Grace Urwin (01:01)

So yeah, we used to have like website development up there, some sales people within. Eventually it just made sense for everyone to be in one office because we would come back and forth so often. So yeah, that's really what we've been mainly doing now. How often do you guys work remote? Tuesdays and Fridays? Tuesdays and Fridays, yeah. But for me and Andrew, it really depends like, because Andrew helps me so much with the podcast and other things. Sometimes me and him are coming in on those days. Usually I'm always coming in on those days actually.

But I like to I am not a big work from home. I think I told you I think I told you that when we met maybe But I am I won't focus at home I will do everything else but what I'm supposed to be doing and I know that so I tried my best to just make it It's hard man. Well, my kids didn't learn from school. Yeah, it's like I feel guilty Today because my youngest son will come in my office. It doesn't matter if I'm on a meeting or not. He'll pop in

Dad, listen, I'm at school today. And then I'm like, buddy, I'm gonna call. You I'll see him again. So like, five, six o'clock. He's like, you've been in there. Two feet from me, Dad. Every day. Oh, yeah. See, that was I know. My niece and my nephew were living with me for a couple of months earlier this year. And I was like, I don't think I've ever been able to like, my work was just hard because I'd want to get home to see them. And if I didn't see them, they'd going to bed and they'd like, where were you? So. Yeah.

Universal was even more hard. It was just like, that was when I was like, all right, this is when I got to get back into my result life. my commute from Windermere to Dr. Phillips was an hour both ways. So you leave at eight to get there by nine and leave at five to be home by six. So I just never got to see my Yeah. I know that would be really hard. I couldn't even imagine. Just here? Here's the water, just in case. Yeah, can put it wherever you'd like.

Um, let me turn off the music. That's gonna be important. Hey, Alexa. Much as I love me some Sinatra. It'd be a nice background noise. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, are we recording? Are we good? Yes. Okay. Just to make sure it's because I once was practicing doing a recording and I didn't record it. I was like, that'd been awful. Have someone come here and record anything. Um, but yeah, so 2X0, um,

His name is Dixon Deedin. No, am I making that up? Dixon Dedman. Yes. Me pulling in your last name and like, are you guys related? come on. Me, so for him, he was just kind of explaining like each one. But he first started off where it was his, like his grandfather's like business before the prohibition. ⁓ And then he went into like one that was called Kentucky Owl.

But then he sold, I think he sold it or he like, you know, passed along and then he started 2XO, which stands for double aged barrel. Okay. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. So, you know, I'm a newbie. I'll be out in life. Um, Andrew Jamonson.

I'm probably gonna have to take some of my coffee on. So make a little bit of Irish coffee here. I think on it's a Friday, so I always don't feel bad if I When you were like, it could be a mock day, I was like, we're mad. All the way through. And I'll lose my appetite. Cheers, everybody. Cheers. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Grace, do you want your water over there as well? No, I think I'll be okay.

I can't believe I'm doing bourbon two days in a row. I'm feeling stronger than ever right now. Seriously, that's how I feel. Awesome. Well, when you're ready Andrew, we'll get started. Let's get it going. Awesome. Well, Matt, thank you so much for being here with us today. Grace, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we have Matt Deaton here today. He's the chief growth officer of DevSue. So to kick it off, I'd love to learn a little bit more about DevSue, what you do there, just kind of a background overall.

Absolutely. So DevSoup is a technology services provider. We specialize in outsourced software development, more large scale application modernization. So taking an existing legacy system that maybe has your 20 years worth of development time put into it and bringing it to a more modern tech stack, maybe moving it to the cloud, but essentially reducing tech debt, security debt, and helping companies stay in a more modern framework. Yeah, awesome.

Perfect time. I'm in the day and age with AI. That's a spot. How sick are Now it's going to come up. Yes. We're doing a lot with AI as well in that space. We've built a suite of tools that enable our developers to essentially streamline the entire process from discovery all the way through implementation. We're able to go in now and essentially build out technical documentation that used to take teams, you know,

months and we're able to do it in days. ⁓ We are currently working with one of our financial institution clients and they had a massive modernization project that they needed to have done and it had taken them years and within days we identified millions in tech debt, we identified some security issues that they needed to address and all of this was in nine days. So they gave us a number that it originally had taken them 90.

We got it down to nine. This has our benchmark since. Okay, now we got to beat nine. So it's pretty exciting. exactly. That's awesome. ⁓ that's great. Are there any specific industries that you guys really focus on or who is that great fit for you guys? Financial services, healthcare is one, retail and media and entertainment. And then we work really well with marketing agencies as well. So we do some staff augmentation on the technical side.

So a lot of times, know, marketing agencies will partner with us to augment their technical capabilities. Awesome, awesome. Really cool. Well, for anyone who's interested in learning a little bit more about DevSue, I'd love to hear anything new that you guys have going on. I know you share with me a new product launching. So a little bit more about how we can get in touch with you guys and anything new from the company. Yeah, reach out to me directly. ⁓ It's matt.deaton at devsue.com.

Reach out to me directly, we'll jump on a call. I'm happy to walk you guys through any services or products you guys are interested in learning more about. Awesome, thank you, Matt. So we also always like to feature a drink. So, you know, when it comes to our guests, your favorite drink in general. So I know you're a big bourbon guy. So tell us about, you know, what got you into bourbon, why you love bourbon, any favorites of bourbon overalls that people can drink along with us. Bourbon takes me home. I grew up in Kentucky, Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati area.

with the school to university level and that's always been the drink of choice. If you're from Kentucky, you're a bourbon drinker. So yeah, like I said, it just takes me home. And I appreciate you guys really going all out in terms of the quality of bourbon we have here today. So thank you. Absolutely. And I was telling Matt, so yesterday I went to a bourbon event. was perfect timing because Matt, you told me that you like any bourbon, but I was reading into it because I was like, oh no, do you drink bourbon alone? Do you drink bourbon with things? But when I was there...

everyone drink the bourbon alone. So I was like, you know what, we're drinking it alone. But we have 2XO here with us today. Also signed by the blender. I don't really know the right terms yet, guys. I'm still gonna use star bourbon, but it's delicious so far. So I'm very excited. But bringing that into it, Matt, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your professional journey. What brought you here today as a chief growth officer at DevZoo? Yeah. So I've always had a knack for marketing and sales. I think it started off at

pretty young age. My father was a salesman, a paper salesman, ironically. People see me office now, but I have a legitimate father who was a paper salesman. ⁓ And I just remember him coming home with this awesome brown briefcase. I'm sure you guys know the ones with the six roller digit numbers. And I just remember playing with that thing. But more importantly, I just remember how outgoing he was and how much he just really loved people. And I've always kind of wanted to inherit that characteristic.

