The I-Hate-Marketing Approach to Marketing

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Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Shawn, Jay, and Mel. It’s great to have you all here. Shawn, I wanted to start with you, with kind of a follow-up. Some time back, you told us that you were making some changes to the way you market your business. Specifically, you brought on a salesperson to do outreach in a way you hadn’t been doing. How’s that been going?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, so that was, what? Maybe six months ago, I think?

Loren Feldman:
Something like that.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, you know, I viewed it as an experiment. It was relatively low-cost. He was available to work part-time, and I knew him well. So I had a lot of trust. I would say that it proved a few things, and it also helped me discover a few new things. So the things that it proved for me were cold email outreach is pretty much a losing game. Any efforts that he made in that arena just kind of fell flat.

Relationships are pretty much everything. So when he leveraged his network, and he went out into the community, and he met with people he knew and asked for introductions, that was very effective. When he used LinkedIn and Sales Navigator and all these other things to try to connect to new people, that was a tough road to hoe. So, it was good. I don’t think we’re going to continue. I think there are better ways to invest our money than that.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, we’re gonna have the same conversation we had six months ago. I have to ask the question: You have a list of prospects you sent emails. As a person who gets 50 emails a day that I get rid of in three seconds, I haven’t gotten a letter in… I can’t remember the last time I got a letter. So my question is still—

Loren Feldman:
You’re talking about a letter through the mail?

Jay Goltz:
Let me explain this. Those people who wear blue uniforms to go around.

Shawn Busse:
Jay wants me to do direct mail, basically.

Jay Goltz:
I don’t want to call it direct mail. I want to call it a selective—pick out 50 great targets. Get beautiful stationery. And send a letter saying, “Hey, I’ve watched your company for years, and I’ve always admired your blah, blah, blah. I’d love to be able to talk.” I think—not think—I am confident the person will get this envelope. They will open it, they will read it, and they will think about it, and perhaps call you 10 times, 100 times, more than getting a cold email. And I still believe that is worth trying. Because I believe if you send out 50 of those, you’ll get a few people to call. I do believe that.

Shawn Busse:
I think it’s worth thinking about it. I’m curious what you thought of the invitation I sent you to Catalyst, Jay.

Jay Goltz:
It was an email, right?

Shawn Busse:
No, it was the mail. It was in the mail. [Laughter]

Mel Gravely:
Yikes.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, how long ago was that? How long ago was that? A month ago?

Shawn Busse:
It was probably a month before the event. So, I want to say maybe two months ago.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, I can’t remember. Yeah, two months ago. You should have asked me a few days later. And I know you, so that’s not a fair thing.

Shawn Busse:
Well, I guess my point is, you know me. Actually, of anybody, I would have thought you would pay more attention to it.

Jay Goltz:
Well, I probably did at the time.

Shawn Busse:
You probably didn’t get it, is my point. It’s really hard to get this stuff in the hands of people, because there are so many intermediaries.

Jay Goltz:
Wait, wait. What do you mean, I didn’t get it? You think someone that works for me took it?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, yeah.

Jay Goltz:
No, I can tell you, absolutely not. I open the mail myself. It’s my one little fun thing of the day. I go through the mail, and I pull the checks out. No, I go through the mail myself. Maybe it didn’t arrive. I think that’s possible.

Shawn Busse:
Anyway, my point is that it’s harder than you think—for lots of reasons, especially with remote work and all that stuff. Do I mail it to the person’s office? Do I mail it to their home? I’ve got to pick my battles, right? I can’t do everything.

Loren Feldman:
Well, let’s go back for a moment to your sales experiment. You made it sound like you eliminated the cold outreach. That didn’t work. But it sounded somewhat encouraging on the other side, building on relationships. And yet, you’re not planning on extending the six months. Why not?

Shawn Busse:
I think he’s the wrong person for the strategy that is effective there. So what I mean by that is, where he did add a lot of value is he went through our CRM. He cleaned up all the bad data in there. He put together a process of outreach to past inquiries, past customers. He’s very systematic, which I value, and is really good for sales. But that is not the same person who really loves to go out into the community and kiss babies and shake hands. And I’ve come to the conclusion that what I need is that person, if I’m going to hire a salesperson.

