marketing

10 Reasons why Brand Collaborations Fail

10 Reasons why Brand Collaborations Fail.

Some brand x brand collaborations make perfect sense. But for everyone that takes off, it seems like there’s another that falls flat. Why is that? Some would say it’s because the brands are mismatched, but we think there might be something more to it. Join us as we take a closer look at why brand collaborations fail – and how you can avoid them.

Donations instead of codes

How Offering Donations Instead of Discounts Can Increase Your Conversion Rate

Have you ever considered offering donations instead of discounts to increase your conversion rate?

Talk-Commerce Yash Chavan

DTC Influencer Marketing in 6 steps with Yash Chavan

Influencer marketing is the next big thing. It’s already here. Most of the DTC world needs to catch up to the right ways of executing. If you don’t have big names talking about you, loving you, and recommending you, don’t miss out on millions of dollars of revenue that could be yours. Imagine letting that much money go down the drain because there isn’t a simple enough way for you to capture it.  Yash Chavan with GetSaral.com walks us through six steps that any DTC brand can take to start influencer marketing. As a side note, we did lose audio at the end, but Yash got all six steps in. Yash is a young entrepreneur with a lot of passion for the industry and has built a fantastic SaaS Platform for Influencer marketing. Yash is Located in Mumbi, India.

Talk-Commerce Gaurav Baid

Changing the Buying Experience Through AR technology with Gaurav Baid

The use of AR technology brings spatial depth to the onscreen buying/browsing experience – delivering life-like photorealism, mobile responsiveness, interactivity, and personalization – key influences re-shaping the digital commerce industry today. Gaurav has set out to deliver meaningful & delightful enhancements to visual experiences by deploying 3D Computer Vision and AI technological advancements of Avataar’s proprietary platform. He believes that the way in which end consumers are discovering products today, will undergo a massive transformation with software and hardware evolution in the current decade and wishes for Avataar to play a major role in this.

Talk-Commerce Gina Yuter

Find The Perfect Item In An Instant. Visual Product Discovery Made Easy. With Gina Yuter

No two shoppers view a website the same way. So why are searches always happening the same way? Put some text in, and hopefully, you get the right results. We interview Gina Yuter with Syte.

Syte’s product discovery platform empowers your shoppers to instantly find fashion, jewelry, and home decor items they’ll adore with inspiring visual search journeys that drive conversion and build long-term value.

5 Ways PIM Impacts Your Business

5 Ways PIM Impacts Your Business

PIM stands for “product information management” and refers to the processes, systems, and software used to store, access, update, and analyze data related to your products.

Talk-Commerce Jacob Anson

Segmentation is the key to your email success with Jacob Anson

If you want to grow your business and increase your profits, you need to learn how to segment your email lists effectively. In this Podcast, Jason Anson explains the best ways to segment your email lists and provides you with some of the best tools, tricks, and tactics for ensuring that every one of those subscribers is engaged.

Look for the Free Joke towards the end of the podcast. We learn that most people don’t understand Brent’s Jokes.

Check out my article on Segmentation in email marketing here

3 Reasons Why You Should Care About Email Segmentation
3 Reasons Why You Should Care About Email Segmentation

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Jacob Anson, and Jacob is the co-founder of Agency JR. Jacob, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing day to day and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Jacob: Perfect. First of all, a pleasure to be here. So thank you for having me on. And yeah, quickly introduce myself.

Jacob: I’m the co-founder of Agency JR. We are an email marketing focused agency. I’m one of the two co-founders agency, and within my day to day, I’m mostly focused on the backend, like building out interest infrastructure, the systems, the processes, hiring, like all of the. Not so fun stuff as people say, but I love it.

Jacob: And in terms of some, what are things right now in this phase of my life, it’s mostly boric. I love it. It wouldn’t be that way. But outside of Boric, I guess there’s a bit of fitness and more of work. So fitness work. So that’s about all. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s, that sounds like my life. We won’t get into a lot of fitness right now.

Brent: We want to do it towards the end of the podcast. I could talk about running all day, but we won’t get, Let’s talk about email marketing and I know that that is something that you have a passion for. So tell us a little bit about some of the mistakes people make in email marketing.

Brent: Maybe we’ll start there. 

Jacob: Sure thing. Honestly, the biggest mistake is not doing email marketing. So let’s start there. But email marketing means it’s a broad term. There’s like a lot of verticals, a lot of niches that can use email marketing. But we see that a lot of them don’t use it or there’s not frequent use of it.

Jacob: For example, e-commerce even if you’re a small eCommerce store, you should be doing email marketing with email marketing is and can be very passive. Of course you can also, it can be very active, but you can do the bare minimum, set up some automations and it’s gonna be there and generate revenue while you sleep.

Jacob: And this also applies to any other kind of business out there, but it’s SaaS info product, whatever else that’s selling something. You need email marketing, even if they small scale. So that’s the mistake I see happening. But then to dive would be a bit more specific. So we, we ourselves are usually more eCommerce focused.

Jacob: We also have a couple of info or SaaS businesses as well, but than the eCommerce. Like the other mistake, which is a bit more specific would come down to campaigns. So campaigns, if you’re not too familiar with your marketing, are those one time email plus, for example, that in your Gmail. Those are like, for example, the Black Friday campaigns or like 4th of July sale campaigns and stuff like that.

Jacob: The mistake there usually comes down to the segmentation. So with your eCommerce shop, you have your customer list. Let’s say you have 10,000 customers, you have 10,000 emails. The mistake there is a lot of people think, Hey, I’m gonna get the best performance if we’re gonna take this whole list, these 10,000 people, and blast out an email to all of them.

Jacob: If you think about it in the first thought, it might seem logical because, hey, the more people see the email, the more people are gonna open email. The more sales I’m gonna get, maybe for the first email, yes. But if you continue doing that, they’re just gonna go into the negative spiral in your sales are eventually gonna go down to zero.

Jacob: Why? Because it all comes down to deliverability and list health. So first we’ll have to make sure that people you’re sending out. Actually wanna get your emails. If you’re onlay sending out everybody, a big chunk of the list usually is not engaged. You’re just ruining your del deliverability.

Jacob: And with deliverability, if you’re getting bad open rates, you’re gonna get even worse, open rates later down the road. So it’s important to segment your list. Target mostly to engage parts of the list, segment it and make sure you get, get good open rates as that’s gonna heap you open rates healthy. And then we’re gonna make sure your list stays healthy for a long time and you can extract more revenue and more profit out of it.

Brent: As you’re segmenting, is there specific engagements that you should look at? If a customer is highly engaged, Should you send them more or target it or I know that there’s a way of oversending, so if they’re over engaged, then eventually you’re going to Oversend and tell us some ideas around that.

Jacob: I’m gonna spill the beans of our agency strategy. Basically how we in inhouse do the segmentation. The first thing, it’s very simple. It’s very dumb down, so it’s easy to follow and easy to execute. So the first thing is the engaged customers.

Jacob: You can send them out more emails. So for example, within a month, if we send out 12 campaigns, Around eight to 10 of those campaigns are gonna go out, that Engage list, and that’s completely fine. And the engaged part of the list, it can be built out. We usually have three buckets. Engage 30, Engage 60, engage 90, and Engage 30 basically means someone who has opened or clicked. One of your emails within the last 30 days. Then of course the last 60 days, last 90 days. Those are the engagement tiers. Depending on your rates, which just basically choose one of those the open rates should, ideally for the campaigns be around 30%.

Jacob: If they use Engage 90 and see if it’s around 20% of, we might jump one tier down, test out, Engage 60, and see where at which of those stages it comes out to roughly 30%. And then rest of the campaigns. So for example, we send out nine campaigns to engage segment. The rest of those three campaigns, we can test all different parts the list to try to get them into the engaged parts, the list. So we usually like to do one re-engagement campaign a month. , which is focused specifically on the unengaged part, the list. So we take, all the people don’t open their emails and we send out one email specifically to them once a month just to try and reengage them.

Jacob: And then few emails usually are like smaller segments, a bit more specific segmentation. Might it be like a specific product upsell email or maybe like an announcement or whatever. Something with also like more specific segmentation. So that’s what we usually. Works like a charm. Easy to follow. 

Brent: Yeah, those are some very ironclad rules that they actually make a lot of sense.

Brent: So I would I think if there isn’t any listeners who aren’t paying attention, that would be one part that I certainly would implore people to pay attention to. How about the over engagement? Is there a point in which you can over engage? 

Jacob: Over engaging. Yeah, so like over engaging, like at least how I understand is like burning out the list.

Jacob: So if you have like 10,000 customers, let’s say half of them are like engaged customers opening up your emails, obviously they don’t wanna be over spammed and they don’t wanna receive two emails a day from you. Like the cadence of your campaigns also. Usually to make sure you, you’re not over spamming and over accentuating your list.

Jacob: We usually don’t go over 15 emails a month on regular months. Obviously all of that gets thrown out of indoor during q4. Then you can do what you want in terms of email frequency. But for like regular months, summer spring and so on, I would not go over 15 emails a month and that’s just gonna ensure you’re not over engaging or burning out your list essentially. 

Brent: Yeah. So I know you mentioned q4, so you’re talk a little bit about specific strategies for Q4 compared to the rest of the year. 

Jacob: Yeah. Within the eCommerce, so obviously Q4 is the most important part of the year. Hands down, that’s where all of the revenue profit was made.

Jacob: So within US agency and basically I think every other eCommerce through our agency, they take it very seriously. Like some of the key differences between Q4 and regular months, always these email frequency. If for example, during July, June, we’re sending out maybe 12 to 15 emails a month.

Jacob: During November, December, we’re sending up to 30 emails a month. So it comes down average one email a day. So that’s first thing. And the second thing is how you build out your sales structure. So here maybe also you can spill the beans of our agency tactics and strategies. So for Q4, what we usually like to do, we build out a specific sales cycle, sales calendar, if I can name it that way, and essentially how it’s structured is that we go through certain phases. The first phase, which you usually start around October, started October, is a re-engagement phase which usually lasts about two weeks and that during these two weeks, it is basically try to re-engage as much of the unengaged customers as we can to build up the engaged part of the list, which is gonna get spammed too during the next couple of weeks. Then the next phase is the warmup phase. So once we have reengage as many customers as we can, we really wanna nurture the engaged part, the list, build it up, warm it up. And we usually do that through value campaigns. We do that through educational campaigns.

Jacob: We do that through a very specific warmup campaign. Which is essentially focused on getting the customers respond to the email. So it maybe could be an email, like a text based email, Hey, respond to this customer. But yes, if you wanna stay in the loop for Black Friday emails and what this does, which is really cool if Gmail sees that somebody replies to you, they automatically

Jacob: flag or white list your domain. So like your, all your future emails are gonna go in the primary tab. So it’s like a small tactic to ensure your deliverability is very good for those customers. And obviously also value campaigns. Obviously you don’t wanna always sell to your customers. Give them some values, some tips so they know not just selling them.

Jacob: Build a relationship with them. And once we have warmed up the customer at the start of November, we usually go into a buildup phase, a hype phase where we try to get some early bird list signs for like early Black Friday deals and stuff like that. Really hype up the audience for Black Friday.

