Measuring What Matters With James Gilbert

By Mary Matton on November 4, 2020

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Transcription

MK: Hey everyone. And welcome to office hours. You know, where the real deal learning happens between classes where you get to spend time one-on-one with your professors, for adjunct professors to learn about things in sales and marketing ends. Yes. So I learn all about how to deliver a better, more personal experience to the folks that you want to do business with on fashion.

We’ve brought in James Gilbert, who is the CMO at CRM next, and James is famous for this quote that I love that “whoever owns the data. Owns the room.” When I heard this head Canon, my brain went in a million different directions, trying to figure out what James was saying. Um, and I’m super excited to have him on this episode to learn all about measuring what matters, James welcome.

I’m so excited to have you here.

James: Thank you. I wish I could take a hundred percent credit for that quote, but I’m pretty sure that other people have said it before me. I just know that it’s something that I’ve lived my life by. And it’s the primary reason. Why I’m a younger CMO. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the fact that I took that to heart and I did, I own the room every single time I was in with an executive and I still do just because I love data.

So that’s what we have to do. And we have to build that mentality. I

MK: love that. I think you’re, you’re totally right. And you hit the nail on the head. Data speaks it’s binary, it’s black and white. It’s exactly what you can lean into to be able to justify any decision that you’ve made, or just to find your future decision that you plan to make or strategy that you plan to deploy.

Um, before we get too deep in the weeds though, about data, one thing that we love to do here at Alyce, it’s introduced both, but. I introduced you by your nine to five title. I think you’re reading wants to know more about your five to nine title. Tell me about what you do when you hang up your CMO hat at the end of the day.

James: Number one, I’m a dad and a husband. So that’s, that’s my life. That that’s what drives me every day. Um, I love my kids. I have four of them were actually taken care of a fifth right now, um, through the foster system. And. You know, it’s, uh, that’s what I’m ultimately passionate about, but I’m a big Utah jazz fan.

I’m a huge star Wars fan, which you could see over here. I like video games, even though I never have time to play them, but my kids love them. And I’m really passionate about, uh, you know, giving back. So I, I, I do a lot of that and, you know, there’s there’s initiatives and things like that, that I’m very, very passionate about.

Like, Child trafficking because I have four kids. So I’m pretty big component, a proponent and person behind that, those causes and making sure that we end that because that’s modern day slavery, which is no boy, no. And we need to get rid of it. So that’s, that’s my five to nine, I guess you could say.

MK: I love that.

Is there any organization in particular? That you want to shout out, especially with that child trafficking, passion that you have, that we can give to them airwaves and coverage too, because we’re also right there very much alongside you with that.

James: Yeah, there actually is. It’s one, that’s local here to Utah, but it’s getting a lot of buzz.

Um, you know, everyone’s heard of Tony Robbins. He, he actually is behind this cause, um, there’s a lot of celebrities that are getting behind this cause, but it’s called Oh, You are, um, and it stands for operation underground railroad. I get it that some of you might think that it’s a little bit more on the right.

Yeah. Side of the political agenda, but it’s really not. It’s behind the same cause that we should all be behind. There should be no politicalness behind it now that no child should ever have to suffer no matter what race, no matter what cultural background they have. Um, and why I love the organization is because.

Every single part of the funding that you give them. Um, can they, they literally are. They’re not funded by the government. Um, and the nice thing is, is you get to see their operations. So they record this stuff. And when they go in and save 20 kids, they have a full video. And if you’re a donating member, you get to see that firsthand.

And man, the stories that they’re doing. With the funds that they’re getting is pretty incredible,

MK: Phenomenal. And I love that. You’re so passionate about this. So for those of you that are interested in learning more about this organization, we’ll leave some links below for you to get involved and educate yourself a little bit more.

Maybe bring a little awareness to the issue as well too. Um, I also would be remiss if I didn’t point out behind your shoulder, is that a Nintendo entertainment with them? Like the, the original console.

James: This thing. Well, this is, I put this on my desk because I like sales reps who have video calls with me to pick up on stuff.

And so I’ve, I try to flaunt this stuff purposefully just to see if like you’re smart enough to pick it up. Um, but I actually put this on my, on my tag, on my bag. So when I travel, my kids bought it for me because. Yeah, this is original Nintendo, but I could have had an Atari one. Um, hopefully that as a, like, I’m still somewhat young,

MK: But yeah, we had that in our living room growing up.