Sales and marketing is probably the best place to do that. You really need to understand your customers, your buyers. So I always had a knack for that. So at a very young age, my first job was telemarketing. So that's where I learned how to overcome the objection, right? And then from there, obviously, I went to school at the University of Louisville. told you guys we spent some time in Louisville, about 12 years. Specialized or got my degree in business administration there, focused in on marketing.

also had a concentration on enterprise sales. So really was still wanting to kind of hone in that sales skill. I was blessed after college, this was 2008, if everyone remembers what was happening in the economy in 2008, financial crisis was happening. But I was able to score an internship with an up and coming startup in Little Kentucky called CodeGo. We built a digital signage software for financial institutions. So it was a pretty...

Pretty interesting time to be selling software to an industry that was collapsing around us. But it was really challenging to come in and more of a sales capacity and sell to people who just weren't buying. And that's really when I started to hone in those marketing skills because as a company we're like, need to develop marketing capabilities. So when these institutions are ready to buy again, we're top of mind. So I took on the ownership of kind of building out some of the marketing capabilities of the

of the team there led that initiative until I left the company for Humana. At that time too, that was when Facebook, Google advertising, Google analytics, all of this digital marketing data was starting to surface. And marketers were then able to make intelligent decisions based on data. It wasn't just, I have a hunch or I'm going to spray and pray. was, I'm going to target a specific group of people based on what

the data tells me. And I really was taking an interest into that field. So I felt that I wanted to really hone in that skill set. That was when Humana was kind of opened its doors. I moved over to more of a digital analyst role at Humana where I went from the startup world, which you had to be super resourceful and you're building everything from scratch to now you have every bit of data you can ever dream of at your fingertips, right? And that was when I really kind of honed in.

the data mining skills, writing SQL code, learning the deep dives of Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics. And we had multiple web analyst platforms that we had to learn. Splunk, I don't know if you guys remember Splunk, but that was another one that we had to learn. And it was really just a great opportunity to cross train with other analysts who had been in the data world. They had gone to school for statistics.

I did not, I went to school for business. So it was a great opportunity for me to own in that data mining capability. And then from Humana, ⁓ my family and I decided we wanted to relocate. So we moved to Orlando. ⁓ And that's when I went to work with University, sorry, Universal Orlando. we go, Universal Orlando. ⁓ Senior analysts role there, similar to the Humana capabilities, but different in terms of organization and the product we were marketing, right?

Humana insurance, ⁓ everybody kind of needed it. That was when Obamacare was happening. So everybody needed to purchase insurance. Vacations is a different story, right? So it was a fun product to sell, a fun experience to sell. My first introduction to experience marketing and ⁓ what happened there, what I really took away from my time at Universal was the ability to tell a story through data. I got to work with some of the...

greatest data minds I've ever worked with today. And I'm going to claim some of the greatest in the world. ⁓ Very intelligent people who really loved being in this space. And what I learned from them was that there's a story to tell, not just a story, but there is a takeaway. There is a strategic advantage to truly understanding your company's data. And it can be overwhelming at some points because you have some first

take it all in, right? You have to take every data point you have, analyze it, visualize it, discuss it. But what I was really interested in most was socializing that data, was taking the story to ⁓ the key stakeholders, all the marketing channels and saying, hey, what did you do from a business perspective that yielded these results, right? And do you agree with these results, right? First, let's make sure the data's wrong. Then it was, how did you impact this?

And from there, we were able to say, okay, well, if this was the result we got from this variable, what if we change that variable? So it really kind of led way for a lot of experimentation within, you know, a large corporate structure, which is tough to do. And they were doing, we did such a great job with these deep analytic reviews and this storytelling aspect of it all. ⁓ It really helped me to say, listen, data is what's really going to drive growth.

understanding your buyer, understanding what they want, understanding what channels they want to communicate to you with. All of that is really what's going to drive the overall buyer journey, the customer journey. And you have to understand where to hit them, where to target them, how to reach out, what messaging to send. We measured all of that. So ⁓ it was also during that time at Universal where I kind of missed the technology space. I missed the innovation. I missed the fast-pacedness.

Fast-pacedness, is that a word? I mean, not worth it. I'll tell you, don't doubt TM. The fast-paced life of like the startup group, right? And that's when I decided, you know, I've always wanted to get my MBA, but I never really wanted to get my MBA from the same place, the same state or same region where I got my undergrad, my bachelor's. So this was a great opportunity to kind of explore, you know, should I go back to school and kind of elevate.

different skill sets that I wasn't using in a day-to-day basis at Universal, but more focused on my leadership capabilities and finance, for example, which is a field that I've never worked in, but hone those other skills a little bit more. So I started talking to Execs at Universal. I noticed that a lot of Execs at Universal were carrying the name of Rollins on their profiles and they would wear their shirts and everything. was like...

Tell me more about your experience there at Rollins. It seems like that's a popular place. And of course it ended up in a tour and I just fell in love with it. The curriculum, the executive MBA program presented an opportunity to learn amongst high level execs within the central Florida area. And I just couldn't pass that opportunity. I was new to the area too. So I looked at it as, this is a great place to learn, but also a great place to kind of expand my network here.

And it was just an amazing experience. And then after getting the MBA, I realized I really want to get back into technology, fuel innovation, and help people grow their businesses. There's a tremendous opportunity, just a lot of entrepreneurs out there who have a vision, but they might not know the process to get there. And so while was at Rollins, I focused in on entrepreneurship and took that as my concentration and kind of learned a little bit of a structure on how to

launch a business, grow a business and then scale it. ⁓ And then combining all of my past experience in the data world, sales, marketing, now I'm freshly equipped with this MBA, it was time to kind of pursue that. So I started searching and it's all DevSoup. And our CEO and I talked and we really hit it off. had a vision for what the company could be and where we're going to take it. And essentially I came home then in December, 2020 and

Right then everybody knows what happens. It's like moving to my career path. There's a big catastrophic event that changed the world. But then we had COVID and it was an interesting time. It was a lot of time for us to kind of look internally versus, had an initial plan was to hit the ground running with sales, build out a sales team, all these events. Then that was another time, okay, let's look internally. And I took my experience from Colorado to say.

maybe we should build up this marketing function a little bit more. Maybe we should look on driving leads inbound because that was the only way you could do it. Right. So we did that and we were pretty successful. We built out the marketing capability of the team, drove inbound leads, obviously survived COVID. We went fully remote. So our company is 100 % remote. We have employees in 17 different countries, 300 employees.

