A Real Estate Backed Cryptocurrency Token with Matthew Sullivan
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Episode Summary
Many people want to “get in” on the new cryptocurrency innovations, but are nervous about all the ups and downs as well as the fact that it is “not backed on anything but trust.”
Imagine if the real estate market got disrupted by a cryptocurrency token that would help people take equity out of their home without increasing their monthly mortgage. What if that new token also provided everyday people a way to get in to the cryptocurrency game, but do it with a token that was backed by assets in real estate?
Well you don’t have to imagine it because Quantm.one is launching to help people get cash in exchange for a small percent of equity in their home. The social impact of this is huge as people who need money out of their home to send their child to college can now do so without causing their mortgage payment to go up.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Matthew Sullivan who is the host of his own podcast called Hooked on Startups. He is the CEO and Founder of a new cryptocurrency token called Quantm.One and it’s going to allow people to get equity out of their house without having to take on more debt as well as help those people who don’t have the money for a deposit to buy a new home. He has a fascinating background working with Richard Branson on launching a lot of Virgin brand extensions. He flies a helicopter and he also has a story of how he met the Prince in the UK. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
A Real Estate Backed Cryptocurrency Token with Matthew Sullivan
I have a friend and colleague as my guest, Matthew Sullivan. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Quantm.One. He is also the Co-founder of a $50 million Secured Real Estate Income Strategies fund, and the President and Co-Founder of Crowdventure, a real estate crowdfunding company. He hosts his own podcast called Hooked On Startups. He worked with Richard Branson’s Corporate Finance Team in the Virgin Group for six years and has quite a story about flying a helicopter. He is the Director and Trustee at the time of Virgin’s London’s Air Ambulance, which is what the helicopter is involved with. He went to school in London and studied law over there and now is here in Southern California. Matthew, welcome to my humble little podcast known as The Successful Pitch.
John, it’s my unending pleasure to be here.
I like to ask my guests to take us back to their story of origin. You can go back when you were a young lad as you call yourself in London or you can tell about working for Richard Branson, however far you want to go back and take us back on, “Here’s how I got to where I am.”
It’s really a story of the moment that I decided that I was systematically unemployable. I think all of us entrepreneurs have a moment where we go, “This job thing just isn’t going to work for me.” I remember I was a stockbroker at the time. It was a great time. I was a Far East stockbroker so I would go around the world to all of the Far East Tigers or the Asian Tigers as they were known then, which were Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. Every year or twice a year, we would all go in this junket around those countries meeting companies and doing research and just generally having a bit of a wild time. There was a point when I think I was out in either Hong Kong or Thailand when I just thought, “This is great fun but I want to be the person making the decisions and I want to be the person defining the policy. I didn’t just want to sit back and be an agent of execution.” I think I was in my mid-twenties or early twenties at the time.
[Tweet “A real estate backed token”]
A couple of years after that, the guys that I was stockbroking with, Tim and Rory McCarthy, they set up their own company and I went along and joined them much more as a partner rather than as an employee as it were. Rory wrote a letter one day to Richard Branson because his office was just around the corner in Kensington and he said, “Dear Richard, we own Lindstrand Balloons and I’ve always wanted to go around the world in a hot air balloon, but I think you would be a much better pilot. How about it?” I remember seeing the letter when it came back because the letter said, “Dear Rory, Why not? Yours, Richard.” It was a very simple response and then at that point onwards, we then ended up building this incredibly complex hot air balloon to try and fly around the world and there began our journey with Richard Branson and Virgin. For the next five to six years, we ended up being best friends with him and working in all sorts of really interesting projects from Virgin Jeans, Virgin Cosmetic, Virgin Clothing, V2 Music, Virgin Executive Jets, Virgin Helicopters and Virgin Bride, the list is endless.
Tell us your James Bond story because I love that. I think that’s a great visual for everybody to get just how bon vivant you are.
I learned to fly a helicopter at one of the companies we set up, which became Virgin Helicopters. At the same time, Express Newspapers Group decided that they’d spent ten years sponsoring the London’s Air Ambulance but they’d come to the end of their run as it were. The sponsorship or the funding of the London’s Air Ambulance was up for grabs and there was this risk that it would have to close down. The person in charge of the Air Ambulance at the time came to see Richard and said, “I think Virgin would be a great idea,” so Richard said, “Yes.” He handed it over to us and we sorted it all out and we put the money together. I ended up being a trustee and one of the directors or the operations director in charge of the whole process.
One of the perks that I used to get every now and then was that I would drive my car in the morning to the place where they park the helicopter at night, and I would get out and go to the crew room with all the other pilots there. I’d put my bright orange pilot suit on and my flashy James Bond with a mirror glass and I’d get in the helicopter. Because I have a license, they let me fly the helicopter under pretty close supervision I can tell you. They let me fly the helicopter to the parking place on top of the Royal London Hospital. I would fly to work and I would land the helicopter and I’d get out and I’d unzip my flight suit. I’d pick up my bag and I’d have my business suit underneath and I just catch the elevator down, hail a taxi, and I go off to work. That was my James Bond and I would do that. I’d do that a few times a year actually. It was pretty cool just flying over London looking at all these people underneath thinking that at that moment, I was Mr. J. Bond.
On your LinkedIn profile, there’s a photo of you with some relatively famous people who happen to reside in I believe it’s Buckingham Palace. Can you tell us how that happened?
We were closing one of the other projects that I was involved with. It was a sustainability campaign so that was going back a few years, not too long ago though, I think post-2008. In Europe, we were quite ahead of the US in terms of sustainability in carbon footprinting and the importance for companies to be able to demonstrate environmental credentials. One of the companies I set up, which is still running today which is called Clearway, was a consultancy that worked with companies to help them reduce their carbon footprint and improve their sustainability. One of the projects that we work very closely with was The Prince’s Trust. The Prince’s Trust was really very much at the forefront of running programs and educating companies. The picture there was we’d put together a program for schools, which was called Eco-Schools. The particular program was designed to try and get kids at a very early age to understand the importance of energy usage and sustainability and how the world doesn’t have infinite resources. That was something that was very close to the Prince’s heart and his charity. The picture there was where we were working very closely with the The Prince’s Trust at that point trying to roll this out to as many schools in the UK as we could.
We fast forward to your latest venture and what’s interesting about that story you told, Matthew, in your youth saying, “I don’t want to just execute something. I want to create it.” You have the same mindset around cryptocurrency. You don’t want to just invest in one, you want to start your own token. Tell us how that came about?
It’s a case of faint signals from the future having seen what happened with the internet back in the late ‘90s. Once or twice, there’s normally once every ten years or so, if you’ve got your feelers up and you’re listening out for these things, then every now and then, you pick up these signals where, “These sounds and feels like the thing that we had ten or twenty years ago.” The internet at that stage had its fair share of naysayers and the people on the sidelines. The guys that got in the early stages and understood the potential with the guys that actually really benefited. Having followed Bitcoin not for too long, probably for less than a year, had people talking about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it didn’t really resonate. There was a moment when I thought, “There’s something here.” Then you see the price of Bitcoin going through the roof and you think, “I don’t actually want to be involved as a secondary player here because I have no control over this. I’m purely a passenger and completely at the disposal and at the hands of the market.”
That ride is very choppy and very volatile and it’s not enjoyable at all. To all of you investors in Bitcoin and all of the other coins out there, I know what it’s like because every morning you probably wake up and the first thing you do is you look at the price of your Bitcoin or your Ethereum or Litecoin or whatever the coins are. If it’s gone up, you have a great day. If it’s gone down, you start your day with the equivalent of a cold cup of coffee.
