Tis’ the season to give! We interview Andrew Forman with Givz.com. Offering a discount isn’t always the best idea when enticing people to buy. Andrew walks us through how offering donations and giving to charity instead of discount codes increases your conversion rate. We discuss why discounts are problematic for the long-term profitability of a business and how brands are embracing the move towards social good. Andrew explains how giving away money will outperform a traditional discount – It is true! This is a timely episode as we are coming up to Give to the Max Day.
Why Offering Donations Instead of Discount Codes Increases Your Conversion Rate
Money is king. A massive portion of your company’s annual profits is made through money spent on direct mail, promotional, and ad spending.
One of the most significant issues with discounts is that it’s just a temporary hit to your bottom line, and all it does is increase your expenditure on mailing lists.
Why is Money Really King?
A recent article from the Financial Times revealed that the average luxury brand spends around $3 million on mailing lists alone. This doesn’t take into account the amount of time people spend browsing their emails.
Offering a discount code is a quick solution to an easily solved problem by having an intelligent email list manager build out your prospect list.
The Problems With Offering Discount Codes
The best online stores that we interact with daily are giving discount codes simply because they want to be part of our daily lives.
Giving away discounts to get users to do things they don’t want to do is like training a dog to do a specific task without the owner’s consent. If you are preparing a dog to pull a wagon, is this ethical? Is this ethically right if you’re training a dog to do something more helpful, like picking up litter?
Discount codes are a privilege to be had because most of us are content to give them away.
The Benefits Of Offering Donations
Of course, to offer up a donation instead of a coupon, the first question you should ask is why you’re doing this. Why not just use your standard discount code?
This is where you get into the whys, when, where, and how. It’s essential to figure out why you want to offer your customers a donation instead of a discount code.
It’s All About Impact
One of the most popular reasons to donate your discount code is because the customer is already involved in your business’ cause. In fact, 35% of customers are willing to support charities even if the cost is higher.
By offering them the opportunity to make a donation, you increase your impact and customer experience. You’re also making it easier for customers to make a difference, which you always want.
How Brands Are Moving Towards Social Good
Discount codes have been around for years, and it’s not a new concept. Yet even though this model has worked for so long, the times are changing, and brands are no longer interested in protecting profits at the expense of social good. In fact, there is a growing trend of brands taking the drastic step of totally boycotting discount codes in favor of generous approaches, such as promoting donation schemes.
Looking at this trend, it would seem that the future of a brand lies in focusing on making a social contribution. In order to do so, a brand needs to use every tool at its disposal, especially discount codes, to draw consumers to them. Some brands are so committed to building social value that they have abandoned discount codes altogether.
Conclusion
The rise in digital technologies and marketing innovations means that traditional ways of doing business will struggle to compete against the multi-channel and omnichannel environment created by companies in the modern era. While a move away from offering discount codes will initially see competition increase, those that adopt a different approach may be able to build long-term relationships with customers that work to their advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
The ecommerce landscape is changing. More choices are here and more are coming. I speak with Stefan Hamann the CEO of Shopware and Ben Marks, Director of Global Market Development. They are bringing Shopware to the world and in this episode, we talk about the benefits of Shopware for the US market. We talk about the ease of use and especially the ability to start on a SaaS platform and move to completely custom on-prem. This is something very unique and exciting to the e-commerce world
We interview Chase Clymer with the Electric Eye Agency. Chase helps brands scale on Shopify. Chase also hosts a podcast called “Honest eCommerce” where he interviews brand founders. We talk about Shopify and who is the right fit for a Shopify project. We talk about agency/client relationships and what is a good fit? We go over educating a client on their respective platform and how to get them up to speed on that feature. We go into detail on what platform makes sense for what merchant and talk about why a merchant needs an agency to help them. We discuss some differences between On-Prem and SaaS and even dive into some SaaS vs Open Source.
Learn about fraud, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in our interview with Brittany Allen, who is on the Digital Trust and Safety team at (@GetSift) Sift Fraud Prevention. We learn about Sift and how it helps merchants decrease friction in their checkout while stopping fraudulent transactions. We talk about the “Merchant Risk Council” and some of the latest hot topics, and the big one is cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. Brittany gives some great examples of what merchants can do to mitigate fraud, and we also talk about how consumers are responsible for fraud prevention. We go over their fraud index and why fraud has been up more than 300% in the last two years. We talk about the “fraud economy” and how merchants can protect themselves.
Not to leave out running. We learn that Brittany is a budding runner, and Brent exerts pressure to sign up for the 2022 New York Marathon.
This week we interview Ivonne Rohner with CoachTech Summit. We talk about all things Augmented Reality and how AR can help entrepreneurs in their growth through Virtual Coaching. Learn how you can blend Virtual Reality and coaching and we talk about the XR BootCamp which is one of the well-known virtual boot camps for Virtual Reality.
Using Augmented Reality and Virtual Coaching, Ivonne helps leaders get the most out of the available technology and shape an empathetic virtual atmosphere where people can deliver their best because they feel seen. She works with corporate incubator teams/rocket labs and startups or to create structure and employee engagement in corporations and mid-size companies.
This week we interview Maureen Mwangi, CEO of Starward Consulting who has over 10 years of experience building, growing, and scaling some of America’s biggest brands.
In a world where all the “expert” growth strategies seem catered to the service industry, it can feel impossible to figure out what it takes to turn your product brand into a market leader.
But as a brand growth strategist who’s worked with many of those big brands, Maureen Mwangi knows first-hand that they didn’t get where they are today through trial and error or piecing together fragmented strategies. She uses the data that companies already possess to develop a growth strategy
This week we interview Tomas Gerulaitis who signed the original letter for the Mage Open Source Alliance.
Brent and Tomas talk MOSCA
Transcript
Welcome to this special Mosca episode of talk commerce today have Tomas Gerulaitis. Thomas, why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us what you do. And maybe one of your passions in life. I’m Thomas Gerulaitis. I’m the Magento practice lead at a little company called space 48. I’ve been working with Magento.
Close to 10 years now. And I guess so passion. So that’s a difficult question. Other than, clean code, which I am partial to I guess motorcycles, And are you in the UK? Are you living in the UK or are you yeah, Europe? Yes, I’m in the UK.
I’m in Bath, a little town called Bo. Great. I’ve been to bath I or Boff as you say it. Yeah, it’s a beautiful city. I didn’t, I took a shower while I was there, but I think that’s okay. I’ve been there a couple of times, but anyways so great to have you today. This is going to be a. A little bonus segment on, how the Magento community alliances or the major open source community Alliance is coming together and how it’s sparking some fire in our community.
