Ep. #884 - Data, Discipline & Deployment

00:00.00
Matt DeCoursey
And we’re back. Back for another episode of Startup Hustle. Matt DeCoursey here to have another conversation that I’m hoping helps your business grow all right. So in your business, you’ve got data, you may or may not have discipline.

00:00.00 Keith
Cool.

00:35.00 Matt DeCoursey
And it’s possible. You need some help or you’re able to deploy either in a way that makes sense. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Before I get too far into that today’s episode, Startup Hustle is powered by fullscale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult, Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. And has the platform to help you manage that team. Visit fullscale.io to learn more. That’s my business people. We want to talk to you so reach out, we talk to Startup Hustle listeners all the time. With me today, I’ve got Keith Sawarynski, he’s the CEO of the PIN Business Network. You can go to pinbn.com, there’s a link in the show notes for that which will make it even easier for you to visit. Straight out of Denver Colorado, Keith, welcome to Startup Hustle. I’m ready to talk about data, discipline, and deployment.

02:15.88 Keith
Thanks, Matt! It’s great to be here.

02:35.20 Matt DeCoursey
Ah, which are now the 3 D’s for us today but before we do that, I’d like a little more of your backstory. So let’s hear it.

02:47.78 Keith
PIN Business Network, we are a data company. We were founded ten years ago under the idea or under the auspice that we really wanted to help the small and medium-sized businesses in the market compete with the big enterprises. So think of helping your local franchise owner of Ace Hardware over home depot. So we came up with a concept that we’ll get into in more detail over time. We launched that concept early in None and then we spent a couple of years selling that into the market and then we started getting very curious about data specifically so we are like I said ten years old as an organization we have never taken a dollar of outside capital. And we’ve grown from nothing to where we are today in a nice office just south of Denver and I have about 40 full-time employees in this office. We made a big transition around 2015, 2016 where we realized that what was actually happening for small and mid-sized businesses. They were competing with their bigger brethren, but they were competing against and or inside of an environment. It’s all about ad revenue and ad placement. And so what we figured out was that there is an infinite number of ways in which data is being collected. And there’s an infinite number of ways in which that data is being monetized outside of your business organization. So we made decisions to get off of AWS, we removed ourselves from that platform. We made decisions to go back to what I would call sort of the 90’s and early 2000s where we went into our own data center. So now we have data center footprints here and around the country for redundancy. And we started the process of building the kernel of our own private cloud network. The reason for that is that if you are operating a business, I believe that number one you should privatize and protect the customer information that you are collecting in order to run your business. And then number two, you should be open and honest and transparent about how you’re deploying against that information. And number three, you should never share that information without approval. So what we realized is that the big tech companies, they’re collecting all kinds of data as you engage with their platforms.

08:03.40 Keith
But the bigger you get as a business and the more you use non-d-party systems to prop up how you go to market the faster and more quickly you will realize that you are actually an extension. You are a data funnel in and of yourself for those big tech companies. And then what ends up happening is as that information swirls around out in the ether. It will get sold to the highest bidder and so what most companies don’t realize is that the ease and the freeness of the use of you know Google and Facebook and those products they’re wonderful products. Don’t get me wrong but if you’re trying to stand up a business and you haven’t consolidated your tech stack and you haven’t connected your data streams, then you’re not going to have a whole lot of clarity in terms of how you understand the market is engaging with your products. And so we’ve really stayed away from fundraising and having external funds inside of our organization because we never wanted to be told that we had to sell the database or sell audiences outside of the database. So simultaneously the best decision we have ever made as an organization is it’s private and it’s not for sale. The worst decision we have ever made is that it’s private and it’s not for sale. So we’re sort of in a conundrum and as we continue to scale. We’ve always been very curious and innovation-focused. But most of the stuff that we do, we build as a response to what our clients are actually asking for. So kind of the last thing I’ll say is nothing that PIN does across all of the different disciplines that we engage in is cookie cutter. You can’t buy it off of a shelf. It can get constructed for the client to solve a very specific problem that that client has and then what we’ve done over the course of the last ten years is we’ve co-opted all of our clients together. So they’re non-competing right? And they will share customers because they’re non-competing. But they will never share data.

12:08.78 Matt DeCoursey
Interesting. So you know the data’s obviously been a hot topic for years now. It’s been used inappropriately I think we can ah you know I just finished watching that really enjoyed the series super pumped. On Showtime which was the uber story and my god uber don’t do that to my data. You know I mean that was like pretty much a glaring example of misusing access to things that you have mainly in your phone and. You know with that we went through Facebook and they’re kind of getting well slapped shut out turned off a lot of different things and it kind of makes you realize you’re like oh wow you know there’s a lot of this going on now with that a lot of people are saying that data is suddenly the most valuable thing on the planet.
There’s so few that seem to know how to use it now. A couple things that listeners might find germane here is you know data inherently isn’t structured either. It’s very loose and when you have unstructured data means, like the example would be when you look at a comma-separated values file and you’re like wow that looks like a whole bunch of stuff run together or you actually look at ah, an actual spreadsheet file where it feels organized and sortable, and you can do something with it now with that neither of those matter if you can’t make actionable. Decisions and do stuff you know. So I think a lot of businesses get stuck in this whole thing where they look at the data after the ability to actually do something about it just with some of that would be like maybe the simple signs that that repeat and show up. Before a client churns or something like that. So now with all of that I like any solutions that build things that aren’t cookie cutter. So yeah I like the commitment to that. Can you give an example and you don’t have to like it. I mean you don’t have to get too deep with this. But what’s an example of like something like how does something get well I don’t even know what the cookie-cutter tools are, but I do know as the founder of Gigabook. So that’s a booking platform that’s meant to be. Fully customizable. We exist for the industries and the service provider types that don’t have an industry-specific platform like that’s our niche, and you’re kind of like in that same boat. You know in a lot of ways.

