You’ve had more questions and we had more insights to share! That’s right, another AMA edition of People-First Playbook. From high-level strategy questions down to tactical nuances, Nick and Andy fielded your questions LIVE during this episode. In this AMA we talked about: pairing your influencer strategy with paid media, why follower count doesn’t always matter, the role sales plays in building a people-first strategy, how to measure time to value, how to more effectively cross-sell by leveraging your data, why using data for personalized sales pitches is so effective, and much more… Packed with expert insights and answers to key marketing questions, this session is a must-watch to stay ahead in your marketing game!
Podcast Transcript
Are we live? Are we live? We’re live now. Oh man, we figured that out. Sorry. Everyone that, um, has been trying to join us, we had a little bit of a technical issue with Restream, you know, for two guys in tech, you would think we’d be able to figure these things out rather quick, but Andy jumped into it and figured it out and, uh, we’re here.
We’re here. We’re excited to be with you. It is a Tuesday. January 23rd, I had to look at my calendar to make sure it was the actual day. Um, but Andy, what’s up man? Good. Good to see you. Yeah, calling in from the snowy Catskills at upstate New York today. Thanks to a snow day at, at school. So not in the office for this one.
Different background. Changing it up. Hey, changing it up. Iss always a good thing. Yeah, I mean I, um, my, my nanny called out as well today. She had an anxiety attack, which is no joke, so I was like, stay home for sure. I can tackle it. And um, you know, Hey, we just make those things work. So good. Good to do. Good.
All, all around. So for everyone joining us, if you missed the last episode, we did an a MA and we actually had a ton of questions. And so we were like, why not do a part two and we actually have even more questions. But if you do have any questions, please throw ’em in the chat. We’ll try to tackle those ones live as well, because you’re spending your time with us.
But because we only have 30 minutes today, um, I figured we might as well jump into some of these. So let’s, let’s see. I’m going through the list here. Um. So this one actually kind of is interesting ’cause it covers both like what you guys are passionate about as well as like what I’ve done before. And so the question is how can you pair an influencer strategy with paid media?
And I’ll throw it over to you there because I’ve, so, I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been working for a brand that I’ve worked with influencers and creators, and I’ve leveraged paid media. And I’ve as a creator, worked with brands where they leverage paid media to promote something that I talked about.
So I’ll throw it over to you first, and then I’ll jump in kind of with some of my thoughts. I mean, it comes back to who’s the influencer and how authentic is the message. I think at the end of the day, I mean, if you’re doing your due diligence, which. You know, uh, we will flip back to you in a second is like, okay, are they aligned with our ICP?
Do they have a following that is truly our audience? And then like, what is the message and authenticity behind that message? Because you don’t wanna have somebody saying something that’s just words, but means nothing and, and really, you know, something that you don’t stand behind or something that you do.
Um, but to translate that then into paid media. I mean, thought leader ads on LinkedIn are a great example of how these two silos historically are merged together, where you’re able to. Promote somebody else’s posts as long as they’re an employee, right? And things like that. I mean, meta did it for a long time.
Uh, I mean, I’m not as well versed with that side of things anymore, but you would have sponsored, uh, posts that you could actually put live and it would just say, you know, Kim Kardashian and sponsorship with X, Y, Z, um. You know, we had a term life client that actually did that for a while. We weren’t involved in that campaign, but it is kind of a long time coming.
I think TikTok obviously something very similar to that, where they don’t necessarily have the paid media platform yet to support it, but it’s, you know, it’s coming soon. The question is always comes back to authenticity and message. In my opinion though. Yeah, I, I agree with you a hundred percent. Now, I think the tricky thing with thought leader ads is because you mentioned you have to put that you work at that company or, or whatever, so.
Sometimes the tricky piece is if you wanna leverage thought media ads with an influencer as part of your strategy, like not everyone’s willing to like put that they’re associated with your company. And maybe if you write that into the commercials or whatever, that’s, that’s cool. Um, I do think thought leader ads can be really, really beneficial.
