picture of the food. It's another thing to actually show the recipe and you cooking it step by step. It's done with a high authority client, so a lighthouse is one who's well known in the industry, so Dr. Glenn Vo is the best-known dentist, among other dentists for marketing. He has 24,000 other dentists that follow him. He's a dentist too. But he carries a lot more authority. Who carries more authority on how to drive leads if you're a dentist? Me or Dr. Glenn Vo? George: Well, absolutely the dentist that's doing it. Dennis: Yeah. And the other dentists are gonna believe him and who the hell is Dennis Yu, right? George: So what we're talking about. I like to refer to this as the difference to user-generated content, the voice of the customer rather than propaganda. And I love the word propaganda 'cause we're all thinking, if we get a view right in our head we're like, the Toyota truck in that one ad didn't really haul that boat out of the ocean. And there's text on the TV ad going doesn't necessarily haul a boat like this right but, so it's the difference between advertising and propaganda. And real people that are using the solution and seeing success with it. And it's not just one moment, right? It's an ongoing strategy.  Dennis: So you see professional athletes, like LeBron James who's a basketball player in a commercial for Kia because he won the Player of the Year. But do you think LeBron James actually drives a Kia? No, do you think he drives a Kia when he won Player of the Week? No, he drives an orange Lamborghini right, I've seen him going around town in San Francisco in his orange Lamborghini. He doesn't drive a Kia. But in the commercial you see him in a Kia and you know it's a commercial. George: Maybe he bought Kias for friends or something, just as a gift. Dennis: I'm sure he made enough money from those commercials and endorsements that he could have bought 50 of them, 100 of them easily.   Changing the Game: From a Horizontal to a Vertical Strategy  George: I think it's a really good point that you're bringing up Dennis and people who have been listening to this strategy you've been telling me, I didn't really see it this way. Where I've missed the opportunity to take my four or five customers that are really living the dream following the path that I've been taking them along and using them to generate more customers that look like that. Dennis: So, George, let me ask you, what is more effort or more difficult to do? Executing one dentist that you've done successfully 100 times, so that's 100 projects a hundred clients. Or 10 random clients in 10 different industries? George: You know, we all know the answer to that, and I love that you're going down this path because this has been my whole argument around this idea of horizontal. Meaning, I'm gonna come up with one solution that works for everybody. And then it doesn't work for anybody. The minute you try to find something for everyone, it's not important to any one member of that cohort. Dennis: So you mentioned that you like to go to a Greek restaurant in town for seafood right? They have this incredible seafood dish. George: That's actually true. But they also put Greek ribs on the lobster platter. So it's two lobster tails and Greek ribs for two people for $89 and it'll feed you for three meals. Unless you're with Dennis Yu because then, you know you probably get one meal out of it 'cause I know how much you like seafood and Greek ribs. Dennis: Well everyone who knows that I'm on a seafood diet, I see food and I eat it. When you go to this restaurant, you know what you want. There's that one thing. And what happened was, you would think, like this is what most agency owners think. That if you order if you have more things on the menu, you're gonna be able to drive more sales right? Because you can say yes to more things right? But what kind of restaurant is it that offers everything? What is that called? George: Yeah, cafeteria. Like I think about when you get to the restaurant and it's the 82-page menu, you're like there's no way they're keeping fresh 82 pages of stuff. Like it's just some of that stuff's gonna be old or freezer burnt or that’s not done properly right? 'Cause there's no way the cook knows how to cook 82 pages of recipes, so I get your point it's very well made, great analogy. Dennis: So the lighthouse has two effects, and one of them is easily understandable, which is, you can attract more of the same thing. We all understand that right? The second piece which almost nobody realizes is ease of repeatability. And when you have clients that are paying you monthly, and you know the average churn in digital marketing is three to four months. That's how long a client stays. If you can get that client to stay with you for a year or two years, now all of a sudden that client is worth four to 12 times more. Would you like to have a client that's worth four to 12 times more? Because you can keep them? Because you can deliver something that's called repeatable excellence? That's what's driven by one thing that you're able to do over and over again. Not just because you're known for that, but because you can execute it over and over and over again. And we see so many partners that don't do that, because they're so eager to say yes to everything, that they end up doing nothing. So that's like a restaurant that has no menu. Can you imagine a restaurant that has no menu? George: No Dennis: What would happen? You walked in there and you sat down right, and I'm your waiter, and I say, “George, what do you wanna eat?” George: “Can I see your menu?” Dennis: “Oh no, we don't have the menu. You just like tell me whatever you want I'll try to make something up.” George: “I'd like two lobster tails with all you can eat Greek ribs please.” Dennis: “Great, I can do all of that. And no matter what you order it's gonna be $9.99. So just go ahead and order whatever you like. 'Cause it will custom order, make something for you.” George: “Sounds too good to be true to me.” George: You know, the point is very well made and I think that this is where a lot of people.    Selecting Your Customer: Three Ways to Hone in on Your Demographic George: I've been talking a lot over the last year about selecting your customer. But selecting the customer that you know you can knock it out of the park with. Because it's you know, to your point, you get distracted by all of these other people that you're kind of making it work. Whereas you've got this one niche or these two niches that you're really good at and if you just focused on that. Dennis: So we talk about three areas or three ways that you can focus to be really good at that one thing and be also known to be really good at one thing. One is by vertical. So that's chiropractors and real estate agents and Italian restaurants like whatever it is like you just serve dentists right, over and over again. And you're known as the dentist guy. My buddy Wilton Hong has 175 funeral homes as clients. And he's the number one guy in funeral homes. Who's gonna challenge him? I mean that's his thing right, funeral homes. George: I heard it's a dead industry. Dennis: People are dying to get in there. George: I'm sorry. It was low hanging fruit; I had to do it. Dennis: These guys they drink like crazy. It is a morbid morgue kind of, the kinds of jokes they have is insane. But see he's dominated that one and that's by vertical. That's one of three. Number two is by geography. If you have a really good network, then you can be the person in Los Angeles right, and everyone knows that you're the person in Los Angeles, and anyone in Los Angeles, right you're the one, or whatever city you're in, and there's something to be said about proximity. But you know when it's harder to get together with people because of coronavirus or whatever then, you know, whatever but, which is based on location. And three is by specialty. So you're the guy for SEO or building websites or Facebook ads or video editing or whatever, pop-ups, email marketing whatever your radio ads, right? You're the guy for that. But the key is you gotta choose one of those three ways of specializing right? Because if you don't, then who are you? George: Right, identity crisis. And I'm reading into this that you feel that a lot of organizations, that sell digital solutions to their customers, have this built-in identity crisis as they run around and chase the dollars, and they're and they're not meaningful to any one vertical. Dennis: Okay, yeah, I can do this I can do that. What about this? Oh, I can do that too. Now I don't believe you. You've got to have a menu of a few things that are for a clear customer so that customer prospect, knows that they are right. People like to joke and say well it's the Cheesecake Factory. Well, at least the Cheesecake Factory does have a menu. And they are able to execute those things in an okay way. Most partners we talked to don't even have a menu. They just offer everything. And you see what happens there, that's no differentiation, and then like you said no ability to execute that reliably 'cause you can't keep 80 pages of things fresh in your fridge becomes a Gordon Ramsay which is called Kitchen Nightmare, have you ever seen his show? George: I have. He yells more than I do. Dennis: Yeah, he goes into there, he goes into the walk-in and it's all moldy and there are bugs everywhere like that's what most partners look like when you look in their back-end. George: So when we talk about the lighthouse strategy, how big of a game-changer could this be, if an organization was to adopt it? Like what have you been seeing is you've watched people successfully take this strategy forward? Dennis: My buddy, Dan Hamill was a struggling agency owner six months ago. And I'll be kind by saying struggling agency owner because it was just, it was him freelancing. And he worked for his main... 'Cause he was trained that he thought the benefit of digital marketing was it’s so big and social media and all these things right that's what draws people in. And his job was working at a Sky Zone, which is a trampoline park. Have you seen these things? These bounce houses where you go in there and you can jump around it's like a Chuck E Cheese but you know. George: Who doesn't like the bouncy castle at a birthday party? Dennis: Yeah. So that's the thing that he did and he was making 10 bucks an hour trying to do digital marketing on the side because everyone's trying to start their thing up. And it just wasn't working because friends would come saying, "Hey, I've got a business can you help me with this one?" and another person is a real estate agent and pretty soon you have four or five random clients and we call that a dog's breakfast. And not any one thing and every one of these things is separate and custom and it's not scalable, and they keep asking for exceptions because there are no boundaries. And it was just... So he was working at the Sky Zone making 10 bucks an hour, not able to grow his agency, a very common issue when people start their agency because they're just willing to say yes to anything because after all, I just need to get a client right, I'll do like whatever maybe if I get enough clients I'll eventually you know, if I eat enough turds eventually I'll have a steak, just doesn't work like that. Right?   What Agency Owners Need to Keep Top of Mind for Success George: There are so many nuggets from a Dennis Yu podcast episode that I could, I was hoping that we wouldn't go to some of the things you talked about in the last episode but now I've got some brand new material so I love it. Let's talk about, if you were sitting down with an agency owner, and you wanna say here are the three things that you need to do. what would those... And you only get three. What would the three things that every agency owner should do to be more successful? Dennis: Number one is pick a lighthouse. And we can talk about the technique you do to figure out exactly what's right because people have trouble doing that. Two is amplify that lighthouse. Meaning, you're gonna document exactly how you're doing, what you're doing, of course using the Vendasta platform which is the whole point of repeatable excellence. And putting it out there so everyone in that lighthouse category can see it. Number three, you're gonna hire staff. Or you're going to have staff and software to then be able to execute against that. That way you have repeatable excellence and you have that money coming in every month. George: I really am glad that you got to number three because it's something that we've been talking about internally with a number of stakeholders over the last week or so. I, so we got an agency it's a couple of people, they start up, they're gonna be digital marketing experts right, they're gonna embrace the dream and they're gonna go to work. And then, they sell to four or five or six or 12 customers. And then, one of them has to start claiming Google My Business and responding to reviews and delivering on the brand promise, and guess what happens, the revenue growth stops. And, I'm glad that you identified that you're gonna have to staff this thing at some point. If you are out bringing in the deals, you're gonna have to have someone that keeps them and makes those customers successful. I believe it's the thing that gets forgotten a lot of times when people are thinking about their strategy. Dennis: So we go back to the restaurant analogy, and think of the waiter. The waiter is there trying to convince the customer that lobster ravioli is the best thing on the menu, right. And let's say they're good at it. Let's say they're even standing at the door saying "Come in, come in we have a great dinner special", right, as people are walking by on the sidewalk to come in. But meanwhile, a bunch of customers have ordered because you're so good at selling that you have to go back into the kitchen and you have to cook. And you have to make the lobster and you have to clean and cut potatoes and wash dishes and all that kind of stuff. But what happens when you're in the kitchen doing all this and other customers are walking by? Or other customers are sitting down wondering, they've not come and taken my order yet. I've been sitting here for an hour or two or the lights are not even on. I know of a restaurant owner, I was in Las Vegas two months ago. And there's this delicious looking Korean restaurant but, I was driving by it and the lights were out. I decided I'd go in anyway and there is the owner sitting in the dark, telling us he was trying to save money on electricity. Right, by turning his lights out. And then when we came in, he wanted to charge extra from the regular menu price for takeout, because he didn't have enough customers. So we left. And that's what happens with most agency owners. They don't realize that in a restaurant, you need somebody, you know, the cooks in the kitchen, and then you as the relationship person are the waiter. He cooks and waiters. How many waiters do you know George that also tried to cook the food too and then rush back to refill your water and ask you how your food is and that can take orders? George: It's just not gonna work out, it's not their skill set. So it's taking them outside of what they're comfortable doing and it's leading to a bad customer experience. And you're not gonna get a lighthouse customer if you do that, it's just not gonna work. Dennis: These guys or girls that [think] if they're a digital marketing agency that they have to be able to cook the food too. Do you really expect the waiter to have to be able to cook your food? George: I hope he doesn't, or she doesn't Dennis: Then why do so many digital marketers wanna feel like they can cook the food too? Do they want to be Gordon Ramsay? George: You know they, I believe they just don't know any different and I'm glad that we're talking about this because I believe that if we look at failures in marketing organizations that get started, it's exactly this problem. We've had success in landing clients, but where we're losing is we're not able to keep those customers. And you know, God knows it's cheaper to keep a customer happy than it is to acquire a new one. So you know it really goes hand in hand.    Conclusion George: Dennis always intriguing and always thought-provoking when we have you on the podcast, you give us things to think about, you give us great nuggets. I'm still trying to figure out how turds turn turned into steak, but maybe I can Google that and figure that out somewhere down the road. Thanks for joining us once again, the guest that we have had the most times on the Conquer Local Podcast and it's obvious why, Dennis Yu always brings the knowledge when he comes to the podcast, and thanks for joining us again. Dennis: Thank you, Mr. George. George: I don't mind the restaurant analogy when it comes to putting together a proper recipe. And I think that that's the important piece. Let's think about recipes for a moment. Why do restaurants use recipes? Why do they measure every single component that goes into one of their dishes? Because they're looking for a repeatable process. Once you get to that repeatable process, then you know that you can guarantee that it's gonna be fantastic. You can put together a system where you know exactly what the cost structure is going to be because the same things are going into the recipe every time. And to his point, you can now come up with a lighthouse strategy, where you can attract more customers in that cohort that could use that recipe for success. Let's think a little bit more about the lighthouse strategy. It's about not being one thing for everyone, because that's just not gonna work out. There is no one solution for every vertical. So coming up with something that works for dentists, and then going to find more dentists, or the analogy around the funeral home, with the bad joke in there, or the analogy around... And I'm going to use this analogy. I've got an agency friend that works with vet clinics. The reason being, vet clinics have their own language. Do you call the dog a patient? No, I don't think they do. I actually don't know what they call the dog. Whether it's patient or customer whatever it might be, but this agency knows exactly how to speak to the vet clinic veterinarian on what's important to that business. They know that you probably have to speak to the office manager. They know what product lines they deliver. And what they're looking to market, so having that vertical approach is really important. And where did we come up with this horizontal approach? I have to point back to industries that were in the marketing space that dealt with everybody. Remember the Yellow Pages? And they would do a canvass? Salespeople come into town, knock on every door, go around and get them to get into that book which was so brilliant and vitally important at that time. If you did not have an ad in the Yellow Pages, back when that was an industry, you were pretty much in a lot of trouble because it was a year until the new book came out. But when we think about that, it was a vertical approach. They had different sections inside the book we’d go find auto dealers and pizzas and whatever else you were looking for. So that's where that vertical approach came from. We wanna just go sell to everybody and we've got one solution and you decide the size of that solution. But when we move into digital marketing, where there are different approaches and there are different tactics and there are different strategies depending upon the vertical that you're in. That horizontal approach is actually causing for bad behavior. And it really makes it hard to deliver 100% of the time or even 99% of the time for your customers. So thanks to Dennis Yu, for explaining this lighthouse strategy. I think there's something in there for everyone that you can take out little components and use it for the success of your organization. Thanks for joining us on another edition of the Conquer Local Podcast, the best place to get a hold of us is on LinkedIn, on my profile George Leith, L-E-I-T-H, and we look forward to your feedback. I read every single message that comes in on LinkedIn. We reach out to get clarity, we love getting all of that feedback. So please reach out to us, and we look forward to hearing from you. And we look forward to you, hearing us next week. Right here on your favorite channel, wherever you find the Conquer Local Podcast. My name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.