⁓ And it really kind of helped to shape the culture of the organization. And today we're sitting on 10 marketing and sales employees right now. we're doing really well. That's incredible. That takes us to here today with chatterbuzz. Awesome. Well, I love that story. Like I told you, know, back when I first met you through AMA, I was already inspired by your story. And what I love about what you bring to the table is when you and I met, I was just telling this story like...

honestly yesterday, because I was so excited to meet with you. And so what I love is you bring something real to the table, but that it's actionable. Like I remember when you and I sat down, we had the trivia event. You're like, you know what, one good takeaway that you could have done is you could have had it out somewhere where people saw it and kind of got the buzz going. And I was like, that is such an easy tweak to change for a following event or a following year to do that. So I think that no matter what you bring in, you bring in something new. So I appreciate that. Yeah, I think that, you know, is a core value of mine. It's just that

I want to add value to people's lives. really want to be somebody that helps others. If it's some advice that I can offer, if it's a service that I can deliver, or a simple hug maybe. Show some support. just want to be remembered for a person who's willing to stick their neck out and be helpful. Yeah, that's incredible. We're going a little bit more into your journey. So I know that we talked about this a little bit, but how has your sales and marketing strategies evolved as you transition from

startups to more corporate roles, whether it was the humana side or universal as well. Yeah, the startup world, I you're everything from scratch. You know, it's, ⁓ and you're working with very limited resources. again, I was a one man man, ⁓ working in the marketing team at Kodago. However, again, I was blessed because, ⁓ it was new and the CEO really wanted to know what I was doing. You know, he really wanted to see.

how it was going to impact his business. I look back on this as, man, I was a great mentorship. I had a very young age. I got to work directly with a very successful entrepreneur. the decisions that I was making in terms of how we were spending dollars and what dollars we were getting back really was all he cared about. When you get into the corporate structure, the universals, the humanas, there's so many resources that you're disposing of.

starting with budget. You can run a campaign from an awareness standpoint. Maybe there's no direct response needed. It's just simple, simply running a TV commercial just to let the world know you're there, right? You don't get that at the startup. It's like, no, I gotta have a return because if we don't have a return, we can't continue this program. And you just don't have that luxury. going from resourcefulness to, to me it was more around communication with key stakeholders and

you know, what they were doing to drive success for the business and providing them again, providing them values to where they were arming themselves with the most accurate data so that they can make the best decisions with the money we were spending and optimizing that spend. Not only that, it's future Yeah, yeah, that did. That's perfect. Thank you so much for that. And then kind of going back to Universal, I know that you said some of the most intelligent analysts that you worked with. Tell us a little bit more about, you know,

The team, maybe what were the main takeaways that you implement still today in your strategies as the chief growth officer of them? Yeah, storytelling. Again, I think I have to put, you know, I was I was working with some great data miners. They could write code all day long. They could pull it. They can analyze it. They can present it. But really where what I took away was the art of storytelling from that. I still today tell my team that I don't care what channel you are part of.

what your focus is, what you want to be. Even if you're a creative and you're a graphic designer, your work impacts revenue. What you're doing will have business impact and you need to be able to report on that. So whether it's, you know, ad creative or a website creative, there's an experiment to run that's going to give you the data to tell you which creative performed better, right? And you have to be able to talk through that story.

You're not always going to have a CEO or a CMO or even just a manager who understands that language. They might come from totally different background. For example, I came from a business background, but I was working with statisticians, people with three or four math degrees, PhDs. And I'm like, wow, you guys really understand the statistics side of this. But maybe they might not have had the art of the storytelling. They didn't have that presentation experience.

And that's where I think that I kind of showed my skill set was the ability to take the stories from the various channels, the various stakeholders and combine it into an overall, you know, campaign success story or even sometimes a campaign failure story. Right. Yeah. And again, while working there, blessed with some great mentors and just worked with some of the smartest people in the world who really kind of showed me the way as well. That's awesome. So I know that you talked a lot about testing.

how many things can you change at once? like for example, if you change the landing page or the campaign creative and then you also change the messaging, how often do you think that you should make little changes to A and B tests and then know what was the really big impact from each one? That's a great question. You know, I'm not a big fan of like making a lot of changes in experimentation. I like to be able to come across, come away with conclusive evidence or conclusive findings. So I suggest that if you're just getting into experimentation, don't get fancy.

Right? One, two changed at the most. ⁓ Let's just take email for example. ⁓ Just your subject lines, right? That's something you can A-V test tomorrow if you wanted to try experimentation out for a second there. But did this one versus this one have impact on my openery, right? And that's a very simple test you could run. Now, when you get to your website, for example, now you're getting into like multi-barrier testing. ⁓ And that could be something along the lines of like my header copy.

but not just the header copy, let's just change the background of the header as well. So now you have to decide, it the header copy or was it the background copy that actually drove this result or was it a combination of both? So, know, again, if you're just getting started into it, keep it simple, one, two at the most, but don't make it to where you're measuring your, for example, with the header copy and the header imagery, don't measure two things in the header, right? Measure something that's been the header.

And then, okay, did they scroll down? If they did scroll down, let's change something else in the next section to see if it drove a click or see if ⁓ the time on page was affected, right? And I guess it's all good to say that the first thing you need establish is what results are you going to measure? What are you measuring for? What are you experimenting for? Is it conversion? Is it engagement? But make sure you set up what are your key metrics that you're going to be looking at to say yes.

this actually had impact and it or it didn't. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for that. You take a drink. I've been drinking because we've been talking. So let's get into, thank you so much for answering these. Honestly, a lot of these, was there anything from your professional journey that I didn't ask if you wanted to share about? I feel like you were able to touch on a lot of those areas throughout the conversation. Yeah, I'm sure.

I mean, I guess if I look back, one thing that I could offer is maybe something that would have done differently. Yes, that was the last question on the phone. Anything that you would do differently looking back on your career? Yeah. So I've worked with some great entrepreneurs in my life. And one thing that I'd say, I talked when I was with AMA, I did a talk at UCF, and one of the students asked, well, how do you do it differently? Right. And I don't think my answer has ever changed this question. I told this dude, I looked at him in the eyes and I was like, go build something.

from scratch today because you have no risk. You're young, right? If it fails, you're going to learn. That's a very worst case scenario. You're going to learn and your next job is going to love you for those learnings ⁓ or your next venture. You're going to do it differently and better because you took those learnings away from the first one. So I would go back and I would build something from scratch as opposed to jumping right into a career. ⁓

That's one thing that I tell my children, I'm going to tell any youth of today, just build something and really just have faith in yourself. And if all else fails, have a good job. Yeah, very true. Is there anything, we don't have to include this, but ⁓ obviously you have a love and a passion for entrepreneurship. Has anything ever crossed your mind that you're like, if I could have gone back and done this, I would have built this?

You know, this specific thing, it's technology or something totally different. I know. I don't know what the business is. We'll cut this part. Remember what time we're at. This might not make final cut. No, but I've been ventured into, I'll just put it into our ship. A friend of mine and I, we built an adult party game. Oh, fun. Right? So you play cards against humanity, right? We saw that space just blowing up with cards against humanity. And we were like, listen, this is a low cost

Low barrier to entry. All it is is paper, cardboard. So we kind of ventured into that path. And I'll be honest with you, again, I learned more from that experience than I did from any textbook. And it was something that symbols just a card game. building out the website, looking at measures, this was an experimentation where I really started to get into it. But it was just an amazing experience.