I’ve seen it be really good and I’ve actually done this recently with Devin Reed, um, for one of our other clients. And so we’ve leveraged him to promote. Um, a webinar that we were, we were doing for, it was the two founders kind of doing a thing around repurposing content and. We did kind of a LinkedIn post, uh, newsletter combo, and then we put a little bit of paid behind it, but we were able to get over 300 registrations of the exact ICP, um, from that.
Now, I mean, granted, you know, listen, everything comes with a cost. It was not as cheap as, uh, you know, I would like, but like. It the amount of people that showed up live and then the amount that turned into demo requests. Yeah. It’s as long as one of those close, it’ll pay for itself. So, so, so talk, let’s talk about this tactically for a second too, because I think what’s important here is the follower base of the influencer actually doesn’t matter that much.
It’s more so. Is the influencer well known in the audience that you’re gonna be targeting within the paid media campaigns? Like for example, I mean we’ll just use us for as an example here, right? I mean, Nick, you’re well known on LinkedIn, you’re well known in the creator economy, but for our size of clients typically are like mid-market enterprise level, to be frank.
Most of them, they have no idea who you are. And to put thought leader ads behind something that you might put out there on behalf of us, it probably is gonna do. Squat because nobody knows you and the message that you might deliver on behalf of us. So it is understanding like the follower base of the individual, but also really more importantly is that individual influencer know within the space that you’re gonna be targeting.
Yeah, that’s, and especially, I mean I’ve, I’ve, I’ve wondered this too, like, especially as you get into like enterprise companies, and maybe it’s because you know, my background, I’ve worked in more of like, you know, smaller like. Startups or maybe even mid-market. But like I agree and I think what I’ve talked about has also changed over the time as well.
Um, but yeah, I mean, I don’t if people hype up follower account, I don’t think follower accounts matters. It’s like, Hey, is this person like well known within my ICP? Cool. All right, let’s figure out something to do. And hopefully it’s beyond just like a collaboration through like sponsored posts. You could do a lot more through that.
Definitely with you there. Let’s talk about, um, lemme see one of these other things. Um. What does a, what, what role does a sales team have in building a People first strategy? How do you find harmony between sales and marketing team, especially if the sales team is hyper-focused on leads? Um, so I can, I can jump in there first.
Yeah. And you can kind of. Way in. But so I, again, you know, I came up as a failed marketer. I did failed marketing, I did a BM. So like for me, sales was always my internal customer. And so a lot that I did in before I even like, knew people first or like, it was always something I was doing, but I was regularly communicating.
Like I was in sales before I was in marketing. So I walked a very fine line between sales and marketing. It was like, Hey, I’m not just some corporate marketer that’s gonna jam stuff down your throat. Um. What can I do to build relationships? That was like the first thing. All right, cool. For the first 60 days of any role, I was gonna build relationships with the sales team.
And the reason being was that’s going to have the sales team start to have trust in me as a marketer, but also as the team as a whole. And I can then start to be like, all right, great. Let’s change our mindset of how we approach. Our go to market strategy, it’s not just lead focus. We can very much say, all right, let’s focus on the accounts.
And maybe it’s territory based, maybe segment, maybe vertical, whatever it is. But those first 60 days and the ability to take those 60 days and then have weekly meetings with sales leaders, with the actual sales reps, with even SDRs or BDRs, um. It was very, very, it was very, very helpful in creating that sales and marketing alignment and shifted from like that old like, Hey marketer, go just do this for me.
You’re like my event planner to like, Hey, you’re actually an, an incredible tool to my arsenal and I wanna figure out how to take this strategy and go to the next level with you. And when someone says, all right, listen, I wanna do this with you, versus I’m gonna go do this myself. That’s when you start to notice there’s a big shift there.