I, particularly reached out to you because you are one of the signers of the original letter. So I wanted to talk about that. Maybe dive into some of the deeper issues. And I know that the big issue that people are talking about is forking let’s fork it or not. But I think the, what the underlying thing is, just some transparency from Adobe on how that should work.
So maybe getting your feedback and opinion on that would be good. Yeah. Yeah, of course. the name is still in progress. Yeah. We’ve debated it entirely. I don’t know if it’s if I’m divulging too much, but we’ve debated it internally for quite a while and especially using Magento in the Dame.
But yeah we’ll, make sure to, come up with something as catchy, as Moscow, as soon as we can. And do you feel as though right now is a good time to do a fork? Or do you think this letter is meant to light some fire or, wake up some people at at Adobe? I think it’s a bit of both certainly bringing the issue to light and be bringing an issue to the forefront of the community.
That was one of the goals. But also I think like action needs to happen. And as soon as it happens that the sooner it happens the better. And, whether it’s creating a fork right now, which we’re in the process of or. Like studying some other action or for example, the Magento association taskforce that was started up or the sign up.
So have been started up a couple of weeks ago. I think we need to do something immediately to reassure the merchants in the space that magenta isn’t going away. Because I think, especially after the Adobe summit earlier in the year, we’ve heard some talks that we heard some, big plans that Adobe has for Adobe comments that got a lot of people worried.
A lot of people from the developers seen people who’ve been working at magenta for, 10 or more years. But merchants as well. We’ve seen a number of people moving away from. From the community and, from the platform partly because of the uncertain future, of Magento, not necessarily Adobe commerce specifically because that’s becoming a separate product and it’s quite clear that’s happening, but Magento as well.
And that’s the main reason why this came around and it’s preparing for the future, making sure that. That the clients that we’re supporting right now and the potential clients in the future, they’re still around. Yeah. And I think we’re talking about three players right now. The first would be Mosca or major open source community Alliance.
The second would be the Magento association and then the third would be Adobe. Right now, Adobe holds the control and I would agree that they have done a very poor job of communicating to the open-source community. And they haven’t really looked at the fact that the majority of the installs of Magento two are on open source.
I think they’re only looking towards, or looking at Adobe commerce, the. The outward things that they say are that that the magenta open-source is, not going to change. Nothing is changing in it. There, there should be more assurance or reassurance that the open-source Magento will stay around.
And and that the open source is still going to be the underpinning of the main commerce platform. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. I think it’s in a way it’s easy to say that they’re committed to open source, but we know that like Adobe is a business and their revenues and coming from supporting Magento open source, it’s coming from Adobe commerce.
I think that’s why it would be good to see some actions. He said something backing those words. But hopefully, that’s to come. Yeah. I think this is our second time around that we have seen a purchaser not, understand. I’m just going to use the word, not understand because I don’t feel as they understand where like this th this huge base is a great, place to get new users on.
Onto the commerce platform. And I feel as though that they’re alienating the open source platform in, favor of a very, small install base on the paid version and that if they would take a more open stance that they would open up the amount of users they could potentially have on their paid version.
Yes. Yeah. So this field like put, been around. So for people who’ve been in the community for a while, we’ve had these discussions in the past. It’s not the first time that this has happened. Yeah, I know that Tom Roberts jaw and I were privy enough or we’re lucky enough to be in the original E-bay re insurgents or re-invigoration of the community in 20, I think it was 2015 or 2014 where they took us all out to drive race cars that in Las Vegas.
So I’m hoping that my podcasts don’t preclude me from. I’m hoping they don’t preclude me from the next race car driving event in Las Vegas. But I do feel as though that we shouldn’t wait two or three years for that to happen this time either at the last time it happened it took us quite a long time to wake up and figure out that this, our open source community is, quite important in what we’re trying to do here.
So the Magento Association is another part of the puzzle. What is your view on how they’re helping or hurting or just, what is your view on the association right now? Yeah. We’ve that they, the letter that came out to the wider Magento community, that wasn’t our first communication.
We spoke to the Magento association first cause from the discussions with, the initial people in the group in the airlines that talks about it very much about treating this as a proper open source. Association opensource kind of project. It, then I brought typo three as a very good example of open the project that’s working really well. And it’s evolving the platform and is useful for everyone involved. But in discussing that we’ve realized that this is what the magenta association was supposed to do. For Magento it was a project to support the open-source development, to empower developers, to contribute to the community, and to evolve the platform.
But I feel like personally, I’ve it wasn’t announced. And then I’ve not heard a lot about it since. And that’s one of the problems that we’ve identified and, why. We’ve been so open so, vocal and so quick to, start these discussions is because we feel like we need to act now. Something has to happen and it’s just been slow.
So far. Yeah, I think that there has been quite a vacancy. I’ll use the word vacancy and communications from the Magento association. I know that they’ve continually said some of the problems are around the logo and using the name, but I don’t think that is a reason why we shouldn’t at least have communication.
I think you’ve, hit you’ve. You’ve said it that if they were, to just communicate what they are doing and even better communicating what they can’t be doing or aren’t doing or We, don’t have to get the details. I think people just want to know what’s happening. And the, I think the major open-source Alliance community Alliance initiative is, the response to that.
And the fact that, Hey, we’re not going to wait lot around forever. It’s been, it really has been two years. Exactly. And, I think there, the intent could be here behind this Alliance. Isn’t to be hostile to. Like shame anyone it’s we’re very passionate about Magento. We want to see the platform continue and succeed.
And we’re just trying to find the best way of doing that. And yeah we’re still in talks with the magenta association. I know a number of the original members have signed up to be part of the open-source task force. And we’re still communicating with Magento association and with Adobe.
We’re trying to find the best way to proceed with this. Yeah. I feel as though the association is, tiptoeing around things and they’re worried that they’re going to upset somebody and. I, this is something that has to, happen and, is I think it’s long overdue. I applaud you in that.
I think just one thing that ghetto had mentioned to me ghetto Jensen had mentioned to me is why did I sign it when I’m not a big proponent of forking, but I am a proponent of putting pressure on those who need to do something. And I think the ultimate, if it’s going to be forked or not forked, whether that’s in the letter or not.
Okay, let me just back up. I believe if nothing ever, if nothing happens, it’s going to have to get for it. I, do believe that’s going to live on just like Magento one continues to live on. Even though we get threats that our, sorry, our stores will get shut down because we’re not PC, whatever the reason.
But it continues to live on and and, works. This pressure that’s being put on is important. And the reason I signed the letter is because I believe that we need to make this change now. And without this community vocalization, it was, it would never happen. We would, I think that Adobe would continue its path of doing what it wanted to do.
