Digital Insights: Unveiling Strategies with Matthew Bertram | SEO Consultant Ep. 575

Oh, and we're already recording, so we got to get the intro and going three, two, one. Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burrus, one of the owners of EWR Digital. My name is Matt Burcham, one of the other owners of EWR Digital and the marketing consultant for today. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the podcast. It's been a little bit since we've done a podcast, so we thought we would just, really Matt was like, hey, let's brainstorm something. Let's not dive into articles, which we're diving into all the time. Let's do something different. I said, all right, Matt, just hop on the podcast. I'm going to ask you some questions and then I'm going to put you on the spot because sometimes you put me on the spot and that's fair, but now it's going to be all you. I thought I'd interview you because your journey to marketing is pretty interesting and things that you've accomplished in the space are pretty interesting. I think people would like to hear about those, so facetiously, I'm going to ask, is that okay with you, Matt? When you threw it out before, I kind of laughed about it and you're like, no, let's do it. I was like, all right, let's do it. I'm sure that people have been listening, might want to know a little bit more behind the scenes what's going on. Yeah, all right. Well, let's jump into this. What motivated you because your previous career and you've owned companies, you've worked at companies. Talk about your previous career in a sales role and then I want to understand, let's just talk about that. Give me that background and then I'll have a follow-up question. What was the really kind of the last thing that you did in the sales role but start at the beginning? Okay, I'll be brief. I had an internship with GlaxoSmithKline and I was selling on campus. Pharmaceutical company, right? Pharmaceutical company, yeah. You were the- To establish

brand loyalty early, right? They want us to do on-campus promotions, fraternity, sorority, have an ice cream eating contest, their teeth hurt, here's some samples of Sensodyne, Aquafresh toothpaste, Tums, Tagament, GlaxoSmithKline does a lot of this. I got in trouble actually. I was passing out Vivarin which is like a caffeine pill. Oh yeah, I remember that. And so I did a lot of fun stuff, did a Beano gas, I was like, how do I promote Beano? We asked a partner with the Miller and Bud girls in college and we went around at a chili competition and that was a ton of fun. Interestingly enough, I was looking at the dashboard and data and analytics and I love that stuff. And I realized like based on what I was doing, which I wasn't doing much early on, I was still kind of hanging in there. And I was like, no one's really doing anything and this data is like a month behind. So let me like crank it up, right? So I cranked it up and then I'm like, I jumped up there and I was like top three or something like that. And then I started brainstorming and I was a little bit of a programmer early on. My mom worked for Microsoft, one of the first employees. I was playing like a multiplayer video games with my mom's, uh, like teammates or like people that like people at the company when that wasn't a thing, it was like dial up modem sort of thing. And, but anyway, so did a little bit of program, built some kind of front end stuff and essentially use digital marketing. I bought, got free coupons.com and, and I actually, instead of doing events, I was driving people to a website to download coupons. Okay. Versus like manually passing them out. Uh, I think I 10 X the whole program, not like what I was doing or want it. Like there was 50 something people, I 10 X the whole program. So then that got the attention, 10 times more

business than the rest of the people in the program. Yeah. Like maybe, maybe it was even more than that, but there's like 50 people in the program in different schools and I 10 X what everybody did. Yeah. Everybody combined and then 10 X that. Yeah. Yeah. They asked me to run the program like the next year out of college. Um, and uh, you know, and, and I, there was a lot of attention by some really, really good salespeople and, and I got recruited to, to move to Florida, uh, to, to do pharmaceutical sales. Long story short, like, you know, rising star, uh, you know, one, a couple of competitions doing that. Um, but that was door knocking. Okay. So you're, you're, you're going around, you're door knocking his consultative sales. Um, oh, eight happened and, uh, came back here and there was no jobs. Um, I took an all commission job. Actually I did have an offer from striker, uh, which was like the next step in, in, in the sales career. Uh, but I didn't want to sell anything that I didn't, wasn't connected to somebody. Uh, I couldn't maintain that relationship. I wanted to be a little bit more, uh, versatile and moving. My, my thing was a phone and a computer anywhere in the world. Right. Like I was in my twenties and, um, so yeah, I took a job doing all commission, all commission based on a draw, uh, system recruiting, uh, making 60 to 80 calls a day, uh, getting people to hang up on you. This was before LinkedIn just started. Okay. Just give you an idea. LinkedIn had just started. If they were getting on LinkedIn, I had alert set up, Hey, they jumped on LinkedIn. They were looking for a job. I'd call them up. Like they'd become a candidate sort of thing. By the way, you, you and I've had, have talked about this back back then when they jumped on LinkedIn, it was because they were looking for a job. Like that was, that was