Whether you are a new start-up or an established business, brand visibility is always key. If people don’t know about the new things you are doing, how can you make a sale? We have Chris Dickey, CEO and Founder of Visably AND Owner and Founder of Purple Orange, on the podcast this week. Chris shares that 89 percent of B2B marketers labeled brand visibility and awareness as the most important goal over sales and lead generation. In this day and age, with so many communication platforms, advanced technologies, and modern ways of thinking, what are the most effective methods of getting your brand out there? In this episode, Chris unwraps the ROI for PR, the important pieces to measure brand success, and relates it all to the customer journey. Chris Dickey has a resume that spans publishing, in-house marketing direction, public relations, and software development. Chris is the Owner + Founder of Purple Orange Brand Communications, a PR agency specializing in outdoor and active lifestyle brands. Chris started exploring the intersection of search engine marketing and public relations using his agency clients as the guinea pig. Chris started by having his agency audit search results for PR opportunities, eventually scaling that strategy to win over large swaths of highly valuable organic search results for his clients, using PR tactics. In 2019 Chris took this strategy a step further by founding Visably – a new marketing / PR SaaS platform that audits search results for brand mentions and provides an analysis of a website’s “channel” for further segmentation and list building (so PR practitioners can extract clean media-only lists out of the keyword data). Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.   Introduction George: On this edition of the Conquer Local Podcast, we're gonna go all the way deep into Wyoming. And we're gonna talk to Chris Dickey, the CEO and founder of a couple of different companies, one of them, a PR agency called Purple Orange which has been working with a number of the biggest outdoor and lifestyle brands in North America. But he recently has launched a SaaS startup called Visably and we are going to dig deep into search and why it's important to rank on the first page of search. And what I'm hoping we'll find from Chris are some things that we can utilize in our day to day in encouraging our customer base that there is this idea of utilizing some public relations tools and tricks to get your brand listed and to help you to become authoritative. And if you're selling anything in e-commerce, maybe there is a way to use some of the e-commerce marketplaces to build your brand. So a deep dive into SEO and ranking on search with Mr. Chris Dickey, the founder and CEO of Purple Orange and Visably coming up next on the Conquer Local Podcast.  George: It's the latest edition of the Conquer Local Podcast. And this week, joining us on the show, Chris Dickey. Chris is the founder and CEO of Purple Orange and has now launched a new SaaS company to solve a problem that... And I guess, Chris, you've been living this problem. So welcome to the show first off. And the other thing I wanted to mention is I don't think we've had a guest from Wyoming, so I'm excited. I also, there are only three states that I haven't been to, and Wyoming's one of them. Chris: Oh, man, you gotta come visit. We got a lot to show. George: I know. I hear that. Big state. Beautiful places. Chris: We got some huge mountains, a lot of, I don't know, animals. It's a good spot. George: I wanna first talk about Purple Orange. And you've been working with some massive brands over the years, primarily in the PR space, but also in helping them on e-commerce and those sales. Can we talk about your background and your time with Purple Orange? Chris: Well, thanks so much. Yeah, so it was great to be here. Thanks for having me. And yeah, so I've been working in the marketing and sales field for about 17 years in a variety of roles. I've been an in-house marketing director. I worked in publishing for the last, I don't know, 12 to 15 years. I've been on the agency side. So I've worked for large and small agencies. For the last 10 years, I've worked for my own agency. It's called Purple Orange. We specialize in active lifestyle and outdoor consumer brands. So a lot of the stuff that you would play with outside. If your listeners are Canadian or wherever... In the US you might go to REI, we work a lot with those brands. In Canada, we might go to NBC. We work with a lot of those brands. George: Got it. So action, a little bit of a maybe adrenaline junkie. Is that you, Chris? Chris: I mean, I think that there's so much that can be said for spending time outside, whether it's adrenaline or disconnection or whatever you wanna call it. George: Well, in Wyoming, as in Canada, we got a lot outside. So taking advantage of that. I'm interested to get some learnings from you. I've always been fascinated by the agency business because, in my career as a media sales rep, that's where I got my start 30 years ago, I was introduced to agency folks quite early on because that's where you go to sell inventory. And that business has changed a lot. If we look back at the last five years, what do you think are some of the most remarkable changes in the PR and agency business that you've seen? Chris: Oh my. Yeah, I mean the PR industry since I've started has completely changed. When I started it, and I'm sure you remember the assist, the main way... So what PR does, just to step back for a second, is we effectively are lobbyists for our clients to get them in the news cycle, to get people talking about them, to help get these third party endorsements rolling. So you have other people who are helping promote the message of your clients. And so it's not advertising. We're not paying for these placements. People are, you might say, earning them. So it's earned media. And through this process, 10, even five years ago, when I started this, the iPhone didn't exist, I mean. So imagine just a world without mobile, right? So that's the biggest change right there. The fact that we've migrated from a place where we receive our news via a print and news cycle to a place where we receive it maybe on our desktop to where now we receive it on our mobile devices and mobile has overtaken desktop nationally in search, at least in the US. So there have been so many ways that I think people receive the message differently. And I think that's a huge one. I think podcasts are a massive change that we've seen. So podcasts did not really exist 10 years ago, or it was really in its infancy. And now it's a massive platform and very, very well received across the media landscape. George: So you would then say, if I'm putting two and two together, that podcasting is a form of public relations? Chris: I think it can be. I think what PR is is just how do you meaningfully connect with an audience using a third-party arbiter? George: Well, the reason I asked that question is because I'm noticing that our podcast is driving authority for the brand, but also it's lead-gen and we're running... Our reps are finding... Yeah, I talked to this new prospect today. They've been listening to the podcast for a year. Chris: Totally. George: And it's hard sometimes to get the attribution. So producer Colleen has to produce her reports and she has to then go to the corporate marketing team and say, "This is why we need to keep investing in the podcast." Chris: Right.   Public Relations and Return on Investment George: And they go, "Okay. How much money are we making from it?" Or, "Have you had to solve this?" And I'm not specifically talking about just podcasting, but I'm specifically talking about the loop between public relations and return on investment. Chris: Yeah. No, that is such a good question. And it's something that PR grapples with every single day. And I would say that for most larger brands, there's just a general recognition that PR is an important piece of their portfolio and we're gonna be able to measure it to X extent, but not the same extent that you're to be able to measure an ad. And especially, knowing that the customer journey is very nonlinear, somebody might have to have many touchpoints before they actually circle back and make some kind of call to action happen. And so to track the customer journey, especially when it happens through a podcast or somebody sweeping through a newspaper or whatever it might be is really, really challenging so no question about that. But this is what led me to where I came out with Visably, the SaaS solution that I'm also working on on the side and it's recognizing that one of the most productive avenues for our agency has always been search. And what I mean by that is not just the ads, not just how your website is ranking, but how other people are talking about you in search. So it's effectively PR, right? And so what search does is it delivers an incredible customer that no other platform provides. If you need this widget and it's super niche, where do you go? Do you go to your hardware store to get it? Or do you just like type in the name of the super niche widget and you see what search provides? That's likely what your customer journey looks like today. So again, where else do you find this customer? And then the thing about it is, everybody clicks at the top of the organic search results. 70 plus percent of all the tracking for keyword will land somewhere in the first five organic search results. A high performing ad in search for a non-branded search term does around 2% of all the clicks on a page. So I mean, it's still 2%, there's still customers clicking, but it's 98% of the people are clicking somewhere else. And then what's really interesting is by the bottom of the very first page, you have about a 1% click-through rate at the very bottom of the very first page. And there's virtually no traffic on page 2. So I guess to summarize, search delivers an incredible customer. It's very predictable where they go to find the information, the top of the first page. And if you can penetrate that real estate, you'll do very, very well. George: Well, it's interesting. When I saw your name come across our desk to be a potential guest, I'm like, "We need to get Chris on the show because I want our listeners who are local salespeople working across 50 different countries, working with local businesses, to understand that this is at the core of what we're trying to help the business with, is their online presence. So that when someone searches for the business, they get that organic search result.’ And why it was such an epiphany is I have an auto dealer group that I've been working with. Good friends; dealt with them for years. And they said, "We've really reduced our ad spend because we've achieved the Holy Grail,” which is that organic search result on the first page. They're there, at the top sterling reputation. They're doing all of those things. They got to that point. But when you started your SaaS company, Visably, you found that there was a big gap in helping businesses to understand how to get there. Chris: Right. And if that car dealership is already there, kudos to them. They're doing a lot of things right. I would say that that is the exception, not the rule. And it's really, really tough to get at the top of search, especially for the keywords that you wanna be raking for. So let's just step back for... I think it's easier if you're a hyperlocal company and you're serving a population in a very specific kind of area or region. If you're just launching a new running shoe and you're selling to everybody, that's a tough thing to do. And that's where it becomes incumbent on how do you find other methods to get in front of the customer? And your e-commerce partners can be a massive way to get in front of new customers. And we all know that, right? That's a good reason why you go to Amazon in the first place. It's because they have this massive marketplace, this big ecosystem, and you can merchandise within it to receive a lot more sales or whatever it might be, whoever is selling your stuff. They also have a much more dominant position in the online landscape than you probably do if you're a new customer. So for instance, all of these shops that you're working with that have these e-retail presences, they're doing a lot more than you and they've been around a lot more than longer than you and they have a much higher domain authority than you when it comes to SEO. So they're positioning very, very well at the top of search. It makes sense in those circumstances to work with them, to merchandise better for those search engine landing pages. And what I found, at least with our clients at the PR side, is that none of our clients were even having those conversations with their e-commerce partners about, "Hey, we're selling camera gear. "You're showing at the number 2 organic search position, but you're not merchandising our camera gear on that landing page. How can we change that? How can we improve that?" So we're not even having these conversations. And that's where Visably comes in. So just to back up what Visably does, we've been talking about it, not for a few minutes. It allows you to do a very simple audit of how your brand is performing at any given keyword search. So you might type in, I don't know, best camera strap 2020. And if you're a company that makes camera straps, you type in your name, and then we'll look through every single link on the page against all the page content within all those links and figure out who's talking about your brand. Maybe there are some PR hits. That's where I come from. Maybe there is some e-commerce partners that are selling your stuff and on your landing pages or maybe there's a bunch of blind spots that you never even knew that they existed, but you have those relationships and now you can go fix them. George: Yeah. So it basically, the problem that you're trying to solve is there was no visibility before. And you were finding that there was opportunity. Let's build a scalable SaaS solution to be able to find those opportunities to help brands to market themselves better and capture that white space. Chris: Totally. Yeah, exactly. And it was totally opaque. The first page of search was totally opaque. If you're a brand that wanted to understand all of your potential customer touchpoints, there was no single place to do it. And so what we try to do is make a really simple way to create that audit and see what the results look like.   E-Commerce: More Than a Store George: I'm finding more and more as we move through this post-COVID, we've been smacked in the face now and we understand there's something there and we're making the pivot and more and more businesses are moving to do e-commerce. It's the cart, it's the... And some of those businesses have very unique offerings that they wanna get broader distribution for. And what I think what you're saying is you may wanna partner with an Amazon or another large e-commerce solution to build that audience and get that message out there. So you have your own e-commerce solution for your store, but then you could place it on these other marketplaces. And Facebook and Google are doing marketplaces as well. So there's a whole bunch of them out there. Visably then could help to find out what keywords are important or which keywords you may wanna be purchasing. I just wanna make sure that I'm hearing you correctly. Chris: Yeah. So I think most brands that we work with already have a good sense of what their keywords are. They're already bidding on keywords from a cost per click perspective. They already have an SEO solution that they're interested in trying to promote, but they're not looking at it from a multichannel perspective and trying to align their PR team with winning those hits aligning their eCommerce team with winning more search engine top of funnel visibility with their e-commerce partners and really saturating every single potential customer touchpoint in the first page of search. So that when you look for... So when your customer is actually looking for that widget, that camera strap, whatever it might be, no matter what link they click on at the top of the first page, every single one is going to recommend your product whether it's your website or not. George: Right, wherever it could be purchased. And -- Chris: Exactly. George: This is a dramatic opportunity. If you were to start capturing those searches, it can impact sales quite dramatically. Do you have some examples you might be able to share with us of where businesses have been able to take advantage of this white space? Chris: Yeah, as an agency, we focus on it not from... So as a PR agency, what we've done is we looked at it from an informational perspective. People who are maybe not looking to buy right away, but they're learning to look and gather information around what they might buy. And we go out and we acquire these reviews and things. And a big problem for PR agencies is just figuring out who the heck do you talk to? Right. Who's the right person to do the review so you get some traction and your client actually makes some money? And what we have realized was that Google has this insane algorithm that elevates the best writers and the best outlets for any subject in the world. And it's sitting on the first page of their search engine. Now think about it from the perspective of how can you list build using that technology? And so Visably allows you to go ahead and just extract... This is a neat piece of our IP. Is it allows you to extract all the PR hits from their first page of search, cleanly. So it's not mixed up with all the other junk and static on the page. And you can scale that across tens of thousands of keywords. So all of a sudden you have this massive media list you know exactly who you need to reach out to, all the outlets that are doing the work that's being recognized by Google. And also they're literally the ones that are getting in front of the most customers. George: Is this always a product that's being sold or could this technology be used for personal branding as well? Chris: I'm absolutely using the strategy for SaaS. So I can say it from Visably's own perspective. We're this young software company, no one's ever heard of us. We just released our beta this past summer. We plan to roll out a much more robust solution this fall or early winter. The best way people are gonna learn about us is through search. When people are looking for SEO tools or PR tools or whatever they might be looking for, it's very unlikely that visably.com is gonna show up at the top of search. So then what do we do next? Do we just compete for those keywords? Those are really expensive clicks. May be much better if we could just dial in on who's writing these kinds of reviews about the best PR tools out there, and get on their radar and nurture that relationship and get them to write a review about what Visably does. So again, that's a bit our strategy. It's definitely a growth-hacking strategy, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about that delivery of the right customer. George: It's interesting. I have a friend who's opening a new restaurant at the end of COVID, so good on him. He definitely likes to take chances. But we were talking the other day about how he was gonna position his business to stand out from all the other bloody restaurants that are out there. But he has a very, very storied history in the community of working with various high profile groups and trying to convince him that he should reach out to those people that he's been helping, the charities that he's donated to, and get them to endorse his brand. It was like pulling teeth because it's way outside of what this guy... He's been a restaurant guy his entire life. You open the door and you do good service and good food and people just come. But we all know that it's not that simple anymore. And there are ways to leverage this. What I'm reading into this is you're saying find the people that have the authoritative reviews and get them to review you and use their authority to rank on search. Am I tying those two things together? Chris: Perfectly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not to say don't pursue your own SEO. Do it. If you can get your own website in the first page of search, that's the gold standard. It's just really tough to do. And there's no question that it's very valuable if you can do it. But for the searches that are driving the most customer traffic, it's just you have to display some websites that are much larger than yours. I think at the end of the day, it is all about these influencers. Sometimes the influencers are the e-commerce partners, right? They're the ones that have insane domain authorities. They're doing so well on search. And you might as well leverage that relationship to its fullest.   Conclusion George: Well, that's what we're doing when we bring a guest like you on. We put the social post together and say, "Hey, Chris, that was a great episode. Could you share it with your audience?" We're building out that network of people who could be influencers, but to our point, now to come full circle to the beginning of this show, it's tough to show the ROI around that. And you've been doing this for a long time. Congratulations with the SaaS startup. It's very inspiring. And for our listeners, you found a problem and it was in your day-to-day PR work where you're like, "We gotta come up with a solution for this." And you're building out a SaaS solution to solve that. So congratulations on that with Visably. If people wanna learn more and be in touch with you, Chris, how would we reach out to you? Chris: Reach out Chris Dickey. Visably is V-I-S-A-B-L-Y.com. If you just reach out to us via our contact form there, I'm sure it'll make it make its way to me 'cause there's not very much staff here yet. Also, you can look me up on LinkedIn at Chris Dickey. George: We appreciate you coming in and teaching us about the importance of those earned rankings online and how to utilize some of that public relations moxie that you've built over the years to help out our conquerors that listen to the Conquer Local Podcast. So thanks for joining us. Chris: Thank you very much. George: I like bringing on guests like Chris because he comes from the public relations side of working with a customer. And he has done a lot of direct to consumer brands and especially in that outdoor lifestyle. And he brings a unique perspective on how important it is to rank on the first page of search. Now, if you listen back a few moments into the interview, he talked about hyperlocal and that's where we talk about the auto dealer that's ranking on the first page of search because they're the only Land Rover store in town. So yeah, for hyperlocal, it actually is easier. But what I've found when we're dealing with those local businesses to get them to brag about their product, which is a lot of what public relations is all about, is hard. And one of the hardest parts is to articulate the return on investment. To say, "If we do this work and we get these people that are lobbyists, that have an audience, to talk about you, we can dramatically increase the visibility of your brand on the first page of search." SEO is bantered around as this thing and it's something that we need to achieve. But what Chris talks about is some of the key tenants of search engine optimization, getting onto the first page for the things that people are looking for. And then that relates back to the brand. And I am just fascinated by this rise in e-commerce because I think there are problems that we need to figure out how to solve for local businesses. If you sell unique items, you might wanna put it into some marketplaces. Is Amazon the enemy? No. Amazon could actually be the marketplace to drive demand for your products and services. And there are lots of e-commerce brands that are doing just that. So understanding more about these marketplaces, I think, is important. And it's something that you need to get into your vernacular on a day to day basis. So we are searching high and low to find e-commerce guests that can come in and talk about this. And some of these brands that Chris has been representing over his almost 20 years in public relations are all doing e-commerce and they're all doing it through marketplaces. And we can learn some things from his history and his background on how we articulate the value of e-commerce and the things that we can do to help newly e-commerce-fide businesses in our own portfolios. So thanks to Chris Dickey, the CEO of Visably and the public relations firm, Purple Orange, for joining us on this week's edition of the Conquer Local Podcast. You can communicate with any of our guests in the community at conquerlocal.com/community and get in there and ask some questions of any of the guests that we've been bringing on in recent weeks. And we actually are finding is a great conduit to get feedback on upcoming episodes. So let us know what you would like to hear in the coming months. We actually are starting our planning for 2021 right now and looking for feedback from our audience on what you'd like to see from upcoming guests and upcoming Master Sales Series training episodes. My name is George Leith. Thanks for joining us this week right here on the Conquer Local Podcast. I'll see you when I see you.