And that’s what I’ve had before, in the past. When I had my prior business development person for 10 years, she was a consummate connector. Everybody knew her, everybody loved her. And so Rob is a great guy. He performs a very important function in the sales world. I actually think he would be very successful if he were managing a person who really enjoyed kissing babies and shaking hands.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, so I just need to challenge that thought process. So you’re telling me targeting 50 people and writing the same letter to most of them is harder than hiring somebody, interviewing them, training them, paying them big money? Really? That’s harder than what you’re talking about? That’s just ridiculous. You’re gonna go hire someone now and pay him a lot of money and send them out there and not maybe try—

Shawn Busse:
No, we’re not hiring somebody else, Jay. I’m just telling you the difference between this experiment and, if I were to hire somebody, what I would be looking for, and the difference between the two.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, I’m just saying, the phrase, “I can’t do everything.” I think sending out 50 letters to people who you’ve already got on your mailing list—you already know who they are, maybe they came to your thing—and just appealing to them personally—”Here’s my card, give me a call”—I think is well worth it.

Shawn Busse:
All right, so how about instead of debating tactics, we can just talk about what I am doing instead. Because, you know, as a small company, I can only do so many things. And I think this is the trap a lot of people get caught in, is they try to boil the ocean, especially when they’re a small business. So what we are doing in lieu of Jay’s direct mail outreach—which is still totally viable, Jay, and I may try it at some point—we’re calling it “one hundred and five.”

So, we’re basically taking the entire company, and everybody’s activating their networks, reaching out to customers, friends, anybody we have a relationship with. We’re having meetings with them, and essentially, we’re asking them for introductions and connections to people who may be able to use Kinesis’ services. So, the idea is we want to have 100 conversations in 100 days with a goal of having up to five new customers. So, that’s the effort we’re pushing on right now. And that’s a lot of work. But it’s actually already yielding great results.

Loren Feldman:
How are you selecting the people you’re reaching out to?

Shawn Busse:
So we went through the CRM. We went through everybody who’s ever been interested in us, anybody who’s ever been a customer. Because past customers are a great source of introductions and new business. We’re targeting people, so folks who we look at—to Jay’s point—who would be somebody who we would really like to know or could be a customer. And then we’re looking into LinkedIn and saying, “Well, who might know that person? Who could make an introduction who’s a friend of ours, a customer, etc.?”

Jay Goltz:
Okay, so you could say, “Jay, I agree that I’ve got this great list. And I agree that could work. But here’s even better, rather than sending them a letter, we’re actually going to call them, and…” Okay, I can’t argue with that. Okay, that’s better. Okay. No argument. That’s better.

Mel Gravely:
This is my first time in this environment, and I’m, like, “Wow.”

Jay Goltz:
Are there air quotes over that “environment?”

Mel Gravely:
Yes! Shawn, I don’t know your business at all. It all sounds rational to me. Even Jay’s strategy sounds rational. If I could put on my PhD professor hat—I’m a former professor of marketing and entrepreneurship—I would say that the most important thing about the combination of sales and marketing—and we’ve mixed that word together today, and I do think they’re different—is consistency over time. So, whatever the strategy is, be committed to it over time, even when it appears it’s not working. It’s the replication of the same model over and over. So whatever you pick—

Loren Feldman:
That’s close to the definition of insanity, though, isn’t it, Mel?

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, but here’s the thing about marketing. Think about when you go to your mailbox, and there’s a tree-service advertisement in the mailbox. You don’t have a tree problem, so that tree marketing didn’t work. So they’ve got to do that often enough so that you remember their brand. And they’ve got to do it consistently enough that when you have a tree problem, you’re a day or so away from getting another ad about a tree service. Because then it activates. So people can be getting great marketing data and just not be in that place right then. But if they get it consistently enough when they are at that place, they can activate on it. That’s all.

Jay Goltz:
You know what, that is an excellent example. And I have a lot of trees near my house. And I have to tell you, you know what would be really smart for those guys when they come out and do the work? Take a label with your name on it and say, “Hey, do you mind if I put this up in your garage?” I’d go, “Yeah, sure.” And that way, the next time I need them, I don’t have to go looking for their name. It’s right there in front of me. But they never do that. That would be really smart to do.

Mel Gravely:
The garage-door people do it.

Jay Goltz:
Right!

