Join Bill as he sits down with Robert Royer, founder of Building Brands Marketing, to uncover the biggest lead generation mistakes holding B2B companies back. From CRM tracking failures to over-focusing on cost per lead, Robert shares expert insights on how manufacturers and B2B businesses can improve lead nurturing, optimize sales follow-ups, and increase conversions through effective middle-of-the-funnel content, personalized communication, and more.
We also explore why direct mail is making a comeback, how automation and AI can improve lead scoring, and why many companies struggle with aligning sales and marketing teams. If your business is missing sales opportunities, this episode is a must-listen.
Robert Royer brings his expertise as the founder of Building Brands Marketing, a full-service marketing and consulting agency in Victoria, Texas, focused on lead generation, SEO, and SEM for service-based business marketing.
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Robert: For us, we, we set up CRM tracking with attribution models for, I mean, almost all of our lead gen campaigns, even if the client is not going to use the CRM, we are going to use it all the way to where the lead gets pushed across the marketing bridge and falls and gets pushed across their desk. So we can know everything that happened to that point. Now, the problem with this is the largest mistake I see organizations make is they're constantly scrutinizing where their leads are coming from. They're, they're hyper, you know, hyper focused on, well, my cost per lead from this channel is way higher than my cost per lead from this channel. And, know, they're, they're always fixating on the cost per lead and not talking as much, a lot of times, about the cost per acquisition. They're not putting the same level of analysis on the acquisition ratio of incoming leads as they are the lead, you know, cost per lead. And so they can't properly understand their cost per acquisition because they don't have the right level of metrics once the lead’s coming across to be able to, you know, keep a good kind of consistent pulse on that. And so I think that, really, that comes down to a process personnel and training standpoint that B2B companies are going to have to embrace and understand that that's going to become more and more critical because with AI and machine learning and some of the algorithms, you have to know that acquisition stage and status in order to effectively influence some of the things upstream a little bit. So it's just something that companies are going to have to adapt and evolve. Otherwise they're going to get left behind. It's just simple fact.
Intro
Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. I have a very special guest with me today, Robert Royer. Robert is the founder of Building Brands Marketing, a full service marketing and consulting and advertising agency in Victoria, Texas, focused on lead generation, SEO and SEM. Robert, welcome to the conversation.
Robert: Hey Bill, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
Bill: Great. So Robert, one of the things we like to do in the Missing Half podcast is to have conversations with other of our colleagues in the industry who are experts in specific areas. And today we really want to talk about lead generation strategies for B2B companies. And it's a big topic that it's a hot topic, right? Everybody's trying to generate more leads and grow always. So what challenges do you see with clients’ lead generation efforts and maybe what's missing in their approach to marketing?
Robert: Yeah, that's a great question, Bill. So many companies I see lack of structured follow-up process. They're leaving high value leads on the table because either a, they don't get, they don't work them fast enough and respond fast enough, or they're not offering the right trust, consideration and education components in the middle of the funnel to effectively move them through the sales pipeline. And I feel like I see a lot of B2B companies focused too much on outbound tactics and kind of putting the optimization of inbound lead capture and lead nurturing on the back burner.
Bill: Okay, no, that's great. So let's unpack a couple of those. So we've run into this problem before as well with clients, and I think everybody has and every company struggles with it. If we have a company that's traditional, maybe a little bit behind in the digital maturity scale, right? They've been doing business for 30, 40 years and kind of doing it their way. And all of sudden their sales cycle moves from, we meet somebody at a trade show, we follow up a couple of weeks later, we have this long sales nurturing process to leads that are generated online. That's a completely different timeline that we have to deal with because in our experience, I'd like to get your feedback on this, if someone reaches out online, they're in that 5%. They're in the consideration phase. They're ready to buy now. And we need to more quickly activate that lead as opposed to maybe something in that traditional trade show, fill out the form, send me some literature, that whole thing. What are you seeing in the market?
Robert: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Bill. I mean, I think they're deeper in the consideration stage. And the reality is in all likelihood, we're also, you know, probably not the only company they reached out to if we reached an online form submission. You know, we probably might be facing a little bit more stiff competition at this point, because there's not that personal relationship, that face to face touch that's so, you know, strong in B2B from say a trade show relationship. And so there's a lot of tools that I'm seeing clients do to address this void. The first thing is automating some of the initial pre-qualification process. So once they reach out, immediately triggering an email or SMS sequence to try to get some follow-up questions to pre-qualify them for a real person when they come in the next business day to be sure they can prioritize their lead outreach based on which leads are more qualified. That's a big component of it, I think is initiating a pre-qualification step right away because that also is a confirmation that the process is starting to work on the company side that the lead reached out to. That's the first thing. And then I think on the other side of it is beyond just reaching out as quickly as possible. I think almost immediately, we need to have some sort of communication that starts to reinforce social trust and things like that. And that can be through marketing strategies like geo-fencing, or it could be just first-party data outreach mechanisms like email strategies, so on and so forth. And while you have that proposal that you're building and you're in this pitch phase, they're getting some sort of marketing message that's reinforcing that brand validity and the consideration stage to just add to that personal relationship of the reason they should trust you to buy from.