There is no possible way to scale, manage, and optimize every channel to ensure a company’s story is being told without a dedicated content marketing team. What does a content marketing team look like? Dan McLean, Director of Content Marketing at Vendasta, knows a thing or two when building one. Dan has not only developed a content marketing team in one organization but four organizations. He often sees stories getting lost when creating content because there has been a focus on content specifically based on SEO value. Dan makes a shift in the organizations he has worked with to tell the story that solves the problem. A content marketer needs to be purposeful, understand who they are writing for and the objective they are solving. Writers can lose sight of the audience; he reminds teams to deliver value, not a pitch. Dan's words of advice, give a damn about what you do. Don’t think something is good enough, always do the best work you can do. Dan McLean is the Director of Content Marketing for Vendasta Technologies. He is a seasoned communications professional whose previous experience as a content and corporate marketer includes stints at OpenText Technologies, Intelex Technologies, Rogers Communications, and Cisco Systems. Dan has a 25-year career in information technology as a journalist with IDG and the Globe and Mail, market researcher with IDC Canada, and executive communications manager who worked with the Canadian CEO for Cisco Canada. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy. Transcript Introduction George: Well, 2020 has been an interesting year. And for me personally, it's been the year where I've been fortunate enough to meet some great new friends and bring them on board the rocketship at Vendasta. And today's guest on the Conquer Local podcast is our new Director of Content, Dan McLean. And Dan has a long career. I believe very similar to the length of my career. Most of it in journalism and in content management and building out content teams for companies like Cisco and Rogers. He also has interviewed some of the legends of technology over that career. We're gonna learn everything about content marketing, designing content, what to do and what not to do, and then how to tie it all together into a story that resonates with your customer from lead to bleed with Mr. Dan McLean, the Director of Content Marketing at Vendasta Technologies coming up next on the Conquer Local podcast. Mr. Dan McLean, Director of Content Marketing at Vendasta joining us this week on the Conquer Local podcast. Hello, Mr. McClain. Welcome to the show. Dan: Thanks very much, George. I'm glad to be a part of this today. George: You know, as a new member of the Vendasta rocket ship, you and I have had the last couple of months to get acquainted and understand a little bit about your philosophy around content, but for our audience, I'd love for you to just to give us a quick overview of your background and maybe a couple of those highlights from your resume where you were developing content for large organizations over the years. Dan: Yeah, glad to. So my background, if I go back far enough, I actually started my life as a journalist and spent most of my career covering the tech industry. So I like to say that I was in the best part of the history of tech during the '90s, when a lot of stuff was happening, a lot of growth was occurring. And I got to interview a lot of really interesting people that were historic names in this business. So I'll drop names like Steven Jobs and Bill Gates. They were two people that I had the great pleasure of interviewing. From journalism and tech, where I spent the bulk of my journalistic career, I moved into market research. So I was a researcher with a company called International Data Corporation and worked with them for about seven years doing primary research, mostly in the space of outsourcing and networking and communications. And from there, I actually went back to publishing again around the early 2000s, right around the time that the industry was making a shift to online, and actually, I hooked up with The Globe and Mail as well. So I did a column for the Globe, a weekly column for about three years on a small business technology. And from there, I actually took the dive into the corporate world, started working for a large company called Cisco as an executive communications person for the CEO of the Canadian operation of that company. I did that for about seven years and then moved on to Rogers Communications, where I took on a role as a content marketing director, helping to build that organization for that company at the time, which didn't exist, and did that for them. I moved to another job with a software services company called Intellects. and likewise built another organization there. And then, previous to coming on board within Vendasta, I worked for another large software company called OpenText as, yet again, a content marketing director. So I've had four stints at this and feel like I'm getting pretty good at it. Tell a Story George: Well, when we first met, and we started to talk about your tenure as a journalist, I was very pleasantly surprised and excited to hear that we shared a lot of the same views around telling a story and coming into these various organizations where you're either tasked with building something from scratch, or you're coming into an existing content philosophy. Do you find that maybe that idea of having that story from lead to bleed is getting lost compared to, yeah, I got a couple of blogs that I wrote, and I did this white paper? Are the stories getting lost, in your opinion? Dan: I absolutely believe they are, George. I think that a lot of times when you step into a corporate role, I think you can lose that as a writer, believing that you've really got to focus on the product stories or the feeds and speeds stories and the how-to, and you lose sight of what really matters, which is your audience. And I think that's universal in content marketing. Everything starts with your audience, and you've gotta be focused on storytelling and speaking to them. Everyone loves stories. I mean, we all like to be told and listened to and to tell stories. And I think that's what makes for effective communication, especially in the whole space of marketing. You've got to be a storyteller, and you've really got to focus on your audience and what matters to them. George: You know, listeners to the Conquer Local podcast will know that I'm a big believer that stories sell. And you're a big believer in that as well. The difference being that when you write the story. it's for the entire organization, and it then articulate to the prospector to the existing customer. It reinforces the value that that is being provided by the organization. We talk a lot about nurturing and delivering the right message to a lead or to an existing customer at the right time. How big of a challenge is this for organizations as they start to build that story, and how do they understand when might be the right time to deliver, or what's the trigger as to why I would wanna send this piece of information at this time? Dan: Well, that's a great question from the standpoint of now. I think we're in a position to do that kind of thing better than we've ever been able to do. And it's because we were able to serve up content to folks through online campaigns, and everything you do online is measurable. And you're able to sort of see what it is that people are consuming and how long they're spending on any piece of content or asset that you might have. To answer your question, it's a difficult challenge to pull together assets, content, informational items that address wherever a buyer or a customer happens to be on their journey. It's a huge amount of work to fill in all of the gaps, all of those spaces that eventually bring a prospect or a customer along in a sales funnel that eventually leads them to perhaps a sales discussion. People can come in at various different points. I might be someone who really doesn't know much about anything on the topic. And I'm really at that very front end, what we call top of the funnel awareness stage. And I need some education. I would start there, and I would go through maybe a stage that we might characterize as consideration, which is really about, okay, well, I understand sort of my pain and what I need to be thinking about to address, the consideration might say to me, okay, here are the things that you need to be looking at; the best practices, the technologies, the options that are available to you. And then, once I get through that stage, I might go to a decision stage where I'm thinking, okay, I'm ready to make a choice now. Now I wanna learn about my options in terms of vendors and solution types. And I wanna know more about the success that's being driven through a particular vendor solution, through the voices of customers or whatever. So it's a big long set of assets conceivably that you need to have. And you have to assume that a customer or a prospect can come in at any stage of that journey. And you've got to make it possible for them to continue that journey through the assets and through the content that you make available to them. Writing for SEO Value or to Solve the Customers Problem George: So when we, again, I'm gonna go back to that moment when you and I met, we realized that we were aligned around this idea of telling a story. And you shared something with me that you found to be a common trait, and that is that writers have a tendency to get dragged over to this let's optimize for search engine optimization and forget about telling the story first, and then optimizing second. Why do you think this phenomenon has happened to content teams? Dan: Well, it's a slippery slope. And I think content teams can get really wrapped up in this notion of things like ranking and trying to be so focused on your Google performance that sometimes you can lose sight of what it is that you're actually trying to do. And for example, the way I've spoken to the team here at Vendasta is to say to them, "Look, let's consider what the prize is. The prize is at the end of the day to generate leads and to lead conversions, to get to conversions through our content. That's what we're trying to do. And everything begins with the customer. It always does. It doesn't begin with where you're trying to rank in terms of keywords on search. It begins with the customer. And when your story starts there, you can guarantee that you're on the right track." And then what things like search engine optimization should do, in my opinion, is to augment the great content that you're building or that you've already built. SEO, to me, is an overlay. It's not where things begin, but it's frankly where things end when it comes to developing your content. It should be that last overlay where you're adding to your content those things that would help you to improve ranking and to improve search, but it's not the be-all and end-all. And sometimes content teams can get bogged down and kind of thinking a little backward about that, in my opinion. George: So writing a great story or delivering a great message that resonates with the audience is the number one component. Then let's do some technical things to make sure that it ranks for the robots and for the various searches that are out there. I'd like to also put into this same idea, what networks are we going to use to amplify the message or what ad tactics, or are we going to do a series of social media posts? Or is it going to be a YouTube video pre-roll or, again, all items that are very, very important, but without a great story, or the absence of that great message, then you're just deploying tactics that may not be as effective as they would have been with that great creative. Dan: Exactly right, George. I mean, you said it well. Everything else is a tactic. Look how you go about turning your content into a campaign where perhaps you're utilizing paid and organic social, you're using an email campaign. You're considering how you might write blogs to amplify the great content that you've developed. Those are all just tactics, and unless you've got frankly great content, none of that really matters. It's not gonna get you. I believe in the kind of success that you need to have. And frankly, if the content isn't very good and you're putting a lot of time and effort and muscle behind promoting it, and people are underwhelmed by it, the risk you run is they're not apt to go back to anything that you might introduce again. So real quality really does matter. Great content really does matter because if it's less than that, you're not just risking the success of your current campaign. It's frankly the success of every campaign after that because you may have underwhelmed people, and you definitely don't wanna do that. George: One of the moments where I think that I got most excited was when we were having our first conversation around the value of amazing content. And you've done a great job of articulating that, not just today but throughout your career. But then we had this moment where I asked the question around, well, what about the email that's being delivered by the sales rep to some deal that's already inside the pipeline? What about what's being said on that call, where they are now taking, again, that content lives throughout any motion that is delivering it to the prospect? And you did something you'll probably remember this, the very, that day, or if not, the very next day you went and listened to a number of calls where salespeople were articulating the story, and that is true ownership of all the content. And at what point in your career did you figure that piece out? Dan: Well, I think it probably began as my life as a journalist because I always sort of liken journalism to marketing because as a journalist, you're trying to do all of the things that you're trying to do through marketing. You're trying to engage your audience, get them interested in the message that you're putting out there, and you're to move them to an action, which continues being a reader. So, I mean, that's where it started for me. And that's where it sort of stressed the importance of, I call it customer first or audience first. Regardless of how you look at it, I think that the focus of what we write in the way of content, how we speak to prospects, it should really begin with them. It should be that there I call it the Stephen Covey notion of seeking first to understand then be understood. And I think that's the right formula, whether it comes to creating content or speaking to your customers and your prospects. I'm a big believer in that. And I've just seen it work repeatedly. Building a Content Marketing Team George: What would be some advice that you have for a young writer or a young journalist or a young content creation individual on some of the pitfalls to avoid? And then on the flip side, and we've talked about this at length, how do we get these folks to write around the problem that's being solved and not around the flashy button or the feature or it is one of my pet peeves in the SaaS software business where my career always had around just helps the client and really understand what their challenges are. So how at first the one question, what advice would you have for that young writer to truly be effective to reach their audience? And then number two, how do we get people to understand a right to the problem that's being solved and not the product? Dan: Yeah, great questions for a writer. And this is what I say to the team here all the time. I tell them to be purposeful. So when they write something, be purposeful in terms of understanding who they're writing to and what's the objective that they're trying to achieve. There should be clear objectives when you're writing anything, and you should be considering those things before you put pen to paper, as they say. The other issue is to really understand your audience. Who is that audience that you're speaking to? This is, again, we lose sight of this sometimes, even as writers, that we forget to ask that question, who's the audience, who am I speaking to? What do I know about them? And this is the first step in not just writing, but to me, all of marketing begins with defining and understanding your intended audience. And then the third thing I would say to them is to deliver value, not a pitch. Focus on the things that matter to your audience, and always align marketing as an effort to solve my pain or problems and make my life better. In B2B marketing, it's often the effort to help me do my job and be successful. So those are the three big things that I sort of preach to my writing team here. George: So in your early days as a journalist, and now we're sitting here in 2020 with all this amazing technology that we have access to, and I'm sure some days we're like, "Ugh, more technology." "What!" But one piece of technology that I think is an amazing way to tell a story today that is actually quite readily available is video. And I'd love to understand from you over the years how you transitioned from being a journalist and doing that writing and that reporting function to now utilizing video to deliver those messages, or even what we're doing today, which is an audio broadcast. Dan: Yeah, video is incredibly powerful because it allows, I think people if they can see a face behind something that's said, that's really powerful. And it's interesting in terms of doing effective video. The same rules apply there that apply with, say, something like journalism, where you wanna have direct messages. You wanna be succinct. You wanna be targeted and focused in your messaging. You know, you wanna keep it tight. You wanna be very clear on what it is that you're saying and your calls to action as well. And video allows you to sort of inject your personality, which is great, but more than anything, you wanna be focused on that message, and you wanna be tight and succinct and direct. Interviewing a Couple Legends George: Dan, it's not every day I get to talk to somebody who interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. So could you give me a couple of highlights from those two interviews? I know you've had a number of others in your career, but two of the most iconic innovators of our time, that really changed the way that we do everything that we do as a society. And you've had a chance to sit across the table and interview both of them. So why don't we start with the late Mr. Jobs? Dan: Yeah, well, my story about Steve Jobs was I actually interviewed him when he was with a company called NeXT computers. So he had been booted out of Apple, and he was doing a speech in Toronto back in the '90s. And my interesting story with him was that he had spoken about his experience buying a washing machine I remember. He was talking about how he and his wife had invested all of this time and energy in purchasing this washing machine because they were looking for something very specific, eco-friendly. He wanted to have as much technology put into this thing as he could. And he frankly sort of told this story about going all over the world to do the research and all of this. And I mean, it was a fascinating sort of story. And I told you a lot about the sort of person that he was and what he was passionate about. He loved technology. He loved this whole notion of innovation, and it wasn't just the thing that he would talk about it in speeches, but I mean, he lived his life that way. And I found that a fascinating sort of story, and that truly was sort of guy that he was. That permeated, I think, everything about him. It wasn't just something that he stood up and talked about in the keynote, but in his own personal life. He was always looking for innovation and that next great thing. George: No, I read the auto, not autobiography, but it was the authorized biography that Walter Isaacson wrote on Steve Jobs and how he didn't even have any furniture for the longest time. So making the decision on a washing machine, I could see that being a tough decision, but you do have to wash clothes. Dan: That's true. George: Let's move to Mr. Gates, Mr. Bill Gates, and the interview that you did with him. Dan: Very guarded. So Bill Gates was the sort of guy that he was. It always about Microsoft. I can remember speaking to Bill and really trying to throw all of these personal questions at him to sort of get an insight into what sort of guy he was. And during his days at Microsoft, he was a very guarded, private sort of guy, very careful about what he said. And it was amazing, a lot of his keynotes really didn't speak to, you would expect a guy like Bill Gates to be talking about, the future of the world and what was really sort of, frankly, all of the stuff that he talks about now, quite honestly. He's a much more interesting guy today than he was back in the day because he didn't speak much about how he felt about some of the issues that were happening in the world. Most of what Bill Gates would talk to you about was Microsoft, Microsoft products and solutions. I mean, he really was their best pitchman. And frankly, again, I think he's a much more interesting guy today than he ever was back then. George: Well, when I think of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, I think about both those companies that they were involved in and numerous organizations, but I'll never forget that day where Bill Gates came on the screen on the Apple presentation and looked larger than life and were there two lives collided? And I think it wasn't there as an investment made or something like that, that really changed the face of Apple at that time. And Microsoft had a key in that. It's pretty cool, Mr. McClean, that you're able to talk about two of those icons and interviews that you conducted over your career. I appreciate the learnings that you brought my way over the last few months. So we've been working together, and I'm looking forward to what we might be able to accomplish moving forward. One final item, because I know that you really enjoy mentoring young talent, and you found a few of those young folks inside our organization, words of advice for someone that is in the content business in 2020 and beyond. Dan: Yeah, boy. Well, I guess the most important thing is to give a damn about what you do. I think that, and I've seen this a lot over the course of my career. I've dealt with writers who would write things, and they felt that it was good enough, and it's the old story of good enough. It is never good enough. Do the best work that you can do. I think it says so much about not just a writer, but anyone. I'm always really impressed when I see or look at the work of someone that has put in a really solid effort. They've looked at the smaller details. I can see that they've looked at smaller details, and they've really thought through what it is that they produced in the way of work. So I mean, my advice to new writers, to anyone that's early in their career especially, is to just give a damn and do the best work that you can do. That's always going to impress people. And it's a great way to get people on your side for sure. In Closing George: You've been listening to the Director of Content at Vendasta Technologies. I like to call him the King of the story. Mr. Dan McLean, thanks for joining us on this week's edition of the podcast. Dan: Great, thanks so much, George. I appreciate it. George: Well, if you are a young aspiring content creator, or maybe you've been doing it for a while and needed a refresher, there it was that's Dan McLean Content 101, 201, 301 in about 20 minutes time. I could listen to Dan all day long speak about the way that you can improve the messaging on content. And I just love the takeaways around. Let's worry about SEO afterward. Let's not forget that our job in content is to write a compelling story. Let's not get too caught up in the feature benefit. You can always put that down here in a couple of bullet points, but let's tell the story of how the solution or the product or the service solves a problem and really speak to the audience in a way that entertains and nurtures them as they move through that buyer's journey. All of those things are a lot of times easier said than done, but Dan has a very uncanny ability to break them down into some very easy to consume bite-sized pieces that just make sense. And then, when you hear about some of the amazing interviews, he's been able to conduct over the years and the work that he did at Cisco with the CEO of the Canadian operations, exposed him to some of the biggest tech leaders of our time. You could tell that this gentleman definitely has the resume and the pedigree to offer the advice that he brought in the last episode. So thanks to Mr. McLean for joining us. If you'd like to continue the conversation with Dan McLean or any of our guests on the Conquer Local podcast, you can do it in the Conquer Local community. It's all part of Conquer Local and the Academy as well. You can learn. You can ask questions from the guests that we've had on the podcast. You can carry on conversations with any of the product teams or product marketing teams. It's actually a pretty cool place. Producer Colleen and I spend a lot of time in there answering questions and comments, and we're meeting a lot of new friends. So be our friend, please. Come to the Conquer Local community. And what we're really looking for is your feedback and insights, and suggestions on what Conquer Local season four is going to look like. That's 2021, our fourth season. We already have over 150 episodes of the Conquer Local podcast in the can. And now we're moving to 200 in-season number four. So sending those suggestions, we can't wait to hear from you. My name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.  