That’s when you start to be like, all right, I think I’m starting to win this battle. So I think you touched on something very important There is relationships. Mm-Hmm. And you talked about it from the perspective of sales and marketing. Sales is relationship driven. That is act actually how you drive a sale.
You need to build a relationship. You need to sell not just what you’re selling, but you need to sell yourself and the trust and everything that it brings with you. So I think relationship goes, I mean, relationships are across this entire thing of alignment, which when we think about like a. People first, strategy trust is at the core of everything there.
It’s understanding and building that trust that drives that relationship forward. Now, the other thing that’s people first focused is, let’s think about how we’re going to actually go to market. Well, we need to understand who those audiences are, what they care about, what their challenges, their passions, their problems are.
Guess who one of the gatekeepers is to all that information. Sales. Sales calls, the actual customers. If you don’t have a customer success team, but everything is handled by like an ae. Um. They are your champions internally, but they’re also your champions to understanding who your customers are and really developing those audiences that marketing needs to go to market with.
And then ultimately align the messaging, the marketing materials and the enablement materials so that way you have a cohesive message and you’re not disjointed in, Hey, marketing is saying this and promising X, Y, Z, and sales is coming in and discounting everything we’re doing, removing all the value. Or vice versa.
And I think it all goes back to that trust piece of things that has to happen across the board. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. And I, I, I don’t think, you know, I feel like there’s a lot of marketers out there that. Don’t look at sales as like a trusted partner. Yeah. Throughout this whole thing. And I think that’s part of the issue, but I feel like it needs to start from like C-M-O-C-R-O or whatever that is.
VP of marketing, VP of sales. Yeah. Like it has to start from the top and whatever angle and then push it down from there. So, uh, shameless plug for our other show that I do with James Krak from Dragon 360 called Digital Banter. If you guys check out. The episode that we just released with Scott Logan, we talk a lot about this, where he basically says, look to my team, him speaking to his marketing team, like 50% of your time needs to be spent with sales because you’re creating alignment across the board.
You’re pre creating collaboration, and you’re creating the insights that are gonna drive that go to market machine. Yeah. You know, it was, it was funny. I, I’ve known, followed him for, for a while and, um, met him at a conference, I think it was like a year or so ago, or maybe two years ago. But he put out this like funny like content series after that and like, I was like, oh, this is actually really, really good.
And it’s, it’s something I actually listened to that episode, so I, I, you know, maybe. I subconsciously put that in because of that, but we’ll, we’ll see. Um, so no, I, I agree with that. Relationships mean everything. I wanna talk about something, and this one came in and maybe it’s because I was a customer marketer for a short period of time, but, um, I.
Don’t forget your marketing research partners. Yep. That’s, that’s a huge piece, Nick. Um, I actually, you know, it’s funny going back to that. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked for like smaller companies, but we’ve never really had like marketing research partners. We’ve had people that have kind of like focused on a little bit, but like, it was never like a, a, a bigger piece that you, you see in bigger companies.
Yeah, same here. Um, cool. All right. Let’s talk about, this question came in, someone dmd me it and it was, what are some effective ways to measure the success of customer marketing efforts now? I don’t have to tell you. I mean, are you losing clients? Well, I, I think the issue is too, it’s like, I mean, listen, we know the economy shit right now.
Like it’s Dow just hit like a record high man. Maybe we shouldn’t be saying the economy shit anymore here. Well, well it’s funny because I, I, I go out like I was at, um, I was at a funeral recently. We went out to lunch and the amount of people that were at this restaurant. Midday on a Monday blew my mind.
And again, it was probably, it was a lot of like baby boomers, so like mm-hmm. They probably have nothing else to do and like they probably have all this money saved, but like, this has happened now like four times in the last couple of months where I go out for lunch on like a Monday or Tuesday and like a decent, like nice restaurant and it is just absolutely packed.
