From Silos To Revenue With Luis Baez

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition, ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started. Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. We are rebranding as the best SEO podcast, but I just love saying it so much, and I've been saying it that way for like eight plus years. So it's hard to get out of, but thank you back everyone. A lot's happening in search these days, a lot's happening in digital marketing these days, and it seems like a lot of silos are getting broken down. I think even with search traffic, it's escaped Google and search is happening all over the place and everywhere. And so today I wanted to bring somebody on to talk about, well, the intersection of sales, marketing and revenue. So HubSpot's pushing a big rev ops kind of thing, CROs have become really in vogue. A lot of people that do SEO or digital marketing have had to extend themselves into CRM systems, into sales operations, because well, if you drive traffic, whether it be through organic or paid, you still got to convert those people because the clients are ultimately looking for a sale at the end of the day. So I have Luis Baez here, and he has done all kinds of stuff for some of the major companies like Tesla. And he comes into agencies and he has some proprietary systems that he comes in and looks at all these different components and tells you how to improve it. So I thought I would bring him on. I know that there's a lot of agency owners listening. There's a lot of changes in product offering as far as what are we offering? Are we selling SEO services? Are we selling AI, AEO, GEO, whatever it is. And so there's a lot of changes happening, but it ultimately ties back to if you're going to offer these services or not, because it is about 10% of

the search traffic right now, maybe 40 in two years or something like that, things are changing. And we're currently dealing with a lot of different plates that people are spending. There's a lot of opportunity with automation. Really having some good frameworks and structures is important. So I want to bring Luis on. So Luis, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Matt. Well, I'm excited. I don't know if I missed anything there in the introduction that you want to kind of highlight and credentialize yourself a little bit. Yeah, no, very long story short is I am someone who worked in sales for many years as an individual contributor, closed over half a billion dollars, stepped into leadership, wore several hats, whether it was leading a sales team or leading the global revenue enablement function for a startup and getting it to a billion dollars evaluation, stepping in as a consultant now into different businesses. And really, again, looking at that intersection of operations and sales and marketing, just to really create the most fluid experience possible for clients and to remove the friction from the sales process ultimately for the folks internally. Yeah. So I actually co-host another podcast. I guess I've recently took on that one over on another network that's focusing on sales and marketing. And really the theme of that is how sales and marketing should be joined at the hip and how they need to work together. Those really shouldn't be two different silos. And a lot of times sales people maybe look at marketing from an archaic viewpoint of maybe like, oh, this conference we're going to, we need some graphic design or, you know, they're doing high level marketing. We're closing the deals. But with Martek, things have changed and account based selling, things have changed. And for marketing and sales to work together creates really a strong synergy and a superpower. I think that you can really target some accounts, you can create some personalization and you can drive sales really, really effectively. I mean,

I was a sales guy too, and I was just looking at marketing as leverage. And so I think there's a lot of people that listen to this, that are marketing, that are now moving the other way into sales. And so always, I think that that is where I've seen a big opportunity of marketing people to better articulate to C-suite as well as sales people, what they do and how they can help and to integrate that a lot better. So I'm excited to have you on. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of that conversation in particular, because I think that it's left hand and right hand in terms of just bolstering the customer's experience. And with marketing, I always think of, you know, what is their job? Their job is inception, right? They're the ones that help people see and help businesses see what's possible. And then sales is really the consultative arm. It's like, once you can see what's possible, then we walk you through making that happen. And so yeah, you do have to work together. And then on the back end, we can talk about the systems and the operations to make that happen. Yeah, I would also say the biggest kind of call out that we had when we started the podcast, as we were speaking mainly to sales managers and sales directors was that sales qualified lead and a marketing qualified lead are the same thing. It shouldn't be, we're going to rate it this way. And that's what salespeople do sometimes is they cherry pick the marketing leads. And then they're like, oh, these leads are bad or whatever. Well, if your marketing direction is not on point, it's kind of like bait that you're fishing with. You're getting the wrong kind of bait. So you got to make sure that that feedback loop to marketing on what they're doing is producing the right kind of leads, whether it's different kind of content, different kind of format, what are the different kind of touchpoints that you're getting involved with

