44:25
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, marketing, leads, customers, sales team, people, website, damon, tool, manufacturers, busy, dave, revenue, bit, prospect, marketers, kurt, content, unicycle, contact
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Curt Anderson, Dave Meyer
Damon Pistulka 00:00
Otherwise we will be in trouble. So, all right, let’s get going here. I’m going to get us started on on LinkedIn live. We got to do our little video and rock with that and then we get started. All right, everyone, Welcome once again to our Friday manufacturing ecommerce Success Series. Whoo. One of the CO hosts Damon, aka with me today I have my partner in crime. The guy with the cleanest head in the state of New York. Kurt Anderson. They’re taken away, Kurt. Hey, brother.
Curt Anderson 00:46
Happy Friday, guys. Like we’re Damon. This ain’t no party. Dude. This ain’t Oh, does
Damon Pistulka 00:51
this go
Curt Anderson 00:52
your thing? no fooling around, man. We were bringing in a big big gun today. So guys, Happy Friday. Welcome to everyone. Hope you had an amazing, wonderful, magical Fourth of July holiday gal. hope you had a great holiday up in Canada. And so guys, welcome. Let me just dig right into our friend Dave Meyers. Dave, thank you for joining us today. Happy Friday. How are you my friend?
Dave Meyer 01:16
Fantastic. How about you guys?
Curt Anderson 01:18
Good Damon. Let me let me share a little bit about our friend Dave Meyer. Okay, so not only is he the man with the plan of Minneapolis, you know, the big man on any campus. But check this out. You know, Dave, I went through your website a couple of things you dude, you write a unicycle? Is that? Did I read that correctly?
Dave Meyer 01:34
Not well anymore. But I do.
Curt Anderson 01:36
I have old eyes. So I’m like, man, he rides a unicycle you kidding me? So unicycle and you know what your favorite quote. So if you guys you have to go to his website, I dropped busy web. He’s the president, founder of busy web, we’re gonna talk about that today. He has some great amazing inbound marketing strategies for you, you guys are gonna love this content that we have today.
But my wife loves you, you have a quote on your profile from say anything one of my wife’s favorite movies. And the quote is, I’m looking for a dare to great. I’m looking for a dare to be great situation. So that was a great quote that you have on your profile. So then you go back to 1999? Dude, you’re like pre internet. Yeah. You know, talk a little bit about what was going on in your life. How you? What, what, how did you decide to start busy web? How did that get going? And then you broke away from your real job, I believe in 2008. Talk a little bit about that journey.
Dave Meyer 02:33
Yeah. So you know, as we do, I was sort of young back then still. And so I was just getting off and going into my first real big corporate job working for a fortune 10 and set up and looked across the sea of cubicles that I was about to join, and decided that I needed to do something to save my little soul. And so that’s how busy web started. I literally back in the day, it was easy in 99 to find website addresses.
So I was looking for business and web. And busy, busy, busy. web.com boom, and I’m good to go. So that’s how it was started. It was a hobby, as you mentioned, for like nine years. And then I took a full time in 2008. Because there was never a better time than 2008 to start a business full time.
Curt Anderson 03:21
Yeah, right. Yeah. Who Why weren’t you started? Right in the middle of 2008. Yeah, so that
Dave Meyer 03:26
was fantastic. That was awesome.
Curt Anderson 03:28
Was there an aha moment? Was there like, what was the leap of faith where you’re like, Man, I’m taking you know, you. You had a fit, you just talked about your son just graduated from high school. So you had a young family? Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about that leap of faith. You know, where you’re that? How am I? How am I? Like I’m making this
Dave Meyer 03:44
really the big thing for me was I was very involved in corporate communications, I ran retail communications for one of the big banks, the second third largest bank in the country. And as I was doing that, you know, I was doing all kinds of other stuff. And I was involved in a bunch of volunteer things. And I talked to my wife, and I said, You know, I think as soon as this volunteer thing is done, I’m gonna start looking for a job because I’m just not as fulfilled as I used to be. And she said, Wait a minute, the one thing you’re not getting paid for as the only reason you’re staying like, Oh, well, maybe I should bump that up a little bit.
So that’s, that’s what led to it. And God bless him. I sent out my notes, my dear john letter to the bank. And within three minutes, the CEO sent me a very kind email and said, If you ever need anything, I’m always here, you’ve been a fantastic asset for the organization, and all the best of luck. So that was super cool. And I still get together with my old bank friends.