And Magento association would continue to sit on the sidelines and not doing anything. This is something that had to happen. And I agree, I think yes, there’s a lot of controversy around the fork in particular, but I think the it’s, the tools that we have right now. It’s, all the control that we have right now is because Magento is open source and is licensed for open source.
All we can do right now, if nothing changes we’ll fork it well maintain it. We’ll keep it going on. But that isn’t saying that we’re taking Magento as it is right now and starting a new project. That’s completely different. It’s going to compete in a diverse, that’s not the plan. The plan is just to keep it going.
And that’s the way that we, can right now. So when, you so one last thing on this topic And we’re, going to try to make the short today is just the amount of inclusion. I think that some of us didn’t know about the letter and I think some of us in the Western hemisphere or the U S or even India, weren’t quite aware of what was happening.
And I think that there has been a lot of criticism about making sure that it is an inclusive community and not an exclusive community. And on the same side, I understand that we all have to make decisions and those decisions will go faster when the fear there’s fewer people involved. From the major open source community Alliance.
[00:14:46] How do you see more people becoming involved and then having a voice in that? So that’s, one of the big questions that we’re trying to work out with. There’s a way to allow more people to contribute while still keeping the pace of things that we’re doing. Because I fully agree with that.
Having a consensus from a large group is, great, but it makes things slow. So, far it’s been a small group of people trying to do. The issue to the front of the community to, get something started, but we’re working right now on, on getting people, accessing them, getting people involved in those discussions and whatever happens in the future.
It’s all like we’re trying to be as open and as public as we can. And do you see then future workflows would be a fork and then. Fixes happening on the fork. And then those fixes getting rolled back into the main Adobe commerce version or the, other fork of magenta open source. I think it gets very complicated, especially one of the biggest complaints from developers is they put in a, they put in a pull request on an issue happening inside of Adobe or inside of Magento and it never gets answered.
And then it gets auto closed. So I think that’s where kind of awkwardness as a means as well. It’s and I think partly it’s because currently there’s, not a lot of there’s not a lot of benefit in investing your time and maintaining magenta, open source and people who do that.
A lot of them, they’re not being paid to do that. A passion project, a side project for them. And I think that’s where kind of a defined open source program would, help actually make making sure that the people available whose job is to go through these full requests and, answer questions and make sure that the product is moving along.
Yeah. What are the ideas behind the folk? And I’m not saying that it’s going to be easy. I think that’s one of the personally to what are the sort of criticisms that I’ve seen that I, didn’t particularly appreciate is everyone saying, oh, 14 is hard. Therefore this is going to fail. W we’re not saying that it’s going to be easy.
We’re not saying that we’re just going to create a new repository with the Magento COVID as this right now. And everything’s going to be sunshine and rainbows and it’s, it is going to be a lot of effort. But I think we’ve got people who are very passionate about this and who are very invested in this to, to put that effort in and get, it over the line.
Good. All right. So last question, before we close out, who would you like to hear from at Adobe in order to see things moving, not solve things, but what sort of messaging would you like to see from Adobe and who is it that you would like to hear from, at Adobe? I think passionately.
I don’t know if I can identify a specific person that messaging needs to come from, but I think I would like to see the Magento association get more control over Magento. I would like to see them become in a sense owners of the Magento open source. Because again, one of the one of the.
Restrictions and roadblocks that we’ve seen so far, it always comes down to the intellectual property, the name, the license and that in my view, that should all be a solved problem. We’ve got Magento association, they’re already an approved organization by Adobe. I would like to see them get a lot more control over Magento so that the community.
Can continue investing into the platform without the fear of it going away in a week, a month, a year, however long it takes. And what about Magento community engineering? Do you think that they’ve just been sidelined and we don’t hear from them anymore? I must admit I’ve not been an active part of the Magento community engineering for a while.
Yes. It’s whether it’s by, nature of the platform being targeted more towards bigger clients, bigger big industries. Or if it’s just the interest is waiting because of the slow response. I think, yeah, the community engineering has been a, not really a player in the space. Like, you said, there’s currently three big players and community engineering is one.
Yeah. Realistically community engineering should be driving that close rate on PRS and at least reviewing them and getting back to people. And I’ve heard from multiple people that one of the issues around the open source is that, or is that the PRS aren’t getting closed? And it just correct me if I’m wrong.
You don’t, if there’s a bug in the source code of Magento, it doesn’t really matter if it’s open source or, if it’s Adobe commerce, the core code. It’s the same right now. There’s no fork between open source and Adobe commerce. It’s the same code. So I don’t understand why they would treat the open source any differently.
But anyways, that’s that’s just another issue and another, topic at hand for the future. Thomas I, thank you today. If there was a small little tidbit, you could help merchants feel good about staying on Magento two. What would that be? I think all you need to look at is the passion we’ve had in the last couple of weeks in response to the letter.
Whether it’s people supporting it or people. Criticizing it or and, providing feedback. I think you can see how invested people are in Magento and platforms like this. Don’t disappear. Look at magenta one it’s still around. But gender is not going away anytime. Yeah that’s, great advice.
And and, well said words for anybody out there that is still, or that night it’s still on magenta. Two waiting to go to Magento three. No, that was a joke. Good. One last little thing I always do on, the podcast as they give you a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d anything you’d like to plug today.
I’m not sure if I have anything. I’m pretending. Yeah, I usually prep people, but anything it doesn’t have to be business. It could be personal charity. I guess charity I’m supporting mind charity in the UK. It’s supporting people with mental illnesses, mental problems. So please do any.
Excellent. Thank you very much. Thomas it was, it’s been great having you today. I know it was short notice and I appreciate you putting some words out there to help us understand the quick nature of what’s happening in our Magento community today. So thank you very much.
This week we interview Courtney Taylor and Jeff Campbell with Fidelity Bank. Courtney tells us how she is the matchmaker of the banking business. We learn how peer groups will help every entrepreneur succeed in their business. We talk about how important it is that your banker knows your business and you as a business owner are not just a number. We talk about trends in the banking industry that relate to commerce. We dive into a lot of great subjects that business owners should know and do with their bank.
This week we interview Jakub Winkler (No relation to the Fonz) of Q-Solutions Studio. He has some very strong opinions on the MOSCA letter and why this has happened now.
We discuss the Magento Community and the impact that the Magento Open Source Community Alliance will have on it.