17:28.48 Matt DeCoursey
What’s a real-life example? Especially in a way that someone listening might be like oh PINBN, by the way, there’s a link for that in the show notes.

17:44.58 Keith
Yeah, that’s a great question. Thanks! so so I’ll give you an example. I’m not going to name the client I want to protect sort of that that that commitment I have to them. But we back in 17 signed a big contract with a coffee company.

17:58.00 Matt DeCoursey
Sure

18:24.48 Keith
That most of I would imagine your listeners would know if I actually named them they were they recently just went public. Let’s just leave it at that when we started working with them. They had a lot of great assets and a lot of great creative. A lot of great videos were very prevalent on social media. Had a wonderful mission and they lived their values. Um, when we first started talking to them, what we realized at the very beginning was if they were gonna scale if they were gonna grow then they needed to be able to understand who their customers actually were so or who their customers actually are. So we built a system that would allow them to create audience segments. So a cookie-cutter example of this would be going to Google or your favorite Dsp provider. Let’s just use you know basis or somebody like that and you can ask them. For audiences when you go to deploy marketing. But you’re actually relinquishing control over who’s getting that message, and you’re relying on them to serve that message to people you think are most likely to engage, and what we say what we said to them is no, let’s reverse engineer that. Let’s not ask who the audience is are let’s build them. Let’s go through the customer database that you have now and let’s figure out who’s a None time buyer who’s a subscription customer who’s a bulk order. Who are the business owners that are repeating bulk orders and then what we did was we segmented each of those groups and then we built unique. Go-to-market campaigns and sort of a b-layer testing across messaging and then methodology. And so again, a cookie-cutter approach if you were going to think about us helping you with marketing would be let’s go on Facebook and spend x let’s go on Google and spend y and then let’s hire somebody to do SEO for me and then all those things will magically coalesce into a story. And then the challenge is they will not because Facebook will take credit Google will take credit and whoever’s doing your SEO doesn’t want to lose your business so they’ll take credit but the challenge is and what we realize is you can actually use all 3 of those platforms simultaneously and you can sync them up. If what you’re doing is deliberate. So when you figure out a message strategy that works for a particular audience. The next layer is the methodology in which you use to reach out to them or you can start on the other side and you can use the methodology approach and then tailor your message. So then what we did was we reduced.

23:53.26 Keith
The amount of money it cost them to get a single buyer and then we started and created a process document and we realized that what they lacked inside of the organization wasn’t a message. It was or a messaging strategy. It was how do I maintain conversion and create the. The largest lifetime value out of each customer. So then we started mapping out what happens when they show up in the site. What’s the abandoned cart process. How do we reach back out to them to get them to sign up for email and text and the rest and then all of a sudden you come to find out that your subscription buyers look very very different. Then your 1 time bag buyers. So then you start to bifurcate that information and as you can see like over time you just end up solving a problem which causes you to ask a series of questions you didn’t know existed yesterday and then we just spend tomorrow. Answering those questions and that cycle just continues and continues and continues and so I’ll probably age myself a little bit here, but I like to use the reference from the movie Fletch in the 80 s where he jokes about awesome so he jokes about.

26:07.60 Matt DeCoursey
I’ll get that I’ll get that. Yeah, lay it on me.

26:14.94 Keith
He jokes about you know where the drugs are coming from on the beach and his editor asks him is that this guy fat Sam and Chevy Chase’s character responds. Well, there were kind of in a gray area and he says well how gray and he goes charcoal and the point of that is he doesn’t know so you have a little bit of information. But I like to make sure that our clients understand and the people that work with us understand you don’t ever want a four k HD resolution picture because all that is going to be is yesterday. You should always be in a state of gray and always asking questions and always analyzing data. Trying to find improvements to process to messaging to strategy to even organizational structure that would allow you to move forward and so I use them as an example because they were a client for about 3 years and when they left it was because they got their funding backing. And then that company took all of those processes that we had helped them construct and I don’t want to take away from any of the work that they did. But then now they’re a big public company and so we’re proud of that, and we actually have lots of examples of that happening here in Colorado as well. We just recently had None of our clients that was with us for None ars um, it was a father-son business just had a nice little exit event for themselves as well. So those are kind of wins that we have when you analyze information for a purpose not just reporting on information because it makes me look good.