And it’s it’s wonderful, but I don’t regret a single second ever since because it’s it’s always been helping businesses to grow their businesses is so much more fulfilling for me than just trying to edge stock price up a little bit more. And it’s just more that I can help real businesses to do what They need to do. And, you know, the the whole public and, and all of the different things that you have to do with the board and all that stuff. It’s a lot more steps than I like. And so working directly with owners and with marketers that and with sales, sales leaders that can really impact the results of an organization. That’s what charges me.
Curt Anderson 05:23
That is awesome. And God bless you what a great thing, you know, just a testament to your integrity that the CEO drops a note to you, when you’re parting ways. And so that’s, you know, our hats off to you. Before we dig in deep, I have to ask, you know where I’m going to go with this one? Prince. You talk a little bit so for any, anybody I grew up in the 80s obviously, you’re a prince fan, even if you’re denying it daymond don’t deny it. We’re all fans from the 80s.
Damon Pistulka 05:50
I was in I was in one of his establishments in Minneapolis in the day and it was it was an experience. I want to tell it was an experience.
Curt Anderson 05:57
So I’ve been to the the prince Museum, it is absolutely wonderful. Dave, your claim to fame to my understanding you built out Prince’s last website. Do I have that guy? Yeah, yeah. Just a little bit with everybody about that experience. Sure. And
Dave Meyer 06:12
it was it was crazy. And it was intense. As you might expect, working with genius is not always easy. Yeah, it was it was such a neat experience. We had built a reputation in the Twin Cities in Minneapolis and St. Paul. And so I got a call. And this manager said, you know, I’ve got prints on the line here. And he says that he likes your stuff. He says you come highly recommended. We have a website.
We’d like to kind of cut iTunes out as the middleman and go direct on this one. The only wrinkle is that it’s got a tight term. This was a Thursday afternoon of Super Bowl weekends. And so Thursday afternoon up Super Bowl Weekend, he says we got a tight turn website, we want to build an e commerce and it’s gonna have to be huge. And I said, Yeah, no problem. Big fan would love to love to work with you when you need it by Monday.
So yeah, it was it was good. And it just so happened to be that the Packers were playing in the Super Bowl that year. And my lead developer lives in Fond Du Lauer in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Yeah. season ticket holder, aka and owner of the hackers. And so everybody was very excited. But I actually had to call his wife to wake him up because he had fallen asleep with his face on his keyboard, as we were developing and draw and drilling this thing through. So we got it up. Everything was amazing. It was super exciting. And yeah, and wow. But it was it was intense. For a little bit there. I had a full head hair right before that. Yeah. Like this.
Curt Anderson 08:00
Wow. That’s I love that story. And so and again, Entrepreneur of the Year for your local chamber, at that time, your company of the year. So again, you’ve just you’ve done things the right way. 22 years going strong. So congratulations, for let’s dig right in our folks here. So we have a great we have john, we have Christina, a Christina. Jean, everybody here, dine here. Do you by any chance? Did you happen to bring a presentation to the y? Yes, I did. Well, awesome. How about we pop that in? Alright. Guys, sit back, get pens, pencils sharpened. Here we go.
Dave Meyer 08:35
All right. So everybody, I want to just share a few tips and tricks on how to get your sales team working better with marketing, because that’s kind of the name of the game for all of us. Now as we look to really building out the access to making sure that your team that your clients that your company is growing. So we we were nice enough or Kurt and Damon were nice enough to give me a little brief intro.
Here’s a little bit about what busy web does. We’re a HubSpot Platinum partner. And that’s where I get a lot of my cross connections, we build CRMs we do all of the connections between sales, marketing, reporting, and automating all of the marketing that goes into driving real leads. And then we help enable the sales team to be successful by making sure that everything they do is tracked and or automated into almost a choose your own adventure.
So when someone’s interested in what you do, as an organization, especially in manufacturing, where it’s a highly considered purchase, you need to make sure that you’re giving people more of what they’re asking for at every step. I’m also a speaker and Trainer with Google. And so I’m a grow with Google high impact partner. And we do lots and lots of things in websites in content. Basically, if it involves driving traffic and leads and then helping you close those leads and grow revenue.
You need to talk The busy web. And that’s the only ad you’re going to get for me today. All right. So here’s what I want to talk about quickly, because we’ve got, you know, just a half hour, but I want to go through what sales typically needs from a lead. And then there’s four steps to handing off grade leads, and making sure that they’re accepted. And that you’re moving those forward, that speak the same language between marketing and sales. Implement SLS, if you don’t know what an SLA is, anybody has the anybody knows what an SLA is, go ahead and put it in chat.