We discuss B2B marketing and why every business owner needs to break down what they are doing for marketing and measure, measure, measure! Jens’s best advice for an agency? “Listen to your clients”
We talk about the reasons why entrepreneurs need to hire a marketing agency some of the benefits and ROI they will get in return. This is a very informative episode for merchants and agencies. We also discuss how diversity helps us all be better business owners.
Jen and Brent talk about Entrepreneurship
Transcript
Brent: We have the pleasure of having Jennifer Roth here, Jennifer, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us about what you do and one of your passions.
Jen: My name is Jen Roth, as Brent said, I run growth mode marketing along with my business partner and we are a Twin Cities based women-owned full-service agency.
And we are super passionate about helping companies grow and hence our name growth mode. We love to align strategies and programs and marketing investments directly with our client’s goals, measure that and help them deliver the results and the outcomes that they desire. Passion, I guess I have. A couple, but I love going to really awesome restaurants. I actually got to go to a three Michelin star restaurant and a couple of weeks ago in Washington, DC with my entrepreneur’s organization forum. And it was super, super awesome. And I love going with my girlfriends to Napa. So that’s probably two of my favorite guilty pleasures is when I’m not a mom and a marketer and a wife.
Brent: We are lucky to be in Minneapolis / St. Paul to have some fantastic restaurants to go to. But today we’re not going to talk about restaurants. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. I know that you focus on growth, but also on B2B and probably growth in B2B. So let’s start with B2B Tell us a little bit about what you do for B2B and in marketing.
Jen: B2B marketing is different than consumer-based marketing. Primarily because in the B2B world it’s a considered purchase. Multi-step, complex buying process where you will often start your journey of driving awareness with not only the decision-maker but also the influencer or the champion. It’s really common in B2B to have a C-Suite person sign off on an actual purchase. The people who will be using the solutions that you’re selling are often different. They’re often managers, directors, VPs, et cetera. And so you see it’s just a different world because the evaluation process is considerable, brand loyalty is very important, but the way that people buy in the B2B world is just different. We focus on that and for those of you who don’t know, B2B is business to business. Any business that sells a product to another business falls in that B2B category, it’s super common for B2B companies to also have a B2C component where they might be selling things like benefits, healthcare benefits, for example, or software directly to consumers, as well as the benefit for something that they use.
Brent: Do you develop strategies, not only for new B2B, but you also do then develop strategies for an existing client? You want them then tell them about new products that you as a company are marketing and selling. I’m assuming that you come up with strategies for them as well.
Jen: We do. In fact most often when clients come to growth mode, we have a model, we have a model that includes three phases. We call it a growth marketing model and we implement it with almost every client that we serve. The first phase is really around setting your foundation. The second phase is really around building your presence. And the third phase is really around fielding predictable growth, which is where most people want to get to because that’s really where you start to see your marketing investment materialized in the form of conversions and leads, and sales.
But most often a client does come to us and they come to us for a variety of different reasons, but it’s often something like. We are growing really fast and we don’t have the marketing resources and capabilities in-house that we need. We need an extension of our team to help us strategize and think through the right way to bring our business and our products to market. And, or. We need to want a new product and we’ve never launched a product before. And or we don’t plan on hiring a bunch of people internally. We don’t want to hire a bunch of people internally. We just need an agency that can serve as our partner and our arms and our legs and provide the exact types of marketing expertise that we need when we need them, dialing them up when we need them and dialing them down when we don’t. So that’s often where people start is in coming to us and we’ll build-out. It might be a whole business marketing plan. It might be a roadmap, a marketing roadmap with more concrete, specific deliverables, or it might be a very targeted plan for a big event that you’re launching or a big product that you’re launching.
But that’s typically where we start. And then we actually do a series of different programs and activities based on what the client needs. And so most often we focus on that foundation. Not always because there are times when folks totally have their foundation set, but in twenty-some years of experience working in marketing, I can tell you that if you don’t know who you are, what you stand for, why you’re unique, and what your customers care about. All the marketing in the world is not going to work. So we spend a lot of time upfront working on helping people figure it out. What is unique to them, important to their customer, and provable. And we do that through stakeholder sessions. We do it through the voice of customer interviews. We do it through competitive audits. And then from that, what often comes out is personas buyer journeys messaging, brand identity works again, not always, but often we end up helping clients really evolve and think through that. And then that turns into a website where they’re able to showcase their story and their brand and who they are in the form of relevant messaging, compelling information, optimized sites with words, and buying experiences that we know their buyers have.
And then from there, you get into the next two phases, which is now that you know who you are and what you stand for and you’re inside matches your outside. You can start to build a presence. You can start to establish yourself as a leader in your space, or get people to the targeted people that you really want to know who you are.
Know what you stand for. And that really comes into play with social media and video and public relations and sometimes investor relations. Getting involved in trade media advertising, all that stuff, there, product launches. And then the last phase is really all about fielding predictable growth and that’s what we all know is demand generation. That’s all about it. Multi-component super smart, super-targeted email marketing, paid digital marketing, paid social marketing, organic digital really strong calls to action, and lead magnets that drive your buyers to the site. And get them to convert and experience and interact with you.
Really thinking through that in the metrics and how you actually start to drive a top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of funnel strategy to fill your pipeline so that as you move forward and you continue to grow, it’s predictable, it’s scalable and it’s systemic. A long answer, but that’s our model.
Brent: As a small business owner how would you tell them to start out in getting their marketing plan going?
Jen: I would still start, I follow the same three steps. I just do it in a scrappier way. I can tell you, even as growth mode, we’re about six years old or we’ll have our birthday here in September and we drank our own Kool-Aid if you will. We did the same exact exercise for ourselves so that we could figure out why we were important to our customers, unique to us and our differentiators were provable. And we did it by just simply talking to some of our customers and just asking questions.
I do recommend that if you have the resources to have a marketing expert, do it to start there, but if not, take your clients out to coffee and don’t just take the ones that love you. Take the ones that don’t like you and say, what are we doing? Why did you choose us? What can we do differently? Have you ever talked to anybody as a competitor? And what did they bring that you thought was interesting? What’s the last article you read online? Ask the questions because it’s amazing the information and the insights you can glean. About what makes you, and what is your authentic story?
So if I were a small business, that’s what I would do. And I am a small business so I understand, and I am an entrepreneur. And then from there once you have that in place, identify your target audience. Some companies make the mistake of trying to let the whole world know who they are when really they only went up 10 clients this year.
If you only want 10 clients, you probably know which 10 you want. Think long and hard about who you really want to add to your client base in the next year and focus your marketing energy there, instead of all over the place. That’s probably the biggest piece of advice that I can give to small businesses that are just starting, or that have been around for a while and are struggling with sales.