It’s so funny you say that because I talk about helping people get off the self-esteem roller coaster really feeling good about themselves if their numbers and their sales are up, and bad about themselves if their numbers are down. We can do the same thing with our investments and you figured out a solution to that.
The real point is how do you build something where you’re in control of it? Where you are able to shape and define the policy rather than having to react to it. What I’ve figured out over the years is that always, the answer that you want is staring you in the face. You’re just trying to look beyond it. You’re trying to look outside of it. Actually, it’s there. It’s a combination of your experience and where you are right now. That’s what you should try and leverage. Having spent a bit of time trying to get out of my own way and figure out what was actually in front of me.
Cryptocurrency Tokens: It’s a combination of your experience and where you are right now. That’s what you should try and leverage.
If you look at the components of the businesses that I’m in, real estate crowdfunding and just real estate generally, technology and then you overlay that with this cryptocurrency idea where you’ve got bits and bytes flying around the world without the normal roadblocks that you have with normal money, the solution was really to say, “How do you solve one of the big problems?” On the basis that if you wake up in the morning thinking that your Bitcoin price could have gone through the floor but thank God it hasn’t, that means it’s an inherently volatile currency. Is there a place for something that combines the benefits of cryptocurrencies, which is all this flexibility and the ability to move money around the world in the blink of an eye and something solid like real estate, which is really the mainstay of any portfolio? Real estate is there. They’re not making it anymore. We all know that real estate is a great investment. Really the a-ha moment was how do we take something solid like real estate which is predictable, which always outperforms inflation? How do we make it accessible to people by bolting on this really cool cryptocurrency technology? First of all, we don’t want a cryptocurrency that’s bouncing up and down all over the place in terms of prices. We want something that’s predictable.
There are major problems within the US residential housing market that need fixing. They need fixing by people saying, “You shouldn’t be borrowing so much money. There should be other ways to help you fund your house.” At the moment, the only way you can buy a house is by borrowing a ton of money. You don’t actually buy a house, you finance your house. Is there a way where you can get other people to come in and maybe buy a little bit of your house with you so that your debt isn’t so massive? There are ways of doing that but the problem is, people don’t really want to invest in that because you’re locked in for a long period of time and it doesn’t throw off any cashflow. There’s all these problems floating around and if you wrap the umbrella of this cryptocurrency over the top of that, suddenly it starts solving these problems one by one.
From a volatility perspective, suddenly if you add real estate as your underlying asset, it smooths it all off because real estate doesn’t bounce up and down in price. It moves really slowly. If you can tie your currency to that and the currency comes down and doesn’t bounce all over the place and it becomes much more predictable. The thing about the currency is it creates liquidity. If you can buy and sell these tokens and if these tokens represent this big piece of real estate then theoretically, you can chop up a big piece of real estate into loads of tiny little pieces and you can sell those to people by way of tokens. The people that buy the tokens can then sell those tokens to somebody else. Those tokens move around like atoms. When they’ve got this big solid object underneath, it stays there. These tokens are whizzing around the top of it like atoms and that creates liquidity.
What we’re now in the position of doing is creating money that we can spend with people who can’t afford to buy a house and we can say, “I know you can’t afford to buy a house because you can’t afford the down payment, but how about we come in and split the down payment with you?” Or let’s say, “You’ve got a ton of equity that you’ve built up in your house and you need to release some of that because you can’t pay your mortgage, how about we buy a piece of that equity from you? You don’t have to pay us back. You just sold us a piece of your house and then we can give you some money so that you can pay your college fees or you can help get yourself back on track.” That’s a very long answer to a very simple question.
[Tweet “Helping people get equity out of their home with no debt”]
Let’s break it down a little bit. You decided that instead of just investing in cryptocurrency, you wanted to start your own token because it’s too volatile and you get on that self-esteem rollercoaster based on how something is performing and you have no say in it. That’s the first problem you’re solving is realizing there’s a lot of people that need to find a place to put their tokens. Then you have a social impact element to it, which is there’s a lot of people who have some equity in their house that they want to take out and the only way to do that now is by taking on a higher mortgage amount.
Yes, exactly. This is the design. The design is to say, “Here’s the token which is much more predictable where you haven’t got to worry, you’re not going to have those sleepless nights because it’s not going to bounce up and down anything like the other cryptocurrencies.” The second thing is really interesting because I think something like 70% of people who rent homes in the US would prefer to buy their house but they can’t because they can’t afford the down payment.
The 20%.
I think it’s less than that. 20% is the optimal but even if it’s 5% or 10%, because of all the issues we had back in ’07 and ‘08, the banks are now much more stringent about how much money they lend and who they lend it to. Add it to the fact that if you look at the amount of money that the average person has by way of savings in their bank account, I can’t remember what the exact statistics are, but it’s a few hundred dollars. If something goes wrong with your washing machine, basically you’re screwed because most people don’t have enough spare cash for something like that to happen. To actually find people who are trying to get their foot on the property ladder and to ask them to suddenly come up with this big down payment, they’ve got to go and max out their credit cards, phone up their friends and family and beg, scrape, and put together this deposit. That’s why most people are renting houses. That’s why the cost of rentals is going up disproportionately to inflation and to the all other indicates because there’s so much demand for rentals because people can’t afford to buy a house. We solve that problem by saying, “We will help you with the down payment.”
Cryptocurrency Tokens: Banks are now much more stringent about how much money they lend and who they lend it to.
The other problem is, “What about people that are sitting on houses that they’ve had for a long time that have gone up in value but they’ve fallen on hard times or their jobs aren’t paying as much as they used to and the price of living has gone up?” It’s crazy because they’re sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars of value that they can’t get a hold of because the banks will turn them down if they try and get a home equity line of credit. They are stuck there with all this value, all this money that’s basically nailed behind the walls that they can’t get access to. What we say is, “We want a piece of your house because that’s really valuable to us a real estate asset. Sell us that piece of your house, just a percentage of your equity and we’ll have that and we’ll pay for that.” It creates this liquidity. It puts money back into people’s pockets that the banks are unable to do.
Still have some appreciation but you know it’s never going to go down to zero because it’s backed by some actual residential real estate. The other thing that’s interesting is there’s probably a lot of people sitting on the sidelines going, “I’d love to be part of this cryptocurrency world but it’s too scary for me because it’s so volatile. I could buy a token that’s backed by real estate. That makes sense. That will be a good entry for me,” yes?
You’re right. The other thing is I can buy one token or I can buy a half token. Let’s say for arguments sake the tokens start out at $10 each. I don’t have to buy a whole token. I could go on to an exchange and I can say, “I want to buy a $1 or $100 or $153.45 worth.” I’m not restricted by minimums. I can buy a little bit now, a little bit tomorrow, a little bit next month. I can sell a bit. The great thing about tokens because of the technology, you can actually chop these tokens up into tiny, tiny pieces. That makes it much more accessible for people that don’t want to have to spend $1,000. How much is a Google share or an Apple share these days? You’ve got to be pretty rich just to be able to buy one Bitcoin these days. People understand real estate so it’s the next step where we go, “I don’t really understand cryptocurrencies but I do understand real estate and I do understand that this token is backed by real estate so I’m a bit closer to understanding how this stuff works.”
Also, “I want to put some high investments in residential real estate without having to be a landlord. This gives me the benefits of owning a small percentage of a lot of people’s homes without having to deal with the upkeep because the owners keep the upkeep going.”