But if you don’t, you’re going to by the time this is done, closed loop reporting, how to make sure that everybody’s involved and that is taken account of what they’re doing. And then open communication. We can’t expect people to do what we don’t deliver. And if you’re not really connecting with people, and making sure that you’re communicating at all times, the old sales versus marketing world really needs to go away. And so I’m going to get rid of that for you with open communication. And then we’re going to show you how to align your goals to make sure that you’re closing more leads. And here’s what’s next. First, of course, sales versus marketing.
We know that that’s dead, right. 87% of the term sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative, you know, Glengarry Glen Ross, the leads are weak, you’re weak, right? This is not the problem. People, our sales teams aren’t lazy. marketing teams aren’t in competence. We’re all working toward the same goal. And we need to start realizing that sales, of course, says that the leads are terrible quality, they’re too old. They’re not enough info, you know, I want those golden leads, right? And if they’re not in the target market, of course, but if you don’t tell your marketing team, what to expect, you can’t expect them to change, marketing, same way.
Well, the leads are being worked, sales is lazy, they’re incompetent, they just can’t close our leads, we give them brilliant, beautiful leads, right? So if you’re a marketer, and you’re trying to foist everything on to sales and say, well, that’s just their problem, that’s not going to help you either, right? Where are we we’re all on the same team. We’re on Team revenue, if you can build together to make sure that sales is offering back and forth between your clients, and between the leads and the offerings that you do if you’re doing a good job, engaging your audience with helpful and connective content.
And if your sales team picks up on the signals that they’re getting from the website from the marketing, qualified leads, and if they’re identifying those sales, qualifying leads, and getting the content back, you’re going to start seeing more throughput. And you’re going to start improving, it’s a virtuous circle, instead of finger pointing everywhere. So 60% of your sales cycle is over before a sales rep gets involved. So this is where marketing can get a finger pointed at them, if they’re doing their job, right, someone should feel comfortable with your organization, before they pick up the phone.
As a matter of fact, up to 80 links or 80 clicks happen on any given piece of content or in a purchaser search before they’ll ever ever contact a country company. So I’m clicking, I’m clicking, I’m clicking, I’m looking, I’m downloading on, you know, doing research before I ever pick up the phone or before I ever fill out a form. So I’m throwing a lot at us. And you know, this is this is kind of the setup for getting down into the nitty gritty and the details, you may note that there is a link in the lower left corner of most of my slides, one of them is an email address to reach me, the second is a short link to a tool that’s going to help you identify how to generate more leads.
It’s a lead calculator. So if you go to Bitly, slash visicalc. That’s going to give you a really cool tool that I’m actually going to give you a few demo screens of it’s completely free, very easy, and you can use it, set it up as a template for your business and keep growing from there. Alright, here’s four steps to connect sales with marketing. Some folks I’ve heard this before is marketing, you know, sales and marketing. It’s a little catchy. So I’m trying to tilt away from that a little bit.
But as you’re looking at integrating your sales and your marketing teams, as I mentioned before, you need to speak the same language, implement service level agreements, nobody actually put in the SLA. So I stumped everybody until now I guess. And closed loop reporting and open communication. So let’s get started in talk through what we mean by speak the same language. We’ve all probably heard of funnels. And as we look at funnels, this is what marketers tend to see. And so the top of the funnel is just marketing’s responsibility. And then once you had dumped things down through, you need to make sure that everybody’s caught at the bottom of the funnel, right.
And yeah, of course, maybe we’ve got some shared responsibility at the middle of that funnel. But that’s probably where the magic is happening, where people are saying, either, you know, the marketing team is giving me crap, or the sales team isn’t following up. That middle of the funnel tends to be where people point fingers. As you look through the typical guidance of a sales and marketing funnel, we start with a prospect and a visitor. And so marketing is going from prospect to visitor to lead, excuse me. And then we’re looking at the shared responsibility of marketing, qualified leads.
So marketing takes the content are the things that you’re getting in from your website, the responses to your ads, the responses to your email marketing, and all of those things. They’re saying, sales, these are probably good, and they kick them over the fence, right? sales will then take a look at those leads and say, Yep, this is in our product, this is in our prospect range. This is in our target market, these are the kinds of people that we want, and they generate a sales qualified lead, or an SQL, this is where they say, Yep, check mark, I’m actually gonna pick this lead up off the desk, and I’m gonna take it.