Brent: In the EO world, we have a concept called the shiny object. What would you say to an entrepreneur who would tell their team doesn’t say no to anybody? How do you get around the fact that sometimes saying no is the best thing you can do in the marketing world?
Jen: I have had the, I don’t know if luxury is the right word, but I have seen the consequences of following the shiny object in my own businesses, but also the clients.
And I can tell you irrefutably that if you have a targeted approach and you have a business model in mind, It will pay ten times over to stay focused on what it is that you do best. And here’s why, because let’s say I’ll just use my own agency and my own experiences. And example, if we try to service a business or a client who needs an in-depth public relations program.
And we love the client and they’re super nice and they fit in all of our other criteria and all they want is public relations. So we really just want to give it a try anyway, guess what? We’re not the best PR agency in the world. We partner with PR people. We do a lot of PR, but that’s not what we do best.
And then what happens is they don’t feel like they got what they wanted. They’re not a referenceable customer. We’re not happy with the services we delivered. And my employees aren’t happy because they got stuck doing something they weren’t competent in delivering and they couldn’t do their best work. So stay the course because, in the end, it will be worth it.
You’ll fill that slot with someone else. And the better you do at what you do best, the more referenceable customers you’ll have, and the more customers will refer you to the next set of.
Brent: Earlier you had mentioned something around building a website for somebody. I can recall a conversation that I had with a marketing person and I had brought up this topic of partnering with us because we’re Magento, we’re a Magento shop. And they said our clients don’t really sell things online. They only market things. And no, we’re not interested in partnering with you because we’re not doing e-commerce. And this was pre-pandemic.
What would you say to a small business owner that when they come to you and they say, yeah, we’d like to build up this marketing campaign, but no we’re not going to sell any?
Jen: Where do I start with? First of all, pre-pandemic was definitely different in the B2B world. And even in the consumer-based world for sure, but it was different because there was a belief that sales were primarily relationship-based and that feet on the street were the most effective mechanism for selling. But data will tell you, and you can go in and put this in your Google and look for it. And you’ll find all sorts of stats. Then 90 plus percent of B2B decision-makers are on your website prior to ever engaging a salesperson COVID happened and it became 100%. Because they had no other way to reach an organization to learn about solutions. And we saw over the course of 2020 and 2021 a huge uptick in people, investing in the overall infrastructure of their websites, adding e-commerce capabilities, and really thinking through those buyer journies, and who was actually going to their site, what they were experiencing and what type of information they wanted to provide. So it is probably true in some instances that very few instances that you may not sell something on your site, but it would never be true that somebody wouldn’t use your site as an important piece of information in the sales evaluation process and I believe that wholeheartedly.
Brent: I can comment on the fact that a lot of current business owners and salespeople are concerned that the buyer journey will disclude or we’ll cut out the salesperson. And I know that one way we’ve gotten over that is just giving the website as another tool to enable that salesperson to sell.
And then. I guess you have to say it selling the salespeople on this new tool and it’s not going to infringe on their ability to sell even more. And then I think it’s important to sell or to make it known to the owner or the entrepreneur of the organization, that this is a new tool. And don’t try to take the commissions away from the salespeople, because this is going to increase everybody’s business and having those tools online and the ability to purchase directly in the middle of the night on a Sunday or whatever time of the day is that buyer wants to purchase. It just enables them to do more with their products and to sell more.
Jen: I couldn’t agree more. And I’ve actually given presentations on the importance of the relationship between sales and marketing because I believe I say this often to people who know me, but I believe that marketing represents the voice of the customer, sales represent the voice of a customer and both are equally important. And so when you think about the marketing mix, the role of marketing is to enable sales. So sales can do their job and to understand what marketing needs and to provide the awareness and the ground cover that makes your buyer market, your industry, your marketplace, maybe potential employees aware of who you are and what you stand for and what makes you, you. The rest of your job in marketing is to help those sales folk shine and to be able to do what they do best, which is sales. And to be able to meet the needs of the voice of a customer. And so to your point, like the website is a critical role because it’s where people go first for that top of the funnel stuff, trying to find people and have them be aware of you. It also is where people stay to get to the middle of the funnel. So as they’re cranking through kind of their gear and their priorities and their initiatives, Eventually, there comes a time when they need your product. You want to be top of mind. That is marketing’s job.
When it gets in the middle of the funnel, sales and marketing need to hold hands and work through that together to get that person to convert from being aware of you to be interested in talking to you. And then at that point, Sales comes in and they lead the conversations. They lead the processes, they lead the actual sale in terms of taking your solutions and turning them into what is the most beneficial for the client’s needs and meeting them where they’re at. That’s my philosophy on the importance of making sure sales and marketing work together.
Brent: I want to just continue down this road of buyer journey and really having an entrepreneur dive into their buyer journey and find out places that are resistant and going back to the website and what you talked about, this is where the top level, this is where they’re going to get their information.
Their traditional buyer journey was they’d go to the website. They would look at that information. They would call the salesperson that salesperson would talk to them. Then they would put the order in salesperson would either put the order directly into their ERP system, or they would call some customer service person who then put it into an ERP system.
I guess one message that I had been always trying to tell. Business owners who are in this B2B space are, even if you don’t want your client to put in their orders directly, to think about the resistance that’s in that buyer’s journey and examine that buyer journey to enable more sales to happen without any resistance in that sales process.
Jen: I could not agree more. And that’s another thing we’ve actually seen a big uptick in, in terms of investments is really rethinking and re-understanding and recalibrating that buyer journey because you’re right it’s changing before our very eyes in the B2B world because of COVID and the number of things that happen online, both before and after a salesperson is engaged, it’s shifting and it’s becoming maybe not circular, but not linear. It’s maybe like an up and down or a wavy or a little bit of a loop, where people are in engaging in enacting interacting in both. The only other thing I would add to what you said is we have seen clients very interested in segmentation.
So a lot of industry, vertical kind of stuff. Maybe buyer types and ideal client and customer profiles. And even company profiles. You might be doing like a C-suite persona with a buyer journey map for C-level decision-makers or purchasing folks. But now you’re also seeing. C-level buyer in the manufacturing space.
What does that buyer journey look like? What does that persona look like? And so there could, they’re like almost there they’re there’s growing so much in importance to a business. And I remember when I kinda first started in marketing, I wasn’t so sure about whether or not buyer journeys were worth all the time they took and all the money they took, but I have become a believer as I’ve watched, it worked for companies where I’ve led marketing, but also with the clients that we work with. It’s crazy when you know who you’re serving, why you’re serving them, what matters most to them, how much more effective everything you do after that can be.