Um, so as much as people say the economy is crap. Some people would disagree with that, but like when I think about like the ways to measure customer success, customer marketing efforts, and again, I did customer marketing when I was at Alice for a short time, and the biggest thing that I looked at was time to value.
So I. One of the things that we had was Alice was a B2B gifting platform. Um, they signed 12 month contracts. Their goal was to see time to value in less than 90 days. ’cause when I came in there, and again, I was there for a while, so I was doing other roles. But when I moved over to that side of it, I actually reported to our VP of customer success.
Great alignment there. It actually was interesting ’cause I wasn’t part of the marketing team, um, but. Their time to value is 90 days. So if you think about that, you would see, yeah, break that. Break that down for me. Like how do you measure time to value? So, yeah, so there’s actually a few things. So the amount you like, it was based on the number of gifts that you sent.
So I think the, I think the gifts, it was like you had to send like 20 gifts or something, and that was one pillar of it. Then you had to have a certain amount accepted of those gifts to the people that you sent them to. It was, it was all about engaging the platforms that you actually knew how to use it.
Did you connect your CRM? Did you connect your marketing automation platform so you could see all the different integrations that you had so you seamlessly never had to leave the platform and go and do other things? So in a se in essence, it’s the time in which you are actually getting value out of your purchase.
E. E, exactly. It’s, it’s like the three plate minimum at old country Behe. Buffet. Right. Okay. That’s, I used to go, I had one of those maybe when I grew up. It was like 10 minutes for me. I used to always go to that place and it was, yeah, it’s been a long time. I don’t even think they’re around anymore, but I, I sidetracked you.
Sorry. But yeah, so it was like 90 days. And if you think about that, so 90 days to see value of the tool that you purchased. And listen, we weren’t, we weren’t cheap at the time. I think we were charging like. 25 to $30,000, which some people, eh, you know, it’s no biggie. But for gifting platform, it’s a nice to have, it’s not a must have.
And so you are three months, you’re basically three months into a 12 month contract of. Starting to get your feet wet, not even like you’re a pro at this point. Then it’s like, all right, you’re starting to have those basically, you know, conversations about renewals, you know, two months or so before. So it’s like you have a short period of window to be able to say like, is this platform actually delivering an ROI for me?
And so I said, all right, listen, we need to get that time to value to under 30 days. If you can hit it sub 30 days, then what’s going to happen is. Within that first month, people are gonna start to see value and then you have another 10 months or so where they can really maximize what they see. So hopefully that renewal comes in, there’s upsell opportunities, all of those things.
And they didn’t really do much customer marketing efforts. Well, I was there. I was literally the first person that kind of did that. And the first thing that I did was, and I hate to kind of even like say this, but like they actually didn’t email customers. Users, they emailed administrators of the platform, but they didn’t email the users.
And so I just kind of went and I set up a weekly like tips and tricks type thing. And the amount of people that didn’t know about integrations we had like, and I’m talking about like Salesforce, HubSpot, like simple stuff. Like they were like, wow, this stuff exists. And I’m like, well, one, your CSM should have been telling you that, but they didn’t.
Um, I. And we saw, so I was, by the time I left, we were at 35 days for time to value. So it went from 90 days to 35 days. And we, we only implemented like two or three different programs. It was a weekly email. It came from our VP of Cs that I wrote for her. It was, um, regular meetups with other customers through different types of like VIP style events.
And then it was more of like. Letting people know that we actually had a, um, kinda like a database of like, Hey, you can search these questions again. No, we buried it in our website. So like no one knew about it. Um, and so many people like, wow, this is helpful. ’cause I got all the reply emails and I could see specifically what people were asking, like how am I appreciative they were?
Um, but that was the biggest thing that I looked at that ultimately impacted net revenue retention. Um, from that. Which is interesting ’cause some people might be like, well, what do you, what else do you look at? Like, do you look at NPS scores? Yeah, I mean we looked at NPS scores of course, but like, I feel like for a SaaS platform, um, time to value was one of the biggest things that can actually make a huge impact for your users.