And then of course, we know that sales is the opera has the general responsibility of creating opportunities, and then turning those opportunities into customers. As you look at what a good M and SQL is, there’s a couple of things that we need to think about as you move on this graph. And from low fit or from bad fit to good fit from left to right, from low interest to high interest. The folks that are in the bad, the low fit, low interest costs, you want to avoid those guys, why bother, you know, you’re not going to really get new leads from low interest and fit.
But if you have a good fit, but low interest, well, you probably want to take some time and nurture that interest. This is where marketing needs to stay in the game and take the feedback from sales and give them give the sales team more of what they’re looking for. If your sales team is sharing what the questions or the common objections are of their prospects, then you can get that back into your marketing materials that’s going to help generalize or generalize that interest and get them higher up into the best fit. It’s my interest. Yes, go ahead. And
Damon Pistulka 17:55
you look at that category right there. We’re curious on that D, do you think that that’s one where the sales would actually interact with that, that lead and go, Hey, they’re not, they’re a good fit, but they’re not interested right now. And then it would go back to marketing, and then we’ll go into their nurturing campaigns is what you’re saying in that quadrant.
Dave Meyer 18:12
Okay, so you’re nurturing that interest, this would probably be a spot where traditional sales tactics would come in, because you want to engage those folks, and do some straight or straight old fashioned outbound to try and reach those people. This is where the sales pitching comes in, right? If you’re trying to engage and give them the tips and the little triggers to get them into the next step. But as a sales team, you want to share with your marketing, what’s working in engaging that interest, right.
Other side, if it’s not necessarily a good fit, but they have high interest, of course, you want to take that order, but you’re not going to waste a ton of time on the bad fit, folks, because you could be much better going into the high fit high interest. Because those guys you want to follow up with immediately, that’s going to help and if you’ve got to set a CRM setup well, and if your catalog catalog, cataloging and categorizing your content, you’ll know that this is a high lead score, somebody that’s a great fit, and they filled out a form they’ve said call me they’ve done whatever they’ve visited your website, 60 out of those 80 magical clicks, you know that you want to follow up with them right away?
The best kind of marketing qualified lead is a great fit lead with a high level of interest, duh, of course. But what does that take to get you there? Well, in this example, maybe someone contact or contact downloaded an ebook, on in my case, growth driven design, which is a kind of website design that we do at busy web. That’s a lot more integrative than just building a website and plopping it in our customers labs and saying, talk to you in five years. This is a much better way.
And so if they download the ebook on growth driven design, that company has 75 employees, and then they’re in our target geography, in my case, the Twin Cities. And then if the contact is at a company whose role as VP or director and as a decision maker, boom, bam, I want to get hold of them right away. Right. So that’s my best fit. It’s going to be different for you. So let’s look again, at that sales and marketing funnel right. Now, we have a little bit more owned by marketing, we go all the way down to mq ELLs, where the mq ELLs are responsible, or the marketing team is responsible for qualifying those leads and handing them over to sales.
And then all of the rest is opera operated by sales, they’re going to qualify those leads that they get the mq ELLs, they’re going to turn them into SQL, by contacting them by double checking against fit, and then bringing them through to opportunity and customers. The one part that’s missing here that I’ll talk about a little bit, is that really, a customer isn’t the end of any given lifecycle. If you’re doing your job, right, as a marketer, and as a sales team, you’re going to look at that customer as a referral source.
And so they’re going to be referring or buying again, and so that customer at the bottom of the funnel, instead of just dumping out through the funnel and being gone forever, they’re going back into the system and either referring business for additional credit or for additional engagement, or they’re just going to keep purchasing from you, which is always awesome. So go ahead. No, no, that’s and you talk about that with your marketing five, oh, that’s where the flywheel gets engaged in those people keep driving your brand and, and your sales over time. Exactly, exactly. So I’m going to step back one second.
And then I’m going to show a little bit more about the flywheel. So as we move from M, qL, to customer, or from subscriber to customer, all of these things are moving through. And so you can see a little bit more engagement, a little bit more engagement, you can see, especially as we get over to SQL, that the sales rep is actually connecting, and they’re entering that person manually and saying, yes, this is someone that we’re interested in, and that we know, we can close, and then they become a customer. But just as we were talking about, in the olden days, it was marketing, then sales and customer. Never thought about again, right?