Jacob: Let them maybe tease some deals, maybe let them know about the Black Friday timeline and stuff like that. Really get them hyped up for the upcoming sales. And then obviously once the Black Friday week starts, then we usually have two to three email sends a. Like a main email resend up the same email, three non openers, and like a different email depending on how the offers are structured for the client.

Brent: I want to jump back to what you’re saying about sending a text to get him to respond to the email. Are you saying you’d send him an SMS text to do that? Or How do you mean? Can you just explain that a little bit? 

Jacob: Yeah, sure. Maybe I explained, maybe use the wrong word.

Jacob: So it’s an email, so it’s a text based email. So basically, actually this is a good talking point. So text, like in this case I’ll explain maybe this specifically and i’s talk about text based emails. I think that’s interesting as well. So like for the email, hold the warmup email, it is a text based email, so like an email you would send to your brand.

Jacob: It doesn’t contain any graphics. None of that. Basically usually sent out from a brand representative. It mentions something like that. Hey John we see within our list, et cetera, et cetera. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll have our Black Friday sale and we’ll really think you’re gonna enjoy the discounts, the offers, whatever.

Jacob: If you wanna stay in the loop and make sure you receive your emails or show you how excited you are for the deals, respond to this email. But for example, yes. And that’s basically just make sure the customer respond to that email. It’s something, it doesn’t matter, but what they respond, the most important thing is that they respond with something as that is gonna white list the domain and it’s gonna ensure that the future emails for them.

Jacob: Much, much more likely to land in the primary folder, which then is obviously gonna boost up the open range. 

Brent: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. does it help to do social as well, to drive people to, Is there a way to use social to p get people to respond to emails? , 

Jacob: of course. This of course depends like how used is like social media for the specific brand.

Jacob: Some brands, they’re not that heavy in social media. For those, obviously, it doesn’t make sense to push people there if they’re not gonna do anything with. Those extra follows. But if the brand has like a good social media strategy, then of course we can push people from emails to sign up on social media to stay in the loop with what’s happening there.

Jacob: And obviously if the social media, females that takes care of the Black Friday and everything is synergized, then they’re just gonna be much more likely to stay in the loop because we are gonna remind them through emails. The social media team’s gonna remind. Through social media. So they’re constantly informed about what’s gonna be happening for that specific brand.

Jacob: So if the brand has good social media, then yes, of course. Good. 

Brent: All right. So tell, talk a little bit about some trends that there is in retention for marketing, for email, things like that. 

Jacob: Yeah, sure. Trend, So biggest strength I would honestly still see is SMS marketing. I think maybe it seems maybe the SMS marketing has gone by.

Jacob: SMS marketing was really hot a couple of months ago, may be a year ago, but that, that still is one of the biggest trends I see and let a lot of brands have not properly adapted to. There’s still a lot of brands lacking proper SMS marketing or SMS marketing at all, which I think is a very huge thing.

Jacob: But with SMS marketing, it doesn’t really matter how big or small you are, you can still set up like some initial things that are there that. Drive you extra revenue, extra profit. You don’t really have to worry about it that much. And then at a certain point, you can build out a team, hire an agency to do all of the active work there as well.

Jacob: But some of the other trends we see within the marketing world from our perspective is some more integrated things within, for example, marketing and Facebook ads. Like for example, some funnel build outs and basically just more synergistic marketing strategy. overall because for the last couple of years, like there’s email marketing, there’s Facebook ads, there’s marketing, but there was not a lot of connection between all of those channels together.

Jacob: Maybe even maybe more for, so for huge brands. For bigger brands. But right now I see a lot like, also like medium science brands to really have more synergistic marking strategies. Everything works together much more oiled .

Brent: Is there a difference between open rates on devices? I’ve heard that post iOS 14, that sometimes you may not be able to measure open rates on emails and that might skew some of your KPIs. 

Jacob: , Yeah. So with this, like I have slight slightly the front take on this, like obviously the tracking it is slightly off.

Jacob: So like each new change and adaptation in terms of iOS or like platform is, it’s gonna skew the data a bit. So like it’s gonna skew what we see that the effect of gonna see marketing is still gonna stay the same. If you don’t see maybe like the 10% less people, the emails, that’s what they see on our end.

Jacob: But then in the end, like how many people open up the emails is still gonna be the same amount. But of course if it can skew the data, it can also play around with the conversion data conversion tracking. Because sometimes, for example, some of the email softwares, they also use the open metric as the as one of the, within the conversion windows.

Jacob: So for example, if the open is falsely tracked, it can either not count a certain conversion to. For the email also count an extra conversion for email, if that makes sense. But with this, we have not seen a huge issue, like we mainly use Kavio. I think Klavio has done a smart thing to battle this. Not too technical about this, but I think one thing that they did, which is really smart, is that they noticed how Apple works.

Jacob: So here, nobody quote me on this, but if I understood correctly, So basically how it works when you send out an email to an iOS device or an email with an iOS privacy email once to send out email, there’s gonna be an auto open like within one second. Once you send out the email and Kavio just disregards that and they usually look for the second open.

Jacob: And the second open usually comes for the from the real person, or it maybe comes after five seconds that the, not immediately after the emails sent. So there are things that the. Platforms are doing also to battle this. So I’m not too worried about this, but of course it can play around and with the date and skew a couple of things.

Brent: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think that merchants aren’t gonna worry. Some bigger merchants should worry about this, but. It’s, the whole privacy thing has been such an interesting journey in the last year especially. Just talking about privacy from the US compared to Europe. Europe is much more restrictive on sending emails.

Brent: US has the same rules, but maybe not as well followed. Talk about the best way to grow your list, that’s legal.

Jacob: Good question. That’s legal . Yeah. So obviously Europe, gdpr like in terms of like list growth, generally the same tactics strategies are gonna apply both US and Europe. Within Europe, if you’re gonna be completely legal.

Jacob: Is it? Gonna be a bit less effective. But the best growth strategy for list is actually, is gonna be just driving more sales to your store. Focus on your customer acquisitions you like, your paid ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, whatever. Because most of your list, it’s still gonna come through the purchasers.

Jacob: So people that go to the checkout, if they purchase or don’t purchase, The big, biggest bulk of your list and the highest quality bulk, your list is gonna come directly through that. So that should always be your main focus email. Just basically thanks those customers and turns them into repeat purchases.

Jacob: But if you wanna focus on growing your list specifically, or implement different kind of funnels, which are email first, conversion second obviously popups are. , so have popups on your side as well but popups to give you some tips, some value, a big mistake. I see a lot of agencies, a lot of brands, , Maybe it’s not a mistake.

Jacob: Sometimes it can also be valuable, but most of the case, it’s not really wanted. It’s having popups at very short triggers at very short delays. So if there’s a brand within three seconds, if you’re landing on a brand page, you see a popup, it’s not a good thing for a couple of reasons.

Jacob: First of all, nobody can really make a purchasing decision in three seconds. So if you are three seconds, then you see a popup for 10%. What it’s gonna do, first of all, is gonna scare the customer base, gonna have a negative effect on your conversion rate. And second of all, for the customers that do end up buying, you’re just gonna give away 10% of your margin.

Jacob: Because nobody can really decide in three seconds, Hey, I’m gonna buy this product or not gonna buy this product. So that’s not the good thing. So what we usually recommend is having popups at longer delay. and that’s just gonna mostly focus on driving X revenue. Usually go around like 30 to 55 seconds as that’s what usually sees the average time spent on site.

Jacob: And that is maybe gonna be more cater towards undecided buyer. So maybe they’re still thinking about the product and hey, boom, there’s a 10% off discount and that just gets them over the edge. So that’s a. Better strategy there. And then some other things you can just run direct lead gen campaigns. So for example, for q4, what we are gonna be doing is running leg gen campaigns to, for the early bird list, we’re gonna have a landing page.

Jacob: We’re gonna have our clients basically run, pay that so their warm audience, that planning page, generate a bigger lead list so we can hype it up and push. More revenue through the q4 sales. So good. 

Brent: Yeah. I have an episode that is called Learn to Love Your Popup. So I would encourage listeners to go back and I can’t remember the guest right now, but it is learn to love the popup.

Brent: And I have to admit on my own Talk Commerce website, I need to get a popup rolling on there. Jacob, I’m gonna try something new with you today. Before we close out the podcast. Generally if you, if anybody listens to this they know that before every podcast, I give you a free joke.

Brent: So I wanna a free joke. There’s no obligation. You don’t have to laugh. In fact, I have a laugh track behind. But today I would like to try reading you the free joke and just getting your opinion on it. And I guess the reasoning is, should I charge for it or not? So let’s try it really quick. Ready?

Brent: Three men are on a boat. They have four cigarettes, but nothing to light them. So they throw a cigarette overboard and the whole boat becomes a cigarette lighter.

Jacob: I don’t think I get it right, , so 

Brent: I’ll read it. I’ll read it one more time. It might not think about what we call a cigarette lighter in the US It’s called a cigarette lighter to light cigarettes. I’ll read it one more time. 

Brent: Three men are on a boat, okay? They have four cigarettes, but nothing to light them with, so they throw a cigarette overboard and the whole boat becomes a cigarette lighter.

Jacob: Oh, gotcha. Okay. ? Yeah now I got it. Yes. It’s a smart board play, like the English jokes. They’re sometimes a bit, It’s okay. 

Brent: I completely, I side swiped you with this, so I apologize, but the opinion is should I continue to offer them for free or do you think I should charge for that type of joke?

Jacob: For charge for that type of joke? Good question. I don’t know. For me, It was hard to get. So maybe I’m too dumb. I would not, definitely not wanna pay for that kind of joke. So for now, maybe leave them for free and then later on maybe you can start charging them for them as well 

Brent: and charging.

Brent: That’s the joke. And I apologize, I have to explain all my jokes. In fact I spend a lot of time in Latin America and nobody gets my humor. So you’re not new. It’s completely normal.

Jacob: Okay, so charging is also part of the joke. Okay. I then I’m definitly out. No. Perfectly. Okay. 

Brent: I’m out the league. This is just the way, this is the way for me. I apologize. I appreciate you being a good sport on the joke. No worries. It was fun. No worries. Jacob, as we close out, I give everybody an opportunity to do a a shameless plug about anything you’d like to.

Brent: and a plug in English is a promotion about something you’d like to promote. And so if you’d like to promote, if you like to promote that jokes, I’m all for it. But you are welcome to promote anything you like to. 

Jacob: All right. Thank you for the opportunity. So yeah, in terms of the shameless, once plug, I think I’ll go with the agency.

Jacob: If you need email mar help with email marketing, whether you’re an e-com SaaS info you can check out Agency JR. So it’s agency jacob rains.com. You can check out their case studies what we’ve done and talk with us to see if we can help. And also for agency owners we’re always open for new partnerships.

Jacob: So whether we have an e-com, SaaS or info focused agency you can also reach out through us, through Agency JR and see if a partnership makes sense and. Always have good, and I’ll make sure 

Brent: I get the links from the show notes and they’ll be able to get in touch with you through that as well.

Brent: So Jacob Anson, the co-founder of Agency JR. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Jacob: Thank you for having me. It’s been a blast. Thank you.