That’s a really critical point because the best people you want to look after a home are the owners. There’s a great expression, “If you’re renting properties, you’ve got tenants, toilets and trash.” Those are the three things that any landlord hates. Getting call at 3:00 on a Sunday morning saying that the toilet is blocked so you’ve got to do something about it. If you will own a piece of someone else’s house and you own it in true partnership with them so that if they make money, you make money. If they lose money, you lose money. If you are there as partners, they’re going to look after the house. They’re going to cut the grass. They’re going to paint the walls, they’re going to keep the place clean because they’re proud of the house and you’re a partner in that with them.
The great thing is that there are literally thousands of billions of dollars of people’s houses out there where they would be willing to share or to allow other people to be part owners in their house if they could keep their house or if they could stay as owners. It is a massively untapped asset class or a piece of a section in the real estate economy that people haven’t really been interested in because it doesn’t throw off any revenues. It’s not cashflowing. It doesn’t pay rent. If you buy a share in someone’s house, theoretically, you’ve got to wait until they sell the house before you make your money. That’s what put everyone off to date and that’s what changes with this whole concept of the token and putting the token on top of that.
The real reason to tokenize, if you will, the way people buy a home or get equity out of their home is fill in the blank. Right now, there are ways for people to get equity out of their house and there’s people sitting on the sidelines that can’t come up with a down payment. The real value of having a token do it would be, what would you say? It’s liquid?
What it does is it allows people on both sides of the fence to get involved. On one side of the fence, you’ve got the homeowner who wants to release some capital. Normally, that money would come from these big nasty hedge funds or banks or funds or pension funds and basically men in suits behind glass doors. There’s no opportunity for the man in the street to be able to participate. If I’ve got a bit of cash, I like the idea of investing in other people’s houses. I like the idea of being able to help them get on the housing ladder but that opportunity is not available to anybody right now because the money to do what equity sharing there is, is provided by banks and hedge funds. What the token does is it says, “We’re going to throw this whole thing out to the average investor.” We’re going to say, “Pretty much anybody now will be able to get on the housing ladder as long as they meet certain requirements.” Also, if you want to get involved in this and help people and potentially get a good return on your money, then what the token does is it democratizes that side of the equation as well.
[Tweet “Helping people with downpayment to buy a home”]
Also, isn’t it lowering transactional cost compared to traditional asset trading?
The great thing about the technology is that things happen in the blink of an eye now whereas beforehand, you have to go through brokers and dealers. There will be commissions here and commissions there and paperwork here and sign a form there. If we can do it through this technology lair, all those things happen instantly. The tracking and the securities that we’re putting in front of these properties create more security in these transactions. What we’re doing is we’re taking something that is not tradable, that is not liquid and then using technology, we are making it liquid. The result of that is the efficiency and the magic effectively that the technology brings. It unlocks that. Your question is about cost and efficiency. It will be fractions of a fraction in terms of the cost of doing that transaction compared to what it would be if we try to do it through the normal equity ways that we have today.
Matthew, I love what you are saying so much that I decided to join the team at this very moment. If anybody wants to track what’s going on with Quantm.One token, you can go to the website which is Quantm.One. Any other final thoughts on Quantm and the future of cryptocurrency in real estate?
Cryptocurrency Tokens: In the future, everything we do will have a value and we’ll be able to translate that value into something that we can spend.
As more and more people understand cryptocurrencies, the thing that we’re not really tapping into is just the amazing scale of things that cryptocurrencies can get involved with. My prediction for the near future is that everything we do will have a value and we’ll be able to translate that value into something that we can spend. Whether it’s intellectual property or whether it’s physical activity or skills or the ability to communicate, those skills of cryptocurrencies and tokens and technology, will be able to have a value around those things. That means that people that have these amazing skills that haven’t been able to turn this into capital because capital law, normal money is just a little bit old fashioned, that will be released. We’ll see whole new economies and whole new ways of doing things will also be springing out of this ability to tokenize activities and intellectual property and value.
It’s certainly an exciting time to be a part of all of this. Thank you for being a guest on the show.
John, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
Links Mentioned
- Hooked on Startups
- Quantm.One
- Virgin
- Crowdventure
- Richard Branson
- Virgin Helicopters
- Matthew’s LinkedIn profile
- Clearway
- The Prince’s Trust
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Turn Your Business Into A Brand and Define Your Business Brand with Greg Logan
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
A product or a service becomes a powerful tool to a client when they can clearly see the good it can do for them and their business. Entrepreneurs tend to tell clients what they think and tell these clients what they want. Greg Logan turns this around and tells investors to be good listeners for their clients. To define your business brand helps once this is established because it will give the client a clear idea of the service and experience they can get. Learn more of Greg’s genius way of copywriting a business model and turning it into a valuable brand.
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Our guest is Greg Logan, the Founder of TheDefinery.biz which is a consulting firm that helps businesses of any size become brands. He has an amazing ability to hone in on what your pitch should be, what your brand should be and he gives examples of what it looks like of what he does when you look at Apple. He even coaches me on how to hone in my own particular pitch. He has so much experience from working literally around the world as a creative director on big brands. He quotes Leo Burnett who he worked for, one of the big agencies, and he says, “Don’t tell me how good you make it. Tell me how good it makes me when I use it.” He said, “The key to winning pitches is to become a good listener.” Find out how he does that and more. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Turn Your Business Into A Brand and Define Your Business Brand with Greg Logan
Our guest is Greg Logan. Greg started as a copywriter at Leo Burnett at the age of nineteen. He worked for seventeen years for Leo Burnett from Sydney to Milan where he was a creative director at a young age of 25. Then he started and sold his own agency, McMann & Tate. That’s the one Darrin Stephens used to work for, for those of you who are big Bewitched fans like I am. He has literally created some of the most award-winning and popular advertising over the last twenty years, such as United Airlines, Qantas, Kellogg’s, Fiat, Procter & Gamble. It just goes on and on. He’s been the executive creative director of large branding agencies and he also writes reality TV shows. He would be one of the few people in the world to win these awards across advertising, film and TV. It’s like an actor winning the Emmy, the Oscar and the Tony Award. He’s an Australian. Now, he lives in LA. I’ve heard him speak. I couldn’t wait to get him on the show. He now has an agency consulting firm called The Definery which helps small and medium businesses become the all-important brands. Greg, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John.
It’s always so wonderful for me when I actually get to hear someone like you tell their story and then bring that incredible career and insights to The Successful Pitch. One of the stories I always love to ask people is, what’s your story of origin? I just started to give people the sense of it. At a very young age, you were working for one of the big ad agencies in the world. Paint us a picture of that. Were you inspired by Bewitched?
At the age of ten, I wanted to get into advertising because of Darrin Stephens. Up until the age of ten, I wanted to be an actor. My mom’s twin brother was an actor. I was pretty good at it. It was in my DNA. Every year at the school play, I was cast as the lead. Then when I was ten I said to mom, “Why does Uncle Peter give us really cheap Christmas presents?” She said, “Actors don’t make very much money.” I was like, “Are you serious?” That was the end of that career at the age of ten. I never thought about it again. I used to love Bewitched and I loved D’s office. I loved the briefs he got. I loved his sloppy desk where he had created the stuff. I loved how he presented and pitched. I said, “What does he do?” She said, “He’s a creative in advertising.” I said, “Does he make a lot of money?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “That is what I want to do.” I never changed from then all through high school. When people leave high school, they’re wondering, “What am I going to do with my life?” I already knew. I left school. The next year, I was working at Leo Burnett and I was working on huge jobs. It was so clear. Darrin Stephens plays a big role in my life. After seventeen years at Leo Burnett, I left and started my own agency. I said to myself, “If ever I have my own agency, I’m going to call it McMann & Tate.” I did.