But now customers are at the center. And we want to continue to engage, attract and delight our customers, so that we’re continually getting business from them, it’s 10 times easier to get an additional sale from an existing customer than it is to make a brand new sale from someone who’s never heard of you. So let’s bet on that. And let the people that already love you keep growing your business. So we’ve got a lot to go left. And so I want to just shoot through these semi semi quickly because I’ve got a couple of tips. And again, this is where the tools are going to come in shortly. So at the bottom of most of these slides is a link that I’d love for you to check out.
It’s bit.li slash busy calc. And if you go to that, you’re going to get the tool that I’m about to run through with you. So again, service level agreements, define what each team commits to accomplishing in order to support the other team in reaching shared revenue goals. For marketing, that’s going to be the number of quality or quality of leads to hit goals, and for sales to marketing is how quickly they’re going to follow up and how well they’re going to follow up or they’re going to contact three times five times 10 times, what’s that going to be? Right?
So let’s look a little deeper at that, from marketing to sales, how many leads of a given quality does a sales rep need to make their quota? And if you’re looking at how to get that it’s the revenue per average revenue per customer, that’s the number of customers that you need. And the customers to average lead to customer close is the amount of leads, I’m going to dig deeper on that in a second. For sales to marketing, how many contact attempts should sales make with every lead? And how quickly what’s the worst thing that you can do with a hot lead? lead, right? Let It Die.
If you don’t connect, you’re going to lose that deal. And as a matter of fact, it’s 10 times more likely to close if you reach out within the hour than it is if you wait two hours and if you wait three days, it’s almost zero likelihood that that lead is going to close. So you want to make sure that you’re proactively reaching out and if you’re using a good CRM, you can tell how quickly those are happening. So sample SLA is marketing will deliver 100 MPLS to each sales rep per month. Sales will make one attempt to engage with forbert within four business hours and five attempts in two weeks. The prospect said she was interested called back 16 times with no answer, right?
So how is this going to work? It’s a matter of fact, this is one of my favorite stories on how I knew that we needed to do something very differently for our customers, we were doing a bang up marketing job for one of our clients. And they called us about six weeks into our marketing program where we hit delivered five times more leads than we said we were going to, and they call them They said, We need to cancel, we’re not getting crap out of this thing. I don’t know what you guys are doing. Well, we called them and had an emergency meeting and said, Oh, my goodness, what do you mean, these are all fantastic.
And look at all these leads. They’re like, Well, I’m not getting any deals that get any leads, or I’m not getting any closes, like but but what are you doing with those leads? Well, we mailed a brochure. Oh my god. So that was the moment that we decided that we really need to get into sales enablement, right. Yeah, to help. And if, if you’re just throwing it over the fence and expecting people to magically do something, you’re gonna miss out. So here’s where we’re at on marketing and sales numbers. Again, this is part of the calculator. So you’re going to fill in your own numbers, your own content, yeah, go into Bitly slash busy count.
How many prospects Do you need in order to get to the number of customers that you need, knowing how much revenue you get out of each customer. So if you’re hitting a revenue goal, or if you have a revenue goal of an additional $100,000, right, you’re probably adding a couple of zeros in your head on yours. But I’m going to help you or this tool is going to help you build this out. Let’s look at a simpler formula. Because you know, too many numbers makes my head swim, it’s a Friday afternoon, everybody’s already eyeing the door.
Total Sales Revenue, times percentage of revenue that you get from marketing qualified leads should be your marketing goal. That’s what you’re setting as your marketing SQL, or your marketing agreement. Marketing revenue goal, divided by average deal size is how many customers you need. And customers needed divided by lead to close rate is the total leads that you need. So if you’re looking for how much revenue, if you follow this simple math, you’re going to get to the total leads that you need.
So closing loop. First, of course, the benefits for marketing and closing your loops is that you can get up to date, contact and status updates, know which programs are working. And for sales, you can prioritize the leads because you know which ones are hot, and which ones you really need to follow up with immediately. And it helps you make warmer calls and increase your close rate. Working from a single system, aka having a CRM will let you know which sources are producing the most customers understand interactions that turn leads into customers, help sales engage faster, and send immediate updates. When leads revisit your website.