Talk-Commerce ryan alford

Building Marketing Loyalty Through Community 

The brands winning today are building a community that drives repeat purchases. Loyalty is gained in drips and lost in buckets because there are so many layers of competition. We interview Ryan Alford with The Radcast agency in South Carolina He has been radical about marketing advertising for 22 years.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of talk commerce today. I have Ryan Alford, as opposed to all Chevy. Which we’ve made the joke in the back room. Ryan is a entrepreneur and a super popular podcast host for Radcast Ryan. Go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do on a day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Ryan: Sure. Brent, it’s great to be here with you. Yeah, I mean I own, my main course of business is radical. You’ll notice the rad theme throughout a lot of things. And I’ll go ahead and give you the insider baseball secret. Ryan offered digital is where that started, but I just like the word radical better.

Ryan: Radcast the agency that I own in South Carolina, it’s a digital ad agency called radical and that’s the day to day and been in marketing advertising for 22 years. Working on some of the largest brands in the world before I started radical. And even with radical now working on large brands and I’m a father of four boys.

Ryan: So my passion seems to align with my children and my wife, Nicole God rest her soul. Who is she? Or bless her souls. She’d say not rest. She’s very much alive, but she’s a assistant principal in a middle school doing one of the hardest jobs in America. In today’s age. My passions revolve around family and when they’re happy, I’m happy.

Brent: that’s awesome. Yeah. We are also a family business here and my kids all worked in the company that my wife and I started. Everybody’s moving on, including myself and my wife, but yeah, I totally get it. Kids are at the cornerstone and I think one of the things we talked about in the green room is how are kids influencing what’s gonna happen into the future?

Brent: Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. 

Ryan: My boys are. 1111 and 12. We’re a blended family. I don’t have twins but we’ve been together since our boys were two and four. So we’ve grown up together as the modern Brady bunch, but I will say this I’ve watched them daily. They’ve grown up in what I call digitally native.

Ryan: I’ve grew up and yourself, probably in what I call analog native. Even though I’ve worn both hats because I’ve grown up in the technology and agency industries, which are very tech heavy and owning a digital agency. I like to say I’m split down the middle, but our kids have grown up in a digitally native first world.

Ryan: What I mean by that is. Both video games, social media, smartphones the medium with which they are both consuming content and being marketed to has all been digital. It’s a world they know, and they place value on digital things that you and I and others probably in the gen X or boomers or whatever place value in physical things.

Ryan: My 12 year old son could really care less what he walks outta the house on, but if his avatar on Roblox doesn’t have the perfect pair of shorts, the perfect Nike digital shoes, and a spiky haircut. He’s not had a good day. And that blows my mind that he cares that much about it, but he’s grown up in that world where they place value very much in digital things.

Ryan: And being digital natives. So our children we’re watching them. We’re watching that value transition from physical to digital doesn’t ma mean that they have no value in physical things. We do experiences as families. We go on trips, but they don’t necessarily care about stuff in the physical world, the way that they do digital things.

Ryan: Especially in video games and social media and other things like tokens and different things. And you see this. And it’s really transitioning into that metaverse slash digital world where you’re gonna start to see a lot of marketing transpire and where marketing’s gonna need to take place.

Ryan: Because again, when things are happening digitally is we’ve moved digitally, the place with which to get eyeballs, to get reach, to get frequency. In the future and already now is in these digital worlds. And so marketing is being very much headed down that path pretty quickly. I’m not saying it’s here and now, and certainly for smaller businesses, they don’t need to be spending thousands and thousands of dollars on speculation.

Ryan: But again, you can see this happening in front of our eyes, in front of our children, with where they’re putting value. And so that’s how I summarize that Yeah. 

Brent: So I think that kind of ties into NFTs and how popular they’ve become or are becoming, how do you see that in relations to how your younger children and kids are growing up and moving into marketing and being marketed too?

Ryan: Yeah. It’s interesting right now it’s a lot of hype and a lot of PR you’ve got digital artwork and things, and so I’m not as. I don’t high on the, the apes that are digital art that are, value that may go up or down. Mine is more in where the basis of the NFT, which is the smart contract that’s happening on the blockchain.

Ryan: And also the data transition for first party data that you’re gonna see happen on the blockchain. And all these things are interrelated. The NFT is the start of it because it’s that digital. A contract that I have a piece of art and I own it, and it’s creating that ledger. And what you’re gonna see is when we move into the future, again, a lot of this advertising and marketing is happening on the web and what’s happening is people are getting more concerned and closing in on that privacy.

Ryan: It’s gotten a lot harder to market on Facebook and other channels, because privacy concerns are there and what you’re gonna see with these smart contracts and your ID, you’re gonna have a wallet. ID on the blockchain, that’s gonna be more you giving permission for data usage. And so it’s gonna play really heavily in targeting in the future in marketing.

Ryan: And so the NFTs are scratching the surface of the technology used. And what you’re gonna see is that transition. And I do think we’re gonna move into a world the next 10 years. Think about. How ridiculously hard it is to get title work done on a house sale, if that was done on the blockchain and that digital ledger was there, you could immediately find that information there and it’s recorded there.

Ryan: And instead of now we’re fumbling around and back offices and paperwork from, 50 years ago on certain transactions, I think you’re gonna see all of this, all these things live within the same data and technology, and they’re all gonna be related to both marketing and just commerce in the future.

Brent: That’s that’s a really good point especially for title work for, so going back to kids what are some indicators that you see that kids are shaping the way marketing is 

changing? 

Ryan: Yeah. The biggest thing is if you start with the fastest growing social media platform in the world today is TikTok.

Ryan: and that started as the teenager platform, 13 to 23. And so they’ve advanced this platform, but now, and I just did a talk about this so they’ve set the standard and set the popularity and set the interest level for this channel of social media and content and really entertainment.

Ryan: And where our source of entertainment, our source of news, our source of knowledge. Our children are setting the standard for things that are taking off. But then I say that 50% of the growth on TikTok today is happening in 30 plus. They’re age 30 plus and 30 and 50% of that engagement is happening.

Ryan: So what started as the 13 to 21 year old platform TikTok 2, 3, 4 years ago is now becoming the mainstream. So you’re seeing the youth set the standard and the knowledge base for some of these platforms. And then it transitions. And it’s not that actually different from like Facebook, Facebook started as a younger platform, 15 years.

Ryan: Even 10 years ago. And now it’s the fastest growing platform for 45 to 65 year olds. Everybody thinks Facebook’s dead. Facebook’s not dead. It’s just older. It’s just graying. . Yeah, 

Brent: definitely. Facebook seems like it’s the place for older people. Let’s just say. I think that I think you’re right.

Brent: Especially on the TikTok front I started using TikTok. I’ve been trying to use it more for business things, but I’ll be honest. My Jack Russell posts on TikTok are definitely the largest viewed items that I could possibly have. How do you think that compares to something like Snapchat? I see my kids still using Snapchat every day.

Brent: But the advertising angle for Snapchat, I think is much lower than it is for TikTok, but Snapchat remains super popular. 

Ryan: Yeah. It’s super popular from a messaging platform specifically. I’m not that high on them as far as they’re long term proposition right now. They’ve gotten passed by as a mainstream content platform by TikTok, Instagram, with reels and different things.

Ryan: It’s certainly a player and it’s certainly used, but it’s primarily messaging from that younger audience. And I don’t wanna discount that value, but I just don’t think they’ve done as good a job. I feel like they’ve gotten on to very trendy like things like AR and certain things that are interesting, but the mainstream appeal of the platform has never really taken off.

Ryan: Where TikTok has grown is growing in a more mainstream fashion with content and engagement and the style of video that it progresses. I feel like Snapchat is faded behind by just remaining that messaging vehicle and not necessarily content

Ryan: consumption and video, I say, content is king, video rules and that’s the problem. Video is everything now. And I think that’s where Snapchat’s gotten left behind. 

Brent: I know that you had you, you talk about some ageless truths in marketing and you started off with your son, I think, and his avatars.

Brent: I think one of those ageless truths, though, especially as kids get into their teens, are they going to point at you as the father and say, you cannot wear that today. Dad, you look so whatever 2010s or something, there, there are some ageless truths truths around marketing and the way our kids are

Brent: influencing us as parents. So maybe speak to some of those ageless truths and the diversity between that digital life and that real life. Yeah, 

Ryan: I’ll go through, I have seven. What I call undeniable and ageless truths are creativity, reach, consistency, distinctiveness, attention, emotion, and motivation.

Ryan: Those are the seven. What I call undeniable truths. They’re all necessary even today, whether it’s digital, whether it’s promoting to children, promoting to adults, whatever it is. And I’ll say this no matter what you do, reach and attention are important. So back to the TikTok analogy right now, that’s where attention is growing there in an Instagram and other channels.

Ryan: YouTube. This is where the eyeballs are, linear TV is certainly not dead, but it’s faded for the number of attention and how much, how many eyeballs are there. And at the end of the day, reach is really a measure of media, which is the number of people that see your message. And no matter what, you’re, whether you’re selling t-shirts on e-commerce supplements, whatever it is, you have to have a baseline volume of reach the number of people that see your message.

Ryan: That’s an undeniable truth in anything that you do, unless you’re in accounts based marketing, and you only need to make four sales a year. You need extensive reach in order to meet your sales goals. Cause me media is divided by reach plus frequency. That’s where it gets into consistency. And the biggest thing I see and the biggest challenges I see today are people that veer off their core messages too quickly.

Ryan: And so people, there’s a, it’s interesting to me on social media, everybody thinks I’ve already posted that. How many times do you see the same commercial over and over again? Because that consistency is what drives. Awareness and consideration and intent, and I’m gonna getting into the purchase funnel here, but ultimately what drives a sale is that consistency of message.

Ryan: And the frequency that it happens. So I don’t know that I’m answering your question exactly, but I think there’s just certain things that even as the medians change, even whether it’s children, whether it’s adult, whether who you’re marketing to, there’s just some age old truths. And one of my other favorite ones is emotion.

Ryan: Even in today, people think with their head and they buy with their hearts. And so emotion can be humor. Emotion can be sadness, a lot of different things, but emotion drives purchase behavior. 

Brent: So when we’re going to some of those ageless truths, I think you had mentioned there’s seven of them.

Brent: You had mentioned reach consistency, emotion. What are some of those other ones 

Ryan: on that distinctiveness? That’s the differentiation. So Again, ageless here. If you want to sell more, you have to stand out. So distinctiveness, consistency, emotion, motivation. So again, this is if you go from the top of the funnel to the bottom, motivation are things like sales periods.

Ryan: What triggers your action that you want the consumer to have and take today. And so even you can have a brand promise and you can have a solution that you provide to someone’s problem, or just a great outfit that someone wants to buy. But what’s the motivational trigger that, that drives them to action today.

Ryan: Lastly, creativity, I don’t know if I mentioned that that will never die in marketing, at least on my watch. 

Brent: So creativity, I think is, that’s always the big one out there that people look for. So the name of your firm is radical. What are you bringing to the table that’s radical that follows along with that creativity?