Bill: So I think there's a hot take there. SMS outreach, right? Text outreach is really been something that has been explored more dramatically, I think, in consumer products, direct to consumer. But I close deals over texts. I close deals with CEOs and with C-suite people using text messaging because let's be honest, whatever time period it was that the young people drug us into the text messaging or whatever. It is now something that I actively see text messages daily from current clients or prospects. And I think that's something that's missing from almost all manufacturing and B2B marketing is we kind of see that as to consumer to, update about my pizza is ready or my reservation is ready at the restaurant. So I should go and grab my seat as opposed to there are multimillion dollar deals being nurtured and in some cases closed via text message. Now, that's they're not singularly being activated with text messaging, but it can certainly be a component in the process.
Robert: Yeah, absolutely. Especially as communication styles shift generationally. So, you know, you look at Gen Z and millennials, there's a different style of communication and in a different preference compared to the baby boomer generation and some of the generations that are on the tail end now. A lot of it kind of started with the millennials in my opinion. And then Gen Z kind of took it to another level of they prefer less verbal communication, more email, written communication, things that they could do with their convenience. And also, you know, I'm a big proponent of layering, you know, throughout my day. So I may be at the gym in some cases and responding to business text messages because I got off work and I can finally catch up on my communication throughout the day. So I can, you know, I can respond at my convenience, but still keep that conversation rolling where I wouldn't be able to take a phone call right then.
Bill: No, and I have, I completely agree with that because it seems like if you really want to scare the younger buying audience in some of those demos, ask them to get on a phone call. Like if you want, if you want to, if you want to bring a prospect to a screeching halt, ask for a phone call. I mean, it, it's over then like if you're moving down that hierarchy, then it's an email, right? And then below that, that is a much lower barrier to entry is a text message or a Slack or a chat or whatever, that's much more natural than asking for that phone call, asking for that, like an email. I mean, that's so formal. I'm just showing my age, Robert. Like I'm a dinosaur. I won't talk about fax machines and all of that, but the young people, I had my children in Washington DC at the Smithsonian and I showed them a fax machine because they don't even understand what that means, and that and a rotary phone. So we talked about having salespeople and maybe even more importantly a process by which we're categorizing leads through automated follow-up, lead scoring. So we know which ones are hot, which ones are not, which ones need to be accelerated into that prioritization hierarchy for that salesperson and that sales team. So I think those are really good takeaways. The other thing you mentioned there was talking about the middle of the funnel and having enough information at the middle of the funnel. Could you really unpack that a little bit and what your philosophy and what you've seen is working and what's missing in that middle of the funnel activation?
Robert: Yeah, Bill, absolutely. So a lot of times I think one of the mistakes that we could make as marketers and, you know, business executives is, Hey, I offer a solution to your problem. And since I do, you should just do business with me and, or, you know, you're looking for my service and I sell that service. So you should do business with me. Like, what else do you need to know? Here's a price. And then, and then we might get fixated on, okay, I'm going to be the most competitive price or you know, some of these things and that, you know, that's not always the right approach. So I think the, the biggest thing where there's a gap that we have to fill and sometimes it's on the sales side. Sometimes it's on the marketing side. Sometimes, you know, it might be in another area of the company, but the reasons why someone should pick us over someone else. And usually that has to do with experience, accessibility, education, but especially in a service-based industry, we really have to position ourselves as the experts, the thought leaders, the, know, the go-to everybody wants to have a guy or a gal, right? You move to a new town. You're going to, this is my mechanic. This is my HVAC person. This is my, you know, you want to have a person for everything. We have to position ourselves in the B2B space as being that person for our niche and not just, Hey, I'm a marketer. So, you know, you, you should use me. Well, there's a bunch of other ones out there. So we have to give them that, that those reasons why, and a lot of times that doesn't have to be face to face conversations. That could be after the relationship is initiated, things that are out there on our digital footprint that the prospect can go and research and find more out about and understand that, hey, in organic type of way that, you know, we have those virtues to us as to why they should do business with us, you know, and I, but also, and I could touch more on this in a second as we get deeper into the lead gen conversation. But I feel like a search engine strategy actually is more prevalent in the B2B space in the middle of the funnel than the top of the funnel. But we could touch more on that in a little bit. I think that's a big part that a lot of people don't really think about in the traditional way of search engines.
Bill: Whenever you think about that middle of the content funnel, what do you see as some of the most effective vehicles? Like what are the most effective content assets? Like we're hearing a lot about video, right? That everybody consumes it, but also the searchability is not as high as some of our case studies, white papers or guides or other like lead magnet type of content. Like we all know what we're doing and when we make that stuff. But what is your opinion on if someone needed to prioritize? Because we're all dealing with companies that have budgets and limitations and resources, and we always have to try and give them the best advice of let's prioritize one, two, three. What would be the best approach for you to like attack that middle of the funnel? Robert, what do you see as kind of like your top three go-tos for middle of the funnel content?
Robert: Yeah, absolutely. So middle of the funnel content, Bill, or middle of the funnel lead strategies on how to drive them through? Because it's not always just content in my opinion.
Bill: Correct. So no, a great question. So it would be when you're talking about how this lead specifically in the lead generation space, not so much on a content marketing space. But if we have a lead and we need to kind of move them in from, like you said, I have a need, you provide it. And now let's get down to that sales process. I'm like you, if someone needs it, I'm like, well, let's go, right? What else do need to know? And that's not always the case. There's just a little friction in the middle, something about our prices and their needs and their understanding and all that. So specifically when we look at lead generation and that middle of the lead generation funnel content.