somebody to get them going. So when you look at it, when you look at any organization, give me what you often see when you walk into an organization, what typically happens. I think that that'd be a great place to set the table. Yeah, I step in and typically I see silos and I see chaos that is ensuing because of it. And so these teams aren't talking to one another, they're in competition with one another. Typically, leadership doesn't connect with one another. And so there's this top down communication about what is a North Star and what are the expectations? And then working through different systems, whether it's sales team is on a CRM and then marketing team is on a whole different content platform and there's just no way to, or there hasn't been an intention to connect these systems or to make the data and the reporting available to the other teams. So there isn't that cross-pollination. And then ultimately leveraging the data. Sales is focused on conversions, marketing is focused on conversions, but at very different touchpoints. And then we also need to look at all the things that are being overlooked. I often, when I step into organizations, for example, I talk to sales leaders, they're like, I just want my people to be making more calls. We just need an increase in volume. We need more dials. More dials means more at-bats, more at-bats means more revenue. It's like, cool. If your conversion rate is 1% and I give you a thousand more calls, is that really efficient? Is that really the best strategy? We have to look at the data across the entire funnel. And so that's why we need marketing and sales playing together on that same platform. But when I step into organizations, that's the first hurdle is just breaking down those walls. Man, I hear that. You really resonated with me when you said unifying all the data. So I feel like with the advent of LLMs, the unification of unstructured data, thinking about marketers logging into multiple

platforms all the time, every day, that data is just siloed and locked up and it's not useful to different people across the company. And so that's been my primary focus is cleaning up the data across the internet. We actually created our own offering based on what we're seeing with clients because it's just one giant LLM and it's trying to figure out all the unstructured data and the more you can help clean it up, the better it is for them. But even internally with your own data, like you said, yeah, everybody's shooting for a 1%, 2% conversion rate. It's like, okay, let's get that conversion rate up there and we don't have to force as many people through the funnel. Let's fix the funnel. And then on the backend, what I'm even seeing in the data as well is once people find you, the search journey has changed a lot. And so people are going to be investigating you. You can't just run them to a landing page and they convert. And if you're talking about enterprise selling, there's multiple touch points, but they go to Google, they investigate you, they go look at your website, they look at your social media. They're trying to make a determination about you. We're seeing the number of searches, brand searches go up exponentially. And a lot of times where we're seeing an exit is people are going to LLMs like a chat GPT after they go to your site. So we're seeing people go straight to LLM. And what we're assuming that data is, is they're, okay, I've looked at the website. Now let me get AI's analysis of what they think of this company. And then guess what? It can pull up all kinds of reviews from glass door to fraud awareness to like, I mean, these LLMs are grabbing data all over the place and you need to have reviews everywhere. And so it's just really important to understand where your data is, have it everybody at everybody's fingertips and try to, like you said, increase

the conversion rate of different areas or different steps in the funnel. And if you can do that, you can actually have the same kind of lead quality, same volume and have a higher close rate. If it's somewhat on point, if you're fixing those things and yeah, people got to talk, there seems to be a lot of like fiefdoms I call it or kingdoms, depending inside inside organizations. And there's politics and power structures inside these organizations. And sometimes how do you push change forward? Like as a outside agent, cause you have to have a lot of difficult conversations. And you know, I assume that like when I've had to go in, I made sure that like executive team is supporting this, that you have the authority to be able to do that to influence change. But then it becomes like a lot of difficult conversations one after another and trying to educate people on why they should do this and why this is actually good for them. I'm curious what your experience has been. Yeah, it's different companies have different vibes and cultures. And what I ultimately try to do is just create oxygen and space for listening to happen. Most times when I step into any situation you know, as I mentioned, departments are siloed, so they're not talking to each other, but then even within one department, there's also people not really, you know, communicating with one another because they're in competition with one another. They're scared of any damage to their reputation. They're scared of losing their best people. They're scared of being on the chopping block for the next round of layoffs. There's a lot that's happening psychologically when I step into a situation. There's also a lot of assumptions people assume, you know, the borrowing from the example I mentioned a few minutes ago, stepping into an org, sales leaders are like, I just want this person to make more dials. Are you assuming that everything else is right? Have you looked at this? Have you considered that, right? So I'm