the online resume. The only reason you were getting on LinkedIn was to basically post a resume and not on like the monster monster career builder, all those kinds of things. Like this was like, this was the next thing for like white collar and, um, yeah. So first year made like nothing. Um, second year may like over half a million, a third year made more than that, uh, was, was kind of like, I'm not getting a ton of support here. Uh, and, and I, and I stepped out to do my own thing and then, uh, built that up and, and, uh, you know, a $40 million company came in and acquired me to, to, to, to get a footprint in the territory. And then I've done some other thing, things in the past, um, but going to digital marketing, um, and, and sorry to speed this up. That's kind of like a sales, more of a sales background, but here, here, I'll ask the question and then it'll be perfect. What motivated you to transition from sales career to a marketing expert? There you go. Yeah. So this is called an effigy bridge. This is called an effigy bridge. It's also in my book, build, uh, build your brand mania. Um, it's a lot about, um, that transition to the story. In most organizations, sales run the show. Um, marketing is, is sideline graphic designs kind of sidelines like, Hey, oh, we're going to go to a conference. We need to like a marketing team. Oh, we're doing some high level branding, but it's really like the sales department that that's driving a lot of those decisions. Well, sales enablement, which is something that, that we offer an automation and personalization and retargeting and, um, you know, uh, well mass emails before can spam act and same thing with like fax blasting, like sales was a volume game, uh, back early on and it was trying to find a needle in haystack. And, and right now that is not how you sell today. Okay. Like everybody

hates the spam on LinkedIn, on the phone calls, the text messages, like the phone is just like, Oh, it's all these spam calls. Right. That was not the case before people would pick up the phone. Right. Just like now it's funny. It's gone full circle. Like you actually will go check the mail. Direct mail is working great now, you know, but before it was just like junk, junk, junk. But now with COVID and everything you're, you're looking at, you're actually looking at the mail. So it, it kind of came full circle and, and certainly certain things are working more than others. But, but I was doing 60 to 80 calls a day trying to catch somebody and I was calling into companies, Chris, that I would dial like one number up, one number down, and I would actually have to build the org chart of who I, who that person was at that number. And then try to figure out like if they wanted to leave their job, like there's been people today that are in sales have been coddled. Like not only have they been coddled, they have so many tools. So like when I hear people complain about like prospecting and selling, it blows my mind on like you have nothing to complain about. You have nothing to complain. You have everything you need, like all the data at your fingertips and you can send, if you want to, you can send a bunch of messages and that, that was what I was doing before. Can spam extending ton of messages, trying to get someone to raise their hand, started working on the ad copy and, and I just was like, how do I get, you know, better open rates, right? How do I get better, um, you know, more candidates? How do I get the right type of candidates, you know, content marketing, right? Getting people connect with you, social media, getting people to know you because it was hard to get into two different kinds of companies and, and everything just

gravitated to marketing is sales online. It's it. That's all it is. It's taking the sales format and putting it online and then really if you do marketing right and you're, maybe you're talking about direct response marketing, but it's getting as far as you can down that sales funnel before you have to pick the phone and talk to somebody. And I think people want that too. There used to be one 800 numbers, right, that you used to call cause you didn't want a salesperson pushing on you. You just wanted to listen. You wanted to learn a little bit more information. Um, so a lot of people are in that information gathering phase and so having a good website back in the day, if you just had a good looking website, they, they would assume you're a huge company because not even every company had a big website, right? So if you had a website and then later on, right, you had like social media, it didn't look like ghost town, like there's different layers of this evolution of what's evolved. But man, I had like a phone book or I had a, a, like a society directory and then it was like, good luck. Right? So that was literally it. And I had to talk, I had to find, I had to find clients and then I had to find the candidates for those. I had to build a network. I had to maintain a network and, and this was like very early on in maybe like Facebook, right? Like Facebook, like Instagram wasn't even around. Um, we have so many tools today. Everybody's so accessible. The online footprint is so big. The digital marketing tools have advanced, um, but really good ad copy, uh, email marketing, uh, just sending emails to people was, was kind of, kind of like people would open their emails for a member of the rates, like open rates for like 20, 20 minutes on like an email and now they're like three seconds sort of thing or people don't even