Lead Generation to generating business leads the inbound way. Learn how lead generation fits into your inbound marketing strategy and easy ways that you can start generating leads for your company. We welcome the Conquer Local Podcast's first Producer, Brock Andony. Brock started as an intern and now is a Content Marketing Strategist at Vendasta. He brings to life what it means to write a "Big Rock" content piece and the power it holds to continue to bring value and leads for your organization. Brock brings some shocking stats with him - 61% of Marketers say lead generation is their top challenge and 55% spend half their marketing budget on obtaining leads. He shares why organizations need to develop Big Rock pieces of content, create a release strategy, continue to gain leads of a large piece of content, and share what's next for lead generation. Get the guide here. Brock is basically a digital marketing Swiss Army knife. What started as a childhood passion for fine arts has blossomed into an affinity for the more imaginative parts of demand generation. His expertise spans email marketing, performance content marketing, content syndication, paid ad strategy, SEO, web design, and everything else you need to generate leads in today's business landscape. From co-founding early-stage startups, to winning the largest cash case competition in Canada, to pioneering new content strategies at large enterprises, he is always looking for the next immovable obstacle to overcome. Oh, and he also answers to Archie—for obvious reasons. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy. Introduction George: Welcome to this edition of the "Conquer Local" podcast. As we move through 2021, we are looking at that funnel that organizations need to build. What does that buyer's journey look like? What is the use case of people that are coming for your solutions? How do we craft a message? And content marketing is really the key to building top of funnel awareness and bringing in those ideal customer profiles that you want to be speaking to. And we have a young gentleman at Vendasta, who is brilliant at developing amazing content. Brock Andony, content marketing expert, is gonna join me next on the "Conquer Local" podcast. Brock welcome to the show. And I gotta tell the folks at home, Brock has been on the "Conquer Local" podcast probably more than any other folks, well maybe outside of Brent and Colleen but you helped produce the podcast in the early days and now here you are as a guest and welcome. Brock: Well, thank you George. Yeah, it's my honor to be here. It's yeah I guess about two years ago, I would have been sitting in the other side of the table from here. But back then, we were just trying to keep the lights on. It felt like, and what the "Conquer Local" community and the academy and the podcasts and everything have grown into, it's truly amazing. So huge props to you and your team over there. George: Well, it's pretty cool, it's the team. It's pretty cool to see things grow like that. And Brock speaking of growth, you've been with the company for a little over three years and started as an intern, which I always admired because you were still continuing to get your degree and working more than you probably should have been, but that's just the way that you're built. When I look back over this history, you have your BCom in Marketing, but you won 20 grand at a marketing competition. Tell us how you did that. Brock: Oh, easy, you see, I pretty much stole a content marketing strategy that I was building at Vendasta and gave it to somebody else. So basically the story behind that. So it was a little productivity consulting firm based out of Edmonton. And it was actually the largest cash case competition in Canada at the time. And me and one of my colleagues from school who had competed on other case competitions together, we got together and decided we'd go for it. So it was like a three round interview process and we through the first round, made it through the second round. And the final round they invited the top 10 teams. They go out to Edmonton and present to the actual company in question and fight for a $20,000 prize. And we came out on top. So yeah, it was super exciting. George: Well congratulations, I love to see that competitive spirit. I wanna talk about you as a writer and people may not know this, but I don't mind telling people. You actually have acted as me a number of times. So thanks for really improving me. But in ghost writing some blogs and some contents and things like that, and the reason why I bring it up and the reason why I don't mind talking about it is, I think there is this perception for business owners and for channel partners that you have to be a content writer, you have to write some of your own things. And I wanna dispel that myth because folks like you who are experts at writing, a lot of times you can take the concepts that somebody has and turn into something that's just magical. And we see a lot of that happening in the industry, don't we? Brock: We really do. And that's a big thing with content creation too because it's the ideation process that's really the challenge. Like I can write all day long, but coming up with the original ideas is literally 50% of the battle. And that's why it really helps to have experts like yourself that we can kinda glean on. And then putting ourselves in your shoes to do something like ghost writing, honestly, for me, I had a lot of fun with that. I guess impersonating George of all the people I could write as, I mean, I had a pretty good time. So it's honestly super valuable. And the thing with content creation is that it's really how you repurpose and remarket that content. So, the name on it, the name that's affixed to it, that's really elementary in the grand scheme of things. George: We know we should do. I happen to have a Vendasta hoodie that I would like to award to the listener that can pick all of the pieces of content that Brock ghost wrote over the years. So maybe go back, look at the blog, look at the LinkedIn profile. Look at my website, georgeleith.com and then reach out inside the community on the podcast on this episode and give us the number and whoever guesses close enough will get this a hoodie from Vendasta. Fundamental Guide to Lead Generation George: So I wanna talk about your baby. And not that you have a baby but you do have a baby that you've been working on for the past couple of years and is called "The Fundamental Guide to Lead Generation". And a few episodes back in season three, Dan McLean our Director of content talked about this concept of a big rock. And for those on the broadcast today Brock is gonna tell you all about his big rock, "The Fundamental Guide to Lead Generation". So first off, how many pages and how long did it take you to put this thing together? Brock: Oh man, this thing, it may as well have been my child. The amount of time I've been working on it, it's been I think it was about seven months in the making from ideation to completion and launch. And it's been like pretty much my life. It's almost, it almost cost me my soul but I think the end result was well worth the effort. George: Brock, I've always admired your ability to take a concept and then you really relish in doing the research. This thing is 300 pages long, and I'm wondering the level of research that you needed to perform to then put together the idea and the story and to write it like it just, this is a massive piece of content. Brock: Yeah, it was by far the largest project that I've ever tackled in my life. It came out as a 284 page guide. I think it was just shy of 70,000 words in total. And the research process was incredibly long and strenuous. I spent, oh it would have been hundreds of hours, reading blogs, digesting other pieces of gated assets out there. Just really becoming as much of an expert on the topic of lead generation as I could. And I mean, I'm a marketer and I think a lot of people think there's this misconception that as a marketer, you're a master of lead generation, but those are not one and the same. And I think that that was really a part of the a big part of the research process for me was just really becoming an expert in lead generation. The Future of Lead Generation George: Well, let's test and see if the research that you did... you can't go to the guide. So I want to test you here. When we, when I read through this novel, and it's an amazing content and congratulations, but you talk about the future of lead generation. So what, what did you learn when you went to do your research around where this business is going around lead generation? Because the reason why I want to talk about it is I get asked this question virtually every day by either a channel partner or one of their customers or somebody in the business, like in our building. Where do you think lead generation is going in the future from your research? Brock: I mean, that's a great question. I believe the way that I framed it in the guide was around mass personalization. And we're starting to see that in existing programs already. So if we look at, if we looked at even LinkedIn. So a big proponents of how we've been marketing this guide is through LinkedIn conversation ads and the way LinkedIn conversation ads work is pretty similar to a direct message or direct mail ad that you might've seen in the past. Like, I'm sure we've all received those sponsored messages in our inboxes. But a conversation ad is taking it one step further. So the way you wire up a conversation ad is you wire up the first notes and then the recipient has to interact with it through buttons that they press or responses that they send. And then you pre-automate answers that are auto responded based on their responses to your inputs. So basically it rolls out almost like a conversation that you're pre-programming. So that's just one of the ways that major social platforms are really trying to dive into that mass personalization space. And it's really, it's taking so many of the things that we've learned over the years and account based marketing strategies and just trying to build them out at scale. So there are a lot of companies out there that are they're building ABM solutions and that's really what it's gonna become is ABM at scale. That's what I see as the future of lead generation. Generating Leads with Social Media George: LinkedIn, we've had a number of folks from LinkedIn on the broadcast over the last little while. We've been talking about this platform, of course, I'm an expert user. I use it every single day. I've drank the Kool-Aid, I'm all in on this thing. In taking this massive piece of content and then parsing it out into components and using LinkedIn, you are right on the cutting edge of the latest pieces of technology to get people to interact with it. What's the ultimate goal of that motion and using that channel? What are you trying to accomplish? Brock: Well, the irony here, George is that we're trying to generate leads. That's that's the end game. "The Lead Generation Guide" is a lead generator for Vendasta and it's been one hell of a lead generator so far. I checked the stats yesterday and so what we did to roll it out. So the guide was actually completed before Christmas but we knew that if we published it and tried to promote it before Christmas it would just get drowned out and all the rest of the noise at that time. So we waited two weeks and we published it first thing in the new year. But what we did in the meantime is we created a teaser of the guide, which was just the first chapter. And we ran a bunch of conversation and sponsored ads on LinkedIn surrounding getting your early Christmas gift from Vendasta. And these campaigns absolutely blew up. So we started with a small budget. And once we saw the attention that these ads were getting, we ramped up the budget, and we were getting bites like crazy. And then about two weeks ago once we publish the full guide, we switched to the full guide promotion on LinkedIn. Then we rolled it out onto Facebook and rolled out organic promotion as well. And grand total we've generated north of 600 sponsored posts leads, over 3000 conversation ad leads, over a hundred organically leads and that's all coming in at an average cost per lead of about $40 which is pretty much record-breaking for the demand gen teams here at Vendasta. George: Well it's interesting for our listeners you'll notice that Brock was quoting different channels where they're measuring, and then also he has a measurement based upon other programs so the idea of taking this content putting it out in the wild, it's not as simple as just using one channel using multiple channels, multiple tactics to put in front of the right users. Brock, I have to be a salesperson. I just can't help myself. Just because somebody downloaded this guide. How does that, how's that a lead? Is that really a lead? All he did was open an email. How is that a lead? Now you're laughing. I could see that you are worked because you and I have together for a number of years and we know a lot of salespeople. What is your comment on that? Where someone says, "Wow, just because they download that guide, doesn't make them a lead?" Brock: So there, it's a different type of lead. What I would call this as an informational lead. A lead that not transacted but converted on an informational asset. And the alternative to that would be a transactional type lead. So a lot of the campaigns and the promotion that we do at Vendasta is around generating transactional leads. So this would be marketing things like free signups and a demo buttons. The likes of that. So with these, obviously the intent is a lot higher. It's a lot more bottom of the funnel in nature, as opposed to somebody that may be downloaded a lead generation guide, but the only difference is really time span. So it's what a lead like this a informational base lead requires is a lot more nurturing. So generating the lead is really just the first step and that's just one of many touch points. So after the lead has been generated after they've downloaded the guide, we have a bunch of email automation setups that are triggering campaigns sending them correspondence for weeks after the download, pushing them towards additional Vendasta and "Conquer Local" based assets. We also have remarketing campaigns that are running on social. So any of the people that converted on "The Lead Generation Guides" on social are getting remarketing messages surrounding the market use case. George: Well, so interesting. I wanna talk about this so that the audience understands because I think what we found in, and you've been a part of this because you sit right on the frontline sales floor, is that setting the proper expectation with the organization as to what this lead really is, is important because sometimes you have a lead come in, they walk in, they have their checkbook and they buy. Right. They put their credit card in and they just buy. Underneath the hood, there's been a lot of research that has went into that before they get to that purchase phase. So we go back to a piece of content that we've been pushing out over the years, the modern customer journey. We have that interest in awareness stage. We have the can I find the brand, the search and the find-ability. Then we go to reputation and then we go to conversion and then advocacy. But when you look at a piece of content like this it actually has the tendency to play in a lot of those different stages, where you could place it in an ad campaign to drive top of mind awareness. You also could place it into your search. You could put it onto some of your listing sources as a piece of content that could be downloaded. You could then have components of it, because I notice in this piece of content you actually have some testimonials that goes to reputation and trust. And then when we get to the purchase point, there still is that idea of, yeah, I get the guide. Like I actually get the thing and I get to have it in my hand. So I think it's important when you are looking at a content marketing strategy to make sure that the other stakeholders in the organization understand the purpose of the various items. The Origin of the Fundamental Guide to Lead Generation George: Where did this idea come from? Like, is this something that, you had in your back pocket, or you read or was it something that was mandated to you like, "Brock go out and get this, build this thing?" Like, where did the original concept come from? Brock: That's a bit of a story, actually, George. So the idea originated actually, I believe it was with our previous VP of demand gen, who was Devin Henig, who was also a guest on the show, I believe. And essentially it was always a pipe dream of his to create this ultimate guide idea to lead generation. And he actually created a variation of this on his own personal website but he always wanted to see a branded version for Vendasta. And when I started working on this I was actually kind of in between teams. So this is when we were kind of transitioning away from the enterprise marketing team and towards more of a core marketing group. And we were starting to build out different silos within that. So I was kind of homeless for awhile there actually. And I didn't really have a whole lot on the go, I didn't know who my direct report was. And I was like, "You know what? I'm just going to tackle this thing. I'm going to start writing. I'm going to make this lead gen guide." And when I started writing, I thought, "This would be a one month process. I would put pen to paper and I just grind it out." And the more, the more I went over it and the more I reiterated the more this outline grew into this behemoth. And the more I drafted content and started to backfill information the more it kind of blossomed into this massive massive PDF that it is today. It was kind of it was a perfect storm of events because it wasn't a shot in the dark. This was when Vendasta was kind of transitioning to our new use case framework. And one of those key use case is that we'd identified was the market use case. And that's a use case that was somewhat underserved with respect to contents at that time. So one of the topics that we thought was really pertinent to that group, that interest group and that need was lead generation. So what we did is we now we started packing together this piece, and yeah it's a, it probably should have been a 30 page PDF but if you're gonna do it, you may as well do it, right. So it became 300 . George: Brock you don't do anything half-ass, that's why you and I get along. I'm glad that you gave that color because I think it's important for our listeners the folks that serve businesses to understand that you probably won't write a 300 page guide for those businesses, but having the content strategy align with what the company is trying to accomplish. So when you're in the needs analysis motion with your client, tryna understand where they're going as an organization or what the vision is, and then aligning the content strategy of the organization to that. And I've been doing some R&D with some end user businesses. And I found, and I have one client that I'm working with right now, I found that this idea of a marketing funnel where you're using content generation to generate leads, it is quite foreign. They don't even understand that it might be a thing. It's like run an ad and get me a customer. But having that content that you can utilize as the ad copy, having that content that you could send to a prospect to build trust in the brand. There's their sales organizations that they have no clue what to put in the email that the sales teams are sending to potential prospects. They have no idea what to send while they're in the middle of the deal negotiation process, where you send the proposal out. Let's say I'm on plumbing company, and I send out a proposal to a business that I'm doing work on. What do I do in the meantime when I'm doing followup with that customer? And having some of these pieces of content you can then take components of it. And it, again, leads to that level of trust. Not to mention you just put it as a PDF in the footer of your email and they can download it. So this content strategy has to stop start at the very top of the organization, align to the strategy of the organization and then you need a Brock; someone who can write an amazing story and do the research and give some sizzle to the steak and then get it in the hands of the parts of the organization that are going to get the eyeballs on it. So it really needs to be this cross-functional group that is making sure that the content is, it's the right story. It aligns with the strategy. It then has the ability to be broken up into components so it can be used in various places. And then you've gotta have the discipline and the accountability to make sure the frontline teams are using it as part of crafting the message or the overall brand of the company. Using Social to Amplify George: Well I want to talk a little bit about how you utilize these items on social because inside "The Lead Generation Guide" it talks about all the different social programs but you're not just running ads on LinkedIn with this. It's building out blogs and it's building out social posting calendars. What where are you going with this Brock? What's the plan? Brock: Oh, George, we, we have all kinds of plans. So yeah, you, you absolutely nailed it with what you're getting at like really content is the backbone for all of these other programs. So when you create an asset like this that's literally less than 50% of the battle. It's what you do with it after. All the syndication tactics that you deploy that really give it legs and give it the potential to generate those leads that you're trying to generate in the first place. So surrounding social PPC was obviously the first motion that we deployed, 'cause it's the quickest and the fastest, and we had that stop gap to fill. So we started generating leads as quick as we could on PPC. So we've also deployed an organic posting schedule. So we're gonna be, you're gonna be seeing Vendasta talking about the lead gen guide for weeks and months to come. But then the next component of this is as I created this I actually parsed it out into about 45 different blogs as well as the core guide itself. So you may have seen these as well but there are about 35 blogs in addition to the ones that have already been published that are all queued up to be published over the next 35 weeks. So you're going to see blogs coming out on a blog marketing, on newsletter marketing on all of these different topics within the guide right into August of this year. And it's gonna be social work surrounding that. There's going to be email campaigns drafted supporting. There's a lot of work to be done still. And yeah, we have a lot motions in place. Conclusion George: So when, when you look at the time and effort that you put into this, this isn't just to get the release date, January 10th, you've got the pretty much this next year sorted for this line of content by using that. And we're going to use the big rock. The definitive guide is the big rock and then you take components of it. And it goes across all of the different strategies that you're using. And I will tell our listeners, I've been noticing and talking to organizations. They're really struggling with what do I put into an email campaign? What are the hooks that I put in there? What is the messaging that I want to deliver? And when you have one of these big rocks that has been written properly that it can be parsed out into components. It really starts to solve some of that challenge that you have around. What am I going to do with my social campaign in February? What am I going to do in my email campaign to this customer group? It’s a long lived solution. Brock always great having you on the show. And thank you for sharing with us the journey that you've been on in building this definitive guide to lead generation. Any chance I could get you to unveil what you're working on next? Brock: Oh, sure thing. So actually you'll love this one George. The next big guide is gonna be "The Comprehensive Guide to Sales Enablement". So with "The Lead Generation Guide", we aim to tackle the market use case. And next on our hit list is the sale use case. So stay tuned for "The Comprehensive Guide to Sales Enablement". George: Good. So that will be done next week. Brock: Yeah, sure thing. Be on your desk. George Excellent. Brock thank you for joining us. And we look forward to continuing to conquer with you. Brock: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, George. George: Well, as you can tell Brock and I've worked together for quite some time and I love interviewing him because he just hit the enthusiasm of this gentleman and the way that he loves creating content and telling the story is just infectious. But let's unpack what this is all about because content is such an important component to the brand that you are representing in a marketplace. And as I continue to work with channel partners and then work with their customer base, I find that it just is something that people don't get the power and what it might mean to their organization. Now, I don't think that you need to go and write a 300 page definitive guide. You've got to kind of grow your way into that. But when we look at the idea of maybe even a 10 page PDF, that could be your big rock and then it could be your social campaign for the next six months. And it could be a number of blogs on your website. So it solves a larger problem. But when you go to find a writer or you reach out to an organization that says that they do content you wanna very clearly set that expectation that you're looking for one of these big rocks. And, but you're also looking for the ability to build out a social calendar and build out a blog calendar, and then even go as far as this becomes some of the content in your emails. Again, I do a lot of work with small businesses to have some stories to tell and to see what's going on on the, on the street. And when I talk to salespeople in organizations I don't care what it is, agricultural businesses, maybe it's in plumbing company, anybody that has a sales motion. Those sales reps are trying figure out what to put in emails. They're trying to figure out a way to engage the prospect and they don't have research teams and they don't have folks that just do that all day long like a 'Brock'. So what we're hoping to accomplish in these episodes in the first six months of 2021 and season four is to give you some of these components. And we're going to give you big ones because we just, I love doing big stuff but you need to take it now down to how it could work for you and your organization, then how you could position it for your client base. Because what we're talking about here isn't just for tech companies. And it isn't just for large companies. It is for every company, that ability to have that content to position you as the trusted expert in whatever field you're in, and then to take that content and amplify it and put it in front of the right eyeballs so that you can build your brand and move people into that lead motion, and then eventually across the finish line. I think there's two very telling stats when it comes to lead gen and marketing that we've found. And I wanna leave you at these two stats. 61% of marketers say lead gen is their number one challenge. Not even that, it's their number one job. It is the number one challenge of their job. And then 55% say that they spend half of their marketing budget on obtaining leads. So this is a very big business and we have found that this concept of big rock and then utilizing the components of it and putting it out through various channels to amplify that information and build your brand is the way to generate those very very valuable leads that you need for your clients and that you need for your business. And what about this guide that we keep talking about? We have the link right inside the notes for the podcast. You can download your own copy of the 300 page definitive guide on lead gen from the one and only Brock Andony. My name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.