I. In general, it kind of baffles me that so many brands don’t use customer marketing in a much greater fashion than what they do. Like to give you an example there, right? I mean there’s so many ripe opportunities if you sell multiple products or. Ancillary products. I mean, the cross sells upsells, everything that goes with that.
And when you think about how people go about doing that, it’s like, oh yeah, they’re gonna hop on the weekly or quarterly call with their CS and maybe that person will plug it. Or no, we send emails like Who? No, you get enough inbox emails as is. Not enough brands take advantage of you own, I shouldn’t say you own.
You have this first party data that you can use in so many different ways. I mean, us as a performance marketing agency, we’re always asking for that because of all the opportunities it brings. I mean, you’re talking about cheaper acquisition costs, you’re talking about people that are directly in market.
You don’t have to sell them on the brand as long as you build trust. You just need to sell them on the features and opportunities that these other products or services. Bring to the table. I mean, it’s kind of like a mini a BM effort in so many regards. Mm-Hmm. Except you’re not going after coal prospects that have never heard of you.
You’re working with existing customers and you’re just tagging onto everything that’s being said by their account reps and everything else. Again, it amazes me that not enough brands use that as a quick win opportunity, or even part of the strategy E. Exactly. And then when you think about like going into enterprise and how many different buying units there are, like you could leverage your existing, like, you know, say you’re in one or two different like units there, like why aren’t you leveraging them in those relationships?
Which going back to relationships, like going into the other things, so Yeah, exactly. Cool. Let’s see, there’s, uh, there’s one here that actually could be good for you to kick things off. So like, what, what role does data play in understanding, connecting with your B2B audience, especially when it comes to putting people first.
Everything. Yeah, I mean, we just talked about customers. I mean, understanding who your customers are, all the data that that provides and all of the data points that it is an output of that allows you to create audiences from, I mean, audience segmentation and development is the core piece to our process because it is people first, it’s understanding who our ICP is validating that it is actually the ICP and then understanding who those.
Decision makers are the champions and all of the pains, passions, challenges and problems that come with that. I mean, using tools from Sales Navigator to spark, Toro, all of those data points. Craft an, uh, an identity and a, a picture of who your actual customer is and what they’re struggling with, either today because they’re in market or tomorrow because they haven’t realized they have a problem yet.
I mean that it’s a, it’s a broad question, but like data is everything to getting off the ground and then ultimately understanding if it’s working or not. Yeah. And it’s like, it’s, it’s, honestly, it’s a great way to figure out how to like, leverage that data to be able to personalize. So it’s not like, you know, not spray and prey on LinkedIn.
Like, you know, we’ve all gotten those like dms where it’s like, Hey, saw you like Justin Welsh’s post. I’m just gonna segment you. Basically, like for liking something like, I, I can’t tell you like. I got one really good pitch from a salesperson years ago, and like it was so personalized, like took specific like LinkedIn posts that I wrote, took some stuff from my profile, stuff from people that like knew me that somehow they had information from and they leveraged.
I. That plus their internal, like first party data, um, to basically craft this incredible email. And usually I just hit delete on these things. But with this, I actually, the guy was so people first without me even knowing it, that I ended up signing a $30,000 contract with them two weeks later. I. I was, I was working for an IT company at the time, and they provided, they were kind of like, um, kind of like a G two for it.
And, um, they exactly the audience that we wanted to plug into and like helped me like realize I had a problem without even like, knowing I had a problem. Um, but like. It felt like someone that knew me for so long and, um, I still talk to him to this day and I, I tell this story to, to him that like I tell people, so, um, if he’s listening, I’m sure he’ll, he’ll find that funny.
But, um, you know, four years. The other thing too, you have to be careful with is like misleading data because let’s, let’s use a great example here just because our audience is on LinkedIn and our audience is 40,000 strong based off of the parameters that we have mapped out. Yeah. It doesn’t mean that they actually hang out enough on LinkedIn to make a difference.