Ryan: Yeah, the biggest thing is we preach what I call B to H business to human. Whether we work with probably equal parts, B2B and B2C. But what we do is we create it. We drive creativity through the human lens because on the other side of the, whatever, the platform, whatever the medium is, a human that’s buying, whatever you’re selling.

Ryan: And so we use that as a premise for a lot of our creative thinking and what we’re trying to do again, back to those triggers. At the end of the day, what happens when you create an agency called radical. Is your people hold themselves to a different standard. Not only do we hire people that I consider creative, but we also challenge our clients to think out of the box and to know that we’re gonna bring solutions that may not always be obvious.

Ryan: and for example, today in social media, you need to educate or entertain. And so we challenge and we literally have a comedy troop that works for our agency that we’ll do comedic funny, irreverent skits for common sales pair. We had a flooring company that, we did a spoof off of Ron Burgendy.

Ryan: We did the Floor-a-thon, and, it was just irreverent and had a guy up there who was drinking while he was on set and selling flooring. And so again, we when people go left, we go, we just challenge ourselves to think differently and then push the envelope.

Ryan: And again, part of the, I don’t know, the craziness of calling yourself radical is it’s funny what it empowers both your clients and your people to push a little harder. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s good stuff. Do you find it difficult to get B2B customers to think outside of what their norm is and I’m thinking there’s a lot of

Brent: boomers. I’m not a boomer. I’m not quite that old, but there’s a lot of boomers out there that, that were around before computers or before before the internet, let’s just say there was probably computers, but they, it’s harder for them to embrace some of these things in B2B cuz their thing is working.

Brent: How do you push them outside of their comfort zone and get them to do some of those things? 

Ryan: The first thing is back to, when you hire an agency called radical, you’re gonna get what you paid for. So we set the table early, and at the same time, it is difficult. So Brent, so you’ve totally nailed what can be the challenge, but at the same time we do get that license to press them just when they hire us.

Ryan: We’re pretty upfront in the process. We’re gonna push you to consider things. And I also think what’s happened though, is you’ve had this convergence of B2B and B2C channels coming together a little bit, especially with the pandemic and stuff like that. A lot of people are at home on social channels, doing different things, embracing content through different ways.

Ryan: So you’ve had a little bit of a lightning and, or easing of, I call it maybe the executive level content, like everybody’s left their hair down a little bit. And realize that, Hey, I don’t have to wear a suit and tie every day and do stodgy boring content to be effective. So I think that the realities of today have helped lessen that expectation.

Ryan: And, again, B2B companies are seeing, and finally realizing that the age old stodgy Content and overly produced stuff doesn’t work. You’ve had a D social media, whether it’s TikTok, and I’m not saying that’s where B2B brands necessarily belong, but it does have influence. And LinkedIn has even grown as a content platform.

Ryan: People have gotten more comfortable and there’s been a decentralization of content being overly produced. and I think B2B is caught on in the companies that wanna work with us, that we push certainly have caught on. And again, preaching through that B to H business, to human language.

Ryan: They understand that. And that doesn’t mean that, your website can have any fewer legal standards or things like that. But I do think there’s an understanding and a place in this convergence of marketing and media that’s coming together. 

Brent: Just sticking with B2B.

Brent: Do you help some of these companies who’ve come to you and they’ve maybe they have a baseline or they’ve tried something and it hasn’t worked, it’s gonna work cause you’ve seen it work for their companies. Do you create a baseline and then really help them understand how, whatever that audience is?

Brent: Let’s just say it’s YouTube as a simple one for B2B. To explain, Hey, let’s do this and let’s at least try it and then measure it and see how we’re doing. And then they have to also continue on with it for a certain amount of time to see some success. 

Ryan: Yeah. That you’ve nailed it right there.

Ryan: That last part we just won’t, we choose not to work with people that wanna see definitive results in 30 days on anything marketing and the channels and the complexity are too great. It’s not because we won’t hold our soul to expectations. It’s because you have to trial and error, so many different things, and you have to be able to test a lot of different variables so that you see what works.

Ryan: So we like to run two or three tests at a time with different content and different mediums and then compare and cross over those things. And that’s the challenge, but that’s also the opportunity. And I think the brands that kind of buy into that see the success. 

Brent: In our green room, we talked a little bit about that you spoke at a FedEx event.

Brent: I would like to talk about social selling and live social selling. Let’s dive into that. I’m interested in that and I think you’re right. That’s where it’s going right now, or at least a trend. Why don’t you explain what that is to our audience and help us to understand better how people can get into 

Ryan: it.

Ryan: yeah, there’s two parts to it. Overall social selling is just exactly what it says. Leveraging Facebook, Instagram, TikTok Twitter, whatever the platform may be. These all have integrations into the eCommerce platforms. So social selling we press a lot of clients either towards Shopify or Magento when we’re working with clients on e-commerce.

Ryan: And all of them have these integrations built in where your product catalog pushes the social media so that the sale happens within the social platform. So that again, social selling you’re pushing or promoting whether it’s stories, whether it’s posts, whether it’s whatever that content channel might be.

Ryan: You’re but the actual technology that takes place in the transaction happens within the social channel. The biggest trend though, and that’s certainly growing and what’s happened is you’ve had two worlds come together that have allowed that number one, the demand for consumers within the channel, and then the technology’s gotten a lot better.

Ryan: It used to be clunky as heck to try to integrate your product channels within like Facebook and Instagram, like two or three years ago, it’s gotten much easier. As well as the kind of transaction gateways is much easier. So you have demand and technology coming together around the same time. But then the biggest trend in all of this has been live social selling.

Ryan: So this is when you leverage the it’s really, when you think about it’s the QVC effect in 2022, but what we have now is the technology for anyone to broadcast you are your own media channel within these platforms. So whether you’re on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, You can go live and start promoting your products.

Ryan: And so we’ve seen a lot of success for brands that literally built studios, whether they’re a, furniture store or a merchandise t-shirt store, no matter really, whatever you’re selling set up studios within their own facilities that are just small facilities, where they have someone come on, they go live and they’re promoting product.

Ryan: It brings in that human element. So that you’re you put a face with the brand while also just giving someone that kind of channel with which to ask questions. Cause you’ve got messaging that can happen between there. And this kind of started in Asia, two or three years ago started really growing.

Ryan: And I think we’re at the right at the mass kind of adoption here the next year or two certainly a lot of brands have already using it, but I think you’re gonna see more mass adoption and it’s an incredible way to create another channel with which you can market and grow sales. 

Brent: Yeah, I think Instagram certainly started some of that trends in Facebook, of course, in their in

Brent: buying directly from the app. But I think what you’re saying more is you go to the actual eCommerce store and they’re selling it to you live and maybe even doing a studio call where you can, where people are talking to you like on QVC, but you can also interact with those people directly through the channel

Brent: I think that makes it very exciting. And it makes for a broader audience via multiple social channels as well. Yeah, 

Ryan: that’s right. And it’s another way to build community. The brands that are winning today are building not just selling, unless you have a truly differentiated product.

Ryan: The brands winning today are building some type of community which drives, repeat purchases and some amount of loyalty and brand. Loyalty’s very difficult to I say they it’s it’s gained in, in, in drips and lost in buckets because you. There’s so many layers of competition now. So it creates another layer for building community and building again, that dual communication channel on your product services or no matter really matter what you do.

Ryan: And yeah, I think it’s it’s a really big opportunity. And I think the channels the companies that are doing it are seeing a lot of. 

Brent: I like that. You mentioned community and I was at ShopTalk a couple weeks ago and saw a great presentation. I can’t remember the brand right now, but it was a clothing brand and they’re, they built a lot of their brand around a brand building community and having, not just influencers, but the community of people purchasing that brand that are advocating for that brand consistently.

Brent: Do you think a lot of Let’s just say eCommerce only merchants are missing out on that opportunity to build community within that brand. Yeah. Within their own brand, I should say. Yeah. 

Ryan: I, every brand is unique, so it’s hard to pass judgment per se, but I do think it’s a level that with the social channels now with influencers with different opportunity path, It’s a lost opportunity if you aren’t and it’s so hard to stand out and create, repeat purchases, unless you’re doing it again, unless your product is just so differentiated.

Ryan: But if you’re selling cosmetics or t-shirts or any kind of apparel, You better be building community because that’s, what’s gonna hold you up through the test of time is that community channel that it’s glorified word of mouth in a way, but it’s also creating and bringing together like-minded and it’s back to targeting, bringing the right target together and so that you’re building

Ryan: both the awareness channel, but the loyalty factor, because then they’re loyal to you for more than just the product itself. 

Brent: Is there risks in e-commerce merchants or even any merchant embracing this I idea of community and then working on their social channels to promote their products?

Brent: What are, what risks do you see in this. 

Ryan: There’s risk in anything, but I think there’s the upside is much greater. The risk could be you certainly don’t want to alienate especially if you have a broad mass appeal product, so you might risk, bringing together.

Ryan: Certain audiences that are maybe not reflective of your brand, that’s certainly a risk, but I think if you do it right, and you organize around your beliefs and principles and bring the right people along the upshot is much greater than the risk. Certainly with social media, in the live forum and in other things, the risk would be just imperfection.

Ryan: But what’s interesting is consumers sort of embrace that realness and that rawness, I can’t speak towards every legal liability. So you again, need to empower your people with the knowledge and the safeguards that they need. But I think the biggest risk might be.

Ryan: I think it’s more, the fear brands are fearful of imperfect situations or content. When in reality, that’s actually. . 

Brent: Yeah. And I can speak to experience on some of the risks around the idea of trying to automate too much of your social media. I can remember. I’m a very ferocious tweeter when I’m at an event.

Brent: And I can remember setting up some bots that would auto tweet a hashtag if it was. Some combination of hashtags and somebody figured it out and was retweeting some inappropriate content based on the hashtags. And I quickly realized it was very early on, but I realized that was not a great idea to try to to try to promote some of those things

Brent: so I suppose some of the risks are around automating things and not monitoring that automation. And I think another risk too, that I see is is brands embracing social media, but never answering. Yeah, people sending you a message that says, Hey I want, this is, this has been a horrible experience.

Brent: What are you gonna do about it? I think Delta airlines has done a great job for me anyways, on responding to me on those type of things. But there’s other brands that I won’t mention that never get back to you. 

Ryan: yes. If you don’t have support to do this, you’re better off not doing it. So you can’t do things that spark conversation and not have

Ryan: the hands on the other end to then answer it. That’s a total no-no and I think what you’ve also said, you brought up the automation factor, again, these channels are so ripe for customer engagement building community. And so you’ve got to commit the resources to them appropriately to take advantage of that opportunity.

Ryan: But if you don’t embrace it completely and you try to automate too much, that can drive a whole nother set of issues, some of which you’ve just described, but also there’s just an authenticness that consumers now expect from brands. And again, if you can’ embrace that fully and it doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, but it does mean you have to truly have engagement

Ryan: and someone assigned and ready to speak and act and be empowered on managing that.

Ryan: And the other challenge is on the automation side, lot of people get into that and I, there’s a big push in marketing to use more automated tools, but right now consumers really crave that authentic expression from brands and they don’t expect perfection.