Robert: Yeah, absolutely. So the first component that I think works really well that many times is an afterthought is what I was just alluding to, paid search. So once somebody has initiated contact, we can enter them into a retargeting or remarketing campaign via paid search. And then every single time as they're in the research process for our products or services, we're having top of page presence in front of them because we're bidding higher for that position once they're in the retargeting section of the funnel. So that way, our name is continually staying in front of them as they're performing their consumer journey. So we're getting additional brand touch points because, know, everybody that's been in marketing for any time knows the old, you know, mantra, hey, it's seven or eight brand touch points before someone ultimately converts. So that's the first thing as far as the messaging goes, you know, one of the best things that I find is two forms of it. Well, the mechanisms are delivered in two different ways. And I know this is going to sound crazy, but bear with me. Direct mail is a really good in between, and email, which probably doesn't sound as crazy as a good in between. Now, what is the message is the big question, right? Now direct mail. I feel like there is so much value in sending a snail mail letter to a prospect that you're working on right now. Because it doesn't happen with, especially with like, I'm a millennial. Right. It does not happen with my generation, but I'm an old soul. It blows people out of the water. If I send them a postcard while we're like in there, you know, in the introductory page of, of, I'm an introductory stage of dating. And that message is usually going to be purely about the prospect. I, at this point, I don't need to keep telling them all the reasons they should do business with me and you know, why I'm good at what I do, why our team is equipped to really, you know, drive results for them. I've probably already had that conversation or they've done their due diligence, researched us as a company and they've discovered that information. What I need to deliver them now in terms of content needs to be 100% about that prospect. What will be beneficial to them? What are value points to them? I was reading the news this morning and I saw an article that was relevant to them that I thought is connected to their industry, is a trend they should be aware of. I'm going to send them a quick email and say, Hey, I want to share this article. I thought this was relevant to you with a two sentence overview as to why it takes me a total of two minutes or three minutes to fire out that email. And it's a major value touch that that, that, that client is going to get or that prospect. And I still do that even after the activation stage years as a client, because it, I, and the other thing is I always refer. Well, I truly look at like our clients like I am the owner of their business. I try to put myself in those shoes. So I always refer to everything as our business, our team, rather than you and I, it's more of a we and our, because I want them to understand I'm putting myself in their shoes as a buyer and trying to make the most mutually beneficial relationship as possible. So this is a good positive working relationship.
Bill: So Robert, I love that I am a generation or so older than you. So direct mail is something I grew up with. We used to, I've sent over a billion direct mail pieces in prior career with a lot of D2C branding and market activation. But I absolutely agree with you. Direct mail is like the it's like the hack code right now if you want to break through because let's be honest, on the phone, on the, in the email, on our browsers. It's like you're standing in Times Square and all of those screens are just like firing, right? There's just so much noise and to really break through, especially at specific phases of the, whether it's the lead generation funnel or the nurturing funnel or even the retention funnel. We've been talking about adding that to our client retention funnel where we're sending them things and certainly there's we have some gifting strategies around that as well with our clients. But the, I completely agree with you on direct mail and email as far and the we talk about sometimes a value ladder where one of our touch points up that value ladder is a very personalized research point that it really connects with that person. So it's not just your canned stuff, right? Like, okay, here's who we are, what we do, why we do it, etc. This is more of like, hey, Robert, I saw this article, and it's completely about your situation and just wanted to send it your way. That's, that's a great touch. So let's unpack that a little bit. So we’re in the Missing Half, we want to discover what's missing. And we have conversations with experts like you, Robert, we unpack things we didn't even plan on talking about. We're going to take, we're going down this rabbit hole.
Robert: Yeah, love it. Let's go.
Bill: Whenever you whenever you think about that email, and you send it out, I love that strategy. Let's talk more about the physical direct mail, because I think that's something that our viewers would need to be exposed to more conversations about direct mail, because it needs, in my opinion, to have a greater consideration in the marketing mix to activate people. Here's an example. I have two sons, one who's in college, one who's about to enter college and the amount of direct mail that they received after they took their tests. There's some type of mechanism and I don't understand it all because I'm not in higher ed, but once you take your SATs and your ACTs, it's like all of sudden, it's just like the floodgates open. Some of the direct mail is amazing. Personalized, puts their name on it. Like there's variable data. Also, some of the universities are so very well organized in that they only send direct mail about the major interests that like one of my sons would have filled out on their app, like their preliminary application. Like, I want to be an engineer. I want to be a business student. So it's I mean, it is dialed in. So and it is very effective. And these are young people, right? These are people who have the phones and like they're totally into it and grew up not knowing what the Sears catalog was. And Robert, you might be too young to know what the Sears catalog is.
Robert: Oh I know what the Sears catalog is, absolutely.
Bill: Okay. If I say that to some people, like we one of our series in the Missing Half is we interview a lot of young marketing managers who are brand new in their careers. And I used that example in a conversation the other day, and they're looking at me like, what's a Sears? What's Sears? I'm like a store. What's a catalog? Like we had to go way back. But you know, this generation doesn't understand the Sears catalog, doesn't understand the religious devotion that we all as children showed to that catalog and studied and marked pages and circled them 20 times hoping to give Santa Claus or in all cases, mom and dad, hey, this is what I want. So when you think about that direct mail component, what are you seeing specifically in that phase that's working well? And what have you tried and what do you think needs to be tried? Because I think we're almost coming back into a new innovation phase in direct mail.