look at them. I'm hearing Google even talk about, Hey, if you're not using your, your email box, so warning to everyone out there, if you have an email that you're as like a repository of information or old information, if it's not active, Google's just going to close it. So we're moving from the days of everything being free and they were just trip over themselves to just get you to go online to, you're going to have to pay for it. You know, you gotta, you got the, the Twitter check Mark, you got the Facebook check Mark now, not a lot of people are using that, but, but we're getting into so much spam cause this is what marketers do, right? They like overuse things to the point that they don't work and, um, you know, now it's kind of like vetting out, like there's so many messages, like how to communicate effectively and now it's about being personalized and great targeting. It's really about making that connection or maintaining that connection. That's what social media is about, maintaining that connection after you made it. Right. And, and so I think that there's a maturity that's happening in the industry. Uh, and I think to a certain degree, a lot of sales, I will tell you a lot of sales, what's been working for the big companies for a long time in these old ways, cause they had these big moats of their brand or how they operate or whatever is slowly being chipped away at. And there's new kind of committees being formed on, on buying selection and the good old boy network starting to go away. But there is a huge lack, I believe of sales organizations not leveraging their marketing department or, or marketing in general to help them grow their business. And I, Chris, I, I, uh, I'm, I'm doing a podcast on the OGGN network, the oil and gas global network. It's based here out of Houston. I'm the fractional CMO for them. And um, it's the largest, uh, oil and gas

podcast community or oil and gas community in the world. And it's continuously growing. And uh, the owner asked me to do a podcast with him. He's hardcore oil and gas sales for 36 years. He wanted to bring me on it and kind of say, how do we break down the silos between marketing and sales? And um, that's, that's been really, really successful. And so my mind has been getting back into, okay, I have all this marketing knowledge and uh, it really works well and SEO is fantastic and all these things. And then it's like bringing it back to like, where are these sales organizations operating? And like, man, they're still behind the times and they could, the organizations that start leveraging some of this stuff sooner are going to, uh, take advantage, right? Like everybody's talking about chat dbt and chat dbt is amazing, right? But how is it being incorporated into your workflow? How is it helping you sell better? Um, you know, you still need strategy and you still need execution of those tools and, and you, you need help bringing it all together. Um, and you've got to have that fundamental knowledge. Now you could ask chat dbt all the stuff and learn it, right? Just like you could just sit the, spend the time on Google and, and do all the searches and read it or go to YouTube and watch all the videos. He got the, it's info. Yeah. Like, but you got to do that, right? Like you, like you still got to learn those things to incorporate those tools and, and one of the biggest things I know I've kind of been talking for a minute here, um, thank you for giving me this platform to just talk, but, but I think that, um, technology, Chris, like technology is moving at such a pace that it's hard to keep up with what's going on. You know, I'm like, I'm kind of like one of those nerds that, that buys the iPhone book. Like I'm an iPhone guy. You're