It didn't go anywhere. We still own it. We still have the game itself, but we don't actively pursue the business anymore. It's like hands-on learning. We learned a lot from it. At it was with your friend. It was a lot of fun. had a lot of fun there. you guys play it at all? Oh, absolutely. That's the best thing. We did it for ourselves at the end of the day. Yeah, it was fun. That's awesome. Really cool. Perfect. Let's bring it into AI and marketing and sales. Obviously at DevZoo.

you you share with me, you guys are also actively building a lot of AI tools that are coming out and something that you're seeing is one, there's a race to AI, but there's also either they get taken over, right? Someone just buys them out or they fail because they don't have enough marketing in place. So for you, what would you say are the key factors that can help or do help AI companies stand out in such a crowded market right now? Super clustered market right now.

If everything has dot AI at the end of it today, it's, you know, ABC dot AI is the joke that we have internally. ⁓ you know, I was just at a conference, a Gardner conference in Dallas and earlier this year. And one of the things is the same question that came up when the keynotes is how do these companies survive? Right? How does an AI company or AI software company today, you know, compete and survive long-term.

And the answer that the analysts gave was they won't. They won't unless they're able to differentiate, but not differentiate in the sense of, you know, a value proposition, but in the actual business value they can generate. ⁓ I look at, you know, how AI can provide business value, right? And if you can't show me that your tool is able to save me money or generate revenue.

It's not going to stick around. And by that, I mean, improve workflows, right? Improve the pace at which we do business. Can you improve my velocity? Can you cut my costs down from a supply chain perspective? It has to be able to provide that business value or else it's just going to fade away. And I don't even see them fading away through acquisition. I see them fading away as bankruptcy, but that's just my opinion. Yeah, that completely makes sense. And then for you, so I know obviously on the sales and marketing side, there are so many different AI tools that you could use.

Are there any that you would favorite that you've noticed help your workflows that help your sales team that marketing thrive? I'm spoiled. I work for a tech company. Right. So we built an internal AI tool that takes that allows our entire company to choose which LL and they want to use. Right. So I can choose from chat. I can choose from anthropic. I can choose from Google and anything else that hits the market. We're tapping right into it and

You can use it. we're using them all, I would say right now. We are a HubSpot shop, I will say that as well. And HubSpot's doing a lot in terms of lead scoring and more of like ABM account rankings and scoring, predictive pipelines as well. That's great for sales support and sales enablement.

AI has totally changed the game from a content production perspective, but it also got overused very fast. Now I could tell that was written by a robot and there's really no human intelligence in there. So we encourage our team members. It's great for ideation. You need an idea. That should be your first stop. Go for it. Empower your mind to take an idea, but build upon it. Make it ours.

How do you customize the output? ⁓ I know I think I'm rambling into your original question here, but I would say that, you know, make sure you're generating business value. Make sure that you differentiate by value. Don't differentiate by a cool website. It has to actually be able to prove there's business value. Yeah, yeah, that completely makes sense. ⁓

Let's go to the sales side. So I know you said HubSpot is what you guys use. Obviously they have great lead scoring and other AVM features like tiering. How do you believe that AI can help sales teams become more efficient and effective at closing deals as well? Personalization. I'm going to get to the point on that one. Not personalization from an email that says, Hi Grace, how is chatter bus right now? Not that type of personalization, but

personalization from a sense of identifying at an account level how you can help this person or how you can help this company and be able to take that trigger or that scoop and say, sales reps, what do we say to them from a personalized outreach perspective? Not, again, not high race, this is Matt from Dev Studio, but more so, I was doing my research into ⁓

Chai was and found that you guys are researching this specific topic. And I wanted to reach out because we've helped other companies exactly like yours generate tangible business results. And I'm sending you now via email a case study that we had just recently completed that I think you'll enjoy and I think you'll find value in. I'm not asking for a lot of your time here. I understand your time is valuable, but I do think that we should have talk.

Right? And not just send that an email, but record yourself saying that. Yeah. Right. And I do see AI and video as kind of the future tool with sales outreach because it's just become non-personalized in a way that everything is on the text these days, whether it's LinkedIn, outreach, or it's email. But personally, I want to see your face. I want to talk to you. And I think that video, AI video is really...

the next wave in terms of prospecting for sales teams. Yeah, that's really cool. So are there any tools that you would recommend? like intent based tools? I know there's some like Bombera and other ones where you can see, you know, some companies and they're researching those key terms that have those sales intent and what tools would you use to follow that process? Yeah, sales navigator, LinkedIn sales navigator is a big one. We use that. We've used ZoomInfo. We use Apollo.ai is another one or .io.

Those would be three that I know that we use internally and I would recommend that. Yeah, perfect. And then video wise, any tools that you recommend? Like, are you talking just to clarify, like the AI videos where it's like an AI person or no sales person? No, no, no, no. So I'm going to do a shameless plug here. We worked on a great product for a client. I don't think they're going to mind me saying artificial. They were a startup. They were working on a AI solution that would...

pull data from your CRM system or any type of data source that you have. And this would be based on those intense signals that we had mentioned before, but also more like, this company is based in Louisville, Kentucky. here's what the majority of people in Louisville, Kentucky are interested in, maybe when we burp in the Kentucky Derby, something along those lines, right? And it would customize the background of the video based on what they found from the data.

And then you would essentially type in what you wanted the voiceover to say. So it would be an AI-generated voiceover based on text. So in a matter of minutes, you would go from nothing to a completely customized video that is targeted to somebody based on an intense signal. And again, it's more personal.

It's not at the personal level that I would say that I would want my sales reps to reach out to you, but from a marketing perspective, great. Yeah, that's incredible. Really cool. Awesome. All right. What time are we at Andrew? We're at 12 33. Oh, we're doing good. Look at that. Also, I know we have a decent amount to get through here, so let me just see if there's any other AI questions that might be good. There's a couple more in here. We kind of already said this, know, I guess this is a good one to still ask.

If a company is just starting to integrate AI, right? They're not probably at the level where they have HubSpot, their lead scoring, all those different things. What do you think are easier ways or a good foot in the door on the marketing and sales side to kind of start for a good impact and then they can level their way up? ChatGTP. For $20 a month, I think you can access to the latest, sell out, them chat. You can be very dangerous with just that in terms of...

writing copy that aligns to your company's core values and customizing it based on the research you've done mentally. If I'm implementing an ABM strategy, I've done my research on this company, I know what their pain points might be based on past case studies that I've done for other clients, and I can use that information to feed the model to then generate email copy, website copy.

even a sales script, a voicemail script, I have a sales rep leaving voicemails, you can be very dangerous with just simply $20 a month. Yeah, I think that's my daily habit. Now I'm so bad with it that even if I'm having dinner and I want a pair of drinks, I'm like, what are the best drinks to pair with? That's so funny. Everything from business to personal to my workout planning.