Mel Gravely:
The HVAC people do it. So, Loren, that’s what I meant by the continuity of it. Again, that’s theoretical. And I didn’t drop down to whether it should be a mailing or not. I will say, though, the ones that get through to me are the handwritten notes. If you write me a handwritten note, my staff—I don’t open the mail. I could lie and say I do. I don’t. But all the handwritten notes get to me. Even the ones that are angry mails get to me.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, and Mel, I agree with you a thousand percent. And since you don’t necessarily have the full context, the kind of constant drumbeat prior to the pandemic, we had that going on. And we had it going on on several levels. So we had a constant drumbeat of speaking and workshops. That was largely me. We had the constant drumbeat of Alison networking, connecting, meeting people, making friends, kissing babies, shaking hands. We had kind of a constant drumbeat of recurring communication, folks who signed up to our newsletter and so forth.

And that put about, I don’t know, 10-percent growth a year into the company, very reliably. You could set your watch by our CRM and inbound inquiries and conversion rates. Obviously, in-person events were disrupted quite a bit in the pandemic. And that was a tough blow. So we’re getting back, I think, to the fundamentals of what we did before. I wanted to try something slightly different with this guy, Rob, that was more of a cold direct outreach. And you might be right, in terms of, that process could work if I gave it another six months to a year. I just want to put bets in other areas.

Mel Gravely:
Well, six months, to me, is long enough on the strategy. I wasn’t questioning your strategy at all. I was commenting at a much higher level, Shawn, because I believe everything you’re doing is exactly right. Jay’s wrong. [Laughter]

Shawn Busse:
Mel, we’ve got to have you back, man.

Jay Goltz:
Listen, Mel, you said it all. You get a handwritten card, a handwritten note. Tell me if this isn’t true. When you get an envelope that’s hand-written, it’s either the lady or the tiger. It’s either, “You are the greatest company ever. I love you. And I want to thank you.” Or, “You are the worst.” And I don’t get many bad letters. I can’t think of the last time I got a bad letter, but it always makes you stop—“Okay, here we go”—when you open up the envelope. So it makes you think.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, the other piece of context that Mel may not be completely aware of is that, as you’ve explained to us previously, you’ve kind of had a love-hate relationship with marketing. And you’ve gone back and forth a little bit, in terms of how you want to pitch what you do. You don’t like to sell yourself as just marketing. You like to take a more holistic approach, and look at how a company operates in total. How are you addressing that now, as you do this outreach over 100 days? What have you decided, in terms of what exactly you’re pitching?

Shawn Busse:
I mean, I’m probably a guy who knows marketing and hates marketing. I mean, just in terms of how it’s normally practiced. It just drives me crazy as a discipline. I think there’s so much snake oil and salesmanship in that discipline. And I also think that it is very complicated as a domain, meaning that if you send your kid to school and they take a class in marketing or get their degree in marketing, the kinds of stuff they’re going to learn, it does not apply to our clients. I mean, 90 percent of it.

Jay Goltz:
It doesn’t apply to small business.

Shawn Busse:
Very rarely. Yeah, exactly. So, I found that when I would go to a party and somebody would ask me what I do, if I say the word “marketing,” most people? That ends the conversation. Like, literally.

Loren Feldman:
Seriously?

Shawn Busse:
Yes, seriously.

Jay Goltz:
I totally understand what he’s saying. Absolutely. I’ve been thinking that ever since college. “Oh, you’re getting a marketing—huh, what is that?” I think you’re right.

Shawn Busse:
Well, one of two, like, maybe in your era, they didn’t know what it was. In my era, it’s a distrust. And it’s not universal. It’s probably 80/20.

Jay Goltz:
Mel, did you pick up on that subtle, passive aggressive “my era, your era?” [Laughter]

Mel Gravely:
I literally was going to call that out.

Jay Goltz:
Excellent. All right. I just, I want you to get the rules of the game here.

Shawn Busse:
Well, I mean, you were talking about how people didn’t understand you, and I would just say my experience is different, in that they actually stop the conversation because they’re not interested. And I found that really interesting. And I think that’s because there’s so much marketing going on around us—so much of which doesn’t live up to its promise—that we just have a hard time with it. So I have an inherent frustration with marketing, in that most people, especially in the B2B space—I’m in the B2B space—are even more skeptical. My clients are often engineers. You want to talk about a customer that doubts marketing more than anybody else? It’s an engineer.

Jay Goltz:
Sure. Interesting.