That’s where you go to like sales navigator or something else and see the activity that those. Members had in the last 30 to 90 days. ’cause if it’s only 5% of your audience is hanging out enough, then LinkedIn’s probably not a channel that should be like one of the primary channels within your marketing mix.
Yeah. So that’s, that’s the big thing is like you wanna have to take data with a grain of salt, but also look at various aspects of it that me, uh, together to create that picture. Yeah. Well here’s, here’s one for you that kind of plays off of that. Like if you, if you don’t pay for Sales Nav, because like for example, I don’t use Sales Nav.
Um, I’ve used it in the past. I, I see the value in it, but like I just can’t afford it now. Um, but like how could you leverage data in like, figuring that out like today, like as someone that say maybe you, you’re not using sales now. What would you do? Uh, I mean, at scale it’s kind of difficult. There’s other tools that exist, but at scale the, is the challenge there.
Especially because like LinkedIn holds so much data Yeah. In house and doesn’t let it get exported legally. There’s plenty of tools that you can get it from, but whether or not you get banned after the fact is, is questionable. That’s, um, it, I mean, it does come down to that. I mean, you can add in layers within campaign manager around activity and things like that, but I.
I don’t, you have to go through the process to figure it out. At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s a foolproof answer to that. Yeah, no, that’s fair. Um, I wanna talk about one that’s around like the creator economy that like, is that a little bit interesting? Um, so this came in from a, a very large company.
Um, but the question is how is the creator economy changing the way brands market themselves in what should we know about it now? And I’m curious your take care, because it’s enter, I can tell you it’s an enterprise company. Um, and I think a lot of these enterprise companies are so. Kind of like old school mindset that I think they’re still trying to catch up.
So I’m curious, like what would you say there? It goes back to the influencer question, I think. Mm-hmm. Right. Because if you are develop, I mean, if you’re tapping into influencers, they’ve already become a creator. Now, if you’re looking to build a creator internally, the question is. Can, does that person have the ability to do such?
And are they willing to do such? I mean, there’s plenty of evangelists that have existed out there. Right. And I think that’s like the closest thing from an enterprise perspective that you could probably relate back to like the creator economy is evangelism and evangelists that you’ve created internally.
Um, now the question is then is like, okay. How does that trickle down into creating more opportunities of creatorship? I mean, I’m making up that word right now, but, um, it goes back also, like the thing that comes to mind right now is like, you go back maybe like what, six, seven years? Like employee advocacy and all of those tools that came out.
Like, uh, GaggleAMP is a great one that I remember just off the top of my head. Yeah. Like, this thing has existed for a while. It’s just. Picked up steam and in a different way than what it was back then. So I think as an enterprise level, I mean, you need to know that there is a comparison to things that you’re probably familiar with.
Mm-Hmm. The other thing that I feel is a, a hurdle that an enterprise brand needs to overcome is you can’t slap handcuffs on anybody. Like for true, authentic creatorship, they need to be able to create. Willingly and openly and talk aligned with your message. Don’t get me wrong, but like you can’t have them go through 50 layers of compliance to wean down some message into something that means nothing to their.
Audience or the audience that they’re looking to build at the end of the day. But once you have a creator that has built up that audience and following, then you can flip it easily into an opportunity. Now, the thing also I think that comes into mind now as I’m like talking off off the top of my head is like, you better be prepared for a compensation conversation to happen.
Because if you’ve got somebody that’s invested and they are building an audience on your behalf and now you’re gonna tap into it or thinking you’re gonna tap into it. You better expect to pay a commission or some kind of comp that kind of is above and beyond the salary that you’ve already already given them.
Yeah, that’s a, that’s a really good point. And I think that, like, I, I remember like just people talking about like employee advocacy and like, I, I mean, I was an evangelist and like, kind of like when I was at Alice and even air meeting, like did like, you know, I was posting stuff and like there was inbounds that were coming from it and like, cool.