29:11.66 Matt DeCoursey
So I grab the data and I grab the deployment side out of that I’m feeling like the discipline is waiting for the right pitch and you know and I mean that like in a baseball kind of sense or like you mentioned like the 4 k. High Resolution views always of what occurred in the past now. Yeah, it’s sorry I’m a former baseball player. So then always the hitting coach tells you to look for the fastball and adjust to a curve and that means you have to be ready to ah you know to pivot. To You don’t know where the pitch is going to be. You don’t know if you’re gonna yeah know if you’re trying to hit an inside pitch down as a righthanded batter down the right-field line. You’re not gonna get very far products break your bat you know and so a lot is that the discipline side as having like being able to be disciplined enough to. Not just chase the pitches that are out of the strike zone.

30:53.62 Keith
Yeah, so that’s like that’s a good analogy I describe it as you again? I’ll go back to the cookie-cutter templatized sort of version if you go on Linkedin and your Linkedin profiles probably very different than mine. But because there’s a big function of my business that’s marketing-related i. I have a bunch of marketing experts that I hear from them on Linkedin all the time and I describe them as marketing experts because they are but they’re channel experts. So I’m very good at building quote-unquote Adwords campaigns or Google ads campaigns I’m very good at building social media campaigns I’m very good at. Copywriting or whatever that is but what if that’s not the solution and so when we go in again just using marketing as an example I like to say I am agnostic to the channel that we are going to deploy inside of the only thing that I care about is getting the right mix. Of messaging and spending in the channels so that I can create a conversion so I don’t want to talk about impressions I don’t want to talk about website visits I don’t even want to talk about lead forms unless lead forms is creating an opportunity for sales. What I want to talk about is. How are we spending money that that creates the impression that we exist builds positive sentiment creates engagement in the brand and then ultimately creates a conversion the more you start to think about this as a multilayered you know 3 D 4 D view then you realize if. Google is not the place to be then don’t be there. But if Google is the place to be, then you should be there, and you should meet your customers where they’re likely to engage with you, and so that’s where the discipline comes in. Where I would never expect any of my account managers or any of the people that work on any of our clients’ accounts to tell them to spend money someplace where it was inefficient or unlikely to create the most cost-effective conversion.

35:00.90 Matt DeCoursey
Which is by the way anti-ad agency that wants you to spend as much as you can as fast as you can because they get a percentage of everything you spend. There’s nohing that that you talk about that charcoal colored view of things. And yeah, this is I want to share this with people listening so you know what you got there was a very very sophisticated but yet manageable viewpoint on how you should look at marketing and promoting your business now as a purveyor of hype. I have a a strong affiliation with that. But I’ve had so many conversations with people that so I was just having this before we recorded and you know we had someone through here that through our office I’m actually in my in the office in this new start a Startup Hustle studio today and I was talking about how people get obsessed with clicks traffic and whatever and I hear people it’s about having the right visitors not just visitors. and None thing that I catch people saying is they’re like you know I you say well what kind of marketing have you tried what kind of promotion have you tried. They’re well I tried. CPC on Google and it didn’t work. Okay, tell me why? well, I got None clicks but nobody bought anything and I’m sitting here and my response to that is it sounds like your landing page sucks or you’re or you’re pointed at the wrong people the job of the ad is to get clicked and it’s over That’s it. That’s the job of the ad the ad’s job is to get the attention to get the click now if you’re aiming that at the wrong people that are still clicking it. That’s a whole nother subject and if you bring people to something like so I had this discussion with a former sponsor of Startup Hustle and ater like 3 or 4 episodes of sponsorship we reached out and we’re like because they made it they did make a specific landing page for us. But it only had a contact form on it. Nothing else right? They said well I don’t know if this is working because we got None visitors but no one filled out the form I was like oh my god for what you sell None visitors is like a landslide of visits. I guarantee you the rest of the site probably got that many visits may be in a month probably not even close. So in that particular case like we did our job which is to drive the traffic. But if you put people in a crap experience, then it’s not going to go to her, and I do want to get your response to that. But.

40:17.50 Matt DeCoursey
You know I do want to remind people that finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit fullscale.io, where you can build a software team quickly and affordably. Use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs and then see what developers, testers, and leaders are ready to join your team. Visit fullscale.io to learn more by the way. It only takes like 2 minutes to fill out that form and you will see what matches are there. You can schedule a call to talk with us after where we love helping. Much like you Keith, we like helping people get results that actually matter. There’s a lot of complexity to a lot of this.
So back to my comment but before that about you know the ad did its job but it sounds like you guys work a lot with your clients to really I’m right about that I know I’m right about that because if you bring people to ah a crap. Well, think about it listener. Ever click something and you get to the landing wherever that directs you and you’re like huh. Yeah, so how do you fix that? Keith.

42:22.82 Keith
Yeah, that so you’re spot on I I have very I have little kids and so when my daughter was born I used to watch a lot of late-night infomercial television right? As if anybody who has kids understands. And I used to come into the office in the morning and talk about how I’d see a television commercial where the branding was blue and red and then you go and you look them up online and it’s orange and yellow and that brand experience doesn’t connect and all of a sudden that creates a sliver of doubt in your head so that’s kind of ah an easy example of describing what you just said.