So I don’t know if that dates me, ages me, or just gives you a sense of comradery, but we’re, we’re here. We’re in this together.

James: Yeah. I I’ve always been a video game fan, you know, I was. The young kids that grew up with like whenever he first came out. Um, so obviously I had every system growing up. I had the Nintendo, the Atari, the super Nintendo, and I was fortunate enough to, to have, uh, believe it or not a single mom who just worked her butt off and.

Gave me that opportunity. So I was fortunate to be able to

MK: Explain that. So all of a single moms who have provided all that they have for their kids to be the best version of themselves possible. And now look at you, you are extraordinarily successful. You’re now leading the marketing team at VRR C R M next, um, in you’re also paving the way I apologize if this is a little controversial for the marketers that are attending, but.

Well, some peoples are talking to MQ out of the window with the bath with wash. Uh, you’re leaning heavier into it. Tell us about that.

James: Well, listen, you cannot, a lot of the reasons why people are getting rid of this because they have an ABM strategy. Okay. Which is great. That’s great. Do that. But even the, the folks that consult on this stuff have told you, it’s actually better to have a dual funnel.

So if the folks that are consulting you on your ABM are telling you to have a dual funnel, how do you have a funnel without an MQL? The only differences is you’re taking ABM and you’re rephrasing it into an MQA. Marketing qualified account, that’s it. That’s all you’re doing. And all that means is it’s a roll up of a lot of the activity that happens on an individual level, on an account level.

And when you can start mapping that and tying those together, that is when the dual funnel can really start articulating the story for you.

MK: I love the concept of that dual funnel. And I think, um, most folks who are doing this don’t realize that they’re doing this. You can’t just turn one versus the other one thing that I think that gets really interesting too.

Uh, if you wouldn’t mind speaking to this, so it’s about using that dual funnel to be able to track that velocity and the impact of the velocity. Um, so that even before you get sales involved, you’re actually using this dual funnel to be able to measure the impact that marketing.

James: Well, how about I show you

MK: I’d love that.

James: Okay. So I’m going to share my screen and this screen that you’re going to see is just my background real quick, but then I’m going to, hopefully you see, when I present here, are you able to see that?

MK: Yup. We’re here customer journey, process example.

James: Okay. So. First things first. Uh, I know this isn’t a one-to-one for everyone.

Okay. So like your model’s going to look a little different, but the reason why I like to visualize this is because I think people miss a big, important step as marketers. That we are now owning more of the customer journey and the customer experience, which means that we have to map out the journey. We have to understand the buyer journey and this and this phase.

So you have digital and you have offline. That’s traditionally what has been there? And I know there’s other digital channels there. I’m just throwing some out there, but then you have a digital onboard. So when somebody comes to your website, How are you converting them? It might be through chat. It might be through a form fill or whatever the case may be, but eventually you’re then going to send them down a pathway.

That’s going to have deep nurtures and engagements or advertising. Right. And I’ve added in here and MQA just so that you don’t get confused that you can have both. And it’s perfectly okay to have both. So from there, you might have a process where then it gets sent to maybe an SDR BDR team, or however you want to phrase that team.

And sometimes that team might report into marketing. So from our perspective, when they report into marketing, We want to be able to see how many of those MQL and did they then convert into a sales accepted or sales qualified, lead and sales qualified account. And then from there it can actually get pushed back in to a nurture if sales denies it, or if it needs to be.

There needs to be more qualification, but even in the sales funnel. So we’ve separated the marketing funnel. Then you have a BDR funnel, and now you’re going to get into the sales funnel. And the sales funnel is unique as well, because guess what? You have different criteria. You might use band, you might use medic.

You might use all of these other different types of sales, methodologies, and none of them are, there’s not a one. Size fits all for everyone it’s unique to your own business. So from that perspective, we also have to be able to turn those into customers, which is that there’s a customer funnel. And then from the customer, then you can get pushed back into the digital onboarding and the content pieces.

So why this matters is because this helps us identify to it at an executive level. And I’ve shown this to many, many executives and they’re like, Oh man, it’s too much of an eyesore, but then I walk them through it and they’re like, Oh wow, this makes a lot of sense. And what, I’ve, what I’ve layered this in and, and talk to other executives about this.

And I’ve pitched to them, look, marketing really can contribute to most of the functions of the business that exists today and we can help serve, but in order for us to do that, those people also have to be in the room. So when you build this out, it also helps you understand. What areas do I need customer success involved with what areas do I need product involved with?