Two questions that beg, the first one is, do you now give good Christmas presents to your relatives?
Yes, I do. Uncle Peter still gives us really cheap Christmas presents.
The second question is, having worked in advertising myself and selling advertising for Condé Nast for a number of years, I’m very well aware of Leo Burnett. I come from Chicago and that’s a big office for them. They have a reputation for having really fresh, shiny red apples in the lobby. That’s their branding. Tell us the story behind that.
It’s actually a really beautiful story and very few people know it, even people who work at Leo Burnett. Leo Burnett spends millions of dollars not only putting the apples in, but there are some countries that they don’t grow apples and they even import them from countries that do so that every office in the world has a bowl of fresh apples in reception. In the Sydney office, I know the couriers used to love coming here and they would always take an apple. The reason it exists is Leo Burnett started his advertising agency straight after The Depression and people said to him, “Are you crazy? No one wants advertising. No one has any money. Very soon, you’re going to be standing on this corner selling apples.” Leo put a bowl of apples in reception to remind him and also all his staff what they could be doing if they weren’t doing what they loved.
Define Your Business Brand: If you reach for the stars, you may not grab one but you won’t come up with a lump of mud either.
It was just one of those things that was a gentle reminder of, “We’ve got to work harder and we have to do the right thing.” If anyone just Googles Leo Burnett quotes, you’ll see he was quite a wise man and a good man. He was a bit of a grumpy old thing too. He was not dissimilar to Winston Churchill not only in his eloquence, in his quotes, but also in his look and manner as well. Outside my office was a quote that said, “If you reach for the stars, you may not grab one but you won’t come up with a lump of mud either.” It’s just such a simple thing. It’s not saying, “You may not grab one. We may not always get to where we want, but actually if you try and achieve it and you try and reach for it, you’re going to do a hell a lot better than if you don’t.” He had so many incredible quotes. Just that apples at the reception is a beautiful statement.
For me, it’s not only a gentle reminder to do what you love but also to be grateful that you get to do what you love. That’s my big takeaway. That’s what really resonates with me. One of the other quotes from Leo Burnett that you showed in your wonderful keynote was, “Don’t tell me how good you make it. Tell me how good it makes me when I use it.” Tell us how we can incorporate that mindset into our marketing messages when we’re trying to get people to join our team or get people to become clients.
I think it’s tapped into something I really, really believed in and something that he, from his grave, taught me. We have this desire as humans to tell people what we think and tell people what we want. In advertising is, “Isn’t my product great? Look what it does.” Actually, a person wants to feel better. A person wants to look sexier. They want to look trimmer. They want to have healthier hair. They want to be smarter. If you start feeding the audience with how good they could be with the product, it’s far more powerful. He also said another quote which was, “If you can’t turn yourself into a consumer, you probably shouldn’t be in this business.”
[Tweet “Don’t tell me how good you make it. Tell me how good it makes me when I use it.”]
That’s just one of my favorite things ever that I talk about all the time on The Successful Pitch, which is you must show empathy. Whether you’re giving a keynote talk, you have to show the audience that you have been in their shoes. Whether you’re getting someone to potentially hire you to be a client, you have to give them examples of you understand where they are and where they want to get to and possibly you’ve helped other people just like them. It all starts with the empathy factor that builds your likeability.
You have to put yourself in their shoes. It is something that people never, ever do and it’s so simple. Before anything, not just a pitch, anytime you send an email to someone, if you’re having a fight with your partner, if you’re having a disagreement with your neighbor or the work they’re doing in their yard, rather than just going out and blurting out what you want and what’s in your head, before you do you go, “What’s going on in their mind? I’m going to put myself in their shoes. What are they thinking?” Then you can tailor what you have to say that’s going to address what they want, what they want to hear. If you go back to that quote that Leo said, “If you can’t turn yourself into a consumer, you probably shouldn’t be in this business,” I take that a step further and also go, “If you can’t turn yourself into a client, you probably won’t be successful in this business.” I have a pretty good strike rate in pitches. People think, “It’s because you’re such a good presenter.” Those things help. It’s because I’m a good listener that is why I win pitches. It’s such a simple thing that people don’t do. When we’re asked to pitch that’s loaded with all this other stuff of, “I’m giving a presentation and someone wants to know what I have to offer and what I’m going to bring to the table.” People take that of, “How am I going to impress them? I’m going to create this and that.” Then you go off in tangents and go, “This is a really good idea. They’ll love this.” It’s actually you love that. You could be lucky and you blow them away, but it’s not probably what they’ve asked for.
[Tweet “Win More Pitches By Becoming A Great Listener”]
Your consulting agency is called Definery. One of my favorite things to do as part of the story of origin when I’m working with clients is how did you come up with that name? What does it mean? How does it define what you do?
I’m helping small to medium businesses become brands. That’s what I’m doing with The Definery. I’m taking everything that I’ve learnt from helping really big, rich companies get richer and I’m distilling it down to the most important stuff. I used to have big arguments not only with my advertising agency but after advertising, I worked for some huge branding agencies as well. I used to say, “We are spending all this time and effort on all this stuff.” Everyone out there would have heard about big hairy audacious goals and mission statements and purpose and goals and personality and values and SWOT analysis and this and that. What happens is you deliver this book of, “Here’s your brand,” and it’s so long and it’s so complicated that you hand it down to your agencies and people in your company and no one can actually use it because it’s just too much stuff. It becomes blah, blah, blah. I took everything that I knew and I just took the stuff that really made a difference. What The Definery does is it starts with your business definition.
What I do is I start with a business definition. Most agencies won’t do that. They’ll just hear what the business is and then tell them what the brand is off that. Whereas I’d rather start with, “Why are you in business that’s going to make money? What is the most potent thing about your business and why it’s going to succeed?” What I do is I’ll turn it into something in a way that the business has never heard about it before. I always use an example that I did for Apple. They didn’t pay me. This is me just in myself. If I look at Apple I go, “Their business idea is computers for people who don’t like computers.” You’ll never see that written anywhere of what Apple is. It will be a very rational statement about technology. You look at that and you go, “That’s going to make money. That’s why they’re successful.” Off that business definition you go, “What is the human benefit of that? What is the consumer going to experience?” For Apple, that would be revolution. Everything that they do and you feel is revolutionary from the advertising to the design of the products, to the store design and the experience. We define a brand idea then off that, everything a brand does, whether it’s the website or your logo or your name, comes from those two things.
Define Your Business Brand: Start with a business definition.
The other thing I’ve started to do is a verbal definition because more and more, people need to quickly define and tell people what their business or their idea or their startup or whatever it is, is. I said, “I listen very well.” The other difference with The Definery is instead of me going away and coming back a month later and saying, “This is what I think,” I create these things in the room with the people who run and own the business. All I do is I listen to them and I pull out and I basically copywrite what their business is, but in the best way they’ve ever heard it.