an Android guy. That's fine. But I buy the book to read it on how to use all the stuff, all the features. I don't understand. Like I want to know all the features and I want to use the productivity tools and I want to optimize what I'm using the phone for, but, but the majority of people are just using the phone for a few days. Maybe they were on social media or reading the news most of the time, the weather, whatever I mean, there's so much functionality in it and it's moving so fast and that's technology in every single direction. And if you were before the internet, like, right, like if you were born before the internet or even my generation that was like, like came up in the middle and, and had dial up and everything else, like it's a constant struggle for us to stay on top of everything and all the different domains and disciplines of where technology is going and what technologies do what and, and not to mention that all the platforms we currently use continue to change stuff anyway. So like everything's moving at this constant pace of moving target. And if you're not in it all the time and you like don't stay up to date with it, like this same thing with crypto, right? You don't stay up to date with it, boom, it just passes you by and it's exponential. And I think that that's really what what's happening more than anything else is there's, you know, things are progressing so fast. There's so much information. It's kind of like finding that signal and, and figuring out what you want to focus on and then, and then focusing on figuring out how to get that done is what I think it's about today. It's not about the information. All the information is out there, right? So, yeah. So one of the things that you said kind of when we first started working together and, and I don't, you kind of said it, but didn't not so

succinctly, which is you had this kind of very, very rewarding and, and you earned awards in a sales, sales career. And you're kind of first in, in college job, you actually utilize the internet in a way that other people weren't. And your mindset was, how do I turn this sales process that you were not good at year one, were incredibly good at in year two and even better at in year three. How do you turn that into something that you can do online? And, and if you couple that with a stat that we use quite regularly on the podcast, which is 80% of the sales process is complete by the time you're on the phone with the customer, right? Like that's, that's already happened. That's really marketing has taken over 80% according to that stat of the sales process. It's not that the sales process begins, you know, whatever, 25 years ago, the sales process started when you picked up the phone. Now it's almost done. That's actually what's happening. And it puts you in a unique position to have the right strategies of here's what I would have done in a sales situation. And now I'm trying to implement that online in a funnel, in a landing page and then the actual marketing strategy and the actual ads, what do the ads look like? And so I think that puts you in a unique position. So that's one of the reasons that I wanted to, to kind of give the opportunity for the audience to get to know you a little bit better. I've got a question. So you're a two time Amazon bestselling author, right? How do you, did you leverage your marketing expertise to successfully promote and sell those books? And also how do you use those books in any strategy that you might use them? Yeah, I mean, I wrote the books through like, I write a lot and journal and it was really like putting together a documentation of a bunch of different blogs or a story or articles or

whatever. Really just having the idea of what you want to put together. We could even turn a number of our podcasts, right? We could, we could bundle them into a book and sell them. Maybe we should do that. I haven't even thought about that, but you know, the, the reality is you know, Google looks at something called eat expertise, authoritativeness and trust. They've added, you know, management of the site also is important. And then they've added experience, right? And if you think about what people that are experts or authorities do is they publish content, right? And so book is, is one form of, of that content. And it's really like a longer piece of text content, right? Like that's really, that's really what it is. I think, you know, depending on what your intent is, right, when you write the book, it could certainly be used as a lead gen for sales. I, you know, the, the EOS program, which we recently went through their book traction, that's what it is, right? Like that's the book that kind of hooks you in to understand the methodology and then they lead you to a series of other books or to connect you with somebody. Right. That's commonly used you know, a lot of the authors that are making money selling these books have to write books all the time because there's kind of a bell curve of different people that will buy the books. There's also building a community and audience. Certainly there's ways to run ads on, on, on Amazon and other channels to, to promote these books. But I think like every strategy, Chris, it has to be an integrated strategy. It's not a silver bullet, right? There's not one thing that just does it all, right? It's like SEO brings them to the site, but if the site doesn't convert, if the branding isn't good, like, you know what I mean? Like you don't get the people signing up or taking action or buying. There's there, there's a myriad of factors that, that

have to happen. But I, I like to share, I like to help people. I like to coach. Certainly that's something that I was hoping to do more of towards the end of this year and we have some plans for that. But I like, I like sharing information. I feel like some of this information that I'm learning and that I'm reading and even through our podcast, like it's too valuable to keep like bottled up, right? It's like, let's put it out there. Let's put it out there to the world. Let's help people. And it's really great to hear the feedback that we hear and, and the businesses we help. And you know, I think working at EWR2, it's a really rich experience for all the employees and contractors. And we're really looking at, at growing that community really looking at maybe even a certification type program where I'm, I've always been like a recruiter. Like I like to connect people. And I think that there's an opportunity to generate a lot of leads. We've been generating a lot of leads and we've been doing a lot of hiring. And I think that it, it's probably to the point that there's a lot of solo entrepreneurs out there or, or, or smaller agencies that need help to scale and you know, want to be part of a network or have people that know how to do technical or fix problems for them or coaching or, or whatever. Cause you know, the data says there's so many of these smaller agencies and then there's, there's a couple of bigger ones, right. And we've walked that path while I call it walking through the desert to, to get to the, to the other side. And I think I want to give back and help. And you know, I have another book coming up out about SEO. Why am I writing it? Well, it's a lot of great information about SEO and it's something I like to share. And then it's a tool to be able to share to people