In the digital landscape, where businesses are heading in Singapore, digital marketing tools and techniques provide business owners the best chances for competition, survival, and even growth. Get ready; our first guest from Singapore joins us this week - Fabian Lim, Founder of Click Media. He shares his interesting career path and how it led him to where he is today. We get a glimpse into what the digital landscape looks like in Southeast Asia, how their market is evolving into the same as western climates, and how they really dove headfirst in the DIY model to learn digital. Fabian shares how different countries have different levels of technology and understanding. For example, there was never a desktop and laptop phase. In Singapore, they skipped over it and went straight to mobile and tablet - the local businesses run everything off their phone. Fabian Lim is a serial online entrepreneur with over 18 years of management consultancy & digital transformation experience. After a six-year stint with Deloitte Consulting, he ventured into digital marketing. Today, he is Founder of WorldInternetAcademy.com & one of Asia’s foremost Omni-Channel Marketing experts, having trained over 10,000 practitioners over the past 10 years worldwide; and LifestyleTrader.org - the World's first 'earn-as-you-learn,' ROI-based, lifestyle trading system. He is also founding director of ClickMedia Pte Ltd, a digital marketing agency established in 2008 that specializes in Omni-Channel Marketing - specifically E-Commerce Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization, Facebook Marketing, Google Search & Display, Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Web Analytics, Usability Analysis, E-mail Marketing & Marketing Automation and ChatBot Marketing. His online marketing clients include multi-national companies, public sector organizations, and top regional and local brands in the telecommunications, high technology, education, and retail industries, including Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Polytechnic, Estee Lauder, Asia Pacific Breweries, Bausch & Lomb, Fujitsu, Pet Lovers Centre & FarEastFlora.com. In 2016, he founded FlightSchool.sg - Singapore's first private flying school for aspirating aviators. From Sept 2017 to Jan 2019, he led Yellow Pages Singapore on a digital transformation journey as Chief Executive Officer. In fact, in just 8 months, he turned Yellow Pages from a traditional print publisher into a profitable digitally transformed organization. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy. Introduction George: Welcome to this week's edition of the Conquer Local podcast. Get ready, we're going on a trip all the way to Singapore. Our next guest, Fabian Lim is the founder of ClickMedia. And Vendasta is excited to partner with ClickMedia to bring our platform to Southeast Asia. Coming up next, Fabian Lim, the founder of ClickMedia, right here on the Conquer Local podcast. As promised Fabian Lim joining us all the way from Singapore. Fabian, thanks for coming on the show. Fabian: Pleasure. George: Fabian, I wanna get to your history and how you and I arrived working together. And let's talk about some of those large brands that you've been working with, but thanks for having you on the show here. We're really excited to be working with ClickMedia and the worldinternetacademy.com in Asia. And let's talk a little bit about your history and how you arrived in this industry that you're in today. Fabian: All right, so well my history goes back to 2002 I guess when I had just left Deloitte Consulting as a manager over there. I had two choices obviously, one choice was to look for a new employer and another choice was to stay out of employment, right? So I chose the of employment routes. What I'm gonna tell you right now you may not believe, but believe everything you hear because I'm an honest dude, right? So at that time I had some skills which I thought I could monetize. For example, I was a lounge pianist, I don't look like it, I know. I was a professional magician and I picked up wedding photography, so I say, "You know what, look here let me try to find ways to look for customers." And we are talking about the early days of the internet, obviously HTML, Google was already around. And obviously what I did was to build a website to showcase my talents, get some very very basic SEO and believe it or not, the fact that my website was on page one for wedding photography, magician services, jazz piano services, allowed me to really stay out of employment and start my little home-based business as a solopreneur. Right, so 2003 my first website went up and as they say, the rest is history, right? All the way to 2007, I realized that I hated doing something which was waking up early in the morning. Yes, it started a long time ago, right. Now, how it works is that in the wedding industry and those of you who have been to weddings or at least Asian weddings, they start really, really early. And as a result, I had to wake up at 5:00 AM to get my gear ready and be at a bride's place at 6:00 AM. And after doing 278 weddings, I got tired, not with a wedding, not with the bride, not with the bridesmaids, but waking up early. That became enemy number one, right? So for me to quit the wedding industry, I need a new income. And at that point in time, I figured that I was good enough in digital marketing to be in the business of education and training, and that's where I ventured into and alongside of course came the consultancy. And that was in 2007 all the way to now. How's that for history? George: No, I said, I love hearing from folks how they arrived in this industry. And to think back to 2002, Internet's in its infancy and you're figuring out how to make that work and how to build your business back then. Since that time you've trained over 10,000 practitioners all over the world on how to facilitate digital marketing, ClickMedia and Vendasta are teaming up to bring the platform into Asia. And we've done some speaking events together, you're a great speaker, very engaging. I wanna talk about ClickMedia and talk specifically about the Asian market. What are you seeing, businesses in that market, what are they looking for? What is an ideal customer profile in that market and who are the people that are really leaning in to adopt this technology? Digital Marketing - The Asian Market Fabian: Great questions, and the truth is that the markets in Southeast Asia which is really where I'm familiar with, they are evolving, I think similarly with the Western clients. We are now moving into a kind of a do it yourself, learn it yourself culture. And for one, I must say that YouTube has evolved significantly since 10 years ago. There's really quality content out there that people can embrace for free essentially, right. Now that has created opportunities, but that has also created challenges. I mean, what do I mean by that is that, a lot of business owners now think that, "Well, I can figure out Facebook ads on my own, I can figure out SEO, I can go to a YouTube channel and try to learn these things." And they are kind of right, but the whole fallacy of this do it yourself system, is ingrained with the fact that there's a lot of nuances when it comes to any subject matter. I mean, I'll give you one example, right? Recently I bought a pair of high-tech swimming goggles. And because of that, I had to learn swimming. And I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I figured out that I could swim. But guess what happens when I get into the pool, right? I end up looking like a monkey and that is not healthy because girls will be laughing at me for the wrong reasons. By sight distance as well, thanks to SEO, is that run a flight school in Singapore. I teach people how to fly airplanes. Can you imagine trying to learn how to fly an airplane using a YouTube video, right? You will get somewhere, but you will get nowhere because there are a lot of involved in aviation training that only a qualified instructor can share with you. And the same goes for anything to do with digital marketing. Most businesses are gonna be dealing with acquisition, as a basic challenge, and it's one thing to know how to put a Facebook ad together, it's another thing to have to figure out what happens when it doesn't work and you get no leads. So my point is that, the do it yourself, learn it yourself culture, is very prevailing in this part of the world, in Southeast Asia. I don't think it's much different in the US. And we have challenges, sometimes to be honest I think you would probably agree with me, it's easier to talk to someone who has no knowledge than someone with some knowledge. George: No, I agree with that Fabian. It's interesting, I like to say that, do it yourself users are lead gen because at some point in time their level of proficiency is going to come to an end and they're gonna need somebody to help them be the tour guide to move them to that next level. So definitely something that we're seeing in markets. Now, but that means we have to have some sort of, a do it yourself component though, because it's very valued by that customer until they figure out that they're going to have those challenges and that YouTube is gonna help them take it across the line. Net Value of Digital Marketing Fabian: You're right, there're are two sayings over here. One is that, "A little knowledge is dangerous." And the two, "You do not know what you do not know." So there will come a point in time where these guys that think social media is easy, Facebook marketing is easy, SEO is easy, they will realize that easiness and access to knowledge and effectiveness are two different things. That the therefore has to be, well, we've come to an era where believe it or not, whether a business owners or consumers or guys who wanna become digital marketers, where the net value at the front end is almost gonna be zero. And from zero, we look up to a monetary value and hopefully it's a value that basically equates to your time, value of money, and hopefully way beyond that, whether from a premium perspective, when you have super level knowledge itself. George: So in your markets, I wanted to get a bit of a view as to what the local business ecosystem is like. And I ask this question of any of our international guests on the show, the podcast is heard in over 50 countries around the world and we've had people on the show from Europe, we've had people on show from Africa, Australia, Iceland, you name it. And so I'd love to hear from you, do you have a business owners that are predominantly on mobile or they're still desktop usage? What are some of the challenges that they're facing? Is it Search Engine Optimization, is it e-commerce website? I just love to get that view of what's happening in those markets. And I've had the privilege of going to China and Indonesia and Malaysia, and so I think I have an idea but I'd love to hear it from you. Haven't been to Singapore yet, but I'm open to invitations. But I'd love to hear from you as to what the challenges and what that business community looks like in those local markets. Fabian: Sure, I mean to be honest with you I'm not really a fan of working with struggling SMEs. And I'll talk about that more probably later on. As a role I had to play in 2017, as Seal of Yellow Pages, which I help digitize or digitalize. Obviously I've had to interface with SMEs and the truth is this, right? That a large percentage of the business owners who own small SMEs, are what can I say, ignorant isn't it? They have no idea what real SEO is all about. To them a website is a brochure and they don't understand customer journey, customer experience, lifetime value. All these terminologies are ancient to them, right? I don't think there's much different anywhere else in the world, to be honest with you. And there's a reason for that, right. The biggest reason is simply that digital marketing itself as a body of knowledge and we are looking at multi-channel, omni-channel, it takes a lifetime to gain mastery. Now think about this, if you're a business owner and you're a successful business owner, where do you spend most of your time? You spend most of your time dealing with your workforce, product development and likely anything except digital marketing. That's why they are ignorant. Now it doesn't help by the way that we have digital agencies who are lowering themselves from a pricing perspective, right? Where they go off the bargain basement type of pricing in order to win new clients. So we have two issues, which is number one, agencies who are just doing it regardless of their level of contribution to the SME, regardless of results and it spoils the the good repu, that all of us have spent so much time building over time itself, and again I don't think that we are unique in Southeast Asia, I think this problem and phenomenon occurs all over the world. Business Challenges George: This is a global business challenge. And while some jurisdictions may be a couple of years behind other jurisdictions, it's the remaining thing. And my background, I came from the radio business, came from the publishing business, I've sold a lot of ads in my career. And it always was a joke among ad sales folks is, I wish I could get my customer to think about their marketing a little more than the 2% of the hundred percent of their attention. Fabian: You're absolutely right, The other 98% of the attention is keeping the lights on, dealing with the staff, products and services and all of the whirlwind that you're in on a day-to-day basis. So when we look at the stack that these businesses need, and I'll tell you about, when we were in Thailand and you get tired of eating at the resort that you're staying at and you try to find a local restaurant. Just having a Google My Business profile, the restaurants there would have got a lot more business because I had a real hard time finding, all I wanted was a lobster, it's not too much to ask for. But there just isn't that online profile. I think in North America we're starting to see more of that, but I, maybe I wasn't using the right platform to look. What was leading to that experience that I was having, where I couldn't find a lobster. Business Cultures Fabian: The truth with Southeast Asia and the challenge with marketing service Asia, in any type of channel is that different countries have different cultures, different level of tech sophistication. So if you compare, for example in Singapore, you will see very different type of behavior and sophistication, Singapore, for example because of our intense competitiveness, because we're so small and we're so competitive. And we probably have like 3000 aircon servicing guys, in a little small red dot. The quest for survival force us, the more forward looking companies to embrace digital monitoring like 10 years ago. And Google My Business, SEO, websites become commonplace for the forward looking companies. And to be honest with you right now dependency on search, dependency on social media, because of the intense competition in Singapore, again gives rise to hundreds of agencies in Singapore that exists for one man show to MNCs, and everybody is just fighting tooth and nail for the next client. But my point is that the value proposition and the delivery is really questionable on both sides of course. George: So you're finding that as a business owner to find someone who knows what they're talking about can back it up, can continue to expand with the offerings that they have, that's a challenge to find somebody that can put that whole thing together. Fabian: Correct, and I'm speaking from both sides of the fence. Right, I'm a digital guy, I also run, as I said, my flight school, flightschool.sg is the ranked website for anything to do with flight training, private pilot license. I mean, hundred percent of my traffic comes from SEO. And my point is that when you're on page one, number one you do get spam a lot by digital agencies. And most of their messaging, can they find fault in areas where they have no idea what you're talking about. They're always saying your SEO is crappy. But how did I get to page one, number one, and how did I build a six figure business if my SEO is crappy. There's no genuine insight of value that you're adding to me as a business owner, right. I've not had a digital agency who can genuinely help me improve my business, ever approached me in the last three years. ClickMedia Partnership George: Wow, that says something right there. So let's talk about how we are working together with ClickMedia and we had a great kickoff earlier in the year with almost 500 folks that were attending that event, we got other ones planned. This is a takeover Southeast Asia get ready, we're bringing the platform. I know you believe this, but I think that that platform could really help these organizations deliver that stack that those businesses need. Fabian: You are absolutely right, and to be honest with you, George, the reason why I'm excited about Vendasta being in Southeast Asia is because this gives agencies, big or small, a chance to level up. And by that, I mean that the complexity of the digital space right now, that we are living in the multi-channels, they took us there the one-man show is drowning in final play catch up, yet alone become the trusted advisor to SME. Now, what Vendasta will do, is that Vendasta gives it an option to outsource the tasks and services that he knows nothing about. I rather him the Vendasta platform and outsource for example SEO, to a credible SEO organization and preserve the dignity and the relationship he has with this business owner, than to be forced to come up with a bullshit SEO proposal and mess up the whole implementation because he knows nothing about this. And he's afraid that if he doesn't provide the SEO service the SME is gonna go somewhere else and he's gonna lose the relationship. George: You're articulating something that we see a lot where it's "I'm worried about losing this client, so I'm just gonna say I solved that problem, when I don't, now I'm going to have misaligned expectations." And what ends up at the end of the day is the client knows it's bullshit and it hurts the entire industry. Because the next group that goes in, well are they gonna lie like that last person did? And I'm sure you've listened to some of the episodes where I talk about in our Master Sales training, just don't lie, it doesn't get you very far in 2021. The prospect knows you've lied the minute you walk out the door because they just searched the data points that you were giving them. Mobile-First Marketing George: We're excited about this, and I believe that there's an enormous amount of opportunity, I do want to get one bit of knowledge from you and that is this whole idea of mobile-first. There's a lot of markets on the planet that say they're mobile-first including North America. But in your market, what I mean by mobile-first is the business owner is probably running their business on their phone through a series of apps. Like a desktop computer in the back room somewhere, is not where this is happening. It really is a mobile first B2B environment, isn't it? Fabian: More of the third world countries, the developing countries. And let me name them without being offensive at all. Looking at like Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia particularly, many of these countries because the developing nature of their economies, they skip the laptop revolution and right now the kids are all obviously owning mobile phones, so you're right that is not mobile first, is for some jurisdictions, is mobile only. George: Where I learned that was when we started working in Africa and the business owners there, everything had to be that mobile lens on it. And when you don't have all that real estate to work with, the website takes on a whole different meaning, the online listing component takes on a whole different meaning. There's a lot of voice search happening, so we have to really dial in the keyword optimization. So it's a whole new set of challenges. And I just, I love asking that question when we bring on international guests like you to just get a feeling for what the markets are like and what the challenges are and it's pretty cool to know that everybody is facing the same components. Now we've got the COVID discussion, gotta have it. Are you seeing more of a move towards e-commerce like we're seeing in other markets in the Southeast Asia jurisdictions? Moving Towards E-commerce Fabian: I mean, absolutely right, I mean let's put it this way, if you are retail today in Singapore and you're not offering any kind of e-commerce or any kind of delivery, you are gonna be doomed for sure. And we're talking about Singapore, that is pretty advanced. We have had COVID under control already. But the truth is this, the food delivery companies, the e-commerce companies are all reporting hypergrowth because even though Singapore COVID-19 has been controlled people don't wanna leave their homes. You're smart people, why leave home, go to the shopping mall and being risk of getting infected. I mean, you're talking about a country with 5 million people. And our infection rate right now for the community is zero. George: The lens around the e-commerce, we're seeing this everywhere, where you need to be e-commerce enabled, you need to have on your listing sources, you have curbside delivery or pickup or delivery, whatever it might be. I also found something to be very interesting when we were traveling, when tourism becomes a thing again, just the ability to have wifi was a determining factor of whether we would stay at, go to a restaurant or not. So you walk by, do they have wifi and having that on the listing source, really important components. So, loved having you on the show. We're looking forward to working with you. I'm told by producer Colleen, the team in the Conquer Local Academy that they are loving this SEO course that you've provided. So we're gonna put the link to the SEO course in the notes of the episode and ClickMedia, Vendasta, it's a take over of Southeast Asia. And we're looking forward to working with you in the years and months to come. So Fabian, thanks for joining us. Fabian: Thank you. Conclusion George: The insights into those markets. We've been down this road before where we end up in Africa, or we end up in Europe and we find out that there are numerous markets that are, it's not even mobile first, as he said, it's only mobile. It's something to be thinking about as, if you're thinking about doing some internationalization or you're starting to deal with other customers, they don't even think about a desktop computer or a laptop. They're doing everything on their phone. And I love the conversation around bad actors in the space where they're so worried about losing the customer, that they end up setting expectations that they can't hit. And then they wonder why the customer churns. And then also we wonder why people are a little bit jaded when we go into express that we can solve their problem. So it tells us when we hear about these groups that have a tendency to stretch the truth and things like that that we really need to pay particular attention to how we're going to measure success for the customer and keep calling that out. Because remember the customer has this idea that at some point in time, you're gonna lie, you're gonna miss a line, you're not gonna hit the mark, they're not gonna be able to measure return on investment. That's what's going through the prospect or your existing customer's mind, they're kind of always watching to see if that vision that you painted for them is coming true. So it's something to keep in mind. And it's part of the reason why we need to be doing those follow-up calls and those strategy calls. I always get a little bit of a twinge of, I don't know what it just bothers me when I talk to a channel partner and I say, "So, let's talk about your customer base, it seems you got 30 or 40 customers, how often do you talk to them?" "Well, some of them I just sold them and they're just, they're DIY, I never talked to them. I'm like, "Whoa, that's just, that thing's gonna go away because there's all sorts of other people that are talking to them trying to eat your lunch." So having that idea of we're gonna make the sale, we're going to work with the customer. We're gonna turn them into a raving fan and then we're going to move them forward into other products and services. Fabian talks about that a lot in this episode about using all of the complexity to your advantage where you are that trusted expert, that's taking them down the path and giving them those best in-breed solutions. So we look forward to learning more from Fabian. He's gonna be contributing to the Conquer Local Academy. So keep your eye out for that, he's got lots of great ideas on how to help businesses succeed. And specifically with that lens of Southeast Asia which is a very diverse market, depending upon the country, depending upon the geography, there's different things happening but it seems that e-commerce, star of the show. Number two, all businesses have these challenges because they are not thinking about marketing. They're thinking about running their business. So thanks to Fabian Lim for joining us all the way from Singapore today, here on the conquer local pods. My name is George Leith, I'll see you when I see you.