I love that Apple example because if you look back at the history of their advertising, it started off with a Super Bowl commercial about going up against IBM. Then it evolved into the Think Different campaign. It’s still about revolutionary, not going with the norm and there are other people who are iconic. If you see yourself as a Picasso kind of person, reinventing and disrupting things, then this is the computer brand for you. I think you’ve carried that through really well. I’ve never seen anybody else do it. I think for people listening, they really can have some great takeaways here going, “What is my business definition? How do I define my brand?” It’s so important to have a good brand because that defines your culture. Don’t you think, Greg?
Yeah. The brand ideas I come up with businesses, it’s amazing how many owners say, “I’m going to employ people based on that brand idea.” I want them to embody our brand. It’s because the brand idea isn’t something that I’ve just made up. It is the human benefit of what their business is all about. That’s what I do is I inextricably link the business and what’s great about the business to why consumers are going to fall in love with that business and come back again and again and again.
You’re someone who I know can think on their feet and be creative. I’ve seen you do it. Do you want to play a little bit and just give people an example of me using these three models and I’ll say something, then you can tweak it and say, “See how much better that is?” I think it’s one thing if you’re looking at Apple and you’re like, “I’m not Apple.” You really specialize in small and medium businesses even if it’s just a solopreneur or whatever it is. Business definition for me is, “I’m The Pitch Whisperer and I help people go from invisible to irresistible.” That brand definition for me is forget selling and tell stories instead. That separates you from everybody else out there trying to push their message in because when you become a storyteller, you pull them in as opposed to pushing. Then the brand expression of that is once you can tell great stories, Plato said, “Storytellers rule the world,” then that allows you to take that skill and apply it to everything else that you’re doing in your life to pitch to get people join your team and get new clients and anything else you want to do in your life.
Your line, “from invisible to irresistible” is really powerful. I think that’s your business idea. You’re a Pitch Whisperer, you would say, “My business is I turn the invisible into the irresistible. That’s what I do.” Then your brand idea is, what is the human benefit of being irresistible? That acquire confidence, its success, people trust you, it’s magnetic. I think your brand idea is magnetic because you are going to draw people to your clients. What you instill in them just makes them magnetic. Everything you then do with your brand would embody that magnetism. You’re a pretty easy one. You know this stuff better than most. As a brand the idea is, “I turn people from invisible to irresistible.” If someone sees that, it’s like, “That’s going to be successful. Give me some of that.” The only tweak I would make is just make your brand idea magnetic.
[Tweet “What is the human benefit of your brand’s promise?”]
That’s the perfect word and that’s the whole concept. A magnet pulls people in. That’s brilliant. Not everybody can do that. We hadn’t rehearsed this. That’s what I love is because now people can really see if you could do that for me and not just a theoretical Apple then the contrast is no matter where you are, and even with someone who’s got some thought put into it, you take something good and make it great, Greg. That’s what you do. That’s why I wanted to have you on the show to really show that skill off because that’s your genius. I don’t use that word lightly but it really is. It’s your gift. It’s your skill. It’s been honed over years and it’s just a huge gift to everyone that gets to work with you.
It has been fine-tuned over the years. When you work in advertising, your degree of difficulty is so high. In 30 seconds or a billboard, you have so many mandatories that the client wants you to do and sometimes they’re budgetary and sometimes it’s proof points of the product. You have to then make it sing and make people actually want it and get excited about it. You then have to also create this with all the other jobs you’re doing in a short time as well. Your brain gets problem-solving fit. The thing that has been the biggest factor in success in my career is I listen. The amount of pitches I’ve won and afterward it’s always great to ask, “Why did we win the business?” The thing I’ve heard again and again is, “You really listened to us.”
That’s the number one reason why clients lose clients too. I’ve worked with a lot of people helping them win back a client they lost. The number one reason isn’t the competition, it isn’t the pricing. It’s, “You weren’t listening to me. I told you I needed this, you gave me that. I told you I was worried about this deadline not being met. You said, “Don’t worry.” The deadline didn’t get met. Whatever it is, you didn’t listen.” Behind that is sometimes they won’t come out and say, “You’ve got the business because you listened.” They might say, “You’ve got the business because we felt like you’ve got us, you understand us,” which is just another way of saying, “You listened really well.” I just wanted to point that out to everybody is it may not come in that exact wording but it comes in other ways, so recognize it when you hear it in terms of, “You understood us or you get us.” This applies to dating too, “You get me.” That’s everything. You’ve worked on both United and Qantas. I’m fascinated by that because most agencies only have exclusivity within an industry like that. Tell us a little bit about the differences between those two brands when you were working on them.
Actually, that was just a couple I’ve put in my bio. I’ve actually worked on Cathay Pacific, United Airlines, Qantas and Virgin.
I’m a big airplane buff. I used to work for TWA when it was around. I’ve worked with Gensler on helping them with their pitches to build airports, so this is going to be really interesting to me and hopefully everyone else. You’re starting off with what can be perceived as a commodity. You buy your ticket. Is it only based on price? They each have different positions of, “Fly the friendly skies,” or whatever the tagline is. How do you help different airlines separate themselves in a sea of what could be perceived as, “I’m just going to buy the cheapest ticket?” Is there really a difference?
Define Your Business Brand: Tone of voice is the unique way a brand writes and speaks.
United was the trickiest to work for because they really see themselves as the big main brand and I don’t think they have a lot of personality. Inherently in their brand is very little personality. When trouble happens like we saw recently, consumers really give them backlash because all they have to talk about is a big company. I’m not even saying brand. It’s a big company that treats me like a commodity. Whereas with Qantas, I’ve worked very closely with Qantas on their brand and I created their tone of voice. For people who don’t know what that is, it’s the unique way a brand writes and speaks. The fact that Qantas is even interested in doing that says a lot about them. They want to talk to people from their own unique point of view. Just like I do with The Definery in defining what a business is about, I do the same thing with tone of voice. Instead of lots of rules and regulations in a big bible that no one does is I take the personality traits of a brand, in this case an airline, and I translate that into ways that people would speak. Then I go, “If someone spoke like this, this would be the essence of them.” For instance, for a big online betting company, it was cheeky and whatever. It was, “We speak with a wink.” You know exactly how that speaks. With Qantas it was, “When we speak, it feels like home.” For people who fly Qantas, Qantas is so inextricably linked to the Australian spirit and psyche. Wherever you are in the world, you step on that plane and there is an attitude that is so Australian and you get on and you go, “That feels like home.”
I would say even more so than British Airways does for London. I know I’m on a British flight but it doesn’t have the same for me. This is strictly my opinion.
They’ve become a bit United, whereas Qantas could easily do that. Qantas is the biggest Australian airline and they could very much go, “We’re number one.” British Airways has. In fact, you get on a Virgin and you feel more like Britain than on British Airways because they express their personality. I think with those airlines like Qantas and Virgin, they play a lot of importance on expressing their unique personality. It draws people in and makes people feel good about it, whereas United and BA do not.
It’s interesting you said you worked on Cathay Pacific and I imagine their competitors would be Japan Airlines and Singapore Airlines which, for me really you feel like you’re in the country already no matter where you get on the plane. Singapore in particular is really known for that incredible service. How does Cathay Pacific, since it’s not one specific country, how did you help them?
Cathay is interesting. If you’re a plane buff, you would know that airlines really embody the culture of the place they’re from. Cathay is from Hong Kong and Hong Kong is really confused about what it is because it’s Chinese, but they don’t want to be Chinese. They’re torn between being English and Chinese. I think with Cathay, there is that little confusion of, “Who we are.” That said, the combination of the British and the Chinese, you have a very efficient airline. It always runs on time. The planes are good. The entertainment is good. It’s always in the top ten airlines in the world. You just don’t understand their personality as well as Singapore, and that’s because I think the people themselves in Hong Kong are confused.