that I'm authority in the space. And in the reality is you, you put something out there it's really kind of like, like how do people respond to it? Right. Like, like you're, you're putting yourself out there and nerve wracking, right. And like, like how do people, how, how does it sit with, with the community? I mean, when you write a blog, really your, your, and you get it indexed in Google, you're putting your, what you're saying into the national conversation. And Google has a based on query, a query for diversity, you know, so if you differentiate from like what the commonly said thing is, it's like, it's going to show up. If you add something on top of what other people are saying that that's more authoritative and is better expert content, like you're going to show up, right? Like it, this is the hive mind of the world of knowledge. And, and if you understand well, how the internet works and you can publish a blog and there's so many tools to do that. And there are so many things to get indexed, like join the national conversation of what's happening, right? Like everything's becoming digital. I, I believe that like you, you want to make that next step. So I think the book, I guess, Chris is the books are about just like podcasting is talking about something in long form content, right? When the attention span is seven seconds. So, you know, you, you know, or less, you, you, you know, you could definitely do TikTok shorts, right? Who are you speaking to? What is the type of community information you're communicating? You could also take that whole book and then turn it into a bunch of TikTok shorts, right? Like you could do that. It's just a different format. We definitely run ads to target audiences in certain segments to, to get brand recognition or authority in those areas. It's something that we, we sell or even give out at, at different, different events. It's just another tool in the, in

the tool belt. And it's, I don't know, I, I almost look at it, Chris like when I do certain type of work, if I build something with my hands or I do like yard work or something like that, there's like this sense of accomplishment. Like I love building websites too. Like, like you, you look at it, you're like, I did that, right? SEO and sometimes digital ads, like, you know, the analytics, it's not, it's not always a great deliverable. You got to work on how you, you package it and you present it to the client. But, but when you have something that like is tangible, that's I've accomplished this, right? Like this body of work. And I don't know, there's just something about that for me of like the sense of, of accomplishment. So, yeah. And when the customer comes back and they're like raving about the, the leads, you know, just as a, as a case study, starting with 40 clients 18 months later at a, I think it was 120 clients like those, like that just makes you feel good about what you do on a regular basis. So I certainly can have, I certainly agree with that experience. All right. So you're in a unique position, high in sales, high in marketing. And I think there's some value to be extracted here. So I really have two more questions and then we can wrap this up. Which one do I want to do first? I think I want to do, all right. So for, for the old, for, for, for younger Matt, from, from years ago. And what I really mean is for people who are in the sales role, you're now have a whole interesting skillset of marketing. What advice to people in the sales role would you give from the marketing perspective that you have now? Well, you know, it depends what type of sales role it is, right? Like, are you, are you constantly prospecting all the time? Are you developing accounts? You know, like you need to understand

what that is, but I know that where I spent a lot of my time early on in my career was I was going to Google and I was reading a ton of stuff, right? Maybe you might be going to, to, to YouTube now. And it's like, you're like, I need that piece of information, right? That's going to be that magic bullet, or that's going to help me land that, that business. Also, as I've gone through my, my, my entire career and even my career with, with EWR I'm always reading books and I'm reading books about things that I want to learn, right? Or I'm watching YouTube videos or I'm doing trainings on things that I need to learn to fix whatever problem it is that I'm trying to solve in the business. Right. But I would just tell younger salespeople, you want to move from being a salesperson to being a consultant. Okay. People deal with consultants differently than they do with salespeople. I think it, and I talk about this in my book, it's like, you know, typically like your order taker, like they're, they're going to, they're, the client's going to tell you what they want. Then the client's going to look at you, um, you know, as a peer and they're going to work with you on whatever that decision, you're part of that process and you have a seat at the table. Really where you want to be is like that trusted advisor that you say, this is what it is. And they do it right. Like that's kind of doctor or lawyer or whatever, like you want to be at the consultant level and have such a level of knowledge. And I competed with different people in the market, pharmaceutical industry. And typically people were attractive, like, like maybe that was a generality, but it seemed to be true. Um, like I was a young kid and, and I w and I was competing against people that had things to offer that I didn't, um, you know, and so I,