Brent: In the e-commerce world, we see a lot of inbound sales growth through marketing, and there isn’t a lot of KPIs needed on the sales side. It’s more on the marketing side. When there’s a B2B journey or a B2B marketing, there are some sales KPIs. And then there’s some marketing KPIs. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how to mix those and how to put those together. So the sales team is understanding what the marketing team is delivering to them, and even more important, the marketing team understands what the sales team needs and those KPIs that are maybe important to both.
Jen: Now you touched on one of my favorite topics because even though I’m not a numbers person, I love metrics because they tell you what’s working, what’s not working, and where people are going and it helps you fine-tune your marketing dollars and your investment. So that it’s going exactly where you want it to. That’s a super exciting question. Now, I will say it’s, it can be very difficult. So for our clients specifically, We tend to build out metrics, dashboards in Google data studio sometimes Tablo sometimes systems that they already own. Sometimes we just looked through HubSpot because they already own HubSpot and they have their CRM, their Salesforce, et cetera.
There are lots of different tools that you can use. What we do. And what I recommend anybody does is when you write your marketing plan, identify your KPIs for each of the things that you’re doing when it comes to marketing and sales specifically one strategy that we’ve seen work really well in B2B.
I don’t think would apply to B2C, but is that you would have something called a marketing qualified lead. So you’d have an opportunity which is any kind of inquiry or contact that comes into your fold. And they either meet the criteria as a prospect, or they don’t, if they don’t meet the criteria, you need to boot them out of the system and say, thanks, you can listen to us, but we know we know you’re not a client or a prospective client.
If they are a prospective client and they meet your criteria, doesn’t even have to be banned. It doesn’t have to be their writing right now. It can just be that they’re, they fit the right profile. Then what you want to do is you want to work them through lead scoring. And so what lead scoring will do is it will help you think it’ll help based on the behaviors that each of these prospects and users are taking, how interested they really are.
So they might start by visiting your website, but if they go to the careers page, then maybe get negative five points. If they go to the product page and they watch a demo, they might get 25 points and you work your way through these points. And then when it gets to a point where most often we have one, two and three marketing qualified leads and a one, two, and three-phase when it reaches three.
It reaches a certain point threshold where a salesperson will get an email or an alert within their CRM that says, Hey, This person’s done enough marketing activity that it’s probably worth reaching out. And I always liken it to the MQL three is are the kids in the classroom that are going pick me?
The MQL twos are the ones that are in the back of the room that is super curious but don’t want to raise their hand. And the MQL ones are the kids that didn’t even want to come to class in the first place. So don’t send the kids that didn’t want to come to the class, the sales team they’re busy.
They don’t need those guys. And they don’t want to talk to you. So wait until they’re raising their hand or they won’t raise their hand and then get those sales folks and their skillsets involved.
Brent: That’s a great analogy. And I love that picture. You’ve painted. Putting on putting on my entrepreneur hat. You had mentioned earlier that you are an extension of somebody’s marketing team. What would you tell an entrepreneur who believes that they should just hire everybody in-house? And they don’t, they want to have internal resources and don’t depend on anything from a marketing agency.
Jen: That’s a great question. So I have a couple of things there and I’m actually going to answer this. I also was a VP and a senior VP of marketing in the B2B world. So I know what it’s like to sit on. Both sides. Granted, they were bigger companies. One was really big. The other one was midsize, but, the advice that I would give entrepreneurs is if you are not an expert in marketing, you really need to think about hiring somebody who is just like you hire an accountant, just like you hire a lawyer.
If you’re not if it’s not your expertise and your core competence, Then be okay with investing in that and building that as part of kind of your growth infrastructure. Most often when we end up with retainer type of clients, which we have a lot of it’s because they need the world of marketing has so many areas of expertise you have a strategy from a marketing perspective, do you have a strategy from a content perspective? You have graphic design, you have video, you have web development, you have social media, you have there is our paid digital, you’ve got organic. You’ve got the number of skills that are needed to truly run marketing from the top to the bottom and everything in between is just, there’s a lot to it.
And so the clients that we work with love being able to bring in an agency that can literally dial-up and down like today we’re doing a rebrand. So I need a lot of heavy lifting around how we tell our story and what we look like to the market. Okay. I’m done with that. Now, what I really want is digital.
So then those people go away and you spent, you bring in your digital experts. If you hire all those people, you better have a lot of marketing to do because you’re going to spend a fortune, trying to get all the right skillsets. And every once in a while, you’ll find a unicorn that can do a lot of things, but it’s pretty much impossible to find a unicorn that can do everything.
And it’s very common, especially for business owners to come to me and say, I hired a marketing coordinator and him, or she’s really good at writing strategies, but I don’t see any tactics. Or vice versa, really good at doing what I ask, but there’s no strategic thinking. It’s very difficult to find somebody that can do it all. I don’t even know if you can. And so that’s, to me if I were running a small business, it wasn’t marketing, we obviously do our own. I would take the time and I would invest in it because it’s a serious lever of growth and you don’t want to spend all that money on all those people. You’d rather just use people that already know what they’re doing.
The one other benefit that I see a lot. And I always tell my friends that are still on the client-side, one thing I’ve learned has been on both sides of the fences is that when you work with an agency, they get the opportunity to see how lots of people work, versus just themselves. And I never realized that until I was on the agency side. And so if you’re trying to think about something differently, engage in the agency, because you’ll get the benefit of all of these ideas that they get to share with other clients that you will never see.
Brent: So two points of that last your last statement there.
The first one is that agencies need to be always talking to their clients and sharing those stories with your other clients that are the value that you get out as a client. And that’s the value you give as an agency. The next part is about hiring. And the unicorn, especially we’re a development house.
And I can say that we have a few unicorns, a lot some people that can do everything, but the part that’s the hardest is managing a team. And I have repeatedly said to some of our unicorns. That’s great, but now let’s talk about times 12 times, 15 times 20, how. How are you going to get that done? If a certain task or a certain project takes three months?
Hey, that’s great. That means four projects a year, but we actually wouldn’t get done 20 projects a year. So how are we going to make this work as a team? So you as a business owner, you as an entrepreneur need to pick that same. And think. Okay. Yes, having internal resources is great. And our job climate in the, especially in the Adobe space you’re going to look at six figures on a developer salary.
And that developer salary needs to be specialized in our space in the Adobe space, but you really need to have a front-end developer needed a brand person. You need to have, you need to design, or then you need a UX person. Okay. Suddenly now you say your six-figure budget is turning into nearly a seven-figure budget that you need for your small, not small brand medium-sized brand, even that will bring in Maybe six figures in revenue.