Every time someone visits my website, I have a little pop up on my screen as a salesman as a sales manager that says, you know, Damon just visited the busy web website. And if Damon visits I know that I should probably give him a call. Right? So doing those things and keeping your eye on that is very important. Having open communication is also super important. Getting your sales and marketing team together to discuss your successes, your product info, persona education, who are you actually marketing against, and your performance against against SLS, is going to be very helpful.
It gets pretty serious once you really start working with your customers, right. So this is super, super fun. Once you start looking at what you can get. For managers, you want to have a good strategy, resolve your issues. Make sure that your tactics and your service level agreements are based on real data. Because we all have people skills, and we’re going to deal dealing with people. But if you’re not managing against real numbers, and real things that you can improve, you’re missing out on a ton of opportunity.
And finally, your keys to success. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon here we go right now. marketing needs to be more revenue focused. You need to develop and nurture your leads, you need to attend sales demos and trainings. Be responsible for providing mq ELLs to sales providing purposeful and automated follow up. If you’re worried about having marketers follow in or listen in on actual sales calls. Do some dummy calls, like do some testing, do some sales training and have your team listen in between your marketing or between your sales manager and your sales reps.
Right, and then you can be that most annoying customer, or the most annoying prospect and hit them with all of the questions that you wish you had already answer to. And making sure that you’re able to supply that answer through the marketing. For sales, you need to, of course, align with your buyer. provide input on content, share your feedback and ideas from your prospects. And work sales qualified leads, as you promised to provide feedback on the ones that aren’t good. And work the system to use tools. Super, super helpful. And that’s what you need to do. One common goal for all of us is to generate revenue.
Don’t forget that we’re not different people. We’re not different animals. Marketing isn’t from Mars sales isn’t from Venus, we’re all in this together. If you want more, I did promise the busy calculator. And again, check it out. This is what it looks like you fill out a couple of quick things. And then you get the download. It’s super, super easy to generate those leads once you get this. And it’s completely customizable to you. It’s just a Google Sheet that we created for you. Nice, here’s my info. So we’d love to take any more questions. And I know we’ve got some networking that we want to do too. How’s that guys?
Curt Anderson 31:16
Dude? drop the mic man. Damon, you said this was good. You didn’t say I was gonna be this good man. Man Mind blown right now. There was a so much uncovering where I don’t know where we are time. We got a couple minutes. We need to keep this party going. So guys, if you have any questions, please drop them in the chat box. number one. Number two, you have to connect with Dave. We have his LinkedIn profile and his website in the chat box. You have his his information right in front of you. Yes.
Dave now in a great thing. You know, we were blessed with a wonderful group of net marketers, you know, and there’s a number of folks that will kid around and say, You know what, we’re the we’re the cobblers kids, but no shoes. You know, they’re so focused on their clients that their websites aren’t, you know, maybe where they want it to be. They’re not exactly happy with it.
The great thing is, when you go to busy web, you have all sorts of information. You don’t talk to talk, you walk the walk, you guys are certified in Google’s you said, certified and HubSpot. And so you know, I noticed that you like you have a whole list of things like you talked about smart goals, the track tools and gauge tools, delight tools, and then you have a step by step inbound marketing guide, plus an awesome video. So guys, you have to check out the video talk. Can you talk a little bit about that step by step inbound inbound marketing guide that you provide? Yeah,
Dave Meyer 32:38
yeah, absolutely. So the step by step guide will actually it’s built for manufacturers. Nice. So if you go to that guidance on the homepage of the website, and you just drill down a little bit, but for manufacturers, it’s going to tell you what you need to get this, you know, kitschy catchphrase inbound marketing, all that means is being as helpful and attractive as possible to draw people in instead of shouting at them on a street corner.
Right? So I’m not outbound. I’m not puking on everybody all the time. I’m not saying hey, you need a watch, and you need a watch or whatever, right? I’m helping you as much as possible to make the leads and the help come inbound to me. And then I’m answering those questions. It’s filling up those ad clicks that I know that I need. But right where someone’s going to make the decision, and just giving them as much of that content as possible. So it’s going to give you a guide on how to do that, and at least set up a number of the terms that I’m talking about, and how to be as useful as possible to actually make yourself attractive to your prospects,
Curt Anderson 33:45
right. And everything that you’re doing is so transferable, because you’ve taken that it’s a strategy, it’s a process, and you’re using it as a guide for manufacturers on you know, hey, I’m the best kept secret and I have this machine shop and I’ve never done marketing, what do I do? In you do such an amazing job, you have just a natural ability Have you sit been a teacher, college professor or something but you do a great job of educating your clients, your persona, those ideal buyers that you’re talking about. Now, as we are dedicated ourselves to helping manufacturers doesn’t matter if we’re doing circuit boards for bending metal, cutting steel, everything that you’re doing is transferable.