Shawn Busse:
So, what I’ve realized, in looking at my clients, the ones who are really winning at the end of the day—I mean, just killing it—what we’re doing—and you will like this word, Jay—is we’re helping them gain alignment across the organization.

Jay Goltz:
Oooh, you’re right.

Shawn Busse:
So that the culture believes in what they’re doing. The culture is amplifying what they’re doing. Employee retention is really high. People want to work for that company. So that’s on the inside. And on the outside, the customers are getting a great experience they can’t get anywhere else. So they become a word-of-mouth for you. So if you just say “marketing,” most people are gonna think, “Oh, do you do AdWords?” It’s like, “Oh, God, you’re killing me here.” Here’s the hidden truth: The marketing industry is designed to sell marketing services to marketers within large companies. Full stop.

Jay Goltz:
That makes perfect sense.

Shawn Busse:
It’s a silo, right? So you have an agency that does digital advertising. You have an agency that does branding. You have an agency that does content marketing. They want to sell their siloed services to an internal marketer who is siloed. That marketer probably doesn’t have a lot of influence within the leadership team, which is why they got fired in the recession. And so they’re working with silos of activities. It’s totally ineffectual. But when the economy’s good, people don’t look at it. And they just kind of keep cranking the wheel. Mel, I’m kind of curious what your perspective is on this.

Mel Gravely:
Well, I’ll tell you, Shawn. You have nailed your value proposition, and you have also nailed the dilemma of B2B. I run a construction company full of engineers, 100 percent stocked full of them. And we just went through a rebranding exercise. And when even I heard “rebranding,” I was unsure what my team meant. What it did, though, is it aligned us in the organization around our value proposition, clarity around our purpose and values, how we talk to prospective clients.

Jay Goltz:
Core competencies.

Mel Gravely:
All of those things came out, and it was so much more. Yes, and we changed our colors slightly, and we’ve made our logo lowercase, and it looks much nicer. But that was after we did all the other work. And it took nine months and a lot of money. But if you said to me, “Mel, would you spend twice that much to get it?” Don’t tell the consultant, but I would, because I see the company moving.

But here’s the challenge, though: It is so frickin’ hard to articulate that value proposition ahead of time—unless I tell my peer, another CEO, “Let me tell you what it did for us, and let me tell you who did it for us.” And that, to me, is the breakthrough. I mean, the consultant we used was amazing. They were the most expensive of the three we looked at, and I just wouldn’t have it any other way. So I think you’re dead on track. It’s just hard to articulate.

Shawn Busse:
I’m really curious about this. Why did you hire the most expensive one?

Mel Gravely:
Well, we went through an RFP process, right? Not a bid process. I want to be clear about that. They all gave us pricing, but we weren’t ever telling them we were gonna pick a lower bid. But they had the clearest process. They were able to articulate that process and why it was so important to the outcome. And they would not accept a refresh. They said, “No, we don’t want your 50k to do a refresh, because you’re going to be mad at us. So if that’s what you decide, we’ll pass.” And that made me pause.

Jay Goltz:
Wow. That’s a good story.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, you’ve answered part of my question. You’ve explained what you hate about marketing and what you really want to do. But you haven’t really said how you’re pitching this now, during the 100 days.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I appreciate that. So, in looking back at our customers, we literally have clients that have been with us for a decade. And I just the other day crossed the threshold of a client spending—what would that be?—seven figures with us over a lifetime. So the lifetime value of our customers is very high. And I had to ask myself the question: Why do they keep coming back? Why do they keep not just doing a $50,000, one-and-done thing? Like, literally $200,000 a year, year in, year out. And I started looking at it. And I was like, “Oh, it’s because the return on that is like $10 million.”

I just started seeing these slopes of growth, or a client that—because they’re a magnet for talent—they’re not paying recruiters a single dollar. These large companies are calling them to hire them. They’re not doing digital advertising. They’re not paying for customers. And I’m just like, “Oh, of course. Because $200,000 to get $10 million is a really good deal.”

And so the piece that I’m talking about now is the 10X. Like, what is the thing we can help you do that’s a 10X impact? And that’s the impact we’re having on our clients that are really investing in us. They’re seeing these returns around culture and around customer acquisition that are not linear, like you would see with traditional marketing. Because traditional marketing is a linear output usually. It’s you do A/B testing with digital campaigns. You get 5 percent better, you have a linear improvement. This is like an exponential return. And so I have to tell that story.

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