how did I make my way in that? I learned everything that I could learn and I was a resource to them. Right. And so certainly I think moving to being a consultant is really the key. The incorporation of digital marketing and social selling, which we haven't even broached and we don't even have time for on this podcast, there's a whole new way to prospect. And if, and that's what we're talking about, because sales is a broad term, like it could mean a lot of things, um, you know, even account, account management. But if you're looking at like developing new business, leveraging online, social media, um, you know, email automation from touch points, there's even like software out there, like rebump, right. It'll send an email like continuously until someone actually opens it or responds. Um, like leveraging automation, leveraging personalization, leveraging, uh, listening tools on data to understand. Uh, but also I think understanding what, and this is where businesses have failed in my opinion. Okay. From my perspective, I'm not saying all businesses, but I don't think most businesses I'm talking like huge enterprise companies down to like small SMBs, who is the target you're going after? What is the target persona? What is that sales cycle, that customer journey look like? And do you have a sales piece online, offline, and maybe they go online, offline, whatever to get that attribution, to get that close. Like, do you have something at each spot in the sales cycle at each question? Do you have a blog that's ranking for that term? Do you have a one page or do you like graphic design is so far underutilized. You need to be tapping your marketing department. And if, if you're trying to make homemade tools to sell stuff, like your graphic design department's gonna, you know, I mean, it might take a little bit of time and depending on like getting approvals and stuff like that, but what you're probably doing and what's working for you and that methodology and that system could probably work

for other people and vice versa. And the marketing department should be the center of that to bring it together, to get stuff approval, and then to get you out sales pieces that are going to help you tell that story better. And that's what I think marketing in general should do is what is that customer journey look like? And do you have a sales piece or something along the way to help sales is an ongoing or a long conversation, right? Even through the sale, if you're the account manager or you're handing it off, it's this ongoing conversation you, you need to have sales support pieces or content or videos that you can share or authority articles or whatever it is like books, white papers, anything data to, to help move them along that line. But if you don't know who you're going after and what that journey looks like, then you're just shooting in the dark, right? And, and, and, and once you have that figured out, it becomes really easy on what magazines do we need to be in like, or trade journals? What conferences do we need to go to? Who do we need to target online? And there's all kinds of tools where you can take customer lists and certainly got to get approval or if you're working with a third party agency like us, you know, but we can get, we can cite NDAs and put that data. And then there's, there's a hashing that happens. So they take that customer list and all those emails, and then it lines up with anybody that has like a Facebook account or a LinkedIn account or whatever that's associated with that email. And then you can show them an ad or remarket to them, or you can actually create a look like audience to, to get a bigger data set and then market to them. Like there's, there's so much power in marketing that I believe sales is underutilizing because it moves so fast. Right. And, and it's not just intelligence. It's not just