Ryan: So if you weren’t set up to have the resources and human people. Responding to these things and empowered to do it. Automation just can’t complete the circle for what’s needed to use these channels appropriately and I’m and look, I love technology and software and automation. Like certainly it’s made a lot of our jobs easier and more manageable, but on social media, it’s social.

Ryan: That’s the name of the word? It’s not robots. It’s social. It’s, there’s a two way channel for engagement. You gotta be able to keep up with that. 

Brent: Yeah. And I think I’m gonna key in on what you said earlier, you said spark a conversation. And if you put that in real terms, like you’re walking into a room and you’re gonna start talking to somebody.

Brent: If you start talking to somebody and then you simply never respond or worse, walk away as they’re trying to respond. It’s the analogy for social media is exactly the same. You’re basically calling somebody and leaving the phone off the hook. And never answering anything they’ve just said , 

Ryan: that’s exactly right.

Ryan: It’s a great analogy. I love that. It’s true. You can’t, spark the conversation and then not be there to answer it. 

Brent: Yeah. And as, as bigger brands get, the more they should think about answering those things that are coming at them from social media. And if they’re not going to, they should explicitly say we don’t answer this channel.

Brent: Or I would just say don’t use that channel at all. If you’re not gonna 

Ryan: answer. That’s right. I would definitely say that or use it in a way that it’s clear that you are pushing out, but not expecting something back in. 

Brent: Yeah. But Ryan, we had a couple minutes left here. I wanna just, if you want to close out on a, something you said earlier about customers need to stick with a marketing initiative that you’re trying.

Brent: Even if it seems like it’s failing after a month or even two months if there’s a plan in place, is there a recommended amount of time that somebody should stick with it or is it pliable by the marketing campaign you’re doing? Yeah. 

Ryan: That’s a hard, one. Marketing is so complex and so specific to individual companies.

Ryan: That’s a hard one to answer like universally, but I’m gonna give it my go here. Again, I believe in setting 12 month plans, but making them very mialable, like bendable moldable as needed, cuz you need to be able to read and react to the market. But what I do think you have to stick with is number one, you need to focus on a target and that target can’t change every 30 days.

Ryan: So you need to spend, because a lot of I do some master classes and things like that. And the first thing you have to do is nail your. Because otherwise even a good friend of mine, Andy Murphy says this analogy that even if you’re five millimeters off, if you plot that out over a hundred miles, think about how off course you actually end up

Ryan: And again, getting that target nailed in getting the message to that target dialed in and sticking with it long enough that you have true actionable data. Because 30 days really isn’t enough. So I like to see 90 day campaigns that are testing across one or two different variables that might be the media.

Ryan: It might be the message, but again, there’s a consistent target and there’s a consistent kind of brand promise and theme across all of that. And so I think campaigns in 90 days, I think years in planning, like as far as a year or 12 month plan. And I just think you have to nail that target and you have to at least nail the overarching solution or brand promise that you can provide.

Brent: I would add one more thing that maybe a lot of companies don’t listen to as well is that there has to be enough traffic to make that data actionable. If it’s a, let’s just say it’s B2B and they have very low traffic. It’s gonna take a little longer to prove whatever hypothesis that you’ve put out there.

Brent: I think it’s a mixture of traffic and time that all merchants have to embrace or at least trust that they have to be able to see it through. 

Ryan: Yes. I think you nailed it. And the reality is we’ve done all this talk about social media. Organic social media, except on TikTok and a little bit on LinkedIn is pretty dead.

Ryan: you gotta pay to play to get the reach and the frequency that you need. To drive the traffic that you were just describing. So paid ads are a necessity unless you really have patience and know that organic traffic and growth is gonna take time, cuz SEO efforts on your website, take time. Organic posts get your about 7% of your followers.

Ryan: See them Facebook and Instagram. Twitter and others have figured this out. They’re just not gonna let you grow a business or a brand without paid approaches again, unless you’re leveraging influencers or other things, but those are paid as well. So again, if you want the volume that you need back to reach one of the undeniable truths and marketing it’s pay to play.

Brent: Yeah. And I think too that it’s not as easy for pay to play as it was 10 years ago, you really have to work on your campaigns and even look at more of those long tail searches in when you’re doing pay to play. It’s not just open up the spigot, but you’re gonna get a bunch of garbage nowadays, I think as well.

Brent: So as a merchant, you should pay attention to making sure that you’re looking at whatever’s happening and changing, like you said, the course to make sure you’re on target to hit that. Exactly. Ryan, this has been such a good conversation. I appreciate you being here. As we close out, I give every guest the opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug.

Brent: What would you like to plug today? 

Ryan: Yeah, obviously, hopefully this has been enlightening. My hat here, the Radcast. Love for anyone to go. Listen, if you look up the Radcast, we do own most of the SEO. You’ll find our show on all the channels. We’re a top 25 marketing and business show on Spotify, top 100 on apple.

Ryan: And then I am launching a master classes, a different in different things and a mastermind under the radical formula, the radical formula.com. So I’d love for you. If you’re an individual or small business, that’s a great place to work with me. And learn from, 22 plus years in the business.

Ryan: And then if you’re a larger brand radical company, radical.company online, Brent really appreciate it. This has been really enjoyable. And you’re a great host. 

Brent: Yeah, I’ll make sure I’ll get all those show notes onto the onto the podcast. And again, thank you so much for being here.

Ryan: Thanks so much.

Talk-Commerce Kate-Bradley

Looking for the patterns in your marketing with Kate Bradley

In this week’s episode, we talk about everything from entrepreneurship to employee happiness. (@LatelyAIKately) Kate talks about the pressure on a start-up CEO and how it is compounded by trying to run a successful business and raise money at the same time. Kate reveals one really cool new feature on Lately.ai. (You must listen to the end to hear the big reveal!)

What you will learn from this episode and about Kate

• Passion for floating in a pool and listening to 80s music

• CEO of Lately, an AI that repurposes long-form content

• Focus on making fans, not sales

• Educated on Black American perspectives •

White Elephant in the Room: lack of diversity in podcast

• Advice to never assume what any side wants

• Value of lifting others up

• Making a fan creates a machine

• Marketing is about getting a fresh perspective

• Overuse of words leads to dull communication

• Creative use of language to engage people and make them react

I absolutely think that people who are focused on clock punching rather than performance and outcomes are missing out. Clock punchers are focused on the wrong thing and don’t understand the bigger picture. They don’t see how their work fits into the bigger picture and how it contributes to the success of the company. Performance and outcomes are much more important than just showing up and doing the minimum. If an entrepreneur is focused on performance and outcomes, they will be able to make better decisions and find more success.

Kate Bradley

Kate is the Founder & CEO of Lately. The A.I. that learns which words will get you the most engagement and re-purposes video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts containing those words.

Kate is a former rock ‘n’ roll DJ and served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales, and marketing expertise. What she learned in radio about the neuroscience of music helps fuel Lately’s artificial intelligence.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this wonderful episode of lately on Talk Commerce. I have Kaitlyn from lately today. Kate. Please introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role in one of your passions in life. 

Kate: I formally was a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM. So I have a soft spot in my heart for podcasting, of course. I love the theater of the mind so much. I love radio. I love that you Brent have this I don’t even know if you know that you have it, you have this beautiful power to create what I call a two-way street, even though it’s one way.

Kate: I You wield the microphone here, but people listen and trust you and they lean in because you have this ability to create that magical kind of feeling as though they’re part of the conversation. And so that’s what attracts me to radio and podcasting specifically. And I don’t miss it.

Kate: Cuz can I swear in your show? I don’t know. Yeah. Go for it. I had a shit time. there, there’s great things about radio. I met my husband there and his record was our favorite record of the year. And of course, total job hazard. Cause I dated musicians do not recommend, found the one good one, who’ve cut his hair and wears chinos and now he’s. Sales bless his heart, but radio is a boy’s club, of course. And me too, and all that stuff didn’t even exist. And the rewards you got for participating in sexual harassment were large. It was applauded. And so we all did it, and I, not only, and I was a recipient of course, because, I don’t have a phase for radio.

Kate: Yay. And there’s no women either. So of course, like every day my boss would ask. Bradley or your hands queen, meaning could I hold this Dick while he peed? just, it was just the locker room bullshit. So that. Bizarre because what started happening? I don’t know why I’m going down this thread with you, but Hey ladies, listen up the the sexual harassment turned into a hostile work environment because of course I was great at what I did and I arranged.

Kate: The first ever marketing newsletter for any of the channels, it was ours. And it got all of this. This is before MailChimp. Okay. So I was like in outlook having to send multiple copies because you could only send it to 250 people at a time. Remember that there was like no formatting. And I got us. Just a huge amount of press.

Kate: Just because I’m a bulldog, and I was like I think we should do this. And I’m gonna ask all these people to republish it and forward it, et cetera. And they did. And and then I got shit on for my success. So that was confusing because you’re like, I’m killing it. Why aren’t people excited about this?

Kate: It’s because they’re threatened. And I dunno if that’s why I have my own company and I don’t have to deal with. Ego, except for my own. now , the mountain. What were the other two questions you asked? 

Brent: What is your day to day role and one of your passions in life?

Kate: Oh we might have covered the passion but I think at the moment, my biggest passion is floating. I love the weightlessness of floating in a pool and we have a kitty pool and in text one, thank God for those people democratizing this thing, and we’ve had one for a while. It’s 12 feet by four feet, maybe three.

Kate: And there’s just enough room for two people to float. We built a solar heater out of black hose and a black piece of wood and a there’s a pump. And it does when there’s not a heat wave. It’s usually 88 degrees, which is what I like Brent, and me and my noodles are out there just floating away every day.

Kate: I’m allowed three songs, so I bring the Bose out there and I listen to three songs on the radio. Actually, I can still tolerate live radio and by tolerate, I really mean that cause it’s. Fucking terrible. Really terrible, but there’s this one station here that they mostly play 80 songs with and I’m a child at the eighties.

Kate: So I’m like, Hooters, Eddie grant, Steve Miller. Yes. And sometimes I’m lucky and I get three great songs. Sometimes they throw in some, another seventies, crap like BGS, or I don’t really like Harry Nelson, stuff like that. And I’m just like, I’m just waiting for the next good one. But that’s my passion at the moment.

Kate: And then. Who am I? What am I doing? I’m the CEO of lately lately uses artificial intelligence to repurpose long form content like text and video and audio into bite size social posts that it knows very specifically, which parts will get you the highest engagement. . 

Brent: Yeah, that’s great. And I am a, I’m a user of lately for longly.

Brent: It’s been a great tool for us. I do want to just dip back into podcast guests, because it’s not always a two street. And when people come on as a guest that are, that have an agenda that are trying to. They are not a good guest. And I sometimes just look at the clock and think, oh my God, can this 30 minutes be over?

Brent: And now the 110 guests that I’ve had are thinking, are you one of them? Kate, you are not because this is the second time you’ve been on and I really appreciate you coming on. But it is sometimes difficult and it’s, my, my job is made much easier. when the guest holds the conversation, but it’s not a sales pitch.

Brent: And I, there’s nothing more than I hate in a sales pitch from a guest. But anyways, this is my pitch for lately because it is, it’s such a great product. And I’m falling in love with AI. I just signed up with open AI. I would I want want to get into the Dolly thing and there’s so many fun things happening in.