So instead of like inbound marketing guide, how to bend metal guide, right to make circuit boards better how to increase profitability with your, you know, whatever, 3d printing, so everything that you’re doing your you know, and then let’s do a shout out to our dear friend Chris Harrington. Gemini are huge, huge configurator fans, very bullish in basically what you’ve done with your lead. Your, you know, it’s basically like lead generation that you’ve created with your configurator, if you will, right. And that’s another tool that that manufacturers could use, they can do the exact same thing that you’re doing. Correct.
Dave Meyer 35:00
Exactly, Chris is absolutely fantastic. I’m on a number. I’m on a couple other LinkedIn live groups with Chris. And, boy, his real deal.
Curt Anderson 35:08
We know, our hearts go out to Chris. Yeah. So yeah. But you know, so talk a little bit. So let’s talk about that calculator that you have. Yeah. How did you come up with it? And what like, what does it do? You know, let’s share a little secret sauce, like, what does it do for your business or like type the leads or that type of thing?
Dave Meyer 35:25
Absolutely. You know, the fun part about a calculator is that it’s really a tool that bends to the will of the person using it, right. And so a good tool has enough flexibility that it can work for a number of different applications. And so we pretty much stick to this sales kind of terminology. So it’s not as manufacturer dialed in, you’re not going to get cost per unit, or Yeah, you know, the inventory and all of that stuff. But it’s really how many leads you need to generate, and how much revenue you’re normally going to get per lead. So there’s a little bit of that math that you’re going to have to do on your own.
But this is really intended to be a conversation starter between marketing and sales, right? Because you need to have enough traffic into your website. And that traffic needs to be high enough quality, again, the inbound stuff, that when people do pick up the phone, or when they fill out that form and says yes, please contact me, your sales team knows that they’ve got somebody that’s already on the hook that’s already excited. And you can see, well, this person is really interested in in our tolerances on error, how quickly we can turn a new product in, you know, a specific set.
You know, you mentioned, PCBs, printed circuit boards, and you have a client that does that. And it’s incredibly important to get it right the first time. Yeah, on rapid prototyping, right. So a rapid prototype tool is very important. So if people fill that out, that’s going to give you a lot more horsepower for when you’re ready to actually connect and pick up the phone. So that’s what that tool does. It’s not it’s, it’s, it’s a Google Sheet, right, that we’ve put all of the different things into, so you can make it completely your own. Right, that’s the first thing you’re gonna do is you’re going to have to do make a copy. Right, in order to get it. So super easy.
Curt Anderson 37:23
And for anybody listening how much that Google Sheet costs you, Dave? Oh, with billions of dollars appeared right here. So I mean, look at look at the lead form conversation starter, right. It’s showing your expertise, it’s showing that you care, right. I’m here for you. I took a screenshot of you said, you know, 60%, what was it, you know, 60% of the decision is already made, before they already pick up the phone. Right? And how many clients do you work with?
daymond? We talked about this where, you know, work with the manufacturer, like, our customers don’t understand. They’re just, you know, you know, hate to use the word dumb like, right? Yeah. As customers, we are dumb. That’s why we’re contacting you, you have information that we don’t possess, doesn’t matter if I walk into my local convenience store.
And there’s a bunch of slices of pizza in front of me, and I say, hey, do you guys have anchovies? Sir? Do you see anchovies? I’m the dumb cutter. I’m asking a dumb question. But that’s we’re coming to you for help for expertise. And so by you putting out that guide, that configurator or the Google, you know, all these things are just great opportunities to build that trust in your sleeping or playing with your kids or whatever you’re doing. You’re not even there
Dave Meyer 38:31
yet. And it works for you at all times. And it gets you a little bit more information, everything that you’re doing. So if someone went when you’re doing this inbound thing, right, someone downloads the the sheet, right, they download the document, what you need to do from there is to say, Okay, well, what are they going to need next? And so you start building a Choose Your Own Adventure on when you were a kid, you had the encyclopedia Brown, whereas should he should he get on the hallway? Or you know, shitting?