I knew this would be interesting because you really see each thing has its own brand and you’re the expert at helping people figure out the tone of voice and to get that emotional connection at the end of the day. That’s really what it’s about.
Consumers never see the stuff I’ve been talking to you about, but they feel it. That’s what a brand idea is all about.
Nobody does it better than you, Greg. I really mean that. I’ve been in advertising myself for over twenty years and seen a lot of people doing it. I think anybody who gets to work with you is really fortunate. Do you have a Twitter handle you want people to follow you on?
No. My life is too busy to get into that. My website is TheDefinery.biz or if you want to send me an email, [email protected]. I really love helping people. I loved all my time in advertising, working for huge brands but after a while, the satisfaction of just helping rich companies get richer gets a little shallow. When I’m working directly with people and even just how excited you got about magnetic, that happens every time when I tell someone what their business idea is. Some people cry. I had a guy here and I told him what his business was even though he’s been involved with it for many years. I said, “This is why your business is great.” I told him his business idea and he started crying because they inherently know that there’s something great about what they’re doing, but they’re unable to tell people in the most potent way. That’s what I’m able to do and I really love doing it.
Thank you so much for being a guest. I thoroughly enjoyed all of it from spontaneous branding to seeing what Apple is doing right so that we can incorporate those skills to your expertise in the differentiation. If you want to win more pitches no matter what it is you’re pitching, become a better listener and show some empathy. Thanks so much, Greg.
Pleasure, John. Thank you.
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Get Your Sales To Soar By Accelerating The Buying Process with Dave Hubbard
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
For every company to able to raise revenue, there is a need for the sales process and marketing methods to be aligned. Accelerating sales to 30% annually is an easing thing to do for Marketing Outfield CEO Dave Hubbard because he has an engineering background combined with a sales personality. This allows him to get into the gritty parts of sales and marketing. Instead of focusing on the sales process, what’s important is getting the customers into the buying process quickly. By aligning to what customers are trying to do, the sales process becomes dynamic, effective and gets on the same page with the marketing. Learn more on how to turn a suspect to a qualified lead, into a forecast, into and opportunity and then close deals.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Dave Hubbard who is the CEO and Founder of Marketing Outfield. Dave is both someone who’s an engineer as well as a sales expert, which is very rare to find one person being able to do both. He wrote an article called CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth. Regardless if the company is a startup or a big company, there are five symptoms that help the CEO identify that their product team, their marketing team and sales team are not in-sync with the target customer. When the revenue generation team is not working well enough to work across different functions, then the CEO must get involved. They don’t have to be sales rock stars or even marketing gurus to make a massive impact. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Get Your Sales To Soar By Accelerating The Buying Process with Dave Hubbard
Our guest is David Hubbard who’s the CEO of Marketing Outfield which is a revenue acceleration expert. He has helped small and medium business sized companies accelerate their revenues by 25% to 50% annually. The way that Dave does this is by collaborating with business to business companies in the design and execution of their successful product launches. Also, he knows how to get you lead gens and how to execute on those leads. What I really love about Dave is his expertise in getting sales up and running. Dave, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. Pleasure to be here.
Before we get into all your expertise, can you share with us how did you get all these expertise? Did you always know you’re going to be a CEO or a marketing sales guru when you were right out of school? What gave you the experience to get this expertise?
Actually, I became a professional engineer in computer design and systems. I was responsible for a number of computer systems for power utility. I decided I wanted to get in the general management, so I jumped into sales. I was very fortunate to jump into a $16 billion company. They gave me some training to actually sell. It enabled me to become one of their top sales reps in the corporation. A few years later, I decided to go into field marketing. They came along to train me with classical marketing: the product, price, place, promotion. That enabled me to create some and new significant businesses for the company. I went from there being at the field and I moved up to the chain from the field to country level to division, corporate. I did it in a very unique way. I went from sales to marketing all the way along. Sales and marketing field, sales and marketing division, sales marketing corporate and ultimately becoming chief marketing officer at some companies, chief sales officer at others and at a couple of cases, chief revenue officer responsible for all the sales, marketing and product management. I feel strongly that that uniquely qualifies me to help companies better align their sales, marketing and product management to the opportunity and actually accelerate sales.
I’ll say it’s very unique. Back in the day, I sold mainframe computers, Control Data, Amdahl which Fujitsu owned, competing with IBM. It’s a rare bird. It’s like a unicorn in the startup world that has an engineering background and a sales personality. Usually, they’re two very different skill sets and you’ve been able to combine them both. Is that an accurate description of what you do and who you are?
It is. If it wasn’t for the training and support I received early on, that transition wouldn’t happen. You’re right. An engineer that sells is a little bit unique but with all the training and skills, it becomes possible.
Also, sometimes engineers just don’t want to do it. It’s a left brain thing. They want to be in their left brain analyzing, solving problems with design or engineering, whatever it is. Sales people for the most part are not really interested in the tech stuff, “Just tell me enough that I can sell the product but I don’t really want to understand all the nitty-gritty stuff.” The fact that you can go into the nitty-gritty if need be, really gives you a stronger level of confidence and then you’re able to show other people how to get there. Let’s talk about one of the things that is really so important here which is the CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth that you’ve written about. There are really five barriers to getting your sales up. What’s the first one?
The first barrier has to do with what’s called the sales process. A sales process is nothing more than the things that a salesperson must do to move a suspect into a qualified lead, from a qualified lead into a forecast opportunity, from an opportunity into an actual closed deal. The fortunate part is that a lot of companies don’t have a sales process. That is a big problem because a sales organization without a sales process is just a bunch of independent sellers. It’s not a sales force. They may have the sales process but then it’s rigid. In other words, a competitor does something with a compelling offer and it never gets in the sales process so the rest of the sales team doesn’t know about it. They all get surprised when it happens. The sales process has to be dynamic. If the sales process is not dynamic, it becomes outdated, ineffective and unused. Finally, the worst offender is the sales process should be about the salesperson trying to move the buyer through their purchasing process. It’s not about our sales process. It’s about the customer’s buying process. We want to move them through quickly and end up the winner. If we can do that correctly, and most companies do not, then having a right sales process can accelerate sales by 30% annually just that point alone.
[Tweet “How to go from suspect to customer?”]
The big takeaway here is, A) You need to have a sales process so the information gets shared across the entire team and not just scattered. B) Without this, then there’s no structure of moving someone on having a sense of what the next step is to move them as you called them suspects instead of prospects. I think that’s interesting all the way to them saying yes and really making sure that it’s on their timeframe and their criteria, not yours. Is that a pretty good summary?
Yes. It’s absolutely critical. Something like that wasn’t needed twenty years ago. Now that the buyers are self-educating online doing their own research, they’re making decisions without involving us. Therefore, we really have to make the extra effort to align to what they’re trying to do. If we do that, then we’ll become much more buyer-centric and miracles happen. We all of a sudden start talking about what the customer wants us to talk about. We, all of a sudden, start finding who is impacting that decision process and how we’re going to talk to him. We figure out how to get away from no decisions in half the sales because we’re gauged in the buyer’s process not, “An hour every day I did the sales presentation, I did the download, blah, blah, blah.”
It’s really finding out what’s important to them as opposed to just giving the standard presentation every time, right?
They don’t care about the product. They can find that online. What they want is a solution to their business problem.