Brent: That I’m very interested in. But I do wanna talk a little bit about some of the entrepreneur journeys you’ve been going through and also, in our green room, I do wanna just bring up the white elephant in the room, which is me. And we did talk a little bit about, and you brought it up too.

Brent: The fact that there isn’t I don’t have a lot of diversity in my podcast and I would like to work on that. I’m part of the entrepreneurial community here in Minneapolis and Kate. I was just educating Kate, when we, before as well, Minneapolis is a city in the middle of the country.

Brent: And I know people on the coast don’t realize that there’s a part. World that between New York and California, but we don’t have to go into that. So I’m on I do sit on the diversity and inclusion committee. and I always ask myself, why should I be on this? And actually if I had some good guess, and they’ve given me some good answers on why me as a white male should be on this.

Brent: And part of it is just awareness and talking about it, because if everybody doesn’t talk about it, then it becomes something that’s back room. And I think it’s always better if we do talk about it. So not to belabor the point, but I know that there’s challenges in that. There wasn’t even a question 

Kate: in there.

Kate: I have a comment though, if you don’t mind. My friend, please, Jen. God, what’s her last name? Vander something, sorry, Jen. Vander. Awesome. I’m just gonna call her that. So she, we were on a panel once and she. express this in a way that was the first time I got it, which is this, when you are the underdog, you can only be lifted up by those who are on top.

Kate: And the mistake many people make is not including the people who are on top in the conversation and we rely on them to lift us up. So in your case, it has to be white men in the conversation because they hold the power in the world. They. For the most part. And not excluding them is just a stopper right away.

Kate: So I get that on the, just a flip side and we should go into politics cuz that’s dangerous. But I did, I was a marketing consultant for a company called the perception Institute for about a year and their mission in the world or a nonprofit is to change the way that black men are portrayed in the media, black men.

Kate: And. . And so I learned a lot about people, about black Americans specifically and how they feel about white people of intervening in their business. And it was mostly not nice, which was interesting, and the overall reaction was like, stay out of it with your woke perceptions. Because what you think is right is not what we believe at.

Kate: And I’m generalizing. So forgive me there, but just a perspective, like it’s the S U right? You have to never assume what the other, what any side wants. Everybody has to be at the table for the magic to happen for the two-way street to happen. Let’s get back to that. And the second comment I had related to that was.

Kate: You touched on what makes for a good guest, so I believe it or not, I was a terrible interviewer on radio for a long time. I would get very nervous and I was young. And so I didn’t have a lot of experience, doing that. I was, it was the me show. I was great at the me show , I didn’t know how to make people shine or ask the right questions, cuz I was so nervous about pushing all the buttons and getting things right at the same time. Cuz you’re in my day you were managing like the whole show, just like you are with your podcast. So there’s a lot to do behind this in the green room, as you’re saying.

Kate: So to tie in what makes a good guess is when you are able to lift others up. Number one a and that’s I think that goes both ways, but as an entrepreneur. what we say is make a fan. Don’t make a sale right now. The value there might sound corny, but I believe in the long tail, this is the radio that I grew up in is all about the long tail.

Kate: The album cuts, not the hits, right? Get people to buy the records, make fans who are loyal to the death. And I saw the power of those people because when you make a fan, they work for you for free and they can’t help the. And so you get multiple banks for your buck because you make the sale and you make a machine, 

Brent: right?

Brent: Yeah. No. And I really apologize for what I’m gonna say now. because I do feel like now I want to change the name of my podcast to ceiling. Because I would love to get ceiling fans but keep going. I know. I’m sorry, Brent. that was so bad. Hold your nose, 

Kate: everybody. 

Brent: Yeah. So I, my wife and I had this conversation about ceiling, the Mar Marcia Beski talked has a song about a hundred tampon.

Brent: And in, there was there, there was the first lady in space. They gave, she was gonna be in space for a week. So they gave her a hundred tampons and and she has a she’s on Ted. She has a Ted talk anyways. So they, she talked about the fact that she has this song. And then all of a sudden, all these men started berating her about, you shouldn’t make fun of these engineers at NASA.

Brent: Like who knows, like you, you need a hundred tampons right. For a week. And it was, we had a very good convers, my wife and I had a very nice conversation about it. And I, for me, I thought it through and I’m like, yeah, that doesn’t really make sense. I don’t, I don’t know any better, but her point was, there was a lot of men that came out and were.

Brent: Hit Eric making her feel bad that she’d come up with this song or not making her, I don’t know the right words, but sounds funny. They were ham whatever social media, what social media does, that’s what they were doing. 

Kate: I have a segue 

Brent: for this.

Brent: Okay. Yes, we need a segue. Yes, go. 

Kate: So one of my favorite lines is Catherine Hahn in. the, we are the Millers when she calls it a Tanin and she’s from the Midwest. She is in this movie anyways, and so around my house, it’s called a Tanin and we laugh every time cuz it’s so funny to us, but that’s that ability by the way to take so.

Kate: and spin it in a new way, which is really what our jobs are about. This is marketing. How do you get fresh perspective? Whether it’s a hundred tampons in space or throwing a hot dog down a hallway, as she says, right? There’s I love that. I love. we, I just did a post on LinkedIn. I don’t know why I was inspired by somebody on Twitter.

Kate: And I said, words that make you like wanna bar. And I said, I’ll start. And the word was trousers. And so everybody piled on with not only just words that they don’t like the way they sound moist, got a lot of votes. For example, salacious got some. But then also biz lab was all over the place. So people were like partners and utilize at the end of the day, like all that kind of 

Brent: stuff.

Brent: I’ll reach out to you later. Yeah. 

Kate: Yeah. So I was just thinking about the, how we. how we can overuse words to death. So they don’t mean anything like awesome, which I am guilty of as well. All of America overuses. Awesome. But the whole point of communicating well is to don’t only communicate well, but to communicate with meaning.

Kate: and to hear some biz bla drive engagement, to make people lean in is to take something very familiar and just turn it just enough so that somebody is you catch the ear and you make them react. It’s the reaction that we all want. And I love thinking about that. I love so my husband is great at this he’ll he has all these isms one.

Kate: The hammer lane and the granny lane. That’s what he calls the fast lane and the slow lane on the highway. Or dirt nap. That’s like obviously dying 

Brent: dirt nap. Okay. 

Kate: Or booger sugar is cocaine , which we were just watching that Tom cruise movie American made, which is a great movie, by the way.

Kate: Even if you don’t like Tom cruise, it’s a 

Brent: great movie. I agree. I’ve seen it. Very good. Okay. Alright, so let’s move into little, let’s talk a little bit about entrepreneur entrepreneurship. My daughter just got a job with a CRM company called endear and they’re based outta New York, a very young entrepreneur lady who started it with a partner and te.

Brent: Did you have any struggles as an entrepreneur? 

Kate: oh, so many. I think the one that’s ever present for me is it’s, I don’t know if it’s confidence I, I don’t have an imposter syndrome per se, but I take things personally, that, that whole. Bullshit about it being work and business and not personal it’s it is bullshit, to me it is of course it’s personal, it affects people’s lives, right?

Kate: I That’s, it has to be right. And I’ve had to make decisions. I’ve had to let people go. I know how all that, how hard that stuff is. But I,

Kate: the pressure that I put on myself is pretty sprint. I perceive that there’s pressure being put on me by others as well. That may or may not be true, but there’s certainly that there’s that perception whether it’s my customers, like I wanna succeed for you. Whether it’s other women entrepreneurs, my investors, my fam, my family my team, obviously Lauren and Brian and Kristen, Jason and everybody, Kristen and Katie, Greg, I think that’s all.

Kate: Did I forget anyone, Emma Alex , and I, the problem is I don’t know what failure looks like. So let me just put this in the ground for everybody. We’re bringing it down. Brian, my CTO is very good at being positive and PR and practical. He’s an engineer. So he, he, he shoots pretty straight and I’m always.

Kate: wallowing in the negative. And he’s dude, like you have to really understand this, the odds of what lately is. So the chances of startups succeeding at all is already ne it’s negative. The fact that lately still exists. The fact that we have revenue, that we have hundreds of customers, we’ve had thousands before, we’re figuring out how to do it all here.

Kate: He’s like lately should have died a million. So you really need to acknowledge this, but it’s not that I don’t acknowledge it. It’s that the road to getting to the next level, like the levels, the goal post move a lot, which is very frustrating to me. Like I’m trying to figure out Brent constantly not how to win the game, how to beat the machine.

Kate: Okay. That’s all I think about how do I beat the fucking machine? Beat it into the ground. That’s what I. That’s all I see. And it’s not enough for me just to have a nice little business here. That’s not the game I’m playing, right? That’s not this game. And when you do everything that’s prescribed and you do it like to the fucking awesomeness of awesome platinum level superstar, galactic awesomeness, which is what we do.

Kate: And you still can’t hit the milestones. That’s defeating debilitating to me personally. I take it personally, cuz then I think, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I fucking do this? And I hang my head in shame, honestly. The buck stops with me. It has to be me. It’s not I can, there’s all, there’s the great resignation.

Kate: There’s, COVID, there’s the market. There’s all these things to blame, of course. But I don’t think of any of them. It’s always hard. There’s always some shit out there. So it’s me. I’m the one where that can control. What’s happening or figure it out. And, I think just generally that’s the biggest hurdle is my, is myself in a way.

Kate: I don’t have an off button, cuz I want this. It’s not that I want this so bad, but I know it’s I know it’s not even possible. I know it’s probable. I.

Kate: And so I also, that means, I know all the pieces are in front of me here already. I know that they are, this is a matter of assembling the pieces. I have the right. Is which is a blessing and a curse. It’s right here. But the fact that I can’t figure it out makes me feel like an idiot , and none of that’s true.

Kate: I rely on you. I rely on our customers. We’re always asking for feedback. I’m terrible at taking criticism, but my team is great at it, which is why I had them, and we’re always looking for ways sorry for rambling but entrepreneurs, here’s a great tip. Someone told me, and you get a lot of tips that are garbage, cuz everybody wants to give you some advice.

Kate: But a friend of mine said, look for the patterns. So if you can look for the patterns in everything, whether it’s the way the funnel works or how much MRI you’re making or what customers click first, right? All these little patterns are macro and micro patterns. You can double down or then fix them.

Kate: and my, I joke all the time. My, my great skill is seeing the glass half empty. That’s what I do. I look for problems, patterns of problems, so can you imagine being my husband? He’s a nice guy. 

Brent: yeah I am. I am the glass half full and my wife is the glass half empty. So we actually balance each other out.

Brent: We’re either full or empty at the same time empty we’re empty. So I definitely can empathize with your struggle. And I do of want to talk about as a leader that empathy part that you have to have for your employees do you see a difference in differe? Styles of leadership that work or don’t work, or I don’t know.

Brent: I I see sometimes that some entrepreneurs want to like they assume that your employee feels some way and if you feel differently, it doesn’t matter to what it’s not it, the feelings of your employees don’t matter. And I feel like that I’m I believe they matter, but that some of that empathy isn’t there in a lot of entrepreneurs.