analytics. And we haven't even touched on that. Like, that's a huge part of it. Data is the most powerful thing to see how people respond to different things. Do they open the email? Did they go to this blog? Like what IP address is this? It's too much to cover here, but it it's really matured. The industry, the internet and the online industry is not a cottage industry anymore, but it's still new, right? There's still tons of gaps. There's tons of opportunity on YouTube. It's not too late to get started. Things continuously evolve. I mean, look at TikTok came out of nowhere, right? Caught Facebook by surprise. Right. Well, Instagram, you know, they, they bought it and they're just like, well, if I have a TikTok, I think he was focused on the metaverse. Right. So, um, I, and that's going to be big too. Okay. Marketing in the metaverse. Um, like it's exciting, right? Like we're, we're going into an exciting world for, for all the consumers and all the advertisers. Um, I'll just end it there. Cause I could keep, keep going. And this is something that excites me. And, uh, and it's been fun to, but been fun to share, Chris. I don't know the last question. No, no, I, well, well, if, if we could keep it really tight. Right. And I think this is, you know, I once on a, on an interview that we did together asked about a pet peeve and I, and I think that's an interesting insight, but I want to ask kind of an opposite of a pet peeve. What's an experience that you've had really? It could be at a restaurant. It could be in, in any sort of process that you might be a consumer of, uh, that has kind of carried over. And like, I want to, I want to have that experience in my company. I want to have that experience, uh, deliver that experience for my customers. Do you have anything that is, would kind of succinctly say like this happened

to me once and like, you know, that's how it should really be done. I try and carry that into the business. You know, I think that one of the things that I've seen a lot of is people have this expectation, right? Like they go onto Google and if, if, if you're running ads and you don't negative out a competitor, you might show up for that competitor and, and someone's just going to click on it and then they're going to call you. And, and we've, we've seen this both ways for people doing it to us. Uh, ads that we've run for clients that we're listening to vice versa. Like everybody just expects everything to work perfect all the time. Um, and so they click on the first link on Google. If they search for this, it should be that they don't even realize it's an ad. They're calling this doctor, this spa, and they're trying to book an appointment and it's something else. And it's an experience that they didn't understand. Right. And maybe that's a strategy, right? Maybe you're going after a competitor. I'm not like advocating this, but if you are doing that and I'm not saying you should, but if you're doing that, you need to train your salespeople to, to convert them. Right. If that's what it is. And I'm not saying that I want that, but what I'm saying is that there's dashboards that when a phone number calls, it pulls up all their social media accounts. Right. And you can see what's going on. And what I think a lot of people want is to not be a number to the business. They want it to be personalized. Like we have on our site, right? We have these one-on-one audits. We have these workshops and, and I was talking to, I was talking to a prospect yesterday, actually yesterday, today, um, huge recruiting firm. Right. Um, I know how to do recruiting. I know how to do, um, I know how to do marketing. Right. I think I'm like what

you call and recruit perfect candidate. Yeah. Perfect. We would call it a purple squirrel, right? Somebody that like, Whoa, you found this person, right? Yeah. And, um, I have a really good idea of what they need and what they want. I'm like, Hey, why don't we do a strategy session? Cause I don't think you know what you want, or you could buy one of these odds to get started. Hey, um, you know, if you want to do the strategy session and you don't like it, it's money back guarantee. It'll just cost you an hour. I just want to make sure if you do find value in it and you do do that internally or with another agency, cause you're already, you already have two other quotes from other agencies, right? Like that, that, that I get my time covered. Cause you know, like there's only so many hours in the day and, and, you know, he really wanted a customized proposal. Right. And, and when I took an existing proposal and, and certainly I put a little bit of thought in it of what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. And I did customize it, but the bulk of the proposal, three fourths of the proposal was, was templated out stuff of, of how, how we do it, but we do it differently for somebody else. Right. And, um, when I put his name and his company and his logo on the front and like, I had a description of what his problem was and you know what I mean? Like I weighed it like, like I dressed it up a little bit, but I did put some thought into it, that personalization, the response was so much different. Right. And so I am getting a little long winded here, but what I would say is what I want our team to be able to do and what I want to see other businesses be able to do. And what I enjoy anywhere I go is I like that people

know who I am. I know I like that people know what I like. I like that there's a level of care or priority to that. And, um, it just, um, makes you feel good, right? It's kind of a small town feel. Maybe I grew up in a small town or something like that. And so I don't know, that's what I like to see. And that's what we like to do. And our, our, our clients care and make a difference. And this podcast for everybody is coming from at home and we're, we're past time here. And so we will, we will wrap this up. Hey, uh, great. I think that the audience would really enjoy that. If you did make sure you hit us up, add some comments. If you're watching YouTube, subscribe, follow all that good stuff. Until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.