43:10.36 Matt DeCoursey
M.
43:32.82 Keith
So I would add a layer to how you’re thinking about this, you are None correct in that so your audience is hearing about it. There. The sponsor is talking to your audience as you’re doing your piece. They’re then leaving this show and they’re going over there right. And what I would say is most marketing companies will tell you that the data that they’re bleeding from those referral visits or from those direct entries or organic searches, right? That’s the end of the data their access to information starts and stops with whatever Google tells them. That’s it. So for us when I said earlier that we exist to help the small and mid-size businesses compete against the big box that also means helping the none the None level university. Over the university that has the most money that can dump over the top of the market or the you know the the not the largest coffee provider or the largest chain restaurant and so most marketing companies will show up and data is the Buzzword people talk about data and I always like. To set when I have those conversations like to set definitions. Okay, so data is data and you talked about you know that sometimes it’s put together and it’s searchable and it’s queryable and sometimes it’s just a mess and most of the time. It’s just a mess because it’s not actually your data. What you’re doing is you’re reading back to the client or the customer. What Google tells you you’re supposed to read back. Okay, so we built remember I said excuse me we left Amazon so our data center infrastructure is actually our privatized data environment. And so I also said that we have all of our clients are non-competing entities so they’re not chasing after the same dollar out of someone’s wallet for the same product. So what we’re actually doing is we’re collecting none party data and we’re collecting it with. The person whose data is being collected with their permission and this is where the statement of excuse me that data is private and it’s not for sale comes to fruition. So now I can collect information I can build behavioral patterns. I can build psychographic views I can understand demographic information about you and then I can introduce you to other businesses that might be interested in buying your product except you don’t know they exist.

49:15.72 Keith
So if I can circumvent that process where you don’t have to pay for the none click but you can actually organically create it now you’ve saved money and remember I said you can actually invert that conversation. And now create lookalike audience opportunities to expand the net but you’ve created the net yourself so data to me is not what Google Analytics tells me. It’s not what Facebook insights tell me and it’s not what pretty dashboards from Shopify or whoever else has them because they’re amazing. Data to me is on a customer level on a 1-to-1 basis. What do I know about you and what do I have permission to introduce you to because you have given me that permission you mentioned the show on showtime I like to go back to them if you’ve ever seen the great hack. It’s about the voting in 2016 right? But it’s also about voting in 2016 about Brexit. The great hack is is simply an explanation I think it’s summed up by the professor who says can I see all of the personal information that you have on me. Well what if the answer is.

51:02.54 Matt DeCoursey
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yep.

51:39.76 Keith
Yeah, what if I could tell you yes I can show you all the information I have on you, and frankly, if you wanted me to delete it I can delete it and I would if you asked me to I could return that information to you and it’s yours and the fun part about that is the None time someone asks me to remove them from the system and that could be a business as well. I can lift it out because we use Data Lake technology. So Everything is compartmentalized in your own little space and you are filling up that Data Lake or you’re not depending on the efficacy of your business if I can take that out metaphorically and hand it back to you, So It’s no longer in my system. Then I believe that tomorrow the None phone call you make is back to me and you say can I have you back in your system because I’ve made a commitment to you that your information is your information. It’s Private. It’s protected and I won’t sell it and so as you start to think about. How you build those campaigns and how you structure sort of what’s happening on a landing page. Yes, the sentimental value that you’re creating when you when your brand is connected and that that actually works. That’s a part of it but the next question I would ask your previous sponsor is well what do you know about the people who visited the landing page.

53:54.94 Matt DeCoursey
Um.

54:09.30 Keith
And didn’t convert, and what do you know about why they didn’t convert most marketing agencies don’t have the ability to recycle because it’s not their own data. So they’re just going to go back out to the market and fill the top of the funnel again. And that’s when you get conversion metrics. Oh yeah, you know we convert at 6% or 5% or you know this was a great month. It was 12%. Well, what if you could make it 20 or 25 and that would reduce the amount of splash you have to make in the market to actually get in front of people. And thereby your marketing and your go-to-market strategy your operational strategies are much more concise and they’re much more productive.

55:28.58 Matt DeCoursey
You know there’s so many things when it comes to just data marketing and all of it. Some of it’s not even data-d driven some of it’s just like common sense for people not doing stuff like for example, on that particular page and form. There was way too much. They wanted to wait I wouldn’t have ever filled the farm out. Here’s another thing so and I’ve just started this to people so going back to http://gigabook.com we created a thing we called smart start which was like you know as an actual intelligent onboarding system. That the whole mandate was to reduce steps whenever wherever so you look at goofy little things like okay so the zip code box is last on a form. That also asks you to fill in what your city and your state are which if you just ask the zip code like there’s like None things that know what city and state you’re in ah, then you’re going to sometimes you ask people what time zone they’re in zip code also knows that what currency do you use zip code knows that. You know, like all of it and you know it it really kills me when I I see some people’s like ah like effort to collect data and they’re god everyone’s abandoning their card I’m like kids you’re making them do 20 other things now there’s a so you know this simple. Kind of supply chain or training or implementation format where you take the number of steps that are needed to complete any action and you multiply it times itself. So if you take if it’s a None step anything and by the way, every single field on the form is a step. You take None times 5 that’s a difficulty at None now if you get that down to 3 that’s that’s a 3 times 3 that’s a None that makes that almost and yes I know 25 divided by None is not 3 but that process is almost 3 times harder. Or None times likely to not get completed or 3 times harder to implement if you’re trying to get a group of people like so you look at that if you were that kind of data if you were trying to install a new point ofale system. At None stores and you’re like you got to get this training down to like None steps as opposed to None because the None step process is not twice as hard because it has twice as many steps. It’s actually 4 times harder based on that formula which which holds so like in any and every case like.