I almost relied on it a little too much. I love it in the kitchen. I think it's great. I'll go in there and say, I have these ingredients. What can I make? And next thing I know, I'm a five-star chef. I know it really helps. For me, have a wedding coming up in August. I'm like, okay, I need a, and for me, I will go to the grocery store. I'll buy whatever I want. That's like my favorite thing to do. I'll just keep shopping around. I'll buy whatever. My fiance is like, okay, it's time to put a halt to this because we have a budget for our wedding.

And you don't see that budget side anymore. And I was like, okay, okay. So now I go in and I'm like, okay, what can I make when I like these specific things and then it helps me. And it also has cut down my time. That's what it is, it's a time saver for sure. Awesome. So as AI adoption accelerates, what industries do you predict seeing really that are going to be impacted the most? Let's say like five of the biggest industries that are going to be impacted. Finance for sure.

Yeah, banking, finance, probably gonna lead the way. think there's a lot in terms of what we're doing in that space right now and just optimizing their systems and just modernizing that for sure. Healthcare is another one. think a few years ago I was in San Francisco ⁓ and just what some of the health tech companies are doing with AI in terms of bio research and the level and the velocity they're able to analyze.

cellular data at this point. It's amazing what they're doing over there. So definitely finance, healthcare, supply chain, right? And I think we see that from our government investing 500 billion into the space that we're going to see that coming down from supply chain. I can definitely see media and entertainment as well in terms of streaming recommendations, all that. see that being a good space for us in retail, kind of wrapping things out. I retail as well will be another big space.

Yeah. And I've heard you say a couple of times, like for a specific company is specifically in banking and finance use the word like modernization. So can you explain a little bit more about like, what does that look like? Is it just integrating AI? Is it completely like refreshing the way that their organization functions on the technology side? What is kind of that modernization side? Yeah. I mean, you have to remember that these institutions have been using the systems for 20 plus years, right? A whole lot of outdated COBOL systems, mainframe systems.

And now a lot of the time in the cloud, right? We've moved into these more of cloud architectures and many institutions aren't there. ⁓ Especially, you know, the mid markets, ⁓ the regional banks, the community credit unions, ⁓ they're gonna probably be a little bit slower to react and say, you know, the BOAs of the world and ⁓ the Goldman Sachs, right? So I think it's gonna take some time for them to really utilize bringing these tech stacks up.

so that they can even really benefit from AI ⁓ at the rate that other companies have. Awesome. I appreciate that. All right. Well, that will bring us into the last section before we go into the last section. You want to refill? Absolutely. This is why we take breaks. Exactly. Do you think that? I'm good. I think I'm like here. Let me grab some ice for you, Also, we need to cool down. hot. ⁓ yeah. It's... I'm going to talk to Maya about like we got to fix this.

Like we gotta fix this thing. How long has it been broken? As long as I've been here. Although I remember walking in here a couple of times and it was freezing. Like it was straight up freezing in here. I'm like, did we just blow it recently or something? And now it's like you have two options. It is either hot or it is the middle of a volcano in here. Is it running outside? Is it like if there's like a tube outside or is it just

I knocked it on the wall. Good question. At some point I'm like, It's so going to Home Depot. this point I'm just going to get the giant box fans and hope that the microphones can cancel it out. What? This. yeah. Like, we're going talk to somebody like, this thing's going to get fixed. Yeah. I'm pretty sure my face is going to be like, blurted. No, I'm like looking at you, I'm like, why are you sweating? I'm sweating.

This is why wear dark colors whenever we show up in here. I don't want to it. Thank God I get my pants. I don't know how you're not sweating. I'm sweating. I'm so excited for the next section. Have you ever met our CEO in passing? I couldn't put you two in a room because I don't think that you guys would want to leave the room or you guys would end up in a business venture. ⁓ You guys remind me a lot of each other and just your knowledge of everything.

She's been wanting to implement ABM for the longest time, but we implemented like almost like one fourth of what it could be. Cause right, need an ABM, you need an ABM team, right? The ABM team is who you're looking at plus like a couple of content writers. And I'm like, I don't know about this. So it's going to be interesting to hear from you, like how you guys do it. You know, things, I'm excited about this section. selfish reasons. How do you guys do your lead Jen now? We do a lot of inbound, like still inbound works well for us.

right? Because you get what you get. But with that, like it's I'm going to my fifth year into the agency. I've been selling for ChatterBuzz for the last three of those three and a half of those years, like fully by myself. So the strategies have changed, but it still works really well for us. But it still is like the smaller fish like what I would consider my tier three, not really my tier two or my tier one, my tier two come in randomly and it's like, hallelujah.

Tier one are so rare. It's like, maybe I've had two the whole time I've been here. What's your threshold for tier one? Tier one, so that's what's also interesting because we make it so basic, right? Like, okay, well, I the way it started was I looked back at previous, I looked back at our previous clients that we've had, but only since the time I've been here. We've been here for 12 years. So it's kind of hard to say that, but every year changes over time. But I started with the industry, so I started with industry, right?

broke down obviously based on like revenue, based on location, but location only doesn't matter all that much for us. The hardest thing is I'll take two of like my best and I'm like, well, some of these things are completely different. Like their marketing team size, for example, maybe you would assume, well, their marketing team size is probably less than three just because one was and that's why they need a whole agency. Well, our other one has 10 marketers. So, you know, so it got hard to like compare and contrast because I'm like, I can't find commonalities, but maybe it's just cause I have two or three.

Right. I'm like, so you look at like size of the marketing team as one of your primary drivers? I do. But sometimes it isn't that way. So like we're trying. So we have broken into the credit union space actually in banking. ⁓ But again, it's very different there. Like we work with Sidecoast Credit Union. They have like 20 marketers, but they don't have that much of a creative team. So we do all their creative, all their ads, all their billboard design. ⁓ But then you look at like Trustco Bank, who are we're going to be working with shortly here.

and they have a headquarters of only like a couple of marketers, like three. So it makes more sense. But that's what's so weird is like you compare and contrast those two, they're extremely different. So that's like that's actually the biggest challenge because then it's like, don't know who to target effectively. It can really pinpoint those to understand their pain point. How the heck do I begin maybe an average strategy? I mean with your, there's the two clients you have currently. What if,

in terms of pain points, don't necessarily think about pain points, but what... More so like intent payments. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It's like more along the lines of like, what are their interests right now? You're looking at pain, but what are they interested in more so than what's hurting them? Because what you can get to is like, what is the benefit you guys bring? You guys bring capacity, you bring velocity to the marketing side of things, right? Yeah, it's like more like speed.

Right, obviously. then cheaper because you're very similar when you're outsourcing, you're not, you don't have overhead, you don't have those same expenses. And then the third is the like the expertise and results. You're upskilling. Yeah. You don't have the skill internally. give it to us. We get skill. So in that sense, like where do they want to be? Like, first of all, what I've been trying to do more of is like challenge their sales. It's like where, what is your ideal state?