Like that, that makes sense. But like. It was no one, no one was ever willing to pay like that commission or like that extra money. And it’s so weird to me, it was like it was a win-win. Like you’re benefiting as like a company, but like why, why can’t you like, like, like give a little bit of a kickback or something for like the deals that are coming in.
Like ultimately that person’s just gonna end up probably leaving and going and doing something else because they feel undervalued or something. Um, do you feel it came back to like attribution at the end of the day? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, I mean maybe it’s like through self-reported attribution, but like, I don’t even know, like I can tell you, like I can tell you exactly the number of self-reported attribution, um, demo requests that like I drove ’cause I still remember this number and I wrote about it recently.
Um, but like over a two year span between LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter at the time. Um. It was, I brought about like a couple weeks ago, but I think it was 89. I think that was like the total number, um, which resulted in $1.2 million actually closing from it. Now you wanna know how much extra I got from it?
Absolutely zero. Um, pat back, but you got pat back, right? Yeah. I mean, listen, I’m not asking for like a million dollars or anything. Like if you, if you gave me an extra, like 30 grand, I probably would’ve been happy, but I. But Nick, you, you only helped drive the lead. You didn’t close it. That’s, that’s the argument that I would, that I can hear somebody saying like, okay, thanks, thanks Nick for the referral, but I did all the work to close it.
That’s, that’s true. But the good, the, the thing is because they were selling to marketers. I was on a majority of those sales calls, so in fact I was playing a bigger piece than the average salesperson. ’cause sometimes like they couldn’t talk the lingo. Like we had a lot of new sales reps that like weren’t as like, and again, this is where the alignment and like relationship building, like they trusted me to help close sales for them and I got nothing in return.
But I did it as just like, Hey, I’m a kind person. This is what I wanna do. So. Right. Cool. Um, do we have time for one more? What do you wanna do? Go for one more. All right, cool. Let’s talk about how do you gather feedback from B2B customers? This one’s interesting. And, and how has this feedback influenced adjustments or refinements in your marketing approach?
Uh, we do it on the agency side by getting stakeholder and customer interviews. At the very early stages of our campaign development and planning process. How asking? Oh, just asking. Asking the client, Hey, you know, we’d love to have three customer interviews. Hmm. Can you set those up? Like, things like that.
And typically, you know, there’s some back and forth there. Yeah. But also wrapping in, you know, sales interviews. Like we don’t just stick with the marketing department. Like we definitely like break out of any silos and don’t stay within our lane in this process. Like customer success conversations, sales conversations up to leadership.
Because what that really unveils is like what are the true value propositions and differentiated values that are making a difference? ’cause guess what? Nobody’s gonna come out and say, yeah, it saved me time and money, because that’s not the problem they were looking to solve. But yet so many brands put that out there as their go-to.
Message when it comes to anything. Um, yeah, so yeah, it is about getting those interviews. It’s also, I mean, you can use different things, surveys, uh, things like that. I mean, if you have a really. Well-rounded customer-focused brand that you’re working with, like speaking as an agency here, you know, you’re gonna have G two reviews, you’re gonna have reviews that exist out there.
You’re probably gonna have customer testimonial videos that should be authentic and not like scripted down to the word. Um, so there’s other pieces of feedback that you’re gonna be able to get a sentiment analysis around when it comes to brand. And then you translate that into, okay, instead of saving time and money or, you know, making your AP processes.
More streamlined, like, no, we’re gonna make, we’re gonna help you go home and sleep better at night. Or, Hey, we’re gonna, you know that, that insurance broker that has got you covered today, guess what do they have you covered for X, Y, Z that actually is applicable to, you know, the horse farm that you own or anywhere else.