Kate: I had a shitty job, so I know what it feels like to have that kind of panic attack and go to work and dread every day. And I don’t want to any make anyone feel that way. I am very lucky because all of those people on my team are very kind and they’re very loyal and they’re also very smart. I forget sometimes.

Kate: That they can’t read my mind. I try to apologize for that. Luckily they have a high tolerance for my bitch. That’s ano very lucky thing, because I can be an asshole. I can be, of course, and I’m so grateful. I have to surround myself with people who have that tolerance because I.

Kate: Always apologize for it. There’s too much to go on, but I have to also obviously reward and acknowledge. And so I need also the kinds of people who either don’t need that all the time can get it from each other. My re I feel my perception is the reward is to provide a workplace that is fun, which it really is.

Kate: It’s we have like unlimited vacation, no one ever takes a vacation. I don’t know why they don’t, but they don’t. You can, you don’t have to ask to go to the doctor or anything. You just, nobody cares. Get the work done. We don’t really care what you’re doing during the day. If there’s. And everyone is very autonomous.

Kate: There’s, some things I’m a micromanager about. I know this, but my aim is to not be that way and to, to a fault, honestly, like sometimes I’m trying to figure out why these people, these two people, maybe aren’t getting along or hearing each other. And then I realize , I don’t bring them together enough.

Kate: cuz we’re all just out doing our own thing. We’re running and running. And one thing sometimes I forget that. Because we’re, know, we are dispersed and we always have been dispersed and I like that because I feel it’s so much more productive. I hate being in office when people are coming in and talking to me all the time.

Kate: I hate that. I can’t get anything done, and. , I will forget how smart they are. I’m like, shit, Chris has really good ideas. I need to ask him these questions more often and then utilize them, or Lauren is, I think she’s 15 years younger than me. I forget, but she’s younger than me.

Kate: And I forget that she is because she’s so 

Brent: she’s 10

Brent: And I talked to Lauren. Lauren is fantastic by the way. Isn’t she great. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. She’s didn’t mean interrupt to you. 

Kate: No, I’m sorry for she’s so smart. And my, for all of them, my expectation is I, these people are on a scale of one to 10. They’re twelves. They’re all twelves. And so when they’re only tens, I get on their asses about.

Kate: Shame on me. Because I believe in them I respect them and I’m so impressed with them. And Lauren is certainly one of those people, and but she can tolerate my shit, which I, that this is also what I appreciate. So the way I try to reward, money is not the thing that motivates my team because.

Kate: We often can’t pay each other or the salary isn’t very high, but I try to create a workplace where there’s like a ton of flexibility and a ton of autonomy, because these are the things that I need personally. And I know there’s people out there like me, and I think to providing a safe place, like I call it where people can be themselves.

Kate: Like we don’t, we don’t really have a lot of rules, the golden rule, our biggest rule. And. a lot. We have two meetings a week, one for sales and one for the whole team, cuz we’re small enough. We can do these things still. And at those meetings we have what’s called the rolling agenda. And so the rolling agenda is a Google doc that goes on and on for years and everyone’s name is on it and you’re supposed to write what you’re doing, what you’ve done and what you’re doing there.

Kate: And everyone reads it an hour before the meeting and at the top of the meeting is the actual agenda discussion items. And the discussion items are the things that we all actually need to talk about together. Cuz I don’t need to have a report of what you’re doing and plus I can see it all in slack. Our slack channel is I don’t I poo threads because I want everybody, I want it to bleed over for everybody.

Kate: It saves me the time from repeating myself from silo to silo and it makes everybody sympathetic or empathetic. And so the rolling agenda what’s so funny is there’s almost never dis any discussion items cuz we’ve already had the discussion. So it’s a hang we get on the phone and we find out that.

Kate: Chris’s son, Zach just performed at a comedy club and killed it with amazing jokes. A couple of Dick jokes, in front of his grandparents, but I guess they were killer. Awesome. Katie’s daughter, Ruby just scored some major role in a play. I think it was beauty. The beast she’s the lead, which is pretty great.

Kate: Kristen’s getting ready to go to Paris with her two children. For the, and her husband. So the first family vacation and maybe the last one, cuz everybody’s going to college, this is what we talk about, I love that about them, Brent, how lucky am I? 

Brent: Yeah. That’s building a team like that is, is like the dream of any entrepreneur.

Brent: It I think you’ve talked to a lot about, about that team building and how you’ve been successful in it. What would you. If you were gonna say something to an entrepreneur who was hung up with instead of that mentality that you have for performance I don’t care what you do all day, just so you deliver what we’re expecting.

Brent: The opposite of that is I, all I care about is that you come in and punch the clock. right there. There’s a dichotomy there and there’s a big swing, right? If you’re just assembling something and you’re punching the clock, you know what you get because you’re assembling something.

Brent: But the same thing is you could come in and assemble something very poorly. Or, if you’re not checking, there’s gotta be a balance between performance. I’m a firm believer in performance and the outcome of that. Do you think people that look at clock punching, miss the outcome part? 

Kate: Sure. I’ve been that I worked in retail in the mall.

Kate: I know what it’s like. it sucks. And I hated it. Sorry, dad. I worked for my dad for a while. I love my dad. I think, so like begets, like when you are around other people who are working at a superior level and you’re not, it’s obvious and you feel bad and you want to catch up. So that’s one thing, right?

Kate: And I’ve surrounded myself. I’m very lucky to have these people who are, these are amazing people. Please never leave me please. And I’m always concerned when, like one of them, if someone’s gonna get married, Girlfriend moves in or something like that. I’m like, is my productivity gonna go down?

Kate: It’s so mean, that’s my first thought. Then my second thought is I want joy for this person. Hello. What’s wrong with you, Bradley. But I think that I think we were saying earlier, like the work life balance is bullshit. Like work is life and life is work. And if you’re not having a great time during what you’re doing, you’re not feeling fulfilled and joyful.

Kate: and like you’re doing something to improve the world or yourself, then you really need a different job. I It’s so important. I think, for entrepreneurs, the objective, I always think, and I think about this, especially when I’m like arguing with my husband is what is money? What is the outcome that I want here?

Kate: What’s the outcome. So let’s back into it is the outcome to make someone feel wrong because they fucked up is that the. that you want, you wanna make them feel bad. So then they don’t sell shit for you all day long. Cause they feel bad and they’re done. I’ve done that before. I’ve done that. I like making PE people feel wrong.

Kate: Like I do. I like calling them out on their shit. I’m trying to go to therapy to improve this, but it’s there, it’s the thing. And I, but I’ve learned not to do that because what is the point now? Now sometimes you have to correct someone on what they’ve done in order for them to improve.

Kate: I’m not great at this, but I, that is my aim, Poor Lauren. She, I like people to write copy for me. So we’re always, we work together on sales. And so she is in charge of the follow up with the sale, right? So we have a call. We have to email them, she’ll draft an email and Google I’ll take 95% of it apart and rewrite it and then be like, okay, here you go.

Kate: Now her feeling can be defeat defeated, like thanks for wasting my time. I explained to her, I was like, you don’t know how much time you saved me just by starting this. And my point of taking a part isn’t to shit on you. My, my point is to give myself something to play, where I can move around.

Kate: And I said, this was a, like earlier last year or something. And I was like, I will do. I promise to do a better job of telling you why I’m rearranging these things and what, why I’m putting these things in here. If you wanna learn how to do it better, but at the same time, I have to remember.

Kate: Lauren came from she. So she has a she’s smarter than all of us. She has a master’s degree in psychology analytics. And she came from working at the cancer ward in a hospital, God. And took the first job at lately as head of customer service, which she killed it at. And then she ran our sales team and now she.

Kate: Chief operations officer. So she has some very deep legacy knowledge of the company, but she didn’t come from sales. That’s not her background. None of us actually have come from sales me the most. I have the most experience in sales and we have a 98% sales conversion. Brent, Kristen come from sales.

Kate: Chris comes from radio like me,

Kate: the reason, of course the product is awesome, but we. Fucked up that demo 50,000 ways sideways to Minneapolis. Okay. I’ve seen it. Me too. And the demo does sell itself, but it’s the people, it’s the people that sell it. And it’s because Lauren, her ability to read the room and by the room, any room in a room, an empty room on a camera, in a zoom call or a room full of 85 people at SAP.

Kate: Like she has those nuances. And that, and Chris has the same thing as well. These guys this is about being nice, right? It’s about being thoughtful. It’s about listening. It’s about they know both of them are, I’m talking about them cause they’re my chief salespeople specifically, but like they can stand on stage any kind of stage, whether it’s just a call or actually on a stage and lead a room, they have that capability to do.

Kate: But at the same time they know when to listen. I don’t have that capability. I just like to be on stage and hear the sound of my own voice. Sorry.

Brent: So what would you say to To an entrepreneur then that is that they’re building this team and they’re, they seem to be getting a lot of turnover. Is there a magic formula in that team building model or is there yeah. Something to create community or is there anything that somebody could start.

Kate: I think the first thing is just to really think about how you wanna be treated. That’s just the most important thing. And that’s very hard cuz like you’re trying to get shit done, so you have to be very reflective constantly and to not just how you wanna be treated, but when you’re at your best, when you’re in the zone, right?

Kate: What are people around you doing to facilitate that for you? And then try to replicate that? I think that’s the first thing I. the second thing is to know this is so important. You have to ask people about their fucking lives, right? There are so many times where I just wanna get the meeting on and get stuff done, but I don’t, I make sure, Hey Brian, how was your trip?

Kate: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, Hey Jason, I saw that me is on Instagram and she’s like doing this whole abs routine. She looks amazing. What is that about? So he’ll tell me. You have to start that way. People want to talk about themselves. Obviously look at me. I’m someone who talks over people, Brent and I have no patience for people who are offended by that.

Kate: Honestly I believe in passion and I believe in the power to express your passion and that an interruptive culture should be celebrated because people are so excited to share their ideas.

Kate: and I don’t believe in democracy. Lately is not a democracy. I’m the leader. Although you have to make people feel as though they bring listened to right now, you can only do that with people you wanna listen to. So if you’re hiring people, you don’t wanna listen to, then you are an idiot, you’re, you have to really think about who you’re.

Kate: And we’ve made mistakes. Lauren will know, and she rolls her eyes and she tells me every time and I still make this mistake. I constantly think we need an experienced salesperson to come in here. And so I hire these fucking dudes. They’re always dudes. And. some dudes. I love they’re some of them are dudes.

Kate: I love some of them are dudes. I don’t love, and it never works out because they’re probably bold 

Brent: white dudes. They’re the worst 

Kate: is that where, how was, yeah. Or so one mistake we made by the way, which I didn’t know, this was, you cannot hire a salesperson to be both a manager and a salesperson.

Brent: Yeah. Very true. Absolutely. You can’t hire anybody to be either to do dual jobs. They’re gonna do two jobs poorly. 

Kate: Yes. And that is a mistake that I made. I didn’t. I do that. So I don’t understand why someone else can’t do that, to be honest with you. And Lauren does that. There are Brian does that.

Kate: I have superior people in the world who can do that. So it’s of like why, but it’s not everybody’s nature, so I think that’s the first thing a very easy tell for us is this is if your company, if the PE, if your employees aren’t saying. you’re doing something wrong. 