01:00:37.80 Matt DeCoursey
If you’re trying to get to any kind of result which and I love the fact like if if you haven’t heard Nothing that we’ve said today. Let this be the thing that really comes in conversions are the only thing that matters that’s it. None of it and none of it. Nothing else I don’t care if you have we go through this so the fullscale.io blog gets None visits a month full scale and Startup Hustle right? So with that, I don’t you know like I’ve had to go through this with my own marketing team a few different times I’m like. Like hey, traffic’s up. Okay, where conversions out I don’t care if the traffic goes down to 10% of what it is if the conversions go up I’m good. What’s the purpose of what we’re doing to publish a quality no no I don’t care about any of that. It’s to get a lead It’s to get a lead that we can take action on. So.

01:02:14.68 Keith
Yeah, right.

01:02:24.98 Matt DeCoursey
You know, don’t hey look people if you believe the lie long enough. It will come true but probably not the way that you want it to so I don’t know and I digress I need to get that out of my system Keith and once again with me today. We’ve got Keith Sawarynski.

01:02:49.78 Keith
I.

01:03:04.82 Matt DeCoursey
By the way, I had to spell phonetically. Congratulations on having a complex name. I don’t think I could spell it now but he’s the CEO of PIN Business Network. Go to PINBN and I could make a jingle out of that in moments man that’s like.

01:03:14.28 Keith
Thank you.

01:03:43.46 Matt DeCoursey
Yeah, yeah, so but ah yeah, gotta say man I appreciate the outlook on it now you guys are clearly more than just a data company because and you know I and I really appreciate that about what you’re doing because it’s None thing to be like okay your conversions are up your conversions are down. This is the right audience. This is the wrong audience. I mean there’s there’s I mean that you can get some guidance on that from different things. The question is how do I fix it so that’s like the deployment thing. So let’s let’s kind of let’s let’s arrive at our landing place. So if this entire episode. And you know talk a little bit about that. So okay, so as I mentioned earlier you can have the data. But if you can’t make it actionable. It’s just garbage. In fact, you may be not able to make your data-driven outcomes or decisions reality. You actually are probably. Regressing because you’re spending a lot of time on something that doesn’t you know come out in a way that matters. So what are tips for actually deploying solutions that get results?

01:06:06.46 Keith
Yeah, and so it’s a great question so I will answer it with None words process map. Okay, you should have a purpose There should be a reason why you’re doing something so if your marketing department. Is building a marketing campaign and let’s say they’re using television and let’s say they’re using some radio and then they’re using their overlaying. Let’s say a little bit of digital from a remarketing standpoint. What is the expected customer journey. When your strategy involves those 3 channels and then you map it out and so what we’ll do is we’ll say look you run television. You give None pieces of information one is a phone number. The other is a URL so when I show up on on a phone call. What is the process that I expect. Every one of my employees to follow when they answer that phone and you map it out. You record those calls and you use it as training material and if they create sales do more of it if they don’t there’s a break. Now somebody shows up on your site. They’re milling around. They’re doing whatever they do, and they leave, and now they’re part of your remarketing campaign. So a lot of people just say okay well we’re doing retargeting and that’s great because we’ll put our message back in front of somebody who didn’t buy the none time. Well, first of all, you’re sure they didn’t buy the none time second of all right when they come back. What are you presenting to them that’s different than the none presentation that didn’t create the conversion in the none place, and most people don’t think about that so I’ll run through the strategy, and I expect them to fill out a form. Well, they don’t fill out a form so they leave so now I put them back in my audience I put a message in front of them. They click on that ad they land on the landing page and I give them the same exact message that I gave them the last time so again that will show up as a impression served and a referral from my campaign and again your Dsp provider will pat themselves on the back because congratulations. You got another site visit out of it. A returning visit. Well you still don’t understand what about your process is not creating the sale so we process map out if you’re going to use Google ads this is what we expect to have to happen if you’re going to use display. This is what we expect to have happen. If you’re going to use a conglomeration or a combination of a bunch of different fields then here’ is why you’re going to use those channels and here’s the expected path. We think customers are going to follow and then those become the conversion points are we actually getting people.