What areas do I need cells involved with? Is it everywhere? No, it’s not. So then we take this overarching journey and what you don’t see here is, well, what about brand? So then brand can get layered in. Over the top and I don’t define brand, um, like everyone does and that’s okay. You can define brand however you want, but it, the same still rings.

True. I’m defining it as some of these, the other areas, some of my GTM, which is identifying my Tam ICP, the messaging, positioning, product marketing, cause marketing, social proof. So that’s brand. So now you’re thinking, well, how do I, if I’m doing ABM, how does this apply to me? So now every time that you see a little fingerprint, you are going to have layered in account-based marketing tools.

Okay. So now you can see the ABM funnel is being defined and where we have ABM is clear at the top of funnel and after they purchase, and many people don’t think about ABM post-purchase they think about, Oh, well, we just need to provide the air cover. That’s necessary for sales to close deals. And it’s much deeper than that.

And then you have a whole nother layer of intent. And that intent is what makes you a smart data-driven marketer. And if you start understanding these micro journeys, so that’s your specific journey for marketing and even deeper than that, like the journey from digital to then nurture. If you understand those micro journeys, then you can layer in intent or even utilize the data that you’re capturing in these journeys for intent.

So. That’s where you’re going to see the hourglass and the hourglass represents the intent data that you can use to identify those stages or areas in what you can pull information from your dual funnel to provide intent to not only your sales team, but your customer success team, your product team, and other executives within the business.

MK: This is blowing my mind. He, the best learning happens when you’re not in class. This is phenomenal. So once I want to zoom in on a real fast as all of this, that you’ve outlined just now is dependent on really defining those micro journeys. Can you elaborate a little bit more on your definition of a micro journey?

James: Yeah. When I worked for cusp, when I worked for CloudShare in the customer experience space, there was one thing that was very evident and glaring. And I think this still happens today. If you talk to any of the big players in the customer experience space, they’ll tell you. Is no one really knows how to build a really good customer experience.

Businesses are still figuring this out and you, you know, you always hear it. Well, it starts top down and it starts internally. If the building a really good employee experience all that’s true. But nine times out of 10, when you’re really starting to structure and execute on a customer experience program, it starts with building a journey.

So that’s what we’re seeing here. Once you build this, then it helps you identify those functions that we just talked about. And the micro journeys that exist here might be, um, it might be okay. You are running a webinar in the month of October. So the micro journey of a webinar is you’re going to have.

Advertising or promotion, and that could branch into many different things. Okay. And then it’s going to hit a landing page, right. Where they’re going to register with the form, fill that’s your digital onboard. Okay. And then from there, you’ve got to have a way to follow up. So then that’s the nurture pre webinar.

And then post webinar, after the webinar happens, sometimes you’re going to have people that attend other times. They just want the recording. So what are you going to do post. Okay. But even then it doesn’t change. It doesn’t change the fact that you still have got to send them down to the sales process.

Right? Understand each one of those micro journeys allows you to then get deeper and understand what, where in this micro journey of a webinar, can I capture intent to feedback to cells so that it’s more actionable? Well, if I am identifying webinars, an area of intent for still looking at the journey map here that we can pull in is messaging and positioning.

So I use a tool called BuzzSumo. I crawl the web and I look at all the other webinars that are being done out there by our Tam and our ICP. So a lot of our competitors, and I see our competitors doing ABC and D I am not going to do ABC and D because I’m going to stand out. Now my messaging, my webinar topic is not about COVID like everyone else’s is right.

It’s different, but it aligns to a pain point that I’ve already identified with my intent and my ICP as well, because I’ve understood this journey. Does that make sense?

MK: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I think, well, you’ve clearly defined here is that a lot of people have been using account-based marketing as an overlay to a strategy.

They don’t really have much clarity and visibility into, um, they don’t really have too much strategy behind it. Well, what you’re saying here is yes, you’re still going to have the traditional tenants. If you will. Traditional pillars of the marketing that we have always known and have identified with our SQLs, um, opportunity to pick federal all of the same nomenclature we were so used to using, but you’re saying let’s, let’s take a closer look at those moments, those micro journeys that we are pushing people into, who first interact with them to serve, to get some of that intent database data.