How does a marketing agency find success through the pandemic, and how can they help their community? It's about keeping local businesses informed and helping them succeed. If they succeed, you succeed. We have Mitchell Slater, Founder and CEO, from Slater Strategies joining us from Alaska/Florida. Mitchell got his start at just 17 years old in print advertising and quickly realized he had to make the shift to the digital space. He found early success by attending conferences and learning from others' mistakes who have tried and failed. As many agencies went through the same problem, finding success through the pandemic, he knew he needed to figure out how to adapt and help local businesses. Through the challenges that 2020 brought, Mitchell had his most successful year to date. He did this by educating the local businesses around him, finding his niche, and utilizing his network. A key piece to Mitchell's success was no longer being bound by geography because the entire world went remote. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy. Introduction George: It's another edition of the Conquer Local podcast. This week, we get to do something that I really enjoy doing. We have this event and we may not have it for a while or maybe we'll have it virtually, but it was called Conquer Local. It was an amazing conference. First time we did, it was in Austin, Texas. Then we did it in Banff, then we did it in San Diego. And I'll never forget this next guest, Mitchell Slater. I met him in Banff, Alberta. And Mitchell is a solo-preneur. He has, he's a channel partner. I consider him a friend. He has an organization in Florida that is his business and he runs this business solving the marketing challenges of his clientele. And I learned a lot from Mitchell. And he has continued to grow his business. And producer, Colleen, has done a great job of getting him to come on the show today. And I'm looking forward to hearing about the journey of Mitchell Slater from selling a coupon book in the basement of his parents' house in Alaska to now running a digital marketing agency in Florida. We're gonna get the whole story, the ins and outs and how he has grown that business in a few moments right here on this week's edition of the Conquer Local podcast. While joining me on the call today and on this episode, a gentlemen, that I met seven years ago, Mr. Mitchell Slater, coming to us all the way from beautiful Florida. And Mitchell, great to have you on the show and very good to see you again, my friend. Mitchell: Stoked to finally be on the show, George. George: A little passive aggressive there, but that's okay. Mitchell, please tell the folks about yourself and your journey. I'd love to hear about your company a little bit. And we've got to put the Alaska thing in there. So I'll let you tell the story of Mitchell Slater to all of the conquerors out there. Launching the Company Mitchell: Sure thing. So, yeah, my name is Mitchell Slater. I started my company when I was 17. I've lived in Alaska at the time. And I always wanted to start a business. So I thought, what better thing to do then get into advertising and marketing, 'cause I didn't have a ton of money and I could do it from home. So I launched my company, the original name, which I had no idea what I was doing back then, was Alaska's Affordable Advertising. I thought like, "I'll be the next triple A is what I wanted to be in." I launched it and I actually got into print. I think you'll be so impressed with George, the 17 year old, who was born in the nineties launched a print company to start. And I actually, I made a booklet, eight pages. I went and sold ads around my local town, little town of Wasilla, Alaska, only about 7,000 people there. And I went door to door, sold ads, and I filled it, I printed it locally, I distributed it around local businesses and I added up my profits at the end of the first month, and I made total of $30 profit. I was so, man, there were so many emotions, 'cause I worked so hard and I was like, I only made $30. Cause my printing costs was well over a thousand dollars. And for me as a junior, I was a junior in high school, I was like, "All right, a thousand bucks, that'll be nice to have in my pocket back then." And I kept doing it for another couple months and man, totally, I made like $60 total. I just really wasn't making anything with the business. So I changed multiple times. And the long story short is, fell on digital marketing. Found Vendasta about seven years ago or so and been with you guys ever since. And it's been awesome. George: Well there's so many great things in that story, because you learned about cost of goods and profit and loss very early along in your career, which happens to all of us. It also was interesting to me that you were born to be an entrepreneur. We've talked about this and when we've spent time face to face. And the other thing that I thought was interesting in your opener there was, Wasilla, Alaska, isn't that where Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds were in the movie, "The Proposal?" Remember that movie? Mitchell: Sitka. George: Oh right, which was actually they filmed it in a place in New Hampshire or something or Massachusetts. Anyways, I just love the Alaska reference. And then you move to Florida. And you're living North of Miami now. And we're gonna talk a little bit about your business today and what I'd love to understand from you for all of the folks that are listening is the journey that you've been on. Because I remember when we spent time in Banff, Alberta, Canada at a Conquer Local. And then we spent time in San Diego and it was interesting in just that one year, the growth that you had had as a business person and in your learnings of the space and the way that you were delivering to customers. So can we rewind back to those early days? And what I'd love to understand is the trial and error that are in those early days, and then if we could talk about Banff and then eventually we'll talk about what the business looked like at the San Diego time, and then we'll talk about today. So let's first off talk as you really started to dig into that digital marketing. What are some of the things that stick out in your mind when it comes to wins and losses? The Early Days of Digital Marketing Mitchell: So I think most importantly, I was pulled in a lot of different directions when I first started out. So I actually became a youth pastor right out of high school. I was 18 years old. I was working part-time at a church. And then I was doing my business. I was also trying to go to college locally, ended up just dropping that and doing the business and doing ministry and had a blast with that. So I was doing the business, youth ministry, which I absolutely loved. And then when my wife moved, my family moved from Alaska to Florida, I stopped doing the ministry side of things for like as an actual paid position. And then just did the business and continued just to learn and grow and going to those conferences. The biggest thing I always tell people if they are a Vendasta partner wanting to grow is go to the conferences 'cause the confidence that I built up in myself, going to these conferences, was just priceless. We're meeting, being you and me in the leadership, and also other agencies who had the same struggles and shortcomings that I had that I could hear how they were going through them or how they could get better. That was huge. So every conference that I've gone to, which it's only been two, I missed out on it last year, of course, with COVID. And that was huge. So I would always tell people to go to the conferences, because you're gonna be able to grow from there. 'Cause my confidence was bigger and I was always able to then call people directly from Vendasta and be like, "Hey, we met at the conference. I have this issue I'm trying to solve. Can you help me solve it?" That was huge and priceless as well. George: Right, I was interested to see you in San Diego. And I remember he had breakfast on that beautiful lawn at the Del Coronado and it was cloudy, but it didn't matter, it was still awesome. With the helicopters, Black Hawk helicopters from the Navy Seal Base, it is such an amazing place. And you were telling me about your customer, the growth that you had had since Banff, and it was a 12 month period, let's be clear. It was one year difference. And I noticed the difference in your level of confidence. Talking to our audience, how long do you think it takes for you to really understand how to deliver the value proposition? Understand what's gonna happen when you press the buttons and turn stuff on for your customer, and then also understand that customer? It wasn't a one-year journey, I don't think. Growing the Digital Business Mitchell: No, and it's not over. I'm still learning every day, every week, but it took probably three months after that first conference to really build up, I guess, the knowledge that I needed to get to that next level. And then it was kind of just kicking butt the next nine, I guess I would say for that, but it doesn't happen overnight. I that's never been the case for me, it's never happened overnight. George: You made a promise to me at that table and I appreciate you keeping the promise because you said you were gonna really kick some butt in the next 12 months. And now here we are almost 24 months later and we've got good news. And the good news is that 2020 was the biggest year that you've ever had. Why do you think that is? Mitchell: Man, it was an awesome year. It was crazier as everybody experienced. And when March, April came around I had multiple clients pause, multiple clients cancel. And I was like, "Oh boy, here we go. Like, what do we have in store?" And obviously a pause client way better than a canceled client. And come about July, August is when I kind of saw the shift where people were like, "All right, it is what it is. It's not going anywhere. We needed to continue to market our company, when you continue to grow with everything going on." And that was when people started, I got calls from people wanting to market, clients were saying we need a boost budget to market more. That was just a crazy shift come approaching that fall season, July, August, September that everything started to kind of grow. And so my last quarter was like one of my best quarters ever of 2020. George: And we all know that there are certain businesses that really profited from this, and there's nothing good about COVID, but there are some businesses that really profited from the change in lifestyle, the change in the way that we conduct ourselves. Do you see specific categories of businesses? Because that was one thing that you and I talked about in Banff was rather than going horizontally, calling on everybody and seeing, like really finding a niche where you have a customer, you've got a playbook, you know how to work with that customer in that vertical, and then maybe find other customers in that space. What are you seeing when it comes to the clients that you're really able to gain traction with and help them? Mitchell: The ones that have done really well for us are the trades. So people are stuck at home. They wanted to remodel their house, they needed a new roof, a deck, a pool. Those all took off really well 'cause people wanted to be able to enjoy their house since they were stuck in there all the time. So those ones just went crazy when COVID was going on. So those are, those specifically. George: I do know that you are, I'm gonna use the word ferocious. You were a ferocious adopter of new technology and we've rolled out a lot of new technology in the last 12 months. What I'm wondering is, when it comes to collecting payments with the platform and utilizing the e-commerce that we offer to you to use it, the Slater Strategies, are you finding that that is a benefit to you or the business owner just puts their credit card in and they're able to pay right within the platform? Ecommerce Platform Mitchell: It is. It's come a long way. When I first launched, I wasn't ready to make that shift over yet 'cause I knew it had some bugs to get worked out but it's gotten way better since the launch where it's been very handy to have it just in the platform, especially for anybody on the team that needs to go in there and edit anything. I don't have to give them the QuickBooks log in and here's what you need to do in there. Everything can be done inside. So that's been really handy. George: What I'm wondering Mitchell is, that what you were just referring to the QuickBooks log in or building an invoice and saying to a customer, and all those things, it really does take time. And it's not something that you really think about, the amount of time, until you don't have to worry about it. That's the thing that I noticed, there's some people that have found that by having the end to end, it really has saved them some time. What, we've talked about the businesses that you were seeing grow, what are some of the businesses that you're seeing struggle in your market, in just North of Miami there? Mitchell: Oh boy, I don't really mess with the restaurant side of things, but we've been pretty open in Florida since everything. And our governors kept the doors open which I know hasn't been the case for the rest of the country or obviously internationally. But I haven't really seen anything specific struggle besides places where I needed the foot traffic, because people haven't been venturing out as much. Like my wife and I, we have an 18 month old now, so we kind of just stay close to home and just hung around outside, enjoy the weather. So I haven't really, I don't really have much to add to that when I actually, 'cause I don't know, besides foot traffic businesses. The Need for Digital George: No, it makes sense. And it is that physical, where you need to conduct physical business. The one thing I wanted to understand, and I know that one of the core solutions that you sell to your customer is, you really believe in the listing syndication and make sure the listing data is right. Of the clients that you serve, how many of them have been adopting the ability to post that they have curbside pickup? Or that they have delivery or contactless payments, or things like that. Are you seeing an uptick in that? Mitchell: So, I don't work with the restaurant and those types of things specifically. So don't have that for clients, but I have had some that wanted to update their Google My Business with all the new features that Google My Business offered them. So yes, but not specifically like restaurants. George: It's interesting that you mentioned that. So is that something that you offered, or was that something that the business person understood was something they needed to do? Like I don't get a chance to talk to as many folks like you that are dealing directly with the business person. And I do have some businesses that I deal with. What I'm trying to interrogate is, do you feel that business owners are really starting to understand the ecosystem more? 'Cause in the early days, when we first met, you really had to explain everything. "This is why you need to be here. This is why this is important." Are you seeing an uptick when you call on those trades work where they're like, "Okay, I need to tell customers that I have contactless delivery." Mitchell: I would say it's 50-50. There were some clients we sat down with and I was saying, "Hey, this is what's coming with Google My Business." Obviously Google shut down reviews for a while and then turned it back on. Explaining to them the process of what Google was doing with that. And then we had some clients that were like, "I heard this from a friend that I can do this." And I was like, "Yeah." Or, "I heard this on, I saw an ad for this." Whatever it was and then explaining to them what exactly is going on. George: Well that was my point. And thank you for validating what I'd thought. And I've heard this from others is that it seems to be that we don't have to have as much of a heavy left as to what is possible. There's more people starting to understand that they need to be involved in that, which is interesting, right? Because in those early days you really had to understand the deliverables, explain it to them, paint the picture, but now more and more, it's more of a push than a pull where they're coming forward. The other thing that I wanna talk about is when you decide to go into a new category, or a new vertical. So you said schools and roofers, those are not two things that I would put together as a vertical. So how did you arrive there? What was the strategy behind, "I'm gonna sell the schools and roofers?" Mitchell: Sure. So it kinda got plopped in my lap a little bit. So the school, so a little bit background on me. So obviously don't have a college education, college degree. I was homeschooled my entire life. So I wanted to help some of these other homeschool organizations that were across the country to grow their enrollment and help them educate more students. So that was my heart specifically, and I had a couple of connections in that space since I was homeschooled my whole life and reached out to some of these schools and was able to help them grow. So we were able to help one of the schools double their enrollment when COVID, right before COVID started we helped help them double their enrollment in a year, which was awesome. And obviously the school world got flipped on it's edge a year ago as well. And then roofing, we just have had amazing success with roof. I don't know the roofing world really well, but we've had great success with helping them grow and get more leads using Google ads and SEO. George: And the reason I wanted to ask that question is, what we've found, and you and I did have this conversation in Banff, is you find a customer that you're able to solve the problem for and then go find other customers that look like it and run that play over again. And you become the expert in that niche. And this niche approach is quite powerful. I did remember something when I was prepping for the episode we're sitting in Banff, you and I were had just met for the first time, you were asking me how you could find leads or where do I go to sell this thing? And I had said to you in your circle of influence. And I really believe this to be true. When we're working with a channel partner, and we're talking, and I worked with them all over the place and they say, "Okay, where should I go to sell?" And I'm like, "Well, who do you know?" Because the one thing about selling digital marketing services, you remember the pitch that I gave you was, you're not bound by geography, you can sell it anywhere. You could do it the way we're doing it right now remote on a Zoom meeting, you don't really need to be face-to-face. So who is in your ecosystem? And that's where the school thing came from, because you knew those people and you were able to get the warm intro and go and have the conversation. Who else were you able to sell from that, that was in that space? You got any uncles that own businesses, or aunts, your family members that, is that something that you were able to accomplish outside of the the school thing, which you knew how to help them? Mitchell: I think the one that worked really well for me and not using this in a negative way at all, like church. So I knew a ton of people just from going to church and being around people there where they would, you'd find out what they do. They'd find out what you do and the conversation would start. And if you meet me I'm not a pushy salesman or whatever. I know George would be like, "Whoa, you need to be more pushy, Mitchell." I'm really just not that type of person. So if they want what I offer, I'll give it to them if it's a good fit. But being able to be in church, you know a ton of people. And then those people also know a ton of people. So maybe they're not actually gonna be a client, but they say, "Oh, my brother owns this roofing company." Or that, "My cousin owns this restaurant. You should reach out to them." And then when you have that introduction, that warm introduction, oh it's so much easier to talk to them, and possibly sell them on something because, hey, you have a middle ground connection, which is really nice. Growing your Business George: Great. Thank you for bringing that up. I find that it's really interesting. So you get somebody they phone in and they wanna run a successful agency and they're like, "Hey, how do I get leads?" Okay, "Who do you know?" Okay, "Well, I belong to this business group." Okay, have you done a mixer there? And all of those are happening remote right now. So it's your sphere of influence and then find the niche and then go find other customers. The one question that I have is, so you have this community that you belong to, happens to be a church, and you're using that network, which is brilliant, because that's what sales is all about is referrals. And really that's the Holy Grail, if we get to a point where people are giving us leads, because they know we do a great job. By the way, you don't get leads if you do a bad job. So you deliver value and you do it, you deliver on your promises and you're trusted. But I guess the question I have is, do you still deploy marketing against those networks? Is it still something that you're running a marketing, you've heard me call it air cover, where you're talking about the brand and you're maybe running some emails or maybe you've done some retargeting on your website. Are you still doing marketing to that community? Mitchell: Yeah, that's actually something we're just about to launch. We've been building it for a couple months internally for my company. So we've built out a case study for the school we were able to help. We've also created a video for roofers and it's all for Legion. So we have those two separate pages on the website. And we're gonna run ads targeting like principals and leaders of schools to go download the case study. If they download the case study, they're gonna be followed by a series of emails that we've created to sell them on us and what we're able to offer them and help them with, same with the roofing side. They download, see the video, they're gonna be followed with a sequence of separate emails, talking to roofers and speaking in their language to sell them on some of the roofing services we offer. So we're actually just about to launch that internally which we're really stoked about. George: Working with an HVAC company that deals in the B2B space and their sales team. Recently, we were working on some email campaigns and it was really interesting to me. Working with that team, they were reluctant to get specific. And, I was saying, "Well, if you're willing to run an email campaign and your customer base are hotels, and they do very well in the hotel space, you better speak to the specific challenges that hotels have." That talk track for the hotel is different than if you are selling to a shopping mall, by the way, which is another vertical that they do well in. And I think that it's great that you highlighted that you have a separate email cadence for school customer, and you then have a different email campaign for the roofer, speaking to their specific use case. Success Through the Pandemic George: Where do you see the next 12 months going? What do you, if you were to give any advice to the folks that do what you do every day, maybe they have not been doing it for seven years, maybe they're finding this podcast for the first time. What advice would you give them from Mitchell Slater who has been learning this business for the last seven years? Mitchell: Biggest thing would be, be okay with being virtual. I've had, I've worked from home for over 10 years with what I've been doing. I've never had an office that I've gone to. I mean, I'm in my home office right now, and I love that. 'Cause I don't have to go to this office, 'cause people are thinking I'm gonna be there at eight to five to be able to show up and have a meeting with me. I just work from home, and we're able to travel and go wherever we want. So don't feel like you have to have an office, that's an added expense. It's an added thing that you have to go, be in charge of and manage. So be okay with virtual. What's been really cool is when I first started the business when people were like, this is back when I was a junior in high school of course, people are like, "Where's your office?" I'm like, "Oh, it's in my bedroom, at my mom and dad's house." Like, I was really awkward to talk about and explain to people. And it was weird back then, it was 2010. And so it was, people didn't really work from home then I felt like, so now when I say I work from home, people are like, that's really cool, pretty much the whole country works from home at some point now. So it's been really easy. So don't feel like you have to get an office. It would be the biggest thing. The second one would be diversify. Don't have all your eggs in one basket. As I think that's taught a lot of people and people have learned that here in 2020, is if that one basket goes away because of a pandemic or whatever reason, you're in big trouble if you don't have that basket. So, and having separate streams of income, whether it's other businesses, you have a piece in or something, diversify as well. Conclusion George: Well you always inspire me when I speak to you, because number one, you're super authentic. "My office is in my bedroom at my parents' house." And that is why people love working with you, I'm sure, because you have an enormous amount of integrity. You're just gonna call it the way it is. And that is, I will tell you, it's not being a pushy salesperson, it's being persistent is my story. But I do, never, never lose the authenticity, my friend, because that is something that a real true sales professionals need to have. And it's never been more important than it is today. And from those days in Banff when we first got to meet face-to-face to today, it's been inspiring to watch your growth. And I think the other thing that I would love to hear from you right from your mouth is, this hasn't been easy, right? Mitchell: Definitely not, definitely. George: So the expectation that it's not just gonna be a bed of roses and that it's gonna be this straight line to success and dollars, and you're making tons of money and everything's going great, there are always gonna be challenges. I'm not talking about COVID, I'm just talking about day to day. That expectation that there are going to be challenges, people like Mitchell Slater, they rise to that. And I found that over the years as we got to know each other you actually love the challenges and solving them. And that's something that true entrepreneurs, a lot of people don't get it if they're not an entrepreneur. That's what we wake up for everyday is to solve those challenges. So congratulations, congratulations on that beautiful baby, and your fabulous wife and everything that you folks have going on. And we wish you all the best. And thank you for your partnership and friendship over the years. It is just a true pleasure to see you succeeding. Mitchell: Thanks George. Can't wait to see you at the next conference. George: Thanks buddy. Really appreciate it. What a great guy. Mitchell is one of those individuals that you meet and you just know you're dealing with an honest person with a lot of integrity and a lot of drive. And I was really excited to have him on the show today, because he is living this every single day. And from the moment that I met him face to face in Banff, Alberta, I was like, "This guy just calls it the way that he sees it and is not afraid to ask the questions." And it's really cool to see the way that he has grown his business. And that's why I asked that last question to him. It's not been easy. And that was the other thing that I found, he was so authentic in describing some of the challenges that he was having with the software, or the way that he was messaging the customer. You can see that he doesn't wanna be a salesperson, or a pushy salesperson or come across as a pushy salesperson. But what he does wanna do is take care of his customers. And I'm sure that if we got that school or maybe some of those roofing clients that he has on the phone they wouldn't call him Mitchell Slater, they'd go my buddy Mitch, because he's just a great guy. And he really cares about his customers. And he has an amazing lifestyle, because he's able to have the family unit there with that young child and be a part of the kid's life. And with his wife raising that child and then also working with his customers. And you can tell that he really cares about his customers. So there you go, another old print person. But he was 17 when he started selling print in his parents' house, in his bedroom in the basement. Just a serial entrepreneur that has been through the PhD of the school of hard knocks. And here he is, after all this time, he found a partner that he could work with and learn from. And I will tell you, Mitchell is not afraid to reach out to people and ask for advice and look for coaching and maybe sometimes to challenge and say, "Well, why do you do things this way?" And I've been on the receiving end of a number of those conversations. But to see him grow and we were just talking pre-episode, we need to get more Mitchell Slaters on this broadcast so that you folks that are out there can hear from some of his learnings and his challenges. And maybe sometimes we'll have a guest where you're like, "I'm just not gonna do it that way." And that's a learning too. But when you hear Mitchell talk about the challenges and the fact that he really had to figure out where he was gonna get his leads from and how he was gonna deploy against those leads, it's really cool to hear that. And then the Google My Business piece, something as simple, and by the way, it's not simple to the business owner, because they don't deal with it every day. But something as simple as really understanding the nuances of Google My Business, because roofers, they need to be there and they need to be manipulating that technology for their benefit and explaining that in a way that the client can understand and deploy is super important, and you heard it right there for Mitchell something that he's doing every day. It is the Conquer Local podcast, and those episodes and speaking to those folks that I've known for a while and watching their growth as they learn and deploy the lessons and the episodes, 'cause I know he listens all the time and you heard him. He's like, "Finally, I get to be on the show." It's just great speaking to those folks, conquering on a day-to-day basis and helping their customers those schools and roofers, helping those folks conquer too in this time. My name is George Leith. Thanks for joining us this week. I'll see you when I see.  