actually taking people through a line of questioning where I'm re-educating them on their own business by just holding the mirror up and letting them see for themselves where the spinach is between their teeth, because that is a very different experience than me pointing at the spinach and saying you should do this and you should do that. No one's going to buy into that if I just come in waving my wand and trying to magically change things in an organization that I, you know, technically don't belong in. I'm an outsider, right? And so I have to hold that mirror up. I then have to bring everyone together because they don't speak to one another, round them up and share my findings with them. You know, this bone is not connected to that bone. This system doesn't exist at all. Everyone thinks that the elephant is this in the room, but it's actually that one, right? No one's looking at this data at all and this is what it's telling me, right? And so I have to really just unearth all the skeletons. I don't know if you remember back in the 90s, there was this acne treatment. It was, I forget what it's called, where you apply different layers on your face and you would ultimately break out before it would heal, right? And so that's what I'm typically doing when I step into an organization is like I'm earthing all the things that are toxic and not working. And I'm trying to do it in a very neutral way that isn't attached to anyone's reputation or personality or tenure within a company. And I'm just calling out the facts and then I'm laying out the prescription, right? Because it's not enough to just be that person that calls the things out. I also have to confidently leveraging the data, guide them through the phases of transformation and the realistic timeline for getting there. Because that's the other thing. Everybody wants things five minutes ago, but change happens over time. That's just physics or any other

law. Man, I can tell you the reason I stepped heavily into digital marketing and SEO was the data, right? The data guides the decision-making and pushes out the assumptions, like you said. I've dealt with a couple recent fractional CMO agreements where going into the organization, they didn't have a lot of value for data. And I'm like, how are you making decisions, right? Data's probably the most important thing that you can lead with. It's a forward indicator. It's a following indicator. It can tell you where you're at right now. Have you dealt with that at all? I'm asking this on more of a personal note. How have you had those conversations with executives if they have a gut, they've been doing it a long time, they know what it is, but the data might tell them something different? How do you have those conversations? I'm trying to think of a reminder of a client in particular. He had his spreadsheet. Even though we implemented the CRM, created the dashboard, he had his magic spreadsheet with the formulas that he relied on for years. And so on that spreadsheet, it's like, no, no, no, no. What we need to do is we need to increase volume. We need to increase more of this and do less of that. And it's all right here, right? And doing the screen share thing, et cetera. It's like, okay, that's one perspective, right? Let me show you what I see because we're describing the same elephant, but you're grabbing the trunk of it and you're describing how long and bristly it is. And I'm over here in the back leg describing how wide and how leathery it is, but we're talking about the same elephant. I just want to show you my perspective and what I see from back here. I have to take that approach of affirming that your numbers are right. It's not that you're wrong. It's just that it's incomplete, right? Let me show you the full view on your business because why else would you bring me

to the table if you weren't looking for a fresh perspective, if you weren't counting on me to untangle the things that you didn't want to be bothered with? Yeah. No, I love that. I think getting them to make the decision themselves, right? Like looking in the mirror so that they make that decision for themselves is really where you can drive change. Now, you come into agencies as well, right? And I can see a lot of people have brought you into their agencies to help build better revenue lines, to make sure that they're utilizing, everything's talking to each other, they're upgrading their systems. Tell me a little bit about that because there's a lot of agency owners that are listening on what you do there and what kind of tools you use and maybe some success stories. I think that would be interesting for the audience. Yeah. I typically step into an agency that's in that messy middle of like, they've got revenue going, they've started scaling, they might've scaled a little bit too fast or they didn't really look at the scalability of their current offering. And so they are up against some real friction in a very short runway. Like literally they can't mess up or they have to start laying people off, right? It's that kind of precarious of a situation. And I highlight all of that because that's what I'm up against in trying to persuade someone to walk the path that I'm about to describe is I step into agencies at this messy middle and I look at their menus and their menus look like a cheesecake factory menu. I don't know if you've ever shown up hungry at a cheesecake factory, but you're starving. You just need food after waiting 45 minutes for a table because there's always a wait. There's always a wait at the factory, right? And so you sit down, you're given a 75 page menu. The linguine looks great. The burger looks awesome. The flatbread, awesome. The lettuce cup, awesome. But I just, I don't know,