And use those micro-moments to elevate the experience they’re having such that it feels one to few, or maybe even one to one that the agenda you’ve, hand-selected the talk track. The initiatives that you’re picking up are feeling that much more personal to them, personalized if

James: you will. Yeah. I mean, so a good example of.

Just so you know, I’m not like just preaching this, like we drink our own Kool-Aid here. So what we we’re running a campaign right now called the bank Lorette. It’s super duper fun. Um, so 80, I think 85% somewhere around there, 85% of a specific niche of our Tam is female. Okay. And so we, I had all of the females on my marketing team get in a room and I asked them, I said, all right, budget is out the window.

I want you to come up with an idea that is going to be super duper fun. That’s going to be creative. And we are going to build a micro journey for people that want to know the difference between our competitors specific to this niche. So they came up with positioning our competitors as, uh, a dating episode on like the bachelorette, but we call it the banker app because it’s specific to banks and credit unions.

So we hired these actors and actresses to come in and play are our competitors. Now we’re not calling our competitors out specifically by name, but if you’re smart enough, you can figure it out. So the beautiful thing about this is we’ve identified who our Tam is. We’ve we, we even went as far to put this in front of influencers before we launched it so that we got validation.

Is this going to be accurate? And is it going to be something that people are going to engage with? We then sent it to customers. We sent it to a few others that were specific in our niche that we were prospecting into. And we said, what do you think of this? And everyone loved it. So we went live with it.

And now it’s such a unique micro journey. That we we’ve we’ve we’ve figured out all the channels that we want to do well that we want to do with this campaign. So it has advertising components to it as landing pages and email components to it. It has community and affiliate marketing related to it as ABM related to it.

So if you go to G2 and you look at our competitive comparisons, you get re-targeted with an ad that brings you back into this campaign because everyone. Wants to compare software, but you only get the data that’s there on the review site. You don’t get anything more than that. And as for that, that can be fun.

So we made it fun and. Then we bring in direct mail into that. Now, if you haven’t figured out your micro journey, it’s tough to what channels am I going to pick from? Right. So you have to get into the tactical piece pieces of what your micro journey looks like. So what we send out for direct mail is those that engage in the campaign, get a Rose, just like the bachelorette.

When they give a Rose out, but we’re building a messaging behind this as CRM is meant to build a relationship and last, so we give them a Rose that is meant to last up to five years. No kidding. It’s in a little box and it’s creating a micro experience for people that doesn’t necessarily have to have the end goal of sales.

It will turn into sales. I assure you I’ve done this lots of times. I don’t have to say, I want to get seven opportunities from this campaign or a hundred opportunities from this campaign. All I have to do is build a good experience. If I build a good experience, those will come and they’ll come out. I always hit my numbers.

So sometimes it’s experimental as well.

MK: Yeah. I like the way that you’re thinking about the experiential component of what you’re trying to deliver. And you shared with me this really, really impactful story about how you delivered that next level experience for someone that you had been looking to do business with.

I hadn’t closed one, their book of business just yet, but you really stepped outside of the norm and thought about the gift, the recipient on the receiving of the funeral and repeating it in your marketing experience. Um, can you tell us about that story that you had with that one path was now customer, I believe, right.

James: Refresh my memory. MK.

MK: So if I remember correctly, um, you had found out that one of your prospective customers had found a fallen, uh, under some hard circumstances from heart.

James: Yes. Okay. Okay. So again, we utilize areas of our demand gen and our dual funnel that we repurpose as intent. Okay. So everybody that we invite to our podcast.

Is a potential prospect and or customer. We do that by design because one it’s free market research, right? You record with like a gong recording or a zoom recording. Then you also have a way to analyze that, to validate your pain points and validate your messaging already in the podcast. Well, were we were doing this podcast episode with an executive at a credit union and it just so happens that.

Uh, she just went through a really rough time. And this was before we started recording the podcast. Okay. And she told me about a situation where she, her son’s bedroom ceiling caved in, literally just fell. Luckily the sun was not harmed. Um, but all of his stuff was ruined. She, she specifically mentioned how her son was a big X-Box fan.

That’s all she told me about her son, nothing else. Now, normally we send a, just a small token of appreciation and a thank you a handwritten note to all of our guests and say, thanks for joining the podcast and spending 30, 40 minutes with us. Right. And, um, prior to us recording, I got this information and I was, I was after the recording, I was like, well, Hmm.