Where are you today and what is your ideal state of what you want to be? Think about you as a person, right? It's like, I know who I am today, but I know that I want to be like 10x this, right? Like I know what that vision looks like. This is the destination. ⁓ In order for me to get there, and I role models, right? I need somebody who is in that space, who's got me there, right? So like when I was thinking about how we position ourselves as a leader in AI,

It was, we have to live this, we have to live the philosophy, right? So we're going to bring the skillsets, we're going to bring the tools, we're going to bring this, we're going to give you these benefits. That is really what we want you to understand about a partnership is that we're going to help you level up and we're going to help you get to this ideal state. And here's right now, here's who's winning this ideal state, right? Here are the other competitors in aerospace that are winning this ideal state. ⁓ And this is how they did it. They did it by having.

this capacity, this expertise on their team, right? You don't have that, we do. You should partner together and I'll help you be more like them. Yeah, that's a great point. We've seen it. Yeah, because that's where you hang out. We never stop. We just cut everything out. But I'm like, thank God you're saying this, Alex will be listening back. Okay, here we go. But yeah, no, that's a great point because I'm like, I look at it is I'm like, how the heck will I know if they have a need? But obviously there's some intent, but you're right. But that's where it comes into that.

personalization, like really researching, looking at the team, understanding like, you know, the, the leaks in the bucket, if you will, and opportunities that present themselves. For me, I see you guys looking at team size. what are your ideal criteria, right? Do you have a small marketing team? ⁓ you know, what, is your inbound strategy look like? Cause you just said our leads come from inbound, which means you're really good at inbound. So what, like, what is your inbound ROI look like right now? How are you generating these leads?

well, this is what we're able to do for ourselves. You yourself are a case study. I always like to remind people of that, right? So use yourself as how you can do the same thing for your clients too. know, how's things going with it now? What are you doing there? What's your concept production look like? know, who's your ideal client? What kind of content are you for them? But for you, it's like, well, it's a good question. It'll be tough. I want to run outside. Thank you. Yeah, so exciting. Okay. Awesome. So.

As we get into our last section, we really want to discuss account-based marketing versus traditional lead generation, which we're seeing a lot in B2B change, right? It's not that linear cycle like we used to see where it was schedule a demo and then you run that ad on LinkedIn and then they hop on a demo, right? That just doesn't exist in today's age. So going into B2B marketing, how has that really shifted and how would you describe the difference between traditional lead generation and account-based marketing? Yeah, the buyer journey is not linear.

That is probably the best way to start it off. is, you start with A and goes to M and comes back to C. It's so, there's not even like a shape to describe it. It's just all over the place. And my marketing manager would kill me if I didn't say that, because she's always like, it's not linear. We can't just create a funnel anymore, right? It's not that. But it's finding where they are in the buying journey and creating content.

that's going to help them make a decision, an educated decision. And that's pretty much how I kind of, you know, have looked at ABM versus traditional demand. And also ABM to me is another way for you to save. It's a way for you to concentrate the dollars you're spending. Traditional demand, Jan, you know, to me it's become more like spray and pray. I'm going to run this ad. I'm going to create this persona. I'm going to use LinkedIn, Facebook.

Twitter, Pax, all right. I'm going to create these audiences, right, that I think my buyer belongs to and if they end up submitting a form, I'll work the lead. It's like, and that's really a gamble these days, right? ⁓ Bots will eat up your dollars, right? And that's one way to look at it. ⁓ Also, you might get somebody who doesn't really fit your decision-maker criteria, right? You want to speak eventually to that.

decision maker. But for me, when you look at ABM, it's how do I make the first person I talk to a champion? And I want the first person that I talk to within an organization to see how we're going to make their life better, to see how we're going to make their job easier. And, you know, in order to get them on call, you have to show them through content, right? You have to write the logs specifically for them.

You know, write the how to specifically for them. So you're, really writing content for the lead nowadays in an ABM strategy, which takes discipline. It takes a little bit of time. ⁓ but this is, this is something that, you know, to me, it's not something you're going to switch on today and see results tomorrow, but in the long term, you're going to see a higher conversion rate, higher close rate. ⁓ and you're going to also find opportunities for upsell.

more frequently than you would on the traditional demand gen because to me, think, I just based on what we see in our data that on a traditional demand gen, you're going to have more of a transactional buyer and not more of a relationship. Yeah. And that completely makes sense, right? Cause you're reaching out for one reason and you get that done and then you're out. So you fulfilled my need. don't have any more needs. So talking to the buying committee as a whole.

Do you recommend first starting off with one person from that buying committee or do you think in an ABM strategy you should be touching, you know, getting in front of or having a touch point with that whole entire buying committee or do you start with someone that you believe could be your champion and then grow from there? Yeah, first take what you can get. That would be my first advice. Take what you can get. So I'll walk, you a little bit about just an example here, right? So say you're selling to technology focused people. ⁓

the CTO being the ultimate decision maker, but you're gonna have VPs, SVPs in that mix as well. You're have directors, you're gonna have managers. Essentially your service helps more on the director level the most, right? ⁓ So ultimately the manager is the level below the person that you're really gonna have the most value to, but at the manager level, they can also get a little bit of value from that.

Even if I'm speaking to the manager, say the manager downloads a guide or a white paper that we put out there, or we send to them and they download it and say, hey, know, XYZ company over here, they downloaded this guide, but it's not necessarily the person that we think is in the buying committee. It doesn't mean they can't be a champion for you. It doesn't mean you can't get them on a call and say, hey, thanks so much for your interest on our content. I want to know what you found helpful, right?

well, I think that my boss would benefit from this because people want to look good at work, right? So you make that person a champion so that they put you in front of the right person. And then when you get in front of the right person, of course, they have a boss too. So the next thing you want to say is, listen, this is how we're going to make your life easier, but not just your life. This is how we're going to save your company money, or this is how we're going to generate more revenue for your company. Because then they take that business impact, business value, up a level.

And then ultimately what you want to have happen is invite all these people to a call. Listen, we want to get everybody that we think will have value from our services or our product on this call so that when we sell, we're selling account Y. So when you think about enterprise, you have department upon department upon department who could find value in your product or service. And in order to get the higher ticket sale, you want as many people to see the value.

So either your licenses increase or your service level increases. You go from the twos to the threes and then the tiers, right? And that's really what you want to have happen in terms of, I guess, collaborating with the buying committee and getting everybody on the phone call eventually when you get to that point. Yeah, that's a great example. And to kind of stay with that. So how do companies go beyond service level targeting? So obviously, when you ask someone like, who's your ideal target audience, right? They're going to say,

based on industry, based on sometimes job titles, company size. What do you think is the best way to truly identify the ideal customer profile to go beyond service level? Yeah, it's business impact, business objective. So again, I'll use this as an example. We want to partner with companies who need or want to modernize tech stacks. So you've been stuck in the past. You hired this developer 20 years ago who

built this program for you or wrote this code for you. ⁓ And code has evolved. So five years later, you had another developer because the first one left and they wrote code and you have code on top of code on top of code for 20 years, you have that, right? So the time that it would take to peel back that onion to really, and without breaking something, right? And we're talking about core systems. You know, there's just security aspect to that. ⁓ You definitely want to make sure that they understand it.