I don't feel particularly adventurous. I'm going to keep it really safe. I'm going to go back to page one and pick the burger because it's just what I know. And so that's what's happening with agencies when I step in is that they have been so reactive because they're so scared of leaving things on the table or they're trying to take small budgets to earn bigger ones down the line, et cetera, that their menu looks all over the place. It's not very clear what their area of expertise is or even the specific problems that they solve. And so I take them through this journey of let's do the prefix menu. You're a Michelin star restaurant. And I come in and there are eight courses already designed for me. I might substitute the protein in the fifth course. Maybe I do the salmon instead of the beef. But otherwise, there's not very much overthinking that I'm doing. I know there's going to be excellence and you've already described the path for me very clearly. And I know that you're known for doing this really well. So I'm happy to sit here, pay the premium and enjoy this dinner. And so that's what I take agencies through is like, first things first, let's make sure that you are right sizing the things that you offer. Because if you're doing things by the hour, you're already bleeding out in the wrong ways. Let's look at the outcomes that you drive. What do you want to be known for? How do we tie all this together into a signature framework or method? Something that you go to market with and you talk about over and over and over again, possibly trademark and protect, right? Possibly create technologies and things around, right? And then let's look at the process for going to market with this beautifully curated service and experience for customers. That's where we start to look at the tech. Let's start to break down the silos and the automations and the reporting and all the things. Let's start to

make sure that the marketing and the sales are working with the same intelligence, driving towards the same goals and outcomes. Let's make sure that all the behaviors on the sales teams are where they need to be. When I speak to the account executives or the sales directors, making sure they have the same fluency in the customer profile and the offering and how to position it. And let's also think about how we standardize the experience so that customers don't feel like, you know, I heard from so-and-so that they got this deal, or I heard from so-and-so they got a preferential rate because people do talk in industries, right? And so that's also why it's important to really standardize these things. The method that you create beyond really streamlining services also becomes the backbone of the marketing, right? That's how you start to feel that lead generation as well. And so that is typically how I step into an org, right? And typically the walls that I break down and the method and the process I take them through. But we've got to go from the cheesecake factory menu to the Michelin star prefix menu. And that is the most difficult part. The rest of it, there's a blueprint for a checklist, a tool, right? We can start to implement the automations for engaging buyers on LinkedIn. We can start to launch the campaigns via email, all those things. But the real transformation is letting go of that anxiety of saying no to certain projects and yes to very specifically defined scopes. Yeah, no, that was a big change for us a number of years ago to do that. I'm curious, let's keep going through that process. Let's say that we've curated that menu, they productized what they're doing. I actually went to this conference, I think it was a digital marketer conference back in 2017. It was great. And it was all for agencies, how to do it. There was a number of people had a infographic that showed kind of the messy middle, a lot

of small agencies, a couple big agencies. And then there was kind of a desert of how you had to get through the middle two phases. And productizing services was one of the big stepping stones. I'm curious, there's people that have productized services, but like you talked about, their data is still not unified. The tooling systems are maybe not unified. There's a lot that goes on and they feel that they need to expand that menu because I've coached a number of agencies. And you're right, they offer everything. And I'm like, well, but what are you really good at? Well, clients need the full service to feel comfortable. And I said, well, you have contractors for that. Can you partner with them? Or like, do you need to do it all sort of thing? And let's say that they've like, they're kind of like through that they productize their services, they've streamlined it down. But we were talking a lot about like you coming in as a CRO. So how does it tie back to