Should he run away? Right? So this is what you’re doing for your customer? And you’re saying, if you’re interested in printed circuit boards, you probably are you interested in rapid prototyping? Yeah. And if you’re interested in rapid prototyping, here are the things that you need to know.
So you’re doing that fantastic, in depth conversation that you should be having as a sales team, which is why it’s important for your marketers to listen in on sales conversations, because you should be giving them that information and it should feel like a conversation with your digital footprint. So that it feels like you’re helping and helping and helping instead of just trying to sell, sell, sell, nobody wants to be sold. Everybody loves to buy once they feel like they have the information they need.
Curt Anderson 39:49
Right. That was that was absolutely phenomenal.
Damon Pistulka 39:52
Yeah. They want to buy once they feel like they’ve got the information they need.
Curt Anderson 39:58
Yeah, so We want to Dave, this was phenomenal man just absolutely phenomenal. So what a gift and blessing you are. Thank you for taking time. I know how busy you are just had a son graduate, congratulations to you and your family. Last question for you. And then what we want to do we want to get to tables because I don’t want to meet you pick your brain. Last question. We’ll keep it short.
And so Damon, I ran into a conversation just this morning, downward tumble like, you know, those manufacturers that are, are still even with COVID, they’re still a little bit resistant, or they still think they don’t need a website, you know, and you just nailed it. Like, you know this, I love your circuit board example. You know, how, when you talk to some of the manufacturers, I still a little bit on that resistance side? How do you break that resistance barrier? What’s your conversation look like?
Dave Meyer 40:46
I got I got kind of a cheesy answer. Because in the past year, there’s been a rather drastic change in the outlooks of most people. Right? Yeah. Yeah, the fact that you just can’t do what the old stuff was, has helped out a ton. But realizing that, you know, even if you used to do a ton of trade shows, and there’s still plenty of good involved in trade shows where you get me with, you know, high high target environments, right.
But if you were expecting to just go and show up and be you and to have money pouring in to your lap, those days are numbered, if not gone, right. And even if you are, why would you want to take your three or four best salespeople offline for a week or 10 days, and just kind of hope that the right people were going to show up, and then result and then hope that they’re going to have time to give them a call, like 10 days later.
Remember, remember the metric that I mentioned, you don’t get back to them within like a few hours. You’re losing out on the sale. If you get back in if you get back to them. 12 days later, they forgot who you were right. Right. Yeah. So if you’re able to make real connections, and actually build a relationship before you even connect with them, person to person, that’s where the real magic of this marketing stuff happens.
And so I don’t know any businesses that really couldn’t benefit at least some. And yes, if you have a captive audience, if you develop some sort of a widget that’s only available to a very specific thing. God bless you, that’s awesome. see a need filler need. But if you ever want to grow or expand or market or sell to higher profit, people, instead of just taking everything that comes in the door. That’s where some of this guided help thing marketing can really make the difference for you. Right,
Curt Anderson 42:43
right. Awesome. Wow, guys, Jean, john. Val. Gail. Thank you guys. I know some guys. Thank you guys to Chris. I think she had to drop off. But thank you guys for joining us. Join us. That’s keep the conversation going. David the tables Dave. God bless you, brother. Thank you for joining us today. Boom.
Damon Pistulka 43:00
Thanks, guys. All right, everyone. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Kurt. Dave, thanks. Once again, dropping some knowledge bombs on us there. I got lots of notes from it. Lots of stuff. I got to go back and think about research and go through your website again. So thanks so much for that. Everybody that was listening on LinkedIn live. Thanks. We will be back again next week, Kurt. Yeah.
Curt Anderson 43:24
We have a great speaker. Next week, we’re going to talk about Google Shopping. He actually works at Pinterest. Two weeks from today, Damon Allison Levine New York Times bestselling author, she’s bet she’s climbed every the top the high top peak of all every continent, she led the first all women’s team to Mount Everest. So we have an amazing speaker Allison Levine in two weeks. So stick with us every Friday, guys, we have a great time here. And guys, and people like Dave just what a blessing. Yeah. Thanks so much. chinease. That is awesome. Thank
Damon Pistulka 43:53
you so much, guys. If you’re listening to us there live on LinkedIn or some other place where broadcast and you can join us on Remo you just got to look into comments under Kurt Anderson or my name. We’re posting about it every week about our Friday events, you can get on there. And you can join us here in rebo and talk to our speakers after the event. So we’re dropping off on LinkedIn now. And we’re going to go back to the tables. Thanks everyone. Friday, Happy Friday.