We got you. We've been there on this service offering. So we're looking for not simply just firmographics or demographics. We're looking at why they want to get there. What's their ideal state look like as we said before? What is their ideal state? Where are they now? are they going to be obsolete if they don't do what we know they have to do? It's more of that challenge your sales model.

We know better because we see in the marketplace and our goals that help you get there. Awesome. And then what would you say are strategies that you recommend for, you we talked about tiering. So for you in that kind of model that you're sharing, what are the best ways to tier kind of that one, two and three of a narrowing down the right fit audience? Yeah, ⁓ I guess it's kind of relative on your organization, right? Whether you you tier them based on opportunity size.

You tier them on maybe the number of case studies you have already completed in that industry. ⁓ know, we have more case studies in some industries than others, ⁓ but we're not going to admit, say, know, enterprise company in one industry who has a business need that we know we can solve, even though because we have less case studies than we do in another industry, right? Yeah. It would all come down to, can we provide you that same impact? When you come into the system, you might be a two.

But when the sales process is done, you might be our best customer. So ⁓ the tiering really works based on, we have the best chance of closing the deal and adding value to you versus other tiers? ⁓ And again, I think also that you're looking at the size of the opportunity as well. Maybe you're basing that on.

revenue size of the company or the size of the employees of the organization. But yeah, essentially that's just the starting point. at the end of the day, like I said, they can be your best customer, even if they're a cheerleader. Yeah, kind of grow into it. Flipin' pages. Alrighty. It's the most prepared I think you've been. I know, Matt gave me meat. We helped with our call. goes, you want to send me the questions a week before? And I was like, absolutely, Matt, anything for you.

But it did help me with like thinking of good questions. Like these are questions that, like I said, I think even I had a conversation with a company. Oh my gosh. I can't believe it was yesterday. It feels like it was like years ago. It was a two and a half hour conversation. And it was all about like, okay, we have all this content. Now how the heck do we use it? And I'm like, you pretty much were doing like a scattered around a strategy, but not implementing the sales side of it. Like we had the content, the marketing piece, but now you're on the sales piece.

So I was telling them today, was like, I'm going to send you this podcast afterwards. Cause I was like thinking about these questions. I was like, these are all the questions that they want answers to. That's great. I hope they end that. Yeah. It's a cool one though. They are ⁓ a legal BPO. They outsource, know, like, I feel like I have never researched so much on chat TVT for it, but it was like single, ⁓ lean, lean. can't even pronounce it.

More so on medical. So we look at personal injury. It's a whole other industry, but it's such a niche industry, but they work directly with personal injury attorneys. So I'm like, least you know who you're working with. That's the hardest part of it. Showing the value is really the hardest thing to get them to transition from like, why would I not go what I normally have known? I constantly give this to my paralegal instead of outsourcing it.

It's interesting. Yeah, it was really interesting. I'm sure you probably too, part of the depth, I have a strategy for you. Let's go. So getting back into it. So I know that we've discussed ABM and it's so much of an alignment between marketing and sales. What is the key to aligning marketing and sales for a successful ABM strategy? You got to set that up in terms of your internal processes, right? You got to have, we do daily standups because we're remote organization.

We don't necessarily stand up in front of each other, but we at least slack, right? We send a, Hey, what did you work on yesterday? And what are you working on today? What are your roadblocks and where do you need support? And in that, it could be as simple as a, I connected with a lead on LinkedIn. This is coming from the sales side. And what I think I could really do to move that lead forward would be to write a blog post around this topic or.

to provide them with some research around this topic. We're a partner in terms of research as well. So we might reach out to our partners there to say, hey, we'd to have some more content or some more research around this topic that we can share with the lead and get that. So in terms of alignment, it's constant communication and making sure you set up your internal processes to where information flows freely amongst the two teams. And then of course we meet at least once a week to do a formal team meeting.

Um, where we talk about the wins of the previous week. So, Hey, you know, what happened last week when you would consider a win? might be something while I booked this meeting, I booked a demo or I booked a, uh, presentation or, you know, I had to connect it's a cold call and I said this to them and it really piqued their interest. And I think we should repeat it, right? Uh, or we can elaborate on that specific line that we set. Uh, so it just comes down to communication and making sure that.

you identify, I would say, what is a win and where do you need the support to further add value to that buyer? For your sales team, they have a guide that they follow on, okay, once I have my tiers established, I know who my audience is, do they have a process they follow and how do I engage them? Maybe if I see intent coming in, do I connect them on LinkedIn versus...

We have email automation going. What does that kind of look like to make sure that you have a process in mind? Yeah, my first thing that I tell myself, I've a lot of times, they put the face to the name. Yeah. Right. Don't just be a bot. Yeah. They've already received 30 emails in their inbox and they've received five emails from people who are offering them $100 Amazon gift cards. Don't be that. Right. Send them a legitimately day connection. Don't put a message in it. Just connect for the sake of connecting. If they accept it.

Great, now add value to them. Add value to them by way of, listen, I researched your company, I researched what you do for them, and I've worked with other people like you, I've shared this article with other people that found value in it, sharing it with you as well. I'm not asking you to respond today, but if you have time, let me know what you think once you've read it. Just start a conversation with people and don't be salesy. Nobody wants to use car salesman, their model's dead.

doesn't work anymore. You really want to look to adding value as much as you can to your buyer. So I tell them one time, put a face that name, send a late-den invitation first and foremost, then send an email, then send an email message. Once you connect, send them personalized videos, thank them for that condition. But really put your face out there, show them that this is a digital knock on the door, right?

It's not that creepy, but I was there like, you know, just be a friend, be an advocate for them and be helpful as much as possible. Yeah. Do you think that there's a certain amount of time that they should follow up with those opportunities? Because if they saw intent, maybe they shared a case study and maybe they never went back. Maybe they used a tool like a content hub or they see, right, or a HubSpot or they see that they looked at it. Do you think it's appropriate to follow up? A couple days are a longer term cycle without it being

transitioning into that car sales approach, right? Yeah. there's the thin line because I saw something recently, I don't know where I saw this. It's not Ted Lasso, but I saw that the human attention span today is around eight seconds and the attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. So I could be putting those numbers wrong. All I know is that we're losing the goldfish, right?

So in that sense, in terms of the number of times marketing and sales has to put their message in front of somebody to get them to act, right now it's closer to 20 touches. So to your point of how many times do you follow up, it's like I at least have to follow up 20 times before they'll ever think to take action. So I don't want like...

The field of sales gets a bad rep because we're constantly reaching out and constantly reaching out. But if we don't, nothing's going to happen. So I tell my team now, listen, at least 20 touches. Now, is it 20 touches in a week? No. But maybe 20 touches every two months. Space it out. Because they might not have a need on day one, but on day 60, they may. And it's about the right timing too.