01:11:29.60 Keith
To the form fill and then are we actually getting them on the phone are we actually getting people to give us email addresses and then are we reaching out to them proactively over time or is it just hey we tried it once and that was it so process map process map. Because once you start doing that number one you can’t stop right? But then it holds anybody that works for you or anybody who you’re doing work on behalf of more accountable to a thought process that’s beyond just what Google will give you in Google analytics because again. There’s nothing bad in what they give you it’s just it’s a shaded version. It’s a shadow understanding of what’s actually creating a conversion versus what’s not creating a conversion, and so we’ve had clients that come in and they want to they want an inbound strategy of a marketing strategy that will create inbound calls. They have one front desk person right? or we want a strategy where we generate None form fills a week let’s just say that okay a None form fills a week what’s your outbound contact strategy. How are you going to manage that because again marketing metrics. Don’t stop like you said just because I got a site visit or a form fill. It’s.

01:13:22.90 Matt DeCoursey
Yeah, yeah.

01:14:02.20 Keith
How much revenue am I generating off of these clients in these new contexts that are coming in and then frankly, how much money am I do I have to spend in order to get None of them and is that acceptable right? because then all of a sudden you have you start to have conversations about well. Yeah, so here’s my cost per acquisition or here’s my. Cost of of advertising right? or here’s my return on advertising I don’t know doesn’t matter to me what what acronym you use? What matters is is that an acceptable number and if it is great. How many more of them. Do you want and can be created up into the capacity limits of your business. But if it’s not an acceptable number, What do you know about that conversion journey and what deep what points of demarcation have you laid out that basically say I expected this to happen and it did it. So now I’ve got to figure out why that that piece didn’t occur and I solved that problem. Most people will just say um, okay, well, my cost per conversion was supposed to be $5 it turned out to be None so then another marketing agency will come in and say yeah, we can do it for none and they’re like yeah sign me up like you. The problems are going to persist right? regardless because you have to look deeper into your organization and this is where data. Actually comes from data doesn’t just mean I have customer information or impression information or website visits. It’s what do I know about the structure of my actual organization and where are the parts that are helping me create conversions and what are the parts that are actually getting in my own way of creating those conversions in the none place. How do I resolve those issues?

01:17:07.56 Matt DeCoursey
Yeah, and you know and that’s spot on and it’s still back and a lot of that is still coming back to I don’t know man I’m still so kind of stuck on this point where people take too many steps. Those are steps like. For example, when you go to fullscale.io you fill out the get started page I at the very end of that flow assuming that you’re qualified. We offer you ah ah, appointment schedule like right there like now the shitty way to do. It is the contact form kind of way. I’m going to collect your data and then I’m going to start emailing you to hey can you click here and schedule an appointment because I really want to talk to you like do you get it look the best time to get don’t direct people away from your site if you don’t need to like that drives me nuts like it’s hard enough to get. Visitors to your site. Don’t do anything to push them away put it all right there right in front of them and there’s no better time to ask for like well we’ll look at like my version of that is the equivalent of the add on sale. So you know I used to be a sales trainer and I managed ah a section of a whole lot of retail stores at one point and. You know our highest margin products were so as musical instruments and um, you know you don’t tell someone they need guitar picks a tuner and extra strings for their kid’s new guitar after they buy it. Ah, the best time to sell is when you’re there and then you need to be able to to also on some levels you know so I I would so here. Okay, so you really stuck on this ninety nine dollars guitar Keith now I’m going to just tell you that you know as I mentioned when I was showing it to you. This instrument is not high quality. So it’s not going to stay in tune for that long, which means if it’s always terribly added tune your kid’s not going to want to play it can I at least sell you a tuner. Also, there’s going to be some point where your kids are gonna find a fascination with these little keys at the top and they’re going to turn it to one of these strings breaks let me sell you an extra pack of strings because I don’t want you to have to drive back here to make a ¢99 purchase and then also you’re going to need here’s a $3 pack of guitar picks. These thinner ones are going to be easier for the kids to hold and use, and then you could boom like that’s the whole That’s the same thing as like if you’re going to collect. Someone’s information if your goal is to have them a call. Let them have a call you put a joint subscribe to Gigabook or Calendly or anything.

01:22:05.74 Matt DeCoursey
That does that while you’re there. You’ll have a much higher conversion rate when it comes to getting the call like for us. It’s None thing to collect your info but I don’t even I wouldn’t even would never accept a client that we’ve never spoken to so we need to get that part in there and then what we find is that any other things just take looking at data. Um. So we have never ever in the history of our company had ah how to lead submission that came from a Gmail yahoo AOL Hotmail or anything that ended up being a good lead why because we provide technical services to. Rapidly growing companies and if you don’t have a fricking domain if you’re not Keith at something that’s not Gmail, then you’re a shitty lead. So but you you are I’m sorry you are now don’t use this to game my system listeners just so you can get a call with us. But. But the thing is we were finding because as our lead volume really went up from the traffic from the podcast and all that we were waiting down. We were creating organizational drag. We were actually accomplishing the opposite of what we wanted to do because our calls were getting loaded up with ah people that weren’t. Our ideal Target customer now it’s easy to look at that stuff and be like yeah but they could a shota what I live right now. Okay in 2 years when they get it together and they get moving and they actually get a domain. You are not a tech company I did not have to email you a. The link for this recording and to Gmail Keith it’s a whole point. So but you got to look at some of that and it feels counterintuitive like we should probably really talk to every opportunity. But if in the history of your business. It’s never occurred I know I don’t want to go through 2000 phone calls to find the 1 cause I’m not sure I’m making any money at that point. It’s the same thing goes like ah data-driven decisions aren’t just we talk so much about marketing like another the business that I wrote my my book million-dollar bedroom about at one point we were spending.