Exactly. They will ignore us. They will avoid us. They will go through the whole process up to 70% all the way through their decision process without reaching out to us because we’re product pitching. They don’t care about the product. They can find that online. What they want is a solution to their business problem.
What’s the second barrier here as it relates to lead gens? I’m going to guess it has something to do with qualification and following up. Please tell us.
Lousy marketing leads. That’s always been the complaint between sales and marketing, “Lousy leads or they don’t follow up.” Now that you’ve got a self-educating buyer, the rules have changed. You’re going out looking for leads let’s say. 79% according to research of the leads that come from marketing will never buy. The 21% that will will do so eventually; maybe not this quarter, maybe not this week, eventually. The biggest problem is you can’t have a salesperson running around trying to qualify all these stuff instead of closing deals. When you look at the reasons for this, it’s not because marketing wants to do this. It’s because their strategy is outdated. Twenty years ago, in the old days, you didn’t have to worry about it. The customer would only find out what we told them. Now, they’re online. Marketing is still focused on just creating leads. They’re not focused on helping the sales organization convert and turn those suspects into customers. That’s what they have to do because the buyer is online all the time and they’re reading the competitor information, they’re making decisions so that both of them have to understand what’s going on. The key takeaway on that one is if you align the marketing and sales strategy so it’s throughout the entire buyer purchasing process, you’re going to deliver 38% more deals annually. It’s simple as that.
One of the things that I find really useful when we’re working with the marketing department or if you’re doing your own marketing is to really be clear on who you help and what problem you solve and in the marketing messaging and say, “Who this is for and here’s who this is not for,” so that that can really weed out some leads that aren’t qualified to buy or don’t need what you’re saying or don’t meet your minimum requirement. What are your thoughts on that?
That’s absolutely true. I’m going to talk about the impact of product to this whole process and the impact that marketing also has to be aligned to the entire buyer process to be educated to that. If they’re just doing leads, they have no visibility to what happens to the leads. It becomes magic. They have no possibility of knowing. I think that leads us straight into the third thing. It’s one of the reasons that marketing cannot demonstrate ROI. They cannot demonstrate the contribution to the business. The CEO is not interested in how many clicks and views and eyeballs they got. That didn’t wash it. Marketing can say what the cost to lead is but they can’t say what the cost of customer acquisition is. The reason for that is they can’t tell that a Twitter campaign drives more sales opportunities than an email campaign or a webinar or anything else. It comes back that they’re just doing branding lead generation. If they don’t engage with the whole buyer process, they can’t tell the impact of what they’re doing.
That’s so important what you just said there because if you’re pitching to an investor at any stage whether it’s the entry level or further down the road, one of the questions you’re going to get asked is, “What’s your projected cost to acquire a new customer?” If you’re further along and you’ve got revenue coming in, “What does it cost to acquire a customer and how can you reduce that?” Having that thought through in a way that makes a lot of sense because if they’re going to give you money to spend on marketing, they’re going to want to know how you do it. One of the mistakes people make when they pitch is saying, “If we only get 1% of all the people in China to buy this, we will be rich.”
They don’t go for that.
Do you have a story of how someone you’ve worked with has used your expertise to go from not really having an ROI to marketing to figuring out how to do it better?
I can give you the process. I can’t think of one right off the top of my head. Really it comes down to you have to take the marketing expense and tie it to not leads but how many sales opportunities did you increase? How many of those became sales forecast? How many of those became closed deals? How many of those became upsells? How many of those became cross-sells? How many customers do we retain? All of those points marketing can impact. They can impact with all the technology and approaches they have today. It’s all related to revenue. What’s exciting about that and where I have helped is sales and marketing are getting on the same page. You can get sales and marketing and say, “How do we move opportunities to forecast? Sales, what are you doing? Marketing, what are you doing? What can we do together?”
When the salespeople are talking to leads for marketing, do they ask them, “How did you hear about us? Where did you come from?” Sometimes the answers might be, “First, I saw a Twitter and then I opted in for something and then I got an email.” Then you start to realize, “It’s not just one thing that gets a good lead. It’s an accumulation of marketing efforts,” right?
It is. It’s technology that is available to marketers now that wasn’t twenty years ago. For what your example is called, it’s called attribution software. What it does is track a customer who could be anonymous when they go to the website. Track them and know exactly what they downloaded, what social campaigns they reacted to, what telephone campaigns. You can see the whole reaction. If you’re collaborating with sales, you share that. They’d say, “My customer has done A, B and C. I know they add up to a great qualified lead. I’m going to try to cold-call in there.” Let me give you some examples where this ROI comes in. The studies basically say if you go through this approach I’m talking about and execute it properly, you can deliver 27% faster profit growth. What caught my eye was this study. There was an interesting study of an industry. It showed that if you use the right mix of marketing programs, they increase revenue by 30% a year but get this, they decrease marketing expense by 50%. It comes back to marketing. If they don’t understand what’s working or why, they can’t fix it. Now, they have the technology to do that. They didn’t have before.
[Tweet “Getting the deal is never enough to keep a customer.”]
This whole concept of technology being used to retarget someone, they go to the website and they’re cookied and they’re tagged and they follow them when they go to other websites and they see an ad. That I know has shown great ROI for people who need some frequency. If you’re looking for a trip for example and you’re not ready to book yet but you keep seeing ads, so that when you are ready, you then book that hotel or what have you. Do you have any thoughts on the value marketing provides after someone is a customer? I think that other studies have shown that people tend to keep looking at ads of brands and products that they’re using to reinforce their buying decision so there’s no buyer’s remorse.
You’re absolutely in the right point. If you’re gauging online throughout the complete life cycle of the buyer, you know they’re going to go through that buyer remorse. You want to keep on feeding them messages whether it’s email, because you know who they are now, or online advertising to some degree. You want to actually be productive and try to upsell, cross-sell or get them into becoming an advocate for the company. In other words, it never stops. Just getting the deal is not enough. Sales can’t easily make that happen because sales is off to the next customer trying to bring him onboard. But marketing can because they have the technology. They just put it in there and keep the constant messaging going to those customers afterwards related to the product they bought. That’s powerful. It’s really important for startups particularly in the SaaS environment. Retention is critical. There’s so much more energy trying to get a new customer versus retaining what you have; so much better upselling a customer than trying to get a new one. Sales has not been equipped to do that very well because they’re always going after quota. Marketing can do a lot of fill in for that. All of the things that they used to get customers, all the technologies, all the campaigns are the same tools they can use to keep customers.
There’s so much more energy trying to get a new customer versus retaining what you have.
Barrier number four: Dealing with the product, go-to-market. Explain what that is please.
That one there is part of the biggest problem in companies and particularly in startups. If you have a product launch and sales don’t accelerate or every time you do new features and versions to release but you don’t see a balance in sales, it’s possibly and probably because they don’t have a good product market fit. They didn’t find out who the ideal customer profile is. That work is so critical when you develop a product to absolutely know who you’re targeting, who’s making the decision, what are their business issues and it goes on and on. If you do not do that work correctly, what happens is sales particularly in the startup, they’ll go out and they’ll find the early adopters. For them to accelerate sales, they’re going to find the sweet spot.
You can’t make all your predictions on the early adopters and think that there’s an unlimited number of them because there isn’t, right?
Right. If I was to talk to a CEO, I’d probably shake him and say, “You’ve got to get an experienced product manager involved earlier not later.” Doing this stuff, understanding product market fit, understanding the ICP, understanding product launch cross functionally, understanding go-to-market.