You want to make sure you're giving yourself enough time to capture that attention span, but also enough time to where they may not have the need today, but they may have tomorrow. And at least at the end of those 20 touches, if they have a need and they, know, 90 plus, they'll remember you. Yeah, very true. It's interesting because obviously marketing and sales are separate, but there's some commonalities, right? Like right timing, right messaging, right person.

Right. So it's like those three things are so similar. such an ambiguous field, we have to be right off the top. Right. That's true. That's true. I always feel like I'm right. So I don't know if I've ever been wrong yet. All right. So a couple of things coming into here. So obviously, ABM isn't as simple as, you know, lead gen, right? But at the same time, like inbound, you get what you get. What would you expect on the ABM side on the sales cycle? Like, you know, it's going to be longer.

So how do you track successes happening in that longer time span for AVM to really ramp up and work? Yeah, that's where lead scoring comes in, right? It's, again, you might not get somebody who wants to jump on a call tomorrow. The time is valuable. So it might not be that, hey, you send me a message on day one and I'm ready to jump on a call. You might get lucky. But I think it's more likely it's going to happen that, hey, I remember you, right? I didn't have a need when you reached out to me.

And I know you put me in this campaign for 60 days, but here I am 180 days later and you've reached out to me maybe once or twice since the initial push, but you've at least kept looking to add value to me. So I'll give you the time of day that I have the need, right? So the lead score in the level of engagement they have is what our sales team is going to look at to say.

Okay, this person is definitely interested or somewhat interested or there's just no interest whatsoever. And you know, the benefit of ABM is that you're doing it on an account though. So you're looking at the company as a whole and saying, does anybody have a need? Does anybody at this point believe that the company could benefit from what we're offering for the problem that we think, the problem that we know is happening in their industry?

Are they looking to solve that problem? Yeah. So, you know, it's just the engagement score, the engagement levels between the apps and the grocery. And for companies who are interested in starting ABM or marketing teams who want to start implementing ABM, what do you think is a realistic timeframe for them to look at to start measuring those success, you know, measures? Yeah, my CEO and I were having this conversation the other day, right? So if you're doing like traditional demand gen today, I'm not saying cancel all

traditional demand gen programs, right? Some are very successful in that realm and they should stay there. ⁓ But if you are interested in getting into AVM, I would look at it as like, know, 25%, 75 % because AVM does take time. You are saying, I want to work with this select hundred clients. I believe I can add value to this select hundred companies. And within that, maybe I choose five.

So I'm working a total of 500 people and I'm just going to keep working those 500 people until I get a certain percentage of that market. And then I will recycle and I will go on to the next batch that I think I can help out. ⁓ Or I'll just stay in that space. Some industries, some companies say, I'm just going to stay here. Maybe it's government. You're limited to your client pool. But in that case, I would just say, just be patient with ABM.

It's not an overnight success and it takes time. But again, in the long run, you'll see, you will see success if the value is there. Yeah. Awesome. And before he asked us, I think that you answered it, but if there's anything else you want to add to it, like how do you measure success in an ABM strategy? What are the key metrics maybe to track over time? I know you said lead scoring was one. Yeah. Lead score is one. Booking ratio is another one. Right. So I gotta go back to the same example, 500 contacts. What's my booking ratio out of this 500?

contacts over the course of my first 1690 days versus the next 120 so on so forth. look at book ratio. I would also look at things that we've mentioned engagement score but like time on page. Looking at nowadays there's technologies out there where this person was on your website. is that person a part of your ABM strategy? ⁓ Social media is interesting as well.

How does social media fit into the ABF share? Does your company send out a request to connect with their companies? Right? That's one way that you can be prospecting with your corporate social media accounts. know, ABC company, I am with DevSue, ShatterBuzz, and I want to connect with you. ⁓ So you can see the content that we're posting. And then the content that we're posting is relative to you.

It's relative to the problems that you have and how we can help you solve that. And then from there, what I look at is what is the percentage of our following today that is a part of that core 100 target accounts? How many of them are following us on day one versus how many are following us on day 90? And show increase in terms of following, but following of who you really want to follow.

There's many indicators. would say booking ratio is probably how I would look at it and see success overall. Social media has some action there. Any type of engagements for is definitely going to be a metric that you should look at. Yeah. That's a great point because all those work together. So it allows you to measure like each effort that you're doing because the efforts that are kind of on the lower end like engagement or following, they lead to that, that book. You know, so it's like you almost have to have those in order to get that outcome, which of course.

on the sales front naturally want to have that booking. Yeah. And that goes back to what I said before, right? 20 touches is what we look for. How many touches are you getting? And are you seeing at what point you're getting bookings based on the number of touches? So I would look at that as well. So implementing ABM successfully for DevZoo and probably other companies that you've seen and worked with, what do you think is the most common mistake companies do make when implementing ABM? That is all given time. That's where it comes down to. ⁓

you don't see initial success, not truly showing value. ⁓ You still look at this as a spray and pray. ⁓ You look at a corporation as traditional demand gen, right? So you're essentially taking, know, with all the sales databases that are out there today, you can download. So for example, let's say you're prospecting Google, right? How many employees does Google have in a sales database? You can explore your entire...

HubSpot, Salesforce can be Google, right? So you could prospect the entire company and get flagged the spam, right? And be like, now Google's never gonna receive an email from you whatsoever, right? So you just gotta give it time, but you also have to be patient and into what I'm looking for is like concentrated, right? You have to find the people within those organizations that you know you're gonna add the most value to and offer it and give it to them.

And don't expect them to just reply on daily life. But just keep providing them that value. Just keep being an advocate for them. Keep trying to help them. And over time, you'll separate yourself from the pack. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Matt, thank you so much for all of that. The last thing that we'll touch on is your secret to success. So I always like to call this area the spill it, naturally, because we're creating. So if you could share one tool, tactic, or philosophy that has advanced your career.

What would you share and why? Relentless curiosity. ⁓ Just keep learning, ⁓ continuous improvement. ⁓ Find ways, and I think you're going to hear this back, but value. Find ways to add value to those you want to help. ⁓ Offer it for free. Essentially, you'll get paid for it, whether that's in the workforce, whether that's for a client.

⁓ know, the more value you add to yourself, to yourself, the more valuable you become to others. ⁓ invest in yourself, keep growing, you know, be humble, ⁓ but keep adding and just keep improving yourself over time, yourself, your organization, your clients, people around you, your family, your friends, ⁓ community, they will recognize the growth. They will recognize the light and they'll be attracted to it. And they'll want to work with you and want to.

make sure that you have the platform to perform at your highest level. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you for everything, Cheers. Cheers. you much, Evan. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. And cut. Perfect timing. Thank goodness you blocked two hours. I appreciate that. ⁓

full game in the conference room so that he'd be there, but thank you so much for everything. This has been honestly one of my favorite yet. You provided so much value, just to kind of speak on your last note there. I think that even my CEO is gonna go crazy for this episode. So thank you for just cheering.