Customer loyalty initiatives are expected. What isn't expected are banks spawning software companies to let you know which day is garbage day. Darby Sieben is currently head of RBC Ampli Inc, an engagement cashback platform that connects consumers with merchants. Ampli.ca is part of the RBC Ventures which is the beyond banking arm of Royal Bank of Canada. Leading a team of 60, Ampli was launched in July 2019 and since then has grown to a national brand and has established itself as an effective platform for merchants to acquire and reward its customers. Listen to George Leith and Darby discuss RBC Royal Bank’s new-age customer loyalty programs including an app that informs you when to roll out the garbage bin, an app that streamlines the incorporation process for business owners, and an app that walks users through the immigration process to Canada. This “beyond banking” is all about solving bigger problems and it's yielding massive results. **For Canadian listeners only: Download the Ampli App and use promo code DARBY10 for $10 in your account, courtesy of Darby. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy. Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5+ million local businesses through 50,000+ channel partners. Vendasta provides an end-to-end eCommerce platform to experts who deliver digital products and services to local businesses worldwide. Whether it’s introducing new products to your catalogue, generating hot leads, driving new business through marketing automation, fulfilling effectively, or providing proof of performance reporting, Vendasta provides the tools you need to provide SMB clients with a delightful digital experience.   Introduction George: This week on the Conquer Local podcast, a long-awaited guest. I've wanted to have Darby Sieben, who is the head of RBC's Ampli program, and RBC being the Royal Bank of Canada, or maybe they've branded to be RBC, but Darby and I've known each other for a long time. In fact, he is from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and we met around eight or so years ago and have been watching his career. And, over three years ago, Darby landed as the head of RBC Ampli. And, it's part of a group known as RBC Ventures. And, Kantar brands rank RBC as the number three bank brand in the world behind ICBC in China and Wells Fargo in the United States. A very large organization, it's international in scope, and they're a bank at the end of the day. That's where they started. But, I think what we'll find from Darby is RBC is a heck of a lot more than a bank. And, we're gonna learn some things about RBC Ventures, and these new brands that they have been spinning up that look a lot like tech companies. Darby Sieben, the head of RBC Ampli, part of RBC Ventures, coming up next on this week's Conquer Local podcast Joining me this week on the Conquer Local podcast. I say old friend, but you're not old, but you and I have known each other for a long time. My good friend, Darby Sieben, the head of RBC Ampli. Darby, welcome to the show. Darby: Hi. Good afternoon, George. It's great to be here. George: And, we're finding you in beautiful downtown Calgary, Alberta today. Darby: I am. And, it's actually a nice sunny day out with little smoke, so I'm actually kind of excited about that. George: Fun fact Darby is actually from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, grew up here in Saskatoon, and you spent a big chunk of your career with Yellow Pages, and at the pinnacle, were the president of a group called Mediative. And, you give the listeners a bit of the background as to what you did at YPG, and then as the president of Mediative? Darby: Yeah, absolutely, happy to. So, Yellow Pages Group actually acquired an agency of mine in 2005. We had an agency based in Calgary that was doing traditional media tracking, as well as SEO, SEM, web development, and what have you. Yellow Pages Group bought that company in 2005, and then I joined them in 2006 to basically lead all of the digital transformations as we were moving from a print-based organization and starting to get into selling, obviously, digital products. So, during my career at YP, had a great run, managed all of the incredible partnerships, signed the first reseller agreement with Google in Canada. Facebook... We powered the maps data behind Google Maps, iOS, Yahoo Search, helped YP build out a lot of the digital products that today are obviously... That they're selling. Led a lot of the M&A transactions as we acquired a number of different companies over the 12 year period that I was with them. And, during that timeframe, I had a little bit of a sting, to the three years while I ran Mediative, which was our national agency that focused on international clients, where we were doing really enterprise-level... Search enterprise-level display. We also built out and worked with Walmart, building out Walmart Media Group in Canada, which was selling the CPG advertisers that were listing on Walmart's web properties. So, Yellow Pages Group was a really interesting journey. Everybody thinks it was a print company, but we did a lot as we transformed that business into a leading digital player in Canada. What is RBC Ventures? George: I've wanted to have you on the show for quite some time. And, now it's aligned that we have you on the show today. And, what I want the listeners to understand is there's a story here. That's why I wanted Darby on the show, but this isn't just happening in Canada. And, it isn't just happening in North America. It's happening all over the planet, and that is the banks are coming. And, you now are at RBC. When I first heard you moving over there, I'm like, but Darby's at a bank, but it's tied into an initiative that RBC has been driving. I think it's important for our group to understand that RBC Ventures is very much a software company inside, RBC is the parent company. And, that's where you are now, today. So, could you give us at a very high level, what is RBC Ventures? And, then we'll start talking about what you lead, which is the Ampli product. Darby: Yeah, happy to. RBC Ventures started a few years back. and I think it was a big, bold vision by the leadership team at RBC around how do we go beyond just traditional banking, and start to solve solutions for people outside of just the core financial products. And, obviously, those are really important. RBC invests a lot of money in building incredible solutions for core finances. But, when you think of RBC Ventures, we look at the world slightly differently, which is there's a whole bunch of other interesting problems that we can help businesses and consumers solve. And, we think if we can help them solve them, now, what that does is that actually introduces RBC in a more favorable light. So, just to give you a couple of highlights on a few of the ventures that we've launched. Owner's a super exciting venture. Owner helps people, as they're thinking about starting a business, and getting incorporated, to really make the process of incorporation super, super simple. The tie into the bank is obviously after you're set up with an incorporation, we'd love you to have an RBC business banking account, but what we're really trying to solve with Owner is how do we streamline that process to get you as an entrepreneur and get you incorporated. We have another venture called Arrive, which really looks at permanent residents that are coming into Canada. How do we get them set up and navigate everything? It's one thing to get your permanency, permanent residency to come into Canada. But, then there's a whole bunch of host of other things that you've got to do as a newcomer to Canada. So, those are a couple of exciting ones. Then, we've even taken a few ventures that we've acquired, that we think are very strategic. Dr. Bill is a really exciting one, and this is a company that we purchased. And, what they're trying to solve is how do we give more time back to general practitioners? Because, trying to bill as a GP, trying to bill, against the work that you do is actually quite a difficult process. So, they built an incredible platform to streamline the process for GPs to manage all of that billing infrastructure with healthcare and provinces. And, then this allows them to spend more time with their patients. So, we have a number of different ventures across consumer, across business, across mobility, and they all solve different problems, and even some of them as simple as Garbage Day, which is a simple app that basically says, "Hey, you know, today I have to put out the black bin instead of the blue bin." Or, Rocket Man, which is, how do I connect people from point A to point B on public transit systems? And, it's all about solving bigger problems. And, then, of course, we know with each thing, all interconnect back to financial services products, and it gives us the opportunity to talk about our products, at the right time, at the right place in a user's journey. George: I remember, one of the first times I heard about Owner, and this was even before you had arrived at RBC Ventures. And, we started to meet the team there, and they were asking us questions around how we might be able to work together. And, at that time there was just a couple of logos as a part of the Ventures but it... Have you ever shut anything down? 'Cause, you guys start these new ventures to solve these problems. Are they... Any of them that didn't work? That... Darby: There are. We have, we have. And, I think part of the Ventures' thesis was we looked at problem sets, and we figured out what can we come into market? And then, of course, as you know, when you start to launch a business, you take it into market, you learn a lot. So, we have sunsetted some ventures. Butter, which was one of our subscription management products. We did decide to sunset that one. Well-spent, which was helping people to reflect on their purchases. We sunsetted that one. And, when we say sunset, it was just the idea, the teams, the people, they're with the organization. We look at how we can repurpose them around. We look at how we can take all the learnings, from what we've done with those adventures, and apply them to other ones. But, yes, we do shut down some ventures, but we do it because maybe the product-market fit wasn't quite right. And, so we're just taking a step back, tweaking it a little bit, applying those learnings, and then figuring out what's the best way to apply it. George: For our international listeners, as I said off the top, this is happening, we're actively involved in five different discussions in different countries where banking org... And, I can't say the names because of non-disclosures, but banking organizations are looking to help solve their customers' problems, and problems outside of just banking. And, in fact, I think your term internally Darby, correct me if I'm wrong, is beyond banking. Darby: That's exactly it. I mean, part of I think what a lot of the banks globally, and we're very proud of this from an RBC perspective, we're deeply integrated with the communities across the country, and it's really about, how do we help consumers? How do we help businesses? If we can continue to solve problems for people, and we become very... We stay relevant, and it just continues to help the entire Canadian economy move forward. If we can help solve some of the problems that we think we're solving that are important problems to solve. Customer Loyalty: Free Toasters to Spawning Software Companies to Solve Customer Problems George: In the good old days, you used to get a toaster if you opened up a bank account, and that toaster was cost of acquisition to bring on that banking customer. I believe if I look at a billboard, or I watch a TV ad, or... The cost to acquire a customer in Canada is around $300 because, virtually, every banking organization is offering me $300, or an iPad, or something like that, around that cost point. Is this... Am I reading between the lines correctly that this is another way for you to acquire customers, by helping solve other problems? Darby: We believe so. Yeah. It's definitely a case where, I think as you solve different pain points, incentivizing based on... A toaster, or what have you, incentivizing is important. But, I also think it's important when you look at... If I have an organization that's helping me solve two, or three, or four problems, there's a good, real reason why I'd wanna continue to work with that organization. And, so we're seeing some great results on that particular front. Obviously, Ventures continues to grow. The organization's grown massively in the last three years, and I think we're right on the same path of where our CEO's vision is, which is really, how do we help Canadian consumers, and Canadian businesses, and grow the Canadian economy? We wanna do our part on that front. George: So, the product that you are responsible for and our leading is called Ampli, A-M-P-L-I, and encourage our Canadian listeners to go to the app stores and download that app because we've got a little surprise for you later on. But, let's talk about Ampli, and the vision of this... Of this tool, I guess is what I want to call it, 'cause I use it all the time. Darby: Yeah. I'm really excited about that. I mean, when RBC reached out and said, "Hey, Darby, we're thinking about, loyalty, the loyalty space, what are your thoughts on this particular front?" And, we have this concept called Ampli that we want to take into market. I got really excited, 'cause there's not a lot of opportunities where you can really think about how can you solve both a consumer problem and a business problem at the exact same time. And, so just for your listeners, Ampli is a mobile application. From a consumer perspective, we call it an engagement application. And, we started off with this notion of cashback. And, the concept is, as a consumer, link your financial information, we support 130 different FIS across the country, link your financial information. We'll use a watch and match tech, and we'll reward you for shopping at different brands on our platform. On the business side, this is an incredible opportunity to use the data that we're collecting from users. And, we're very transparent about what we're collecting, why we're collecting it, and the value that we're gonna provide to an end consumer, but it's really to help businesses think about... We solve three... We think we solve three problems for businesses. How do we help them acquire customers? How do we help them increase their basket size for existing customers? And, how do we help them increase frequency for their existing customers? Using financial data as the mechanism in order to do that. And, we do it from the perspective of it's a pay per sale model. So, there's no cost per clicks, no cost for impressions. It's all based on what we drive in terms of value. And, I often think of it as it's finding that great intersection of a consumer that wants to interact with a brand, and then creating the right value exchange for both parties. And, if we do that well, I think we've got something that's quite scalable. George: I got a real world example of how Ampli impacted revenue for one of their customers. So, Darby did a deal with Lowe's RONA, which is a hardware store. And, George has to do some work in his backyard. And, Ampli notified me that I'm going to get $20 at Lowe's and RONA, if I go to make that purchase. So, I coulda went to three different lumberyards to get the thing that I needed, but because I was connected to the Ampli network, and because Lowe's had put an offer forward, they got my $400, and I got my reward from Ampli. So, I might've spent that money at Windsor Plywood. I might have spent it, but because I was prompted by... So, this idea of loyalty, yeah, of course I go to Lowe's, it's just down the street from my house. My wife says I go there too much, but that prompted it to come to the top of my mind when I had a need for that product or service. You talk about pay per click earlier, is this in the advertising realm, or is it something more than that? RBC Ampli: Customer Loyalty, Marketing Platform, and Pay-For-Performance Model Darby: It is. I mean, I look at Ampli, we kind of touch three segments within the marketplace. One is we do have a segment of loyalty, because we see what a consumer spends. So, we know how often they're coming into your business. We also have a good idea on are they spending money within your category? So, there's a component of loyalty in an existing customers, but it is also a marketing platform, because we can help businesses identify individuals who don't necessarily shop with them, but might be shopping in the category. And, then the question is, how do we get something in front of them so they can come into your store maybe the first time. And, then, once they get into the store the first time, it's gonna be up to you to make sure that you retain 'em on that front. And, then the whole pay for performance model is how do we shift it to creating a better ROI for advertisers and lower that risk of some of the ad platforms that are out there and really make the pay per sale? Because, that ties into that mission that I talked about earlier on the Ventures perspective, how do we help grow the economy for businesses and how do we help grow for consumers? And, so, going to a pure performance model lowers the risk for an advertiser, and gives them that ability to say, "Hey, I'm getting a really positive ROI on any interaction with Ampli." George: You and I have been working with local businesses our entire careers, and that's why I wanted to ask that question around tying the loyalty component to ads, because that's really the black hole. I put money into this black hole, and yes, there's some data on it today, but why I was always very interested in this is... I'm gonna use the A word, attribution, because you can see that a purchase occurred because of the message that was sent. And, that's always been one of the biggest struggles of an ad campaign is we've never really been able to get right to the transaction. Whereas with Ampli, you're connecting your credit card from wherever it might be, so you're at that transaction layer. That's really the secret sauce, isn't it? Darby: It is. It is. And, there's other players that do this. We think that we've got a really, really interesting model here, that's scaling within Canada. We're focused purely on Canada. Some of our other competitors are focused more broadly, in different geographical regions. We've decided to really make a play, and see how do we serve as consumers and merchants in Canada. Once we dominate the Canadian market, then we'll figure out where we go from there. George: Well, and RBC definitely has an international footprint. That was going to be my question. So, thanks for answering without me asking the question. I appreciate that. You could see it in other jurisdictions for our listeners that are familiar with your brand and in other places. So, you'd mentioned earlier that you had a couple of products, you sunsetted it. what are we talking about inside Ampli and RBC ventures as far as team size? Like, are we talking 50 people? Are we talking hundreds of people? Like how big of an initiative is this? Darby: It's in the hundreds. We don't fully disclose the exact number, but I can definitely tell you it's in the hundreds. With all the different ventures that we have, a lot of them now we're in full-scale mode, because they've been operating for a couple of years. So, we're quite bullish on the future. And, I think you're going to see a lot more from some of the ventures that we've launched in scale. We just launched a new one recently called Mydoh, which I think is going to be absolutely game changing. And, this one is really about financial literacy for kids. How do we create more financial literacy in the market? How do parents manage digital, basically, allowance? Providing digital allowance to kids is an incredible product. I think this is one of the most exciting ventures that Ventures has launched in the last three years. George: I'm at the bank. And, I happened to, full disclosure, happen to be an RBC customer. And, I was in the branch and it was... Some things you still have to go to the bank for. There aren't a lot of things, and I'll never forget this. I'm sitting at the counter, and the teller, after I was done, my transaction said, "Well, by the way, here's a card and you get $20 off if you sign up for Wave accounting." And, you have this accounting platform now, that that is a part of RBC, and this whole... This overarching concept of beyond banking and being the sales person I am, I'm like, well, that's a hell of an upsell or cross sell you guys are doing right there, but you're not... We see these organizations that deal with businesses, and this was a business banking transaction, and they're trying to solve more problems at the end of the day. And, that's why I wanted to have you on, because in the banking sector, you guys are all in in this, like this is... We're talking a massive investment. Darby: Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. It is. And, it starts right from the top. Dave McKay has been an incredible supporter of Venture. Has really led kind of the vision on this particular front. And, there's all the executives within RBC and the team at Ventures very much look at how do we create additional value for all of our stakeholders? Whether they're small businesses, large businesses, consumers, because it's... If Canada succeeds and the economy grows, then we all win. George: It's an interesting business model. And, we were very grateful to have you on the show to share some of what you folks have been working on. And, it's now three years or four years that you guys have been headlong into this. Darby: It's been three years. We announced Ventures on June of 2018, at RBCs Investors Day. Obviously, Venture started a little bit before that, but the public announcement was June in 2018. So, we've been three, over three years, hardcore at RBC Ventures. RBC Ampli Promo: Your First $10 Courtesy of Darby George: Well, for the first time, I'm pleased to announce that we're gonna give away some money on the show. And, the good news is it's not my money and it's not Conquer Local's money. It's Darby's money. So, let's give our Canadian listeners a bit of a treat here. Darby, I guess you came with a bunch of $10 bills or something like that. Darby: Yeah. So, for your listeners, George, or the ones that are in Canada. Obviously the ones that are not in Canada, I do apologize, but for the ones that are in Canada, if you are interested in checking out Ampli, go to the iOS store, or the Android store, type in Ampli. A-M-P-L-I. Download the app, and during the registration process its gonna ask you, do you know how to enter a promo code? And, if you entered Darby10, that'll basically put the first 10 bucks in your account once you kind of linked up. George: Great, we'll put all the links in the show notes for everyone. So, you don't have to worry about writing that down. You can just get it there and enjoy Darby's money. I think every business needs to be thinking about what is your loyalty program? What is your loyalty strategy of taking that existing customer, and solving more of their problems, and continuing to strengthen your relationship with them? Because, as we heard earlier in the show, it's $300 to acquire a new customer or a toaster. And, it's expensive to get new clients. So, if we can take existing customers, and help them solve more problems, and maybe give them some rewards, that's another way that businesses can help grow their organizations. Darby: You're absolutely right. And then, I've been in the digital marketing space now for almost 20 years, helped a lot of businesses over that time grow. And, I get really excited about the fact that I think we're getting closer to that notion of... Build. I spend... I know 50% of my marketing works and 50% of it doesn't, I just don't know which. I think we're getting closer to that point on... 'Cause we do deliver great ROI for an advertiser, then that's going to help lower their costs. And, hopefully that means that businesses can invest more in the experience for consumers. And, I think that's a really important thing. Not criticizing any of the other ad platforms that are out there. They're all amazing. They all do their job. But, I think that really helping businesses get a strong ROI is beneficial for them and beneficial for their customers. George: Well, it's interesting you bring that up because a lot of times it's like, okay, what is the client's budget? And, it's more like, okay, that's an important number, but where are they... What are they doing with it? And, where might we be able to find more efficiencies? It might not be spending more money or investing more money, but it might be in just making it more efficient. Darby: Exactly. You got it. George: Well, thanks for the $10. Hopefully we can spend a bunch of Darby's money, and with our listeners in Canada, we appreciate that. And, thanks for teaching us a little bit about what... Well, what Kantar is calling the number three banking brand on the planet. Congratulations for that. RBC is a massive organization trying to help their customers, whether it be consumers or businesses, solve more problems. In fact, even helping me understand which day is garbage day. Unbelievable story. And, it's just showing how that convergence of the trusted expert, whoever that might be, and we're able to turn to that trusted expert to solve more of our problems. Darby: Awesome. Well, thank you, George, for the invite. Really appreciated the time. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about our story and... You gotta keep up the work on the podcast. I love the podcast. Love your guests. It's definitely one of the top podcasts on my list. So, you guys keep doing what you're doing, 'cause it's very, very informative. George: Thanks, Darby. Appreciate your time. Darby: Alright, thanks George. Conclusion George: Well, it’s obvious that Darby and I could probably talk for hours and we have definitely done that as we've known each other over the years. But, what I wanted to bring to our listeners today is the story that we've been telling for the last four years is trusted local expert, and the trusted local expert, I don't even know if we see him coming. And, that's why I wanted to have him on the show today, because if you would've told me five years ago that banks would be building marketing platforms, or banks would be building apps that could tell you when do you have to take the garbage out? I would have said, "that's crazy." But, very smart people have figured out that they need to go beyond their core business, and really become customer obsessed, and see what problems they could solve outside of their traditional business lines. And, we've got all sorts of lessons that we can look back of organizations that didn't innovate, and where did they end up. Blockbuster video. So, you could just put those names in there. So, what RBC is doing, and it's a very smart strategy, is how do we go beyond banking? How do we recognize that we're a part of the community, and what can we do to make our communities better, and solve problems for our customer base? And, so let's look at the top three takeaways from Ampli, for instance. It helps with the cost of acquiring a new customer. It helps increase the things that your... Basket size, the things that you're selling to the customer, solve more of their problems. And, then increase the number of times that you can do that or frequency. Can I get the customer back in more times to my business and solve more of their problems? It also is solving three big problems in the marketplace around loyalty. I think every business needs to be thinking about some sort of a loyalty program, and then marketing. And, Darby said that great line, 50% of our marketing isn't working. We just don't know with which 50%. And, then this idea of a paid for performance model. I think this is, if there's anything that's silver bullet like, in what Darby was just talking about, it's the idea that you only have to pay Ampli if there's money in the till. And, that is something that a lot of other tactics can't offer. Is that idea of attribution. And, that was when he told me about what they were building and where they were going with it. Now, that I've experienced it, because I'm actually a user and my numbers are ticking up there. I think I got like $90 in Ampli rewards. I think about it first, before I make a buying decision. Am I gonna get any money? Like I'm addicted on the loyalty side. I want to be rewarded. It's very similar to my Marriott Bonvoy, or my Hilton awards or my Delta awards. It's that same type of a concept. But, interestingly enough, if you remember back, Darby said he could connect any credit card from any financial institution. So, it's not... I don't have to be an RBC customer. I could just use Ampli as a competing bank's customer, but I start to be introduced to that brand, even if I don't have a specific loyalty. So, they are solving some interesting challenges for their customer base. But, also, if you think about the whole idea of RBC Ventures, that's why I wanted to get a Darby on the show, because I hear about this in various jurisdictions around the world, where folks in the financial community are looking at their customer base, and they're figuring out ways to go beyond that traditional business model, solve more problems, grow more loyalty from their customers. And, of course it's more money. That's what businesses are. We talk about that. We solve people's problems for profit. So, yes, of course it's around, can we make more money? But, the mission is to help the local communities that they serve. So, thanks to Darby Sieben, the head of Ampli, part of RBC Ventures for opening our eyes a little bit around how financial institutions are starting to solve more problems. And, it's right along the lines of that trusted local expert. We just want that expert to help us solve more problems because they've already built the trust. My name is George Leith. Thanks for joining us in the Conquer Local podcast, this week. I'll see you when I see you.  