Robert: Yeah, well, the first one that comes to mind is direct mail retargeting. A lot of people, they always think about retargeting in terms of social media advertising and programmatic advertising where, if somebody's engaged with our social channel or our website in the past 30 days, let's run some banner ads to follow them around the web while they're in that research phase to try to convert them. Or social media, and everybody's experienced that. Hey, you're shopping for you know, boots on Amazon, get on Facebook or Instagram later, and there's the ad for the boots, right? However, a lot of people don't think about direct mail as a retargeting tactic. And there's a lot of companies now that are doing that. And a lot of vendors out there where they can match those IP addresses and get about a 60% match rate and retarget them with direct mail. Well, that mail piece, just the tactic in and of itself is good, but it's probably going to be low performing unless you're really strategic about the content of the mailing piece. The content of the mailing piece can't be like a traditional direct mail piece where you're just cold going into someone's mailbox and hoping to, you know, hit them with a 20% offer and get them to convert. I think, I think the content of the mailing piece has to be more oriented around the trust and expertise fact, you know, factor and trying to have, you know, the people's faces on that mailer that they're going to be doing business with to get another psychological touch point of a relationship component. Things of that nature are a little bit different from the typical mail piece to try to drive them from the middle to the bottom of the funnel. Now the other approach is more of a standard, you know, old school postcard or letter that's personalized. That's really just a value touch point and no different from an email that you would send over, but it's done in the written format, which is a strong value point as well.
Bill: Sure. No, I love that. And so this is one of the challenges I think we face with direct mail and even any print piece that you develop for a client is they always want to put like from Genesis to Revelation. They want to put from like the company was founded in 1922 the whole way to 20 years from now. We want to be a Fortune 500 company on every direct mail piece on every print piece. And I really love this idea of send them a trust point. Hey, this is the team you'll be working with. Hey, here's the years of experience we have not not a buy this now, 20% off or free X, Y, Z with this or new offer or finance or whatever, right? Whatever the traditional activators are, that's a really great point. Why can't we build trust in the process with direct mail retargeting in the middle and towards the bottom of the funnel? That's a fantastic take. A couple of things we found that have been very effective is one, you have, so for us, a lot of our direct mail is lower quantity because we're dealing with like more ABM or these manufacturers or B2B. So a hundred leads in one campaign can be a nice size. One is hand addressing all the envelopes, which is painstaking and you need someone with really good handwriting, so I don't do it, but that has been very effective. Yeah, my handwriting, I should have been a brain surgeon. I mean, nobody can read anything I write.
Robert: You and me both, Bill. Yeah, I'm the same way.
Bill: So hand addressing has been effective. And one of the other things I really encourage our clients is that we need to invest in really good lists. If we're going to do direct mail, you are going to spend a lot of money with the United States Postal Service. That's where all the expense is, it's in postage. You really need to, it can't be spray and pray like we can with some digital campaigns where the algorithms are going to learn and and get more efficient over time. If you pick that address and buy that stamp, it's going and that money is gone. And so I feel like investing in good data is really critical at that point. But as a, direct mail as a activation channel, I think is coming back around. And I think it is going to be what we continue to see it every day. It's earning more space in the marketing mix because it is working. there's it is so unique. When I was 20 years ago, our family business, they used to bring in bins of direct mail. Bins every day. And I mean, then we had a mail room, we we legitimately had someone who sorted the mail and like boxes on the wall. Now, five, six pieces a day, max, right. And it stands out. You look at it. Right. The same at our homes. I think for the consumer market, we don't get nearly the direct mail we used to. For what, you know, that market has changed as well. So if you have something that's really compelling, and I think this goes back to the college example. My sons do not get a lot of mail at all. But like what, a letter from one of their friends? Never going to happen. Their friends don't even know how to address an envelope, right? My children might not know how to address an envelope. I don't know. But the point is when they get something in the mail it’s, oh wow, that's pretty interesting. I don't usually get mail. So I think there's a lot of trigger emotional triggers, psychological triggers, that you're special if you get something like that. And we need to really leverage that. So I love that take. And I love the fact, go ahead.
Robert: Bill, two things on that. I love where this conversation is going. So two things, first of all, list acquisition, you hit the nail on the head. They have to invest in that. Just as important in my opinion is cleaning up the list over time and investing in cleaning that and cleaning it and cleaning it. A lot of people, you know, they buy the list and then they keep, you know, keep working the list and they're not cleaning it and reducing that expense over time. But this is a tip, actually on another podcast a long time ago, somebody gave me that I really, really, I took to heart and I love, they said, if you ever struggling getting engagement on a direct mail piece and you know your contacts, you know, they're high quality prospect, send them a, an Amazon prime package. You know, it never gets thrown in the, in the mail by the assistant or the gatekeeper, an Amazon prime package. And they, and that I thought was like a genius idea. was like, Hey, if I'm looking at a high quality prospect, that could be, you know, a major prospect. What's, what's $15 or 20 bucks on some little small Amazon prime thing? And I was like, that's, I really thought that was a great marketing idea, you know?