What’s ICP for those people who may not know?
That’s the Ideal Customer Profile. These things are not something you can think about in the weekend and go do. You’re betting the whole company as a startup that the product works. I’ll tell you from experience, it is much harder to find a market for an existing product than it is to design the product for the market correctly in the first place. I’ve seen companies go bust because they have this product but they don’t know where to sell anymore. The market they wanted to is not the right market.
Any example that comes to mind?
Not really except some of the startups I worked that was a problem. They had a product that worked well at the mid-sized side of companies, but it didn’t work well at the enterprise. The features were there. The problem is they didn’t have the robustness and reliability. At the enterprise level, for them that’s important. They don’t want to lose the job. For middle companies, they want to get the job done and they’re willing to take more risk. If you’re in the wrong market and you say, “I’m going to have a sales organization go after enterprise, and this is my product that was really made for the middle market,” you’re going to have a problem.
Keeping up with demand I think is also a big thing I see happening sometimes. If you don’t have the funding to make enough product or you don’t have the staffing to handle the results from a successful ad campaign, that can really be detrimental, right?
[Tweet “How to get you better leads?”]
It is. That comes back to really the four barriers we’ve talked about so far. If you look at moving the buyer through their process, that means you have a much more reliable forecast of what can happen. Marketing can tell you if they generate more leads from social how much revenue that could come out. They’ve tracked it by using attribution software and everything else. They know how many more opportunities could happen, with the right sales closes opportunities and actually have a reasonable forecast of what could happen. Right now, without that, you’re basically guessing.
That brings us to the fifth barrier, which is dealing with leveraging technology.
This one here, this is where the CEOs really got to jump up and get involved. Today, there is over 5,000 marketing technology vendors. That’s not counting the 600 or so advertising technology and the hundreds of sales technology. We have so much technology available to automate everything and anything. The investments on CRM, Customer Relationship Management, marketing automation, the C-level is not seeing the revenue they had hoped to see. There are two basic problems there. One is we’re still automating the outdated broken process that we used to use twenty years ago. That’s not a good thing because what you do is you just get lousy leads at scale because you’ve got outdated process. The second thing is these systems aren’t well-integrated. They suffer. When a salesperson goes to CRM, they see one thing. When the marketing person goes to their platform, they see something else. They’re not looking at the same thing. That makes it hard to align their efforts.
It’s like looking at the elephant, someone is looking at the tail and someone is looking at the trunk and saying, “We’re looking at completely different things.”
Aligning cross-functional processes is very difficult to do. It’s worth 13% faster growth. It’s a lot easier in a smaller company to fix all those stuff than a bigger company that’s got a lot of established bureaucracy per se. The CEO has to get on top of it. He cannot delegate technology, strategy. What he or she should be saying is, “I want a single revenue generation system. I want you to build me a single revenue system so that if we change strategies, I can see what the output is.” Sales looks at it and sees the same thing. Marketing looks at, sees the same thing as product management looks at and the same thing with the C-level.
If the staff doesn’t know how to do that, they can engage you to help them do that. Is that right?
Yeah. It really is straightforward. You really just have to make the commitment that says the CRM becomes a base unit. Everything revolves around it, every tool and you have one view. The marketing people look at the same window with the sales people. They may be looking at different things but they sustain information so that everybody is still on the same page. When it comes to trying to align sales and marketing and product management, it really comes down to give them the same page. Give them the same problem that everybody can work on. You’re looking to have collaboration. All of these people are smart. Sales understand sales they’ve been trained. Very few of them have ever been a marketing specialist especially in the data driven side. Marketers, very few have been in professional sales. They don’t understand. You get two of them in a room, you say, “Let’s communicate.” It’s like having two groups with different languages. They all agreed they want revenue. They all agreed they want customers. Now what?
If I get them focusing on a customer and moving the customer from where we found them to where we want to be, amazing things happen.
You really have to focus them on a common thing. What I found in my experience and in the last twenty years, if I get them focusing on a customer and moving the customer from where we found them to where we want to be, amazing things happen. They really do. You can get them to collaborate. It’s not marketing blaming sales or vice versa. They both have skill sets and they’re both trying to do the same job. I’ve seen it happen where sales and marketing just feel like one team. I see that as a future that has to be done. If we don’t get there, you can’t accelerate sales. You can’t accelerate revenue when you’ve got marketing going one direction, sales going in another. They’re doing their best but they’re not growing in the same direction.
What do you think is the most important thing a CEO can do to accelerate sales? Is it what you just described or is it something more with alignment?
It’s all about alignment. I don’t try to do alignment for enterprises. It’s just too difficult. Alignment is really taking departments, channels and trying to get them aligned. In an enterprise, there are hundreds of channels and departments to align. In a startup, you start out the right way. You get sales marketing and product management on the same page on the get-go. You give them your expectations of what you want to see. You allow them to take the tools and make it happen. The key thing for a CEO is make sure your revenue team is a team from the get-go. Don’t assume just because they get-together in a room, they’re on the same page. You have to make sure that every single person in the company, in the startup understands the buyer journey; what problems they have, how they make decisions, including customer service or customer success as it’s called these days, including financial. Everybody should understand how they’re interacting with a customer. Who else in the company may be interacting at the same point? It helps them understand better.
Dave, how can people work with you and your company Marketing Outfield to help them do all these things or even the services you offer include helping them as a chief financial or revenue officer? What’s the best way for people to decide whether they need you or not?
There are two primary ways. One way is if they’re not getting accelerated sales, I’ll come in and identify the two or three things that can make an impact over the next year that we should fix and collaborate with the existing organization, develop the right strategies and execute them. We take it from soup to nuts to make sure it works. That’s a typical consulting engagement. The one I prefer, the one I recommend and I’m moving more towards is what’s called a fractional chief revenue officer. In other words, you’re getting somebody with the experience that I have in sales, marketing, product management and you bring them in five or ten days a month, not for the full twenty days so you’re paying less, to guide the existing staff with the right strategies or right techniques to deliver acceleration. What it does is when I’d leave whether it’s a year or two years or six months, those people are better equipped and that leadership is better enabled to understand how the revenue engine is working.
You remind me of what a Sherpa does when people are climbing Mount Everest or any of the other big mountains. If you want to get up there faster, bring Dave in.
When I drive consultants in, when I was running companies and a CEO, etc. I wanted them to leave my staff smarter. I wanted them to leave me smarter. They’re bringing an outside perspective, something that when you’re trying to get your company going, you get blinders on unfortunately, and we all do. We’re just trying to execute the plan. Somebody coming in can add so much value. You really want them leaving the company better off, not like the traditional Big League management consultants who come in as a team and leave a PowerPoint behind and say, “Go ahead, do this and you’ll be fine.” It doesn’t execute in, the organization doesn’t get smarter. You’re not really doing the most value you can by getting involved.
I highly encourage people to follow you on Twitter. There are 30,000 people doing it already. You really are constantly giving great information and best practices for getting your sales to take off. It’s @MOutfield. Dave Hubbard on LinkedIn, you can follow him there. Go to the website, MarketingOutfield.com to see how to become more profitable and get those sales up. Dave, thank you so much for being on the show.
It was a pleasure. I hope those listening pick up just one idea that moves them forward in sales acceleration. I think we did a great job if they can just do that.
You did more than one. Thanks again, Dave.
Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned
- Marketing Outfield
- CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth
- @MOutfield Twitter
- Dave Hubbard LinkedIn
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