You know, it’s those people first. Situations and understand like what is somebody actually going to be tasked with or faced with that you’re gonna help with. That drives all of that forward. Yeah. I like, I like that a lot actually. I think that was, I think that’s an important thing that like people sometimes don’t think about is like.
I’ve actually always leveraged, like, I’ve leveraged surveys a good amount, especially when it’s like from like customers, like say you’re doing like a, a user conference for example. That’s another like big piece where like I’ve leveraged like, kind of like NPS scores for, for customers. But, um, I’ve done, I mean I’ve spoke to, to a lot of customers.
I’ve never like. I feel like I never asked for it upfront. Um, always. And maybe that’s, maybe that’s something that I need to change. Maybe that’s something that I actually like that a lot. Um, don’t get me wrong, we get turned down plenty of times, but like, hey, if you don’t ask, you never have a chance.
That’s Yeah. That’s, that’s true too. Um, let’s see. Nick said, yeah, I like it. Now you’re talking my language of marketing research. How about conversations with not just customers, but also prospective customers? Uh, same kind of mindset in my opinion. Yeah. Is like, you know, let’s say you’ve got somebody in pipe or early stages of pipe.
I mean, just having that conversation, starting to gain those insights or, I mean, to his point that he is kind of alluded to or when you’re talking about like market research, like going out in the. Field and just informally talking to people that are within your ICP in your market, you know, what are some of the things that you’re faced with?
What are some of the things that you know you’re really challenged with? What are things that you’re passionate about to understand? Like what their day-to-Day lives really roll up to? And then if you can extrapolate that and scale it into an actual audience, I mean, this is kind of what goes into persona development.
Mm. When you think about it, it’s not just marketing Mary and everything else, like it’s the actual subsurface insights that should be powering those through. Love that. No, I’m a big, big believer of that as well. Cool. Well, I think that’s everything. Um, so I mean, I, I mean, I, I think there’s more questions that obviously we could have got to, maybe we’ll do a part three, maybe we won’t.
Um, but what we are, so question for you is. When can people tune in? So it looks like, you know, going, we’re, we’re kind of dropping these and we’re changing them to doing them biweekly. So the next one is slated for February 6th. Um, anything you wanna add there Is that Super Bowl week? It is Super Bowl week.
49 ERs are gonna, doesn’t matter. 49 ERs it. Yeah, the script says it right. My baby. I mean, we might be coming back with another a MA. It depends on what the followups are. Again, I think we’re, we’re gonna keep it open-ended as far as where we take the, the direction of this. But you know, going back to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about up to this point, leading into.
Last episode in this one, it’s about how do we scale value, right? Mm-Hmm. Rather than just kind of giving value at an individual campaign or brand level. Like, we wanna be able to scale value in this show. And I think that’s kind of the direction that we’re gonna continue to, to tweak Yeah. And, and figure out the best way to do that.
A couple more of these, a couple more of others, things like that. Yeah. Michael, you know, I’m Patriots had a rough year, so I’m, I’m rooting, although I would like to see Lions, baby. Gotta go with the Lions. Lions. Yeah. I would like to see Detroit. It’s been, I mean, it’s, so many Patriots went there. I would like to see, it’s been a while for Detroit.
I would like to see them beat the Niners. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, but, um, I, I still think it’s gonna be Ravens and Niners with the Niners coming out on top, but. We’ll see, we’ll see what happens. But again, hope. Well, thank you all for, for tuning in. If you have questions or you want, if you could send us some feedback, is this helpful for you?
Like, do you find it valuable? Um, I talk to people and they tell me one off, but like, I don’t get from a ton of people, so I clue. Um, Andy, I’m sure you love this feedback, so if you could give us some feedback, we definitely appreciate that. And then, um, yeah, that’s pretty much it. We’ll catch you. We’ll catch you at the next episode.
Reach out to us on LinkedIn. We’re, we’re always approachable, not gonna bite your head off, hopefully answer your questions and deliver more value. Catch you guys next time.