Bill: So I love that. Whenever you're talking about cost per acquisition, and especially when we're looking at B2B and manufacturing marketing, where we're talking about multimillion dollar contracts with tremendous LTV, these could be three, five, seven years. So let's say this one prospect could equal 10, 12 million dollars of lifetime value. Is it worth it to spend that 15 bucks, to spend 30 bucks, to spend, and when we think about, wow, that's a lot. Well, how much did we spend on the trade show? Oh, we spent $150,000 to go to the trade show. How much did we spend on our website? How much did we spend on the video channel? How much are we spending of our people's time to write case studies and do these technical documents and all of these papers and all the things we got to do, right? And we probably still need to do those because it's all a process, but there's certainly an opportunity in the space to have that high value touch point that is unique. And I also think it shows that you're innovative in your approach, which a lot of people aren't. One of the other things, this is a hack I'm trying to explore is handwriting robots. I am terrible at handwriting notes and I'd love to send thank you notes, but many people have called me afterwards and be like, Bill, I saw this was from you. And there's some type of hieroglyphics, what were you trying to say? So there's a disconnect in the creative, let's just say the creative execution on the pieces, but I think handwriting robots could be something that could help us personalize direct mail without, and you know, some handwriting robots at scale were 20, 30, $50,000, which certainly, we don't have the budget to just have that as a channel for that type of capital investment. But now we're seeing handwriting robots that are sub 2500 bucks that I think could be used as a tool, especially for very, very high touch, high value, ABM type of prospects, multimillion dollar prospects. And not only in the marketing function, man, that should be in the retention function, the sales function. There's a lot of touches that we're not even getting into today because we're focusing on lead gen that that type of tool I think could be very, very valuable.
50 Marketing break
Bill: Robert, this is great because whenever we get into the Missing Half, we're trying to have conversations and discover what's missing. And sometimes we start on a topic and we end up taking a journey where we really are discovering live. So, you know, these conversations are not scripted. We generally have some general outlines or topics that we want to discuss, but then we just dive right in. Nowhere on your four point outline that we discussed is the word direct mail and we've spent 15, 20 minutes on, so I love it. Let's talk about, I think, something that's very, very important and very tough is tracking these leads and leads analysis for larger companies. That becomes a challenge. Let's say, well, do they have HubSpot? Do they have ActiveCampaign? Do they have some type of advanced software? Paying $1,000 or $2,000 a month for a piece of software does not solve issues. It just gives you tools to approach issues. I've dealt with some clients where I've done assessments and they're spending, I don't know, 15, $20,000 a month on HubSpot and Salesforce. And they have 19 bazillion SaaS's stacked on top of each other. And they're doing a worse job than someone who has Google Sheets. And right, or just like paying attention to it. So maybe talk about how you approach lead tracking and analysis. Some of the things you've seen are missing for companies and what you've done to try and help them get sorted.
Robert: See the critical thing about CRMs in my experience is, you know, it's just data in, data out. If you're not working the software, then the software functionality in and of itself is almost entirely useless. And then one of the challenges that I've seen in the B2B space as, you know, some of these tech stacks have been introduced is some people in the, you know, that, that have been with these companies for a long time are very standoffish and they don't want to evolve their daily process to adequately use some of this tech, you know, a CRM it involves, Hey, if your sales team is going to be using the CRM, they have to sit down at end of day, every day, fill out their end of day reports. That's a change of pace for someone that might have been 20 years in the business and they never, you know, they might've filled out manual call reports and that was about the extent of it. And so a couple of things here, you know, this is a great question. For us, we, we set up CRM tracking with attribution models for, I mean, almost all of our lead gen campaigns, even if the client is not going to use the CRM, we are going to use it all the way to where the lead gets pushed across the marketing bridge and falls and gets pushed across their desk. So we can know everything that happened to that point. Now, the problem with this is the largest mistake I see organizations make is they're constantly scrutinizing where their leads are coming from. They're, they're hyper, you know, hyper focused on, well, my cost per lead from this channel is way higher than my cost per lead from this channel. And, know, they're, they're always fixating on the cost per lead and not talking as much, a lot of times, about the cost per acquisition. They're not putting the same level of analysis on the acquisition ratio of incoming leads as they are the lead, you know, cost per lead. And so they can't properly understand their cost per acquisition because they don't have the right level of metrics once the lead’s coming across to be able to, you know, keep a good kind of consistent pulse on that. And so I think that, really, that comes down to a process personnel and training standpoint that B2B companies are going to have to embrace and understand that that's going to become more and more critical because with AI and machine learning and some of the algorithms, you have to know that acquisition stage and status in order to effectively influence some of the things upstream a little bit. So it's just something that companies are going to have to adapt and evolve. Otherwise they're going to get left behind. It's just simple fact.
Bill: Yeah, I think you're right on a one. We have many clients that we end up doing all of the work in the CRM for them and then just push some type of what I would call very binary list of information to salespeople because they don't they don't want to log into HubSpot. They don't want to deal with any of it. And that's fine. Right. Know your strength and pay us to do it because we're better at it and faster at it. The other thing I think that is so right on is the issue with AI is the, if you are not organizing your data, AI is only faster with data. If you don't have a good CRM, if you don't have a good customer list, if you don't have good data on your customers that's integrating with your ERP, you are not going to be able to experience or take advantage of the full benefit of AI integration if you don't have the good foundation and fundamentals, I mean, what are they talking about? Hallucinations. If you have AI with bad data, right? It will give you an answer. Whether that answer is true or not. I mean, it kind of goes back to, this is, wow, I'm going to go way back in the database here. Peter Drucker said the lies of yesterday become the truths that we base our business on for tomorrow. And if we have unfounded, if we have lies, and not that we're like actively trying to tell ourselves a lie, but it's just not true, right? It's, it's an assumption we have that isn't rooted in data and findings. It's just an assumption. And then we use that as a truth to base the future of our business on it. That is going to be exacerbated by AI so rapidly. If we have bad data feeding into these models. And I don't want to live in hallucinations when I'm talking about planning my business. I don't want to live with hallucinations whenever I'm giving advice to business owners about what they should do with their marketing. Right? So I think that's right on that we have to make sure. And this goes back to your comments on direct mail. We need to clean that list. This goes into our lead generation and lead capture and how we're dealing with that data with the organizations and the enterprises to make sure they're using it properly. What other challenges do you see with mid-market companies adopting AI maybe other than the data portion and the foundational part of it?