Have you ever felt like you were spreading yourself thin across the hundreds of social media platforms? Are you trying to apply one social media strategy across too many platforms? Krista Neher is a social media pioneer. She is a 6-time bestselling author, international speaker, award-winning entrepreneur, global thought-leader, and the CEO of Boot Camp Digital. Krista has written 6 books on digital marketing, including a textbook and a “Dummies” book on social media marketing. She has worked with companies like Facebook, Nike, Procter & Gamble, GE, Macy’s, Google, and the United States Senate and has been featured as an expert in the New York Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal, NBC, CBS, Entrepreneur, and the Associated Press. Krista is passionate about digital marketing and created one of the first accredited certification programs in the world. In this episode, George Leith and Krista Neher discuss specializing on just one platform and perfecting it, adapting content to different cultures and considering infrastructure when doing video campaigns in different countries, and paid Facebook ad strategies- what strategies break through the masses and gain attention. Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5+ million local businesses through 50,000+ channel partners. Learn more about Vendasta and we can help you build your dream agency or learn more about Vendasta’s Affiliate Program and how our listeners (like yourself) are making up to $10,000 off referrals. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy. Introduction George: It's another edition of the Conquer Local podcast. And this week, we're bringing you CEO and bestselling author at Bootcamp Digital, Krista Neher. Krista is a serial author of six books and counting, Launch Yourself, personal branding, the latest work, all the way to her first book, which is the Social Media Field Guide. And I'm looking forward to learning more about how she became such a prolific author and where did all of this great learning come from. Also, you'll be able to find Krista online when you do a little bit of research. She's a global keynote speaker. She's a certified virtual presenter and an expert on many of the top-tier social media platforms. She's done work for Fortune 500 businesses, like Google and Procter & Gamble, NASA, and even the US Senate. Definitely gonna ask some questions around working with politicians. Krista Neher, CEO and best-selling author at Boot Camp Digital is coming up next on this week's edition of the Conquer Local podcast. Excited to speak to our next guest here on the Conquer Local podcast, joining us all the way from Amsterdam, welcome Krista Neher, the CEO and best-selling author at Boot Camp Digital. Krista: Excellent. Thank you so much for having me today. How Krista Became A 6x Bestselling Author George: Krista, in the next few minutes, I would love to understand more about some of this great content. You are the best-selling author of six different books, and there's a lot of great material inside those books. When did you start writing and what was the inception of you becoming a best-selling author? Krista: Yeah, so, to be honest, I never set out to write books or thought it was something I would do. My first book I wrote in, I think, 2010, 2011, and really, I had been doing training in social media. So my company specializes in training and I started off running these social media workshops and I made a user guide. And it was like 150 printed pages. And a friend of mine was like, why wouldn't you just turn this into a book? And I thought, yeah, why wouldn't I just turn this into a book? So I wrote my first book, Social Media Field Guide, which was just sort of an adaptation of that. And from there, I got a contract to write the first textbook on social media. Then I wrote a book on visual social marketing, right as images and videos were hot, like when Pinterest and Instagram were new to the scene. And the people at the Dummies group, like the people who write the Dummies books, they wanted to do a Dummies book on visual social marketing. So they actually reached out to me when they saw the book I had written. So then I did a book with them. And then my last book is on, well, I have two other books. I wrote Digital Marketing That Actually Works, and then a book on personal branding called Launch Yourself. And really, what my books, I hope, have in common is like practical, real things that work. So there's so much hype and garbage messaging out there in the world of digital right now, and what I really try and focus on, and that's why we came up with, that actually works, is to focus on just like the sustainable things that get you results and get rid of this hypey stuff that doesn't really work in the long run. George: Well, I find that folks that are looking to learn more in this field that we're in, whether it's around branding or social media, they're looking for those tactical takeaways, I can read the book and go do something and see a benefit. Krista: Yeah, exactly. And I think, to me, that's really important, but to stay away from these hacks and tricks, right? It's like, oh, add 20 hashtags and use this tool to find the most popular hashtags and throw those in. Like, if you think about from a user experience, it's horrid. So it's not gonna work in the long run, right? But there's a lot of stuff that's not rocket science that you can be doing that will grow your business right away that will also work in the long run. Social Media Strategy: Are You Using Too Many Platforms? George: When we were going through our research of you and your brand, your organization, I saw these amazing logos. You've been training Fortune 500 businesses, as well as startups and small businesses, but you've done work for Google, Procter & Gamble, NASA, and even the US Senate. What's the level of digital proficiency inside the US Senate? Krista: Well, I mean, you could probably see that if you watch some of the recordings. I'm Canadian, by the way. That's always my neutralizer on politics in the US. I'm Canadian. But what's really interesting, if you step back, I've worked with a lot of politicians over the years, and what's really interesting, again, is they have these tactics or ideas, but the blocking and tackling of building a good reputation on social media, it's not sexy, but it's the same stuff that worked 10 years ago. And you just gotta kinda get it done, be consistent and write great stuff people care about. George: Well, and it has to be content that people want to read and want to consume, really. It comes back down to that age old thing of, what's the message? In the work that you've done on the social media platforms, I'm sure you could give us a training manual on every platform. But the question that I hear coming up more and more, businesses asking this question of, do I still need to be using Facebook? I'd love to understand your feeling on Facebook and where it sits in the ecosystem, because it is changing. And I'm wondering what your answer to that question would be if a business person asked that. Krista: Yeah, so in full disclosure, Facebook is a client of ours, but I think my answer will surprise you given that. Here's the thing, right? I think social media experts do the world, or do marketers the biggest disservice by acting like everyone needs to do everything, right? And there's a sense of urgency. So you could go onto a social media group and say, oh, I'm a llama farmer. Should I be on Tik Tok? And everyone will say, oh, absolutely. You're missing out. Get on Tik Tok, right? So whether it's Facebook or something else, I think the most important thing is choose one channel and maximize it, instead of doing everything kind of at a mediocre rate. So like, the Instagram influencer who's making millions of bucks on Instagram, they don't care about their Facebook page. They're not worrying about YouTube. The YouTube unboxer doesn't care about their LinkedIn presence. And I think businesses need to adopt that mindset of really optimize one thing and one channel. So when it comes to Facebook, I think there's an expectation that many businesses have a presence there, just if you think a restaurant, for example, you'd expect to be able to find them and find their menus. So you need to be there for those types of things. But organic reach has declined so much that I think unless you have huge resources and a topic that's really suited to Facebook, you're really just not gonna see much organic reach. So more and more, we view Facebook as a paid strategy for businesses. And I think that's where you're gonna get the results. If you're thinking organic, again, it's an awful lot of work to earn that visibility anymore. George: I just want to interrogate what you said there. Is that because just the sheer magnitude of everyone that's on there is making it harder to stand out, and that's why you have to have a paid strategy? Krista: Well, so it's both, right? I mean, Facebook was the first social platform to introduce an algorithm to decide what you saw in your newsfeed. And everyone hated it when it came out. People were like, how do I get recent back? But an average Facebook user can be exposed to over 2,500 updates a day, right? Ain't nobody got time for that. So what you need to do is optimize it to say, okay, let's show you the stuff we think you care about. And that's what the algorithm does. But what Facebook's algorithm has done for the last 10 years or something was intentionally deprioritize posts from pages. So their algorithm actively reduces the visibility of pages. And for years, they said it didn't, but then eventually, like five, six years ago, even longer, they came out and said, okay, yeah, we do reduce the visibility of pages. So I don't think it's a secret that Facebook doesn't give organic page posts the same exposure as other type of content. And so, that's really what it comes down to. And I think the average organic reach now is under 1% on average for most pages. So you just do some basic math there. It's hard to get a good ROI when you're reaching so few people with your messages. Adapting Your Digital Campaigns Across Cultures George: So we've talked about the algorithm and we've talked about what's success on a Facebook campaign. What changes when you go into a different country or you go into a different culture, because I know you've worked in numerous geographies and I always get that question from folks that are like, oh, I just got back from a trip to South Africa. How much difference than it is in Canada or Australia or? So what is, in your experience, is the big difference when you go into a different country or language Krista: Yeah, the big things you have to be cognizant of, if you have paid, obviously, the budgets are vastly different. If you think of what you would pay for reach, for clicks in the US versus Indonesia, for example, night and day difference there. I think you also need to be really aware of the format that people are viewing your content on, and the infrastructure. So what we see in a lot of developing countries, like if you take Indonesia, for example, most of the views are on mobile because the infrastructure for laptops and that just never developed. So you see that across the developing world. Same in Africa. But then the other layer on top of that is the mobile speeds that people have access to. So one of the basic tips of Facebook is create more video content, which is true in the US, Europe, developed countries. If you do that in a country with poor wireless infrastructure, the videos never load and play and you're wasting your budget. So the main thing really, I mean, the platform works the same way. Obviously, you need to connect and understand your audience and their needs, but the biggest thing is optimizing your type of content for mobile speeds and the local consumption patterns. George: I remember when we first, in our organization, made the move to Australia and we're working in the Australian market. I had a sales manager reach out to me and say, can we change that text? And I'm like, well, it's in English. It should work. And they were like, no, we don't talk like that here. It was more around the colloquial phrases. Even if it's still English or even if it's still Spanish, there are those nuances. Is it localization is what we're calling it, or how have you experienced that? Krista: Yeah, so it's really interesting 'cause Facebook makes it so easy to internationalize your business, right? You just literally check another country and there you go. But I think you need to make sure it's adapting to the local market needs. Plus, is your website experience in that native language? Is your product service in that native language, right? So for example, we sell online digital marketing training courses. We talked about Indonesia. I could run ads there, but all of our courses are in English. So unless I run English ads, I waste my money because my product and my website is gonna be in English. Sure, you can Google translate the website, but it's not gonna be a good user experience at the end of the day. So I think businesses, in a way, it's easy to reach a global audience, but you do need that localization or some level of customization, or you could end up spending your budget not so wisely. Want To Join Krista's Training Course? Here's How. George: Krista, in your bio, it talks about your global keynote speaking at industry conferences and you do corporate events, but you did allude to your online learning component. Tell us a little bit more about how our listeners might be able to learn from you and the experience that you've had over the last 20 some odd years. Krista: Yeah, so, I got into training, to be honest, because I really felt like there's agencies that can execute this stuff well for you and businesses need that. That's hugely important to rely on people with best practices, but as social media and digital is new, those best practices are still evolving, right? And so, even practitioners need to be up to date, but also, marketers and business owners, you need to know enough to make the right strategic decisions to assess if your money is being well spent. And so, that's why I really got involved in training and capability building, 'cause I feel like that's how businesses get better results. And I continuously find it frustrating when there's so many small things that can be done to grow results that people are just missing, right? So that's why I love training. And we have a full online training program. So we offer certifications in digital marketing, social media and SEO, and those are endorsed by global accreditation bodies. And then we also have a full online library of over 30 classes, which you can try it for free for five days at bootcampdigital.com/aap. It's called our All-Access Pass. But really, what we try and do is give people the practical skills to get results. So it's not just video training. We're gonna give you a checklist. We're gonna give you an implementation guide. We're gonna give you what you need to actually do it properly because that's how you actually grow your results. George: When I mentioned the large organizations that you've dealt with, I don't think the audience should take that as it's, you gotta be Fortune 500 company to work with you. You work with everybody, even individual practitioners. Correct me if I'm wrong. Krista: Yeah, absolutely. It's just no one's heard of them. So it doesn't sound so sexy to be like, and I've worked with 20 businesses you don't know. George: Well, we really appreciate your time today and the learnings that you've brought to our audience. And once again, if people want to reach out to you, we're going to put all of the contact information in the show notes. And Krista, thanks for joining us. I know it's afternoon there, so enjoy your evening. But thanks for joining us here on the Conquer Local podcast this week Krista: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Conclusion George: Well, I enjoyed speaking with Krista this week. It's interesting when you talk to somebody that definitely knows what they're talking about when it comes to various tactics that businesses should be using. And she talked about using those experiences and best practices, and it became the foundation of her training business. And then, as she continued to go out and do that training, it became clear to her that she needed to write a book, and then became that prolific author. But it didn't just happen overnight. I've talked to a number of different authors on this show over the years. And a lot of them have the same theme. They just finally did it. And then they wrote another book, and then another book. It's just getting that first one written. I read something the other day. It was like, instead of talking about all the books you're reading, why don't you write one? So it's just interesting that that was Krista's experience. And then we find a lot of these authors and the people that are out there doing on a day-to-day basis and professing these best practices, they have this online training component so that their audience can continue to grow. And it's being able to leverage that repeatable place to go and find that content. Best practices, they change all the time. And what Krista is telling us in her organization and from her learnings, that we need to keep up with that change. And the pace of change is only accelerating. So that's why we hear over and over again about lifelong learning. And you need to continue to consume information so you can stay on the cutting edge. I did think that it was really interesting how organic reach on Facebook, as it has grown with their user base, and more and more people are utilizing the platform, the organic reach has declined. And you could insert any platform into that message. And we need to be a little bit more innovative in the way that we're leveraging that platform. And she talks about the ad component and how you might be able to use that. And I think you just insert name of social media platform after that, because we have a history of watching these platforms as they evolve. Organic's great out of the gate today, but is it still great two or three years down? The other thing that I love, and thank you to Krista for bringing it up, let's not fall in love with the treat of the week or the recent hack. It's usually that small item or those 10 or 15 small items that, with discipline, you continue to do and iterate on and maybe throw out the one that isn't working, but measure the small things that you're doing and see if they're getting you the outcome that you're looking for and not just falling in love with some bloody thing you saw online that might solve the problem in the short term. She was calling that a hack. I like to call it the treat of the week. We need to stick with the strategy and the plan, look at the measurements and see if it's getting us the outcome, and then make just the small little tweaks. The businesses that are doing that, the practitioners that are following that path are usually the most successful. And there, you've heard it from another expert that that is what she's professing to her audience. So Krista Neher, the CEO and best-selling author at Boot Camp Digital and the author of those six different books. You can find them all online, Launch Yourself, personal branding, Digital Marketing That Actually Works. I love that title. Social Media: A Strategic Approach, Visual Social Media Marketing, Visual Social Marketing for Dummies, and Social Media Field Guide, the one that started it all. Those are the works of Krista Neher, and we have all of them in the notes so that you can find them yourself. And we appreciate her joining us this week on the show to talk about all of those items that she's been working on over the 20 some odd years of her experience, Krista Neher, our guest this week on the Conquer Local podcast. Thanks for joining us. My name is George Leith. I'll see you when I see you.