01:25:53.50 Keith
Right.

01:26:22.76 Matt DeCoursey
So much time and effort trying to prevent None specific type of error that would be costly and then I really kind of sat back and looked at it and I was like man we spend a lot of time in labor on this and I started doing the math because it it really didn’t occur that often. But it was kind of lame. It was like so we were a ticket brokerage and if you deliver the same pdf to 2 people. Someone doesn’t get in the event but that only happened like once a year maybe twice a year. But we felt bad because we were ruined someone’s night. It was a shitty thing on our behalf, but we were spending so much time doing it I did the math and I realized we’re spending like None to None times more in labor than the cost that we would lose when that occurred there. So I I literally made the decision like we’re not going to do. 3 4 layers of extra checking or whatever we have to have a different approach and these are the things that you gotta do this is how you deploy data and like yeah and and and and look you gotta really get into it.

01:28:23.20 Keith
That’s right.

01:28:33.12 Matt DeCoursey
And and drive it and I just did something the same thing with applicants I get like ah just under a thousand people applying to work at Full Scale every month and um, you know the the first part for our developers is they have to take some technical assessments but I had 40% of applicants not taking them. And I had to really get into why I’m like it’s really expensive for me to get these people to apply especially in bulk to have 40% of them not taking it and some of it had to do is you don’t know where your emails are always going so they can end up in junk or spam it just happens and so with that I was like we need to install a text message reminder. You know and and put those in and it and it went down to 15% I mean and you look at that think about that though you went to our whole goal there is if you apply to be a developer we need we needed you to take a technical assessment. But if you don’t take that you’re you’re done.

01:29:55.76 Keith
Right? Exactly.

01:30:23.26 Matt DeCoursey
Ah, the process does not move forward, so we went from you know like and that’s our our primary primary thing we sell so literally think about that those were None to 250 people now look we hire one and only 1 in 30 candidates. But that result that just simple change and implementation of our approach to getting the result we want because that’s the conversion for us and and we were having problems because we were we were so good at selling what we do and we’re really good at what we do that sometimes we.

01:31:07.60 Keith
Correct right.

01:31:26.80 Matt DeCoursey
Run out we have like had waiting lists I’m like so how do we fix this. So it’s like oh we need more applicants now we don’t we need to do a better job of handling the ones that we have now I’ll never get that number down to 0 It’ll never happen. It’ll never happen, and I get it and I’m cool with that. But guess what those ones and that’s another thing I went look back at the.

01:31:44.60 Keith
Bingo nope.

01:32:04.92 Matt DeCoursey
Lifetime of people that hadn’t taken an assessment I’m like why aren’t we remarketing to them. So ah so many so many things to go all right? So we we’re we’re about at the at the end of our time for this episode, and I have a feeling that we could probably go on about this.

01:32:10.78 Keith
Um, right yet is it.

01:32:40.78 Matt DeCoursey
Forever and ever and I wanted to do our our ah our final freestyle here, but you know do you need to hire software engineers testers or leaders because let full scale help. We have the people on the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts. All you have to do is go to fullscale io you’re going to answer a couple. Questions and latter platform match you up with our fully vetted highly experienced team of software engineers testers and leaders and by the way our average developer has 7 years of experience that’s a lot at full scale. We specialize in building long-term teams that work only for you learn more full-scale io. Right? So we’re goingnna wrap this up man I’m going to go ahead and give you the mic for for I usually say the founders’ freestyle I’ve got a Ceo today. So we’re just gonna do the freestyle so I don’t know what stood out of it about our conversation today or what did we forget to mention.

01:34:19.58 Keith
Yeah, so so I think the the most important thing is kind of where you hit ah at the end data data comes from all different places and a data-driven solution for an organization might be. Figuring out how to create efficiencies along a user journey when you’re when you’re talking about hiring new applicants right? and we will look at that the same way you did and what I would say is all I what I would recognize in the pattern you just described is there are a couple of gates that people have to pass through and so. If you know they have to pass through those gates then you give them that information right? upfront, you don’t wait until it’s time to get to that gate to provide that insight you tell them right away and the more you can make those things self-serve the less operational costs. You have to deal with until it is time. For them to engage with you. So now your product is leading your growth strategy as opposed to outside sales or outbound sales. You know leading that strategy. The only other thing, and we did talk a lot about marketing I think marketing is is kind of easy to understand, or maybe it’s not maybe it’s just it’s part of my wheelhouse because of my background. Um, but I think the analogies and the stories are are easy to sort of discern and tell but pin at pin we have a you know have a service side about marketing. We have the data infrastructure, so we call our private network and our our data management platform Prometheus Intelligence technology that is really the engine. It is the database that you can query so you basically quote-unquote ask it a question and it returns an answer that is meant to resolve that challenge. We also have our own commerce piece. It is a headless design. It’s it’s microservice API-based. Um, and it services you know fortune None organizations. It’s not Shopify in that it’s Templatized. It’s made to separate the database and the product information from the actual presentation headless design. We have our own social media environments. You. It exists in all fifty states. It’s called our community now you can look it up our http://communitynow.com. It looks like a news aggregation site but you can actually post content to it. You can put pictures on it. You can post videos to it I can actually Livestream to it. Um, we have our own video department here. They’re actually the guys that helped me get at this hall set up. As we as we came in here and then we have our own Msp department. The internet of things. So all the technology in our office and for a lot of our clients we install from wi-fi networks to desktops and you know phones and systems like that and then again all of that technology I will call it.