Robert: Largest challenges, it kind of piggybacks on my last comment, just the integration and training of it. You know, AI is only effective if the teams know how to use it, in my opinion. Well, it's only optimized and like maximized if the teams know how to use it. And so without proper implementation, it just becomes another underutilized tool or misused tool. And I've seen a lot of that as well, where, you know, it's very obvious to me that AI is being too relied upon. And it's really taking away from the consumer experience when I've been on the consumer end. And so I think training and implementation is probably the largest challenge here. I'm seeing more and more consultants come out that are AI training consultants. Now, some of them are legitimate and some of them are trying to just get a piece of the market share while it's popular. But I see a lot of value in that, you know. Kind of doing an AI assessment of organizations, not just on the marketing side, but organization wide, hey, are there things on the admin side, you know, things of that nature that could possibly be, you know, maximized. And so I think it's training and integration is what it comes down to in two words, Bill.
Bill: Yeah, and I think we're hearing a lot about this adoption conundrum, right? Because like you can sit there, I can sit here and I can come like get AI to do something amazing. But if I can't get that, like, so then let's say it's amazing for our client success team. And if then I can't get those six people to adopt that and use it really, really well, then I am just a mad scientist, right? Who has invented something neat that's awesome in the laboratory, but if it can't be repeated, right? It's almost like an experiment that didn't exist because if it's not repeatable and scalable, who cares, right? Because then it won't make us any money. It's just, it's a hobby. It's a hobby, not a business innovation that leads to optimization.
Robert: Exactly. I mean, I can't tell you how many times since the AI revolution has started, someone said, you have to try this. You need to try Centra. You need to try Perplexity. You need to try, you know, and, and every time they're like, this is, you know, this thing is amazing. And I, I, know, I try to try everything out and just kind of look, take a look at it, do my research. And it's like, it really has to do with how that user prompted it, how they've set it up for themselves and they've given it the proper inputs to be successful. You know, and without those same inputs to be successful, it's just another AI tool, you know?
Bill: One of the things I think from a human perspective with AI, I think it's also a mirror because it's showing us how bad as business leaders, business managers, we are at communicating in general because it's like if you go to an employee and you tell them something or you give them something to do or an objective, there's the human factor and then they go off and then let's say they approximate what you wanted in return or what you envisioned. AI is just truth, man. If you ask a dumb question, it gives you a really bad answer, right?
Robert: I love that Bill, that that's spot-on. I haven't thought of it like that. I love that I mean that's absolute truth.
Bill: I mean, it just, you ask an employee a dumb question, they're usually deferential. They're usually polite, empathetic. They try to like, okay, yeah, Bill. Because I have a thing on my wall here, I'm pointing at it. It says, I am the problem. And I show my team this all the time. I am the problem, I get it. So after Bill gets done asking for this, you guys go and figure out a better mousetrap and do something that meets or exceeds what I'm asking. Don't just try and do it because Bill is limited in his ask. AI, on the other hand, is going to do to a certain extent exactly what we ask it to do. Now, they're saying it's going to learn and the agents are going to be able to process, but it's still going to be within the bounds of what we prompt it to do. And the prompt engineering is going to have to be, it's going to be so fast and precise that the parameters and the prompts are going to have to really be dialed in and tinkered with all of the time with the variability that occurs in the market. It's really an exciting time. And like I've seen some of these very, very smart people who are way smarter than me on podcasts and such talking about it at the highest level of business saying, this is the single greatest invention and the single greatest revolution that we are going to have. Like it's going to blow the industrial revolution and the information revolution like out of the water. So it's very, very exciting. But if that promise is going to hold true, the challenges that it presents are going to be equally as just huge and problematic, right? It is going to be a rough go and there's going to be a lot of tripping and falling.
Robert: Here's the thing, Bill, it's going to come down to this. There's two types of people when it comes to change. You have embrace change people, and you have resistant to change people. Right. And the embrace change people are going to be the people that thrive in the age of AI because we're going to constantly be evolving. I mean, the prompt we used last week is going to be tweaked and improved this week. If you're one of those people that embraces change and you embrace the fact that my business is constantly going to shift and change in terms of processes, protocol systems, then I think we're gonna be those that thrive in the AI revolution. And so, I mean, you gotta ask yourself, which one are you? And if you're on the other side, you might need to adapt. You might need to.
Bill: I was talking to a CEO the other day and they're very astute, very, very successful. And they are on the slower end of the AI adoption because I started going down a path of having a conversation about like, what are they doing and agentic AI and are they, you know, have they used projects and are they like all like just, and I'm a novice, like I am not an AI superstar, but we play around with it every day and we're always trying to use it. We've been using it for years, to some extent or another and certainly a lot more recently. There are a lot of people, think, especially in the C-suite and in mid-level management at large companies who don't even know how to engage it. Sure, they can have a conversation with it. They can use the large language models, right? They can have conversations and do research, write a poem in the voice of Robert Frost about TikTok. Sure. Anybody can do that and get an output. But this implementation and experimentation phase, the other thing I think it's going to be really big is going to be a challenge is businesses are going to have to look at it as a tremendous investment, just like you would an HR department. If you have an HR and training department that has a lot of people and a lot of resources to get all of your people moving in the right direction, and then you have an IT department that is keeping all of your computers and your systems and all that moving in the right direction. You are going to have to have an AI department that every day, all they do, they get up in the morning and by eight o'clock, all they think about is how do we improve the AI implementation and functionality in our business? How do we, like, there is going to be, have to be that level of commitment or like we're, I think we're already within what, two years of this really starting to have an impact of it moving from it's something we all have to dabble in, to what percentage of our overhead is going towards AI, right? There better be two digits. This isn't like, 1%, 5%, okay, is it 15? Is it 25%? And in some companies that are much more technology driven, it's going to be way higher than that. So what are you seeing in that development?