We have an opportunity here to do something. Now I didn’t do this to try and win her. Okay. I did it because it was the right thing to do. And that’s what matters more to me than anything. So I sent her rather than sending her like a coffee mug and a handwritten note with a small little gift card. I sent her a pretty substantial amount of gift cards.

I sent her, her son and X-Box gift card. And. Um, what I got back was, uh, a handwritten note from her, a thank you in three different emails and her being an advocate for us now forever. Will she buy our product it’s potentially possible, right? She might not meet. Shane might not meet exactly who our ICP is, but she’s advocating for us against all the other ICP is now that that might not matter to many of you, but I’m telling you in our niche, it matters more than any type of marketing that I could do.

Simply from the standpoint of the niche that we’re focused on is all about community.

MK: I’m obsessed with this story for so many different reasons. The first of which is. You could have walked away from that moment. You had a choice in a moment after hearing that story to make, take, turn that story into action from your end, or just say, I’m so sorry to hear that.

And then move on with the rest of your life, but you opted to go the extra mile to develop what we’re calling H to H marketing our human to human marketing. Where it’s not about the end result of getting a meeting on the calendar. It’s about just being a good person and caring. And I think empathy for those that are around you, whether they be folks you want to do business with, or folks already in your ecosystem, and you took it upon yourself to turn this experience that she had, um, potentially just interacting with you on a podcast.

Bloated into stone, much more such that she now has this emotional resonance with house human, how authentic your brand is, how kind and generous it is. And she now is a forever advocate for your brand. And again, I think deconstructing that a little bit. You did it because you opened today’s conversation just by showing the audience.

How phenomenal of a human you are, then you care about others. You care about things beyond just, you know, who you are or your little micro world, you care so much. So that, that extends into your marketing strategy. And you have developed this marketing strategy with these touch points here, where these micro domains can be very one to one.

If only you step outside of yourself and think about the audience before you send things out. And now you have this long tail flywheel effect with what you’ve done with this customer. Who’s out there evangelizing your brand, telling them all about it. And she never even actually had that business interacting.

She never got on a phone call with you or your sales team. It was just that human, that human moment that made her a forever advocate of your brand.

James: I almost feel guilty even talking about it. Cause I don’t, I don’t want it to come across as like we’re promoting this cause we’re not like it’s just, we just, there was an opportunity we saw to help somebody.

That was it. But if we, if we, if we brought in the scale a little bit, you know, we’re, we’re running a brand campaign right now where we invited six, six different influencers in the space to be judges. Now you’re probably like, what is this? It’s a contest. And I did this a CloudShare, we called it the CX championship.

And we, those who won, won like a custom wrestling belt is made for them. Right. And it was just really, really personal. And people loved it so much that like, I would ha I was having people all over the globe, reach out to me and be like, how do I get one of those wrestling belts? And I was like, well, you can’t, unless you win.

And you have to be, you have to be nominated by somebody and. Then on top of that, you have to like, you have to win over the judges. So we, we re we are redoing that campaign here at CRM next, but we’re making it specific to our Tam. Because of everything that happened in COVID everybody, I’m so sick of hearing, like, Oh, like, how are you doing things differently during, during COVID or how has it impacted your business look like everybody’s been impacted, but it’s, it’s not how you’ve been impacted.

It’s what impact are you making that may, that really is a story we should be talking about and, you know, One thing that we saw as our Tam and our ICP was not being recognized by the media at all credit unions and banks. You want to know who’s keeping our economy afloat. They are who the hell is talking about it.

No one. So we built this contest and we’re like, they have enough is enough. We’re not going to judge it. We’re not going to be biased. We’re just going to fund it. So we got six judges. The judges are all specific to banks and credit unions. And then we had two outside of banks that, that we were like, you know what, let’s bring in a little bit extra voice.

And we’re like, let’s have people nominate. And the judges are going to know our judges are going to decide who wins and we’re going to, you know, have a fun little gift and stuff like that. That is creating more buzz for CRM next than anything, because it’s organic and it’s real. I mean, we’re not, we’re not fluffing this out.

Like we really aren’t judging the contest. We’re just promoting people doing really good work. And I am telling you, if I could show you some of these submissions, it would blow your mind. People want to be recognized for the good they do. And if you did nothing, I repeat nothing else in marketing, you would be the best marketer, just if you did that.

Not enough people do it.