So you have to, as an entrepreneur, you have to make that hard decision and look at that. And really, I think, one good point you made about is really let’s look at the numbers, analyze the numbers and come up with some ROI.
Jen: To your point, like you might say I don’t want to pay an agency a hundred thousand dollars to develop my website because I’ll probably only make a hundred thousand dollars in sales or attribute a hundred thousand dollars of sales in the first year.
I can hire somebody for a hundred thousand dollars. One person, you can hire one person for that, and you’re going to need about eight. So it’s not that you’re spending a hundred thousand dollars with an agency versus a hundred thousand dollars internally. You’re spending $800,000 internally versus a hundred thousand dollars internally.
And I think people who don’t understand the marketing discipline and the complexity of building a website that actually works, don’t always see that, that piece of it.
Brent: The small part about being an entrepreneur as well as it’s a lot easier to fire an agency than it is to fire a group of eight people.
Jen: Oh, true. And the other part too is, and I’ll be completely honest and I love this and it makes me sad at the same time, but because we’re specialized in growth marketing, we get to work with all these great clients who start small and get big. And then they do hire internal teams because they’ve gotten significantly bigger and it’s very sad for us cause we miss them, but we’re very happy because our kids are grown and gone.
And it’s okay. Because oftentimes like bring us in for project-based things, but things change. But yeah you’re right. Like it’s a lot easier in, in COVID, especially this happened a lot where you could contract. And increase as you need to do versus having that payroll sitting there all the time needing to be used.
Brent: I think the message to an agency because we do get that too, where people get bigger and then they started hiring an internal development team and suddenly we’re not doing so much work, but having that quarterly strategy session with that client, just to see what they’re doing it’s easy when you’re focused on your team and you’re in a silo. It’s easy to stay in your silo and always just go in that same direction. But I think that what we’ve seen and especially in this world with so many new platforms coming out, there are so many different routes you can take and there’s places and things you should test, not only for development but especially in marketing, you need to test those things and make sure that you’re doing or trying them at least.
I know that one, I heard a comment I think was Gary V or something like that. That social media is like your advertising. You don’t advertise on a show, a hit TV show thinking, is this show going to be around for a year? No, it’s here now and it’s popular. So try that platform. See how it works.
And if it’s around in a year, great. If it’s not move on to the next one, but at least test them to see how well they’re working.
Jen: That’s the very premise of growth marketing. It is hypothesizing. Create build or develop implement test refine, and just keep doing it iterative improvements.
And it’s really cool too because marketers have more numbers than they ever have before and we’re metrics to work with. So for example, you can test lead magnets, but a high value. Assets that you put on your home page sales, a demo for a software company, or a free trial for a gym or whatever.
And you pick and you play with those and you do AB tests. And it is amazing how, as you continue to refine it, one always comes to the top, so I think that is a really good perspective and good insight.
Brent: At the beginning of our conversation, you had mentioned a couple of inbound things that people could be doing. You had mentioned paid media. Paid social. Maybe we could just take a little bit of time towards the end of our conversation here to talk about a few of those things merchants should be looking at, or even not merchants to anybody’s trying to market something. And I just want to keep saying, if you’re marketing something, you’re not doing it for free, you’re doing it because you’d like to sell it.
So I’d like to dispel this idea that. Commerce isn’t part of marketing is to sell something that’s the basis. And so anyways you’re doing social media, you’re doing paid ads, you’re doing organic ads. What if we were to take the top five things or top seven or eight things, but what will be those things you would, we would recommend?
Jen: Yeah, so I, what I always recommend is starting with what your desired outcome is, and then doing some kind of. Back of the napkin math to determine if you need a million dollars in sales and each product is worth X amount, how many opportunities do you need? You close half of them.
And then what do you need from my elite perspective. So I always recommend starting with that. You know what you actually need, but in terms of the types of programs, it truly does depend on who you are. Who you’re targeting what you’re positioning. So for example, if you’re selling to a CIO or it decision-maker or an engineer, they are very driven and guided by peer review.
By NPS, by Reddit they have they’re, they’re super smart people who rely on him, meaningful credible information to help them make decisions, and colleagues who recommend. So the strategy you would use if that’s your audience is going to be different, that said. From a digital perspective, you would absolutely still want to invest in organic social media for LinkedIn and for Twitter in any B2B audience.
If you’re interested in the talent side of things, make sure you’re on Facebook. And make sure and start to think about an Instagram strategy. If you haven’t peopled think I’m crazy, but I’m not because take just five minutes. If you’ve got teenagers anywhere near you or young adults anywhere near you in the workforce, 25, 30 years old, they’re on Instagram. They’re on Snapchat. They’re on TikTok. They are absorbing information differently than we are and meaning us old people like me and they are making they’re going. There are future decisions. There are future decision-makers. So start thinking about how you’re going to build awareness and influence within those channels and those worlds as those people start to make decisions.
I’m not doing a super good job of answering your question in a pointed way, but I think. Any foundational demand generation program with, or without commerce or e-commerce needs to have a strong social media footprint in your basic channels, it needs to have strong and consistent organic content.
It needs to have high-value information. That helps the folks that you are selling to understand your product better, do their jobs better. Having an emotional appeal, whatever the situation is, but high-value content, rock-solid content, marketing strategy, organic social, and then paid digital through SEO.
Pay-per-click and display are probably where I would start. I will say that in certain areas, email marketing is definitely not dead. There are a lot of places where email marketing works really well. The only thing I’ll say about that is it absolutely depends on a database that is in good shape.
And so it’s not uncommon for us to work with clients where they want to do email marketing, but they don’t have the database. And so if you’re in that situation, Know that you’re going to have to invest in your database before any of that email marketing stuff will work, which means you should turn to social and paid digital because that does not require you to spend money on a database.
The other thing that’s really interesting is intent data. So if you haven’t, I don’t know if you’ve used intent data yet, Brent, but. It’s actually fascinating. And it’s the thing that makes people so mad, right? When they say Alexa is listening, because there are, there’s the ability to actually be able to detect patterns around buying behaviors and influences and place advertising in front of folks who are actually interested in actually fit your profile.
And while you might say that’s spooky because they’re listening to me, on the flip side, It’s relevant. Wouldn’t you rather have relevant content and relevant ads than things that you don’t care about at all? So there’s, I always think there’s two, two sides to that point.
Brent: I think intent data is an easy one to see too, is if you click on something and suddenly you start seeing ads for that, something everywhere you’re browsing, that’s just targeted ads.