Brent: Yeah. If they’re saying you Kate, that then also you, and I’m, they don’t because I’ve talked to your employees.

Brent: If they are though, just always referring back to you, that’s also could be a problem. 

Kate: I do that by the way on purpose. So I rarely, I don’t like it when people call me the boss, I correct them and say, don’t say that I don’t like. I say we all the time, my team I rarely say my employees, I rarely do.

Kate: I need them and I don’t like the word need, this an needy team is needy, but I cannot live without them. And so they know that

Kate: I send them gifts often, like little surprises, even the. Some T all guys like pocket knives, you can give them endless pocket knives. Am I right there? 

Brent: send ’em a box of tampons. A hundred figure out what to do with these . I do, I want to just go back cuz I you talked about re you’re editing Lauren’s copy when she started it.

Brent: And I think that and it sounds like you explained to her. Why you’re doing it, I’m trying. Cause I think a lot of times a lot of times leaders will jump on they’ll just take it and they’ll do it, but they don’t give any feedback on why that happened. And that just leads to narratives in people’s heads.

Brent: And I think 

Kate: I made that mistake actually, because I assumed that she would understand and know right. And I assume that she would take the time to read it and think about it. But of course, Lauren is busy and she’s just trying to check shit off her list and get, cuz she’s the queen of productivity.

Kate: She knows that. I respect that. And so either one of us weren’t both of us, didn’t want to take the time to do what you just said, which is a very important thing to do cuz who can learn if you don’t do that. And. , know, like I said, why can’t someone read my mind? What the fuck when it’s so obvious to me, but I’m sure at the same time, she’s thinking why can’t Kate read my mind. 

Brent: So yeah, I, I have definitely got, I’ve gotten into the habit of explaining I’m always now trying to play chess with Anticipating the way somebody’s thinking. And I realize that people that are happy are more motivated and that they’re gonna be more productive when they’re motivated and that when they’re happy and productive, they’re gonna get a lot of work done.

Brent: So if I’m gonna be critical of somebody, I would like to explain all those reasons why that’s gonna. and I maybe now do it to, is the word in nauseam or something like that where you do it too much. Yes. Ad nauseum, whatever in nauseum I’m nauseous. Just that, that verbal feedback, because I think we do I also suffer from that same thing.

Brent: Of course, everybody should know what I’m thinking and yes, everybody can do this. Everybody can be a great salesperson. They can also be a developer. I fall onto that trap because I used to be a developer and I would. Of course, you can do that in AWS. I can do it in 20 minutes. Let’s watch me do it.

Brent: And everybody’s oh God, this is the worst time of my life. You can see everybody’s eyes are glazing over and pretty soon, like they’re, anyways, so to read the room, right? Yeah. Read the, yeah. And then it makes it worse on zoom, all everybody’s camera goes off and then you get done with your demo.

Brent: And then, so what did everybody think? And nobody’s there, it’s silence. Everybody’s gone to the bathroom. Oh, I’m sorry. And then one person leaves the mic on and the flush sound comes out and your zoom call was ruined or saved yeah. Or saved exactly. 

Kate: yeah, I think I oftentimes I wish people would ask me why I do.

Kate: and they don’t. And so that, that is frustrating to me because I want the initiative to, to be there and that’s, my problem is that’s why I’m the entrepreneur and these other people are not right. That’s a different skill, so I have to constantly readjust my perspective to reality and think about.

Kate: What’s gonna, what’s gonna get the job done. Like you said, like, how do we get people to be happy and motivated and successful all at the same time? I think that

Kate: it’s important to ask people. Do you like working here? Sometimes you, I brace myself for the answer. You still like working here? Are you leaving? I just wanna know. I think that. knowing what your weaknesses are really important. Like I said I’m not a great cheerleader, but Katie Jordan is, she’s amazing.

Kate: She does it for me. And Chris is great at that. Everybody is there everybody piles on, but you need a cheerleader on the team if it’s not you that bubbly. When, when Lauren’s on vacation, slack is quiet. And you feel that energy gone like that. It’s so important. She she doesn’t even real.

Kate: I don’t know. She realizes that she probably does that. How. Much that energy. Slack is our workplace, right? That’s our work environment. And so it’s the, you can see the thermometer of how things going now. When I like last week, an investor who had hard, committed first to a smaller amount, and then to three times an amount hard commit pulled out for no reason.

Kate: I just was like, mother, fuck. I said every swear word of the thing like that could be. And no, I don’t do it in the general channel. I just did it with Lauren, Jason and Brian because I don’t wanna upset everyone else, but I need them to know cuz they’re my they’re. We are running the business together.

Kate: We’re running the numbers, we’re looking at all these things, but Brian and Jason are co-founders like, they do need to know what happened with this investor. And I need the ability in a place to express. Frustration. I also need them to have sympathy for me because like, when I have to ask them to not have a paycheck, they need to know exactly why, and I’m not doing it on purpose and it’s not cuz I’m selfish or I’m money grubber, there’s a real reason and it’s very painful for me.

Kate: So that sympathy, empathy thing here I think is so important. Like I’m just a person, Brent, I’m trying to do this thing. and they are these people’s lives are in my hands a little bit. Cuz a paycheck is a paycheck. I 

Brent: Yeah I want to just jump on that happiness thing. I had a post on LinkedIn recently that I just put out there.

Brent: I meet with every person on my team every quarter. one on one, just for 15 minutes to get to know them. And we have team members in India and Mexico . I do that and I’ve always had this. I’ve always had a question that I’ve asked and I think I’m asking, are you happy in your job or something like that?

Brent: And I been thinking about it and like I was thinking like does anybody ever ask, are you happy? And period, because yeah. Are you happy period? Because there is. And maybe happy in your job or happy, whatever it’s different. And knowing if you’re happy, if you’re not happy.

Brent: Again, people probably aren’t gonna tell me in that short time, hopefully, maybe over time. In fact I recently did have an interview that I did where he said that I’m very intimidating and it’s hard. Like you had said, you want people to tell you the things that like if they don’t understand something and I think people don’t tell people things because leaders can be intimidating.

Brent: I can get very impatient and then become very I can be an asshole. And and especially when something going the way it should go and. I’m gonna assume you can relate with this. This is something that’s so obvious. Why aren’t we all doing this? Whatever that thing is oh my God, this is obvious. We should know this. You always get French fries at McDonald’s what thing? Yeah. Which I don’t, it’s the thing I don’t, I’m just making the insane, but it’s come on, everybody knows that in. As you’re driving on the freeway and you stop and you get a burger, you get fries, right? You get a Coke and a fries. Everybody does that. What the heck is going on with our team?

Brent: You guys are only getting chicken sandwiches. This is ridiculous. Everybody knows it.

Brent: It’s true. So I don’t know, is there, I think it’s a hard that’s, it’s gotta be one of the hardest things as a leader to give that space to somebody to allow to to open up and tell you, cuz it is a little bit of vulnerability from that person. And and maybe that’s I’m dealing.

Brent: Three different cultures. It used to be four. We used to have an office in Bolivia. But we have three cultures now. So I think culture’s a little different, right? 

Kate: Yeah. I think, one thing is I always, and I’ve said this before, like I expect them to go to to complain about me, to each other.

Kate: I expect that happens to all managers and bosses. That’s part of the role that you’re accepting. And so good. Do it complain to each other, get it out of your system, certainly. The same way how many times you be, are you like fucking Brent? I say that of course, about myself, about, oh, whoever it is that’s just your, and it’s not you mean like you, you have to know that, like to and express a frustration.

Kate: because someone isn’t perfect in this second moment. It’s meaningless it’s just this thing, evaporating the world. And when you have people around me sometimes I’ll complain to Lauren about other people and the company and just cause I need that outlet with somebody and the validation that I’m not alone in this thought, and I’m sure they all, I know they all do this to each other, which is fine.

Kate: And I think they’re, that’s part of the culture that you wanna encourage, right? People are gonna vent it’s. This is human nature. And I think of it as if lately if everything about lately was. Just smooth sailing. Boy, we have no fun whatsoever. This is part of the adventure.

Kate: Are we gonna make it, are we not? So it, that ups and downs, it keeps it interesting. Like I, I think that’s why they come to work every day is cuz they’re wondering what’s gonna happen. I don’t know. 

Brent: That’s it’s often said that without stress, without contention, without arguments, that you don’t move anything forward.

Brent: If everyone is always on the same page you could be going in the right direction, but you may not. And having a dissenter, there is always a, it was always, it’s always a having a dissenter there to ask those questions is important. And I think that essential. Yeah, it’s essential, right? We, as a leader we need to make that space.

Brent: I know that we’ve sent people we’ve sent Indian developers to Germany in onsite to work. And one of their, one of their things that they’ve said was that they were surprised that other team members on the German team would. Hard pushback to the boss in the room. And for them, that was an eye opening thing.

Brent: Cause their culture more is more around. And I’m sure I’m gonna get a whole bunch of Indian developers not telling you. No, it’s not like that here. But their culture is more about doing what you’re told. And you don’t often. It’s not a strong cultural trait to question the boss and to say this I’m a white guy anyways.

Brent: I don’t know, concern that because that’s my perception of the culture. I’m gonna I’m making a disclaimer. I’m gonna put a little asterisks in my transcript. Don’t get back to me on this, but I digress. 

Kate: Yeah, I gotta go do shit, Brent.

Kate: I’ll say this one thing, we just released a new feature where the AI is rearranging what it finds to pull out into wholly new content. Okay. it, we just launched it like the other day. We haven’t told anybody. We haven’t even told our customers like so you’ll just start to see it suddenly the surprise you’ll be like, who wrote this?

Kate: Oh my God. The AI. and it’s pretty good. All 

Brent: right, I’m gonna go try it. 

Kate: Yeah. Keep an eye out. Yeah. 

Brent: Kate, I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug at the end of the podcast. So what would you like?

Kate: Oh Jesus, I’m gonna plug forgiveness today. Forgiveness. 

Brent: all right. Thank you. 

Kate: Yeah, I think we all 

Brent: need a little mark. Kate Laly Kate . 

Kate: This is why just so you know, I’m on the air. I stopped saying my name because I mispronounced my own name once in an interview with the guys from we. And so I never said it again.

Brent: Yeah. Did you wean yourself off that? 

Kate: About a thing on me. Oh my God. I love you. 

Brent: Yes, you’re so funny. Kate Bradley co founder of lately, CEO of lately. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Kate: Thank you, Brent. 

Talk-Commerce Ken Shenkman

The Real Kid in the Bulk Candy Store with Ken Shenkman

Have you ever felt like a kid in the candy store? Imagine if that was your day job! This week we interview Ken Shenkman, who has been running his family business since 1992 and is on BigCommerce.

Nestled in sunny South Florida, The Bulk Candy Store sees its staff as family and its customers as close friends. Bulk Candy Store has been helping celebrate memorable events with sweets and snacks since 1992. Every day is a celebration, and sharing those moments with the people we cherish is priceless. Whether you are ringing in the New Year or just gathering to make merry, the Bulk Candy Store has all of the sweet treats you need to make the special occasions of your life exceptional.

After all, Candy is Happy