MK: You know, they missed the opportunity and we, we called it the episode, measuring what matters. And we talked about the MQL, the MQA, the SQL, but really what matters. Is the authenticity in the impact that that authenticity has on your audience, not burn to signaling, it’s not any sort of performative marketing.

It’s just being a real, authentic human and celebrating people who are going above and beyond to be that authentic, genuine self in every track of what they do in their personal lives.

James: And I get it like, it’s tough because people are very like, well, how do you measure that? What you gotta do it. That’s your measurement, right?

You do it. And I promise what you will find is it will be a lot easier to measure because I just, with this contest, we ran it for one month. We had over 50 submissions and all of them took an hour and a half on average, filling out a five question survey. And providing deep documentation, creative, some of them creative, like it’s all about superheroes and some of them literally created like their entire bank or credit union in superhero form.

All right. I mean, what marketing could I do that would give our prospects that we’re trying to get in to buy our products that much time with your brand? Darren see you there’s, there’s no way that you could do anything unless it’s, or if it’s organic, people will get all over

MK: it. Absolutely. Well, because the market’s mature enough.

James: They know the difference between a virtue signaling. They know the difference between something that’s dip in Genuis and what’s authentic. They already know because they’re surrounded by it on a daily basis, so they can snip it out faster. What marketers haven’t realized is how quickly the market has matured to be able to diagnose authenticity versus something that’s just disingenuous.

Yeah. And you have. When you build out those journeys, you see that there’s a lot of the middle of the journey that people just don’t think about and

MK: it’s opportunities.

James: That’s why I will continue to say, Hey, like the MQL is important or call it an MQA. I don’t care what you call it, but if you’re gonna figure out what to measure.

I get it. A lot of people just measure first, last touch because they want to make it easy. But you could, all you have to do is build out your journey and you’ll see that that’s the wrong measurement, because everything that happens that matters to people is in the middle of their journey. Not always at the front and the end.

MK: No, I love it. We call those pivotal moments and I love how much you have given clarity and context and insight into the pivotal moments that you deliver at CRM. Next, James, it is such a pleasure to get to learn from and with you on today’s conversation and sharing what actually matters when it comes to effective marketing

today.

James: I appreciate you having me. Okay. You need to, we should have like reversed the roles. I should have had questions that I should’ve asked you. And then, you know, we’re gonna. Had a little bit of a more balanced act here.

MK: We can, we have some time left. If you want to do it, I’m, I’m open for it. We can do this all on and posted it as well too.

And I can like jump in and like the jump cuts don’t matter as much because we’re not, it’s not like we’re moving or changing your scenery at all food, but if you had some questions, like, let’s go,

James: yeah, let’s do it. So you’ve, you’ve heard me to find, you know, middle touches, why it’s important. From your perspective, what is a middle touch?

MK: Great question. And to be honest, there are so many middle touches that it’s hard to just give one singular unified definition. I think your visual does a great job at actually encapsulating all those middle touches. Um, and most brands are really not understanding that. Every touch is the first in the latch is a middle touch.

It’s that? It’s the thought the pension that you’ve put into and the consideration that you put into what you call those micro journeys, that something should never actually feel like a middle touch because of the thought and the intention and the impact that you know, that that moment can have. So for us, a middle touch is everything that happened in between that, that first one, that last touch, but not really knowing exactly where someone’s going to jump in to your funnel.

You have to consider your middle touch as that first chance to make a first impression. You can never go back if you’re doing that. I

love it.

James: I always like to think of, think of like how people buy and. I mean, you could use an e-commerce example just to kind of visualize because everybody can relate to it.

But I mean, like if you’re shopping for your kids for. You know, a holiday or their birthday or whatever. Um, how many times do you just like go to the website and just buy right then and there almost never, you go, you go and find a product, then you research it, then you’re, you’re looking at reviews and then you’re looking at it.

Well, maybe there’s something that’s a video that you want to see how the product actually works. And then you want to see how people have given those views. So then you, then you scroll on the Amazon thread and you see all the reviews there, and that’s no different than how B2B. Is is purchased as well.

The only differences is instead of one singular shopper buying one singular product, you have many doing the exact same thing. And so oftentimes the, the business will say, okay, we are only going to give first and last touch attribution simply from the standpoint of like, that’s, that’s all they can measure.