Robert: Yeah, well, I agree with you certainly that it's going to have to be something that's implemented into everybody's operations to some degree. For us, we're seeing a lot of different ways on the marketing side that it's supporting businesses. For one client, we see AI-driven chat bots are reducing response times, improving that kind of a prospect consumer journey and they were able, like this is a home services client, they were able to capture 40% more leads after hours where typically somebody wouldn't work that lead until the next business day. So they were able to get actually get a response 40% more of the time by having a response after hours and starting to pre-qualify that prospect. Like I talked about earlier, predictive analytics using AI is allowing people to prioritize higher intent prospects, like I was alluding to earlier. That's where we're seeing, those are probably the two most prominent scenarios that I'm seeing on the marketing side that's having the biggest impact with AI right now.
Bill: That's great. Hey, I want to pivot a little bit here because one of the things I wanted to ask you about, and this is something I think we all struggle with in marketing, is how do we position our agencies and how do we make sure that we're becoming an ally to the sales team? Because no matter what AI does, we are still going to have people involved in these processes. And whenever we think about the sales silo and the marketing silo, the reason those, that cliche is used is because it is so true, right? What are you seeing as a way that you can position your agency, and I often ask experts this and agency owners because I'm trying to create some learning for myself and see if there's some gold nuggets we can develop and what's missing on how to ally ourselves with sales teams.
Robert: Yeah, it's a great question, Bill. And I mean, this has been happening for decades. I've been on the sales side and the marketing side and the fulfillment side for that matter. And the reality is that sales, if sales is ever underperforming, the first person they're typically always going to point the finger at is marketing. Right. So right away from the jump, the important thing is to position ourselves as an ally, as a collaborator and not a competitor. And we're not competing for the same job. You know, it's you or me type of thing. I think for me, I try to align the marketing strategies with the sales goals. So ensuring the marketing isn't just generating leads, but delivering prospects ready to convert. And again, kind of focusing more on that cost per acquisition rather than cost per lead. And I think that there's a real benefit to having regular joint meetings, whiteboard meetings, collaborative meetings, sharing the KPIs from desk to desk so we can kind of bridge that gap where, a lot of times there's usually in my experience, there's a lot of gaps in the CRM collaboration, marketing's getting things inputted, sales isn't giving the proper data within the CRM to tell the rest of the story to help marketing. And so if we can connect it from the aspect of, Hey, I'm here on the marketing side to help you on the sales side to be better and to produce better results. So for me, I'm always a big person attach it to the benefit statement of how it's going to benefit them so that you can produce more results in your job, make more money, be better, you know, be more successful, hire a larger team, whatever it is that speaks to them with their current goals. And if we can help bridge that gap and actually make their job easier, we'll get a lot of buy-in. And then we tend to get more communication upstream or downstream so we can better fine tune some of the things we're doing on the marketing strategy side.
Bill: No, that's great. Another thing I want to ask you about is we're in a moment in the marketing industry that I believe we can accelerate companies who are way, like way behind their competitors really quickly because in my opinion, it has never been more accessible for late adopters to come up to speed really, really quickly because how inexpensive, relatively speaking, it is to where it was 10 years ago, right? If you want a video campaign, it doesn't cost $150,000 to have a video team come out and give you like an amazing shoot like maybe it did 15 years ago, right? Like you can buy the same camera that they use to film movies, you can buy for five grand though. So like all of that has become cheaper. What do you think about companies competing effectively with like Fortune 500 companies, really large companies who've been doing it for a long time. How quickly can they catch up if they are just aggressive and roll up their sleeves, allocate some money and get after it?
Robert: That's a great question, Bill, because the whole consumer journey has shifted with the digital age and different resources and tools. I think the key here is the riches are in the niches. Focusing on these niche markets that are really hyper-targeted is the best approach, because I think that's how you can go in and get a piece of the market share quicker. By not being too broad and saying, Hey, this is my specific little narrow area that I'm really, really good at. And I don't try to do everything. And that tends to appeal more to the person who's listening because they go, well, I need somebody who's really, really good at what I do because I just do this. I don't do everything that, you know, this other company may serve. And so I think first, you know, riches are in the niches. Leveraging organic content. It's kind of been a reoccurring conversation on this whole, you know, last hour conversation is trying to find a way to, build trust, consideration, expertise through your organic content strategy. But then also the last piece is really using automation to scale efforts without increasing manual labor head count. You know, that can, that alone can propel someone very rapidly if they figured out how to use automation. Not necessarily just AI, but automation in general to be able to scale labor essentially. I mean, it's, there's, there's like so many tools out there that can help, you know, reduce costs and expenses and turnaround time and things like that in different areas of the day to day, you know, business cycle these days.