01:39:56.44 Keith
It is used to create certain pieces of data and then you catalog and categorize the pieces of information that matter and then the stuff that doesn’t you let it go. And so I think the last thing I would say is for us as an organization we want to help organizations when we say the 3 d strategy and that is actually what we call it data discipline and deployment. We deploy data with discipline. We want our clients to have that same level of thought and insight. And we want to arm them with information that allows them to make good business decisions. Um, so that they can manage their operation so they can manage their go-to- market strategies so that at the end of the day they can if they would like to grow they know where they’re gonna grow when they’re gonna grow and create some level of predictability knowing. You know you know as a business owner. You’re never going to be able to get to full predictability because who could have guessed you know February or March of 2020 and what we’ve been dealing with since um, but the idea is once you figure that out and you’re in that environment data is going to be the thing understanding what information you have access to and what you can do with it. That’s the thing that’s gonna move your business forward and so if I can I will often say to clients even that don’t sign contracts if I’ve given you a piece of information today that allows you to think about a problem differently that’s enough for me because once that. Metaphorical genie is out of the bottle you you can never put it back.

01:42:50.42 Matt DeCoursey
So there’s something you mentioned that you talk about the client journey and I actually invented a word to describe what you were doing the same for democation. It’s demonstrating and educating at the same time. And I actually use that a lot and I think it’s a very strong thing because look people aren’t buying for reasons that you that are always easily understood and people have so this is just the world of sales is. It’s simply known as objections. Now buyers that don’t have objections usually aren’t buyers. They’re tire kickers like normal people that want their interest in your product have questions so objections are like is this better than the other thing or whatever and if you listen for the echo and and if you listen to this show regularly. You know what? I’m talking about but there are things people ask. Over and over and over and I get through this I was just hiring new salespeople here at full scale. They said well, what’s the sales process like it says I said same questions over and over and over so we try to democate with our initial like I can give you a 1 minute overview of what we do. And slice through so many objections like people will tell me at the end of this minute when I talk to them about full skill. They’ll be they’ll say they’ll literally say wow that answered so many of my questions already I’m like great great now we can talk about other stuff now another thing. We’ve talked about messaging and I wanted to throw this in earlier and I got on a tangent because I’m very passionate about many of the things we talked about so a lot of times when you’re not selling converting or doing or getting the result that you want or the revenue you want. Because people are obsessed with talking about the features of something. No one gives a shit about your features. They care about the advantages and the benefits that said features provide and those are way more important than the features like for example I went to buy use this a lot. It went wants to go I was.

01:46:53.90 Keith
Yes, yeah.

01:47:13.60 Matt DeCoursey
Convinced that I was gonna buy like a $2000 camera cause I honestly was tired of my wife talking about the shitty pictures that we had on our phone at the time for family events and whatever. And I went to Best Buy and I got there and I was like cool tell me about I’m looking at. This like $1500 camera or something. And the kid went down this list of shit that didn’t matter and could totally confuse me. And so I left and I came back a week later and there was someone else there. It was that kid versus adult thing here, but it was an adult and the guy said to me he goes well, what do you want this to do? And I said I want the peace of mind of knowing that my wife isn’t going to complain about the pictures on Christmas morning. He goes well, what’s your budget? I told him I said whatever it takes to get that done. He walked me right over to a camera and he told me he said, look there’s a whole list of stuff this does. But really, what you need is a high quality picture with something that auto focuses. It’s easy to do so on down the line. So great, wrap it up. I’m that easy to sell to cause it’s the end result that people want. They want the benefit of the feature. So many run into that. It’s like at Gigabook, we do online appointment scheduling that creates efficiency. We give you peace of mind that you can actually take a client booking while you’re providing service to another or maybe while you’re asleep. We unchain you from your business. Now we made the fundamental shift from presenting it as like who cares like another thing that schedules me or takes a payment or whatever to unchain yourself from your business which like at that point people were like oh my god I feel so chained to my business. Okay, I wasn’t a marketing genius. I literally heard enough people say I feel like I’m chained to this business. I’m like, well there we go. That’s the whole thing. It’s like the same thing with you know, make your message clear like at Full scale. Build a software team quickly and affordably, that’s it. That’s all key point. So anyway, so many things we could probably go on and on and on. We’re gonna have you back another time so we can readdress the many ways that people are aggravating us when it comes to their own efficiency and operation sales. All of it. Keith, thank you so much for joining me and go to pinbn.com. See yah!

01:52:22.92 Keith
See you, Matt. Thank you.