Jen: That’s targeted ads using intent data. So they took your cookie and they said, this guy likes golf clubs and then you see golf clubs everywhere, and then you might see golf apparel, and then you may see golf vacations, and that’s intent data.
Brent: Intent data is best seen on Facebook. When all I get in my feed are bike apparel stuff, and I don’t even bike that much. All right. So we have a little bit of time left. Just, I want to change a little bit directions here. We’ve been talking a lot about diversity in our community.
You had mentioned earlier that you’re a women-owned, woman-founded company, maybe from an entrepreneur’s standpoint. How maybe some advice for women who want to start or. From a diverse background. What would you how, maybe you could comment a little bit about that?
Jen: Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t get asked that often. If you, for women people of color any ma I actually also have a greatest, so I actually have a disability. And my advice to people is. Who might feel like they can’t do it or feel like maybe they’re in a minority situation is if you want to do it and you believe you can, you will.
And reach out if you have a good idea, put it on paper, talk to people about it. Draw inspiration from those who you trust and respect use your friends and your networks. To make you stronger and better and pay it forward, make other people stronger and better. And honestly, this is a shameless plug for EO, but join organizations like EO, because I find that my forum is like my own little advisory board and I can draw on all of these super-smart folks who can give me advice where maybe I don’t have the strengths yet, or the skillset or the know-how. And there’s a lot of grants and resources, especially for women-owned businesses that to get to get you started. So you can look for, I believe it’s WBENC I could be wrong, but if you search for women-owned businesses are women own business resources. You’d be amazed at what you can find in a way of grants and just resources to help write a business plan, to help fill the budget.
They offer a lot of help and I always tell people who call me, who say, I’m thinking about leaving corporate America and starting my own business. What advice would you give me? I always say. Make sure you have a great CPA, make sure that you have a lawyer because you’re gonna wanna make sure you have all your articles of incorporation and all that stuff set up.
And make sure that you have a really solid network because the best way to get started is to rely on the people around you who know a lot who know best and who can help you.
Brent: One last question then, what would you say to it? How would you say, what would you say to a bald white male who typifies the non-diverse aspect and we’re in Minnesota. The bald white male is the person in the entrepreneur community that’s most represented. Unfortunately, maybe sometimes they have hair, but who knows? Sometimes they don’t. What advice would you give them to help enable people of color, people of diverse backgrounds, women who whomever it is that would like to get into the entrepreneur community. How could you give them some advice and enable them to be advocates for them?
Jen: If I were a white male, what advice would I give me? Is that what you’re asking?
Brent: What would you, and I asked this question a lot and I think making noise around it is the first thing, but a lot of bald white males don’t feel like they should be on any committees or be part of a diversity program because I’m not diverse. So what do I have to offer?
Jen: What you, that is a first of all, really insightful and great that you’re asking it, but Your skills and your knowledge and your connections. Everybody who starts at the very beginning needs to some they need strength. They need grit. They need intelligence, but they also need a running start and a lucky break.
So I think helping people, connecting people to resources and potential clients and information is what you can do most and to just remove the barrier I’ll get, I don’t know if this is even a fair example. Your right, EO is definitely comprised primarily of white men. But there is a conscientious effort to increase the diversity within the group.
And I have seen that happen and I do learn from all of the folks, whether they’re white men or they’re other women or they’re people who have come here from other countries. So I think just the more you open yourself up to a conversation with somebody who is a minority and you let them in and you share what that barrier starts to just go away. You don’t even, you don’t even see it anymore. Does that make sense?
Brent: I think I’ll add on just that you should be aware of the fact that maybe you’re in a privileged person and I’ll just say that to myself, that be aware that, and then invite people to that and start the conversations.
And I think the most important thing is don’t be afraid to have that difficult conversation and it may feel uncomfortable and. You know me as a mid-west Lutheran we would tend to look at our own shoelaces before we’d look at the person. So maybe looking up and seeing that there’s somebody different and that, Hey, they have something to offer and it makes this community even better when there’s more diverse.
Jen: Yep. I agree. And I think sometimes the answers can be found in our children. I think about my kids that are teenagers and young adults now, but when they were little, they didn’t think twice about where a person came from or how much money they had or what color their skin was, or what gender they were, because they just didn’t know to.
And if all humans could be like that, we live in a wonderful.
Brent: We absolutely would be great. This we’ve really chewed up this hour and so just as we’re closing out what kind of nugget could you give a person that wants to sell something? They don’t have to sell it online, but they’d have something to sell.
What would be something good that you could tell them to do?
Jen: Yeah, I would say make sure you know who you want to sell it. Make sure. You know why they want to buy it and meet them where they’re at in their buying process. If you do those things, you will succeed.
Brent: Great. Thank you. So as we close out the show, I like to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug and go ahead and give us a shameless.
Jen: My daughter is selling now I’m getting pizzas, burgers, her theme. I’m kidding. I guess I’m really proud of a growth mode and the agency that we have built for me and my business partner. And I guess what I’m most proud of is that we were named to inks were about six years old.
I think I mentioned that earlier, and we were named. Fastest growing companies. We’re actually in the top 25% and we are a certified WBENC company. And I attribute that to certainly setting the right stage and. Building the right kind of culture and the right vision for how marketing should be done with the businesses that we have the privilege to serve.
But I also attribute it to having an amazing team that makes every day fun and makes every client happier and makes the world a better place. And we, our secret sauce are absolutely the team that has allowed us to grow the way that we’ve grown. So I guess my plug is really around just growth mode as an agency, but also the great team and clients, honestly, that we get to work with.
Brent: That’s great. Thank you. I’ll I will give one small plug, both and being fully transparent. Jennifer is the marketing chair this year for EO, Minnesota. I am the membership chair for EO, Minnesota. If you are in the twin cities area, I would encourage you to reach out to us if you’re an entrepreneur. And learn about
Entrepreneurs Organization Minnesota.
It is a global chapter. There are 15,000 members. It’s a great organization. And as Jen mentioned earlier EO gives you a chance to talk to other entrepreneurs that you would never get the chance to do. You can’t tell your best friend who is working in a company in a corporate world about, Hey, I can’t make payroll this week or I can make payroll. And by the way, I just made an extra million dollars this year. Those are conversations you can have with your entrepreneur’s group that you can’t always have with your typical friends and family. So it is a great thing to join. At least learn about, and Minnesota is. For news organization in Minnesota is a great chapter.
And we are looking for members. So that’s my shameless plug. That’s awesome. All right. Jennifer Roth is the president and co-founder of growth mode marketing in the twin cities and all of our links and show notes will be available for you to get those Jennifer. Thank you.