Bill: I think that's great, Robert. And one of the things we also talk about a lot in our community is the department of one. And I imagine you deal with this with a lot of your clients where they have one person at their business, whether by job title or role, that is the marketing go to. And one of the things we like to talk about is the value of the marketing agency relationship in what you just talked about. We can scale with a little bit of extra. So you have that headcount in your business. You've got that labor expense. And then if you want to take that in like 10 X, a hundred X, their impact on your business, it's dialing into a company like yours, like mine, that has all of these fractional people that they can leverage to get things done really quickly. Cause let's be honest, AI is going to help us all be better. It's not going to replace everybody. At least we hope not. We'll figure that out later. Remains to be seen. And it's not going to replace, you know, all the things that humans have to do. So whenever you're dealing with companies and the department of one, how do you see like your agency services and the agency business really like giving that 10x superpower to those teams?
Robert: Yeah, that's great question. And I think that it goes back to even like the sales question earlier of figuring out, where are the gaps right now in their organization? How can we be an ally to that department of one? A lot of times we serve as an extension of that department of one. That's basically what we are. And so identifying, hey, where are the major gaps? And then also, what are the things right now that that department of one is doing that we could easily do either faster, more affordably or better? And let's pull that across the table and not again, not trying to steal their responsibilities, but positioning it as, Hey, this is something that makes sense for us to fill this gap here. And then that can free you up to do something. That's one of your more strengths, possibly. You know, I, we, think of a recent win that we have with a manufacturing client out of Rosenberg, uh, over this last year, you know, they're a department of one. And they really are relation, that person is really a relationship driven person. He's very good at the face to face interactions, the trade shows, things of that nature. So they serve a nationwide audience on the manufacturing side. We really pulled in some of the basics, refined their website, did some SEO work, launched some LinkedIn ads. Um, and you know, we were able to increase non-branded leads year over year, uh, in 2024 compared to 2023 by 270%. Well, it's by us filling some of those gaps that aren't, you know, everyday conversations. So that, that previously were intended to be filled by that one person within the organization. So we could free him up to do more of the trade shows. And that ended up in more acquisitions because he's able to go out and have more of those face-to-face conversations and not be having to fixate on some of the behind the desk tasks that don't involve face-to-face conversations that truthfully can be done in the office. They could be done 120 miles from the office in our office, or they could be done halfway across the country if needed.
Bill: Sure. No, I think that's right on because number one, you will never run into a department of one person who doesn't have 3000 like they don't have 3000 more things that they're supposed to be doing that they aren't getting, like they're never under tasked. They're always under resourced. And when we think about that department of one, if we can take something that we can do better, faster, and we have a higher level of expertise and can actually get the performance out of it in the agency function, it is always better to move that to someone else, to a resource partner in the agency space, than to continue to struggle and underperform. And then yeah, do something else with that time that only that internal employee can do if it's the trade show, if it's having more meeting with sales, voice of customer research, engagement with subject matter experts in the company to extract more content, right? That's what the internal marketing function should be. Expecting a department of one to be a master of web dev UX, lead generation, SEO, SEM, video production, copywriting. It's like that person, God has a job and it is not to do your marketing, right? He is busy with all other things that he is not going, I always say to people, God, Mother Theresa, and Albert Einstein were busy and they retired. So now you have to get this done with the resources that are available you have today. So, no, think that's a great take and, certainly, congratulations on those results. It's always good to hear wins. And those are the type of things I think that we can, we can execute for clients, and certainly experts like yourself, Robert, you guys are doing that on a daily basis. Well, Robert, this has been just a fantastic conversation. I did as always with the Missing Half podcast, I learn more every day and I have these conversations I have no idea where they're going to go. We just start out on a path and then along the way we do check-ins with just some topics, but I loved the conversation about direct mail and that perspective and just some other things you shared were just like gold nuggets. We are at an hour and this always happens, I think, you know, how are we going to fill an hour and then in an hour it's like hey we just got started. Let's get another cup of coffee. But I want to maybe ask for a run back here in a little while. We'll have another conversation and talk about some of these topics in more detail but I do want to give you, Robert, the opportunity to talk about where people can reach you. This will, all of this information will be in the footers and in the postings and around the episode so people click on it but let's verbally go through your company, what you're offering, where people can find you and that type of thing.
Robert: Yeah, Bill. Thanks. First of all, before I get to that, I just want to thank you. You've been a fantastic host. You have some really, really good information and insights that you shared today. You obviously know this space of this B2B manufacturing space. I've done a lot of these podcasts and I don't always have a conversation that rolls this smoothly. So, fantastic host. I mean, I’ve got to, I got to give you that, but Building Brands Marketing, that's our firm. You can find us, you know, on any social channel, just at Building Brands Marketing. Uh, of course, LinkedIn, Facebook, uh, TikTok, uh, Instagram, but me personally, could follow me on LinkedIn, Robert P. Royer. It's going to be Robert P is in Patrick Royer. Um, always sharing some good individual insights on there as well. I love sharing information. I love trying to educate people on, know, uh, just, just business and business trends. And I also love being educated. So I love people, you know, that share, constantly share tips and know, tidbits with me because I'm always looking to be better than I was yesterday. But yeah, those are our social channels. You can also visit us online buildingbrandsmarketing.com. You know, we're the SEO and SEM guys throughout the whole country. That's what we built our whole reputation doing. And, while we do, you know, full agency services, that's kind of my bread and butter and what we've, really built our reputation nationally on. And it's been an absolute pleasure to be here today, Bill. Thank you for inviting me.
Bill: Robert, this has been great. Thank you so much. And yeah, we're gonna run you back here again and do another conversation, because this has been a pleasure.