That’s all they have. And they just like, Oh yeah. W w we got this and they forget about all the other people that might’ve influenced the decision. Yeah,

MK: I think it’s though, we actually take a lot of our playbooks from the e-commerce space. Um, it’s no, I mean, I came from the e-commerce space that used to design and consult e-commerce businesses.

Our CEO also came from the e-commerce space as well too, but there’s a lot that you can learn about the jury that someone goes on, even as an individual consumer, you have, when you have a whole buying team and you have then just, you know, quadruple quintuple, the amount of people who are taking these trees in all these different directions.

Everything in the middle journey. When you have so many people who are influencing the decision-making process

James: a hundred percent agree MK, tell, tell the audience what are some ways that they can make the journey more personal.

MK: Ooh for Alyce. I mean, everything that you do, you should always be thinking about stepping outside of yourself, stepping outside of the MQL, SQLs, whatever goal you’re held accountable to and remove yourself from this funnel you’ve developed and think about the person, not the persona.

We are big proponents of that. We spend a lot of time really conceptualizing and thinking about the person at who is going to be on the receiving end of whatever marketing strategy you’re you’re, you’re working on, you call them micro journey. Then you think a lot, you think really closely on those micro journeys without using the same vernacular.

That’s exactly what we’re thinking about. We care about every, and we have stepped over every detail that we put out there, whether it be, you know, a fun G2 video. And we think about the experience we want to have about telling people how proud we are about our customers who have nominated us for this position all the way down to like the precise copy that we use in our emails.

And even the finishing touches of emojis that we use to humanize the marketing that we’re putting out there. Every step of the way. We really think about the impact that we want to have on someone who’s experiencing something within those micro journeys. And we might not actually obsessed over that. We care a lot.

Our marketing team, I hire specifically to find empathetic folks who, who go out of their way to step beyond themselves in a way that contributes, whether that be in their community, it could be outside of work. It could be, you know, volunteerism that they have. I care about people who care because they produce better marketing period because they care about the products that they’re putting out there.

And they care about the people on the receiving end of the marketing that they put out into the abyss.

James: I know a lot of people will ask the question, well, how do we scale something like that? And she kind of just told you how, but there are some other things when you’re on a call like this. I mean, you can see MK has a guitar in the background.

She has a really cool painting with a skull. Uh, I mean, those are things that you got, the star Wars stuff. You can tell. I have kids cause there’s a painting here. Those things are how you can do it as well. If you want to know how to scale, get yourselves team to make sure that their prospects are on video.

All right. And then once you do that, Do a quick, like 32nd analysis after the meeting, just pull up a screenshot of it and say, Hey, here’s some areas that I think that we could maybe send direct mail, send them something personal. That’s related to those things. I had a, I had somebody who sent me one of those piñata grams, you know, and I’ve seen them a hundred times and they’re great.

Don’t get me wrong. Um, well it was actually the delivery that mattered most. It wasn’t the, the product she found out that I had kids. And rather than sending me a gift that I would probably get from anyone. Right. She sent a note to my kids and said, Hey, I know you have four kids. So here’s three piñata grams.

Hopefully they can have fun with them, but just a small little note like that. And my kid’s like, by the way, we’re obsessed with those freaking periodic grams. Like so much of the fact that they like caused tension in the house. But, um, like that’s that’s, it was the delivery that mattered. It really

was.

MK: And that person again, could have left it on the doorstep and just said, you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Or that person could have said, I could just spend the extra couple of bucks to actually make this family’s night. And the lasting impact that that entire experience had had. No, have you evangelizing their brand?

Has now had you thinking about this and now your whole family is just loving these piano Kenyatta Graham.

James: Exactly. And my kids now ask me all the time. Hey, when are you going to get another opinion? Autogram and I’m like, you know what? When the next company decides that they want to be personal,

MK: I love, I love, love, love this.

James: Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

MK: Thank you. You honestly, you’ve helped to establish this new concept of what you should be measuring and your impact. You’ve given some very clear examples for folks and how they can start to be thinking more closely and examining that micro journey. You’ve also given great examples for the way that people can drive that human to human impact with their marketing, to elevate that experience and to care about the person, not the persona.

Thank you so much. I know you’re super busy, but thank you for carving out time to chat with us between hanging out with the kids, maybe catching a couple of video games, or maybe a star Wars movie here or there. The jazz is not playing right this moment, but okay. I imagined that the game you can go back and rewatch to just try to rebel in the moment.

James: Yes. And I do often. Um, so yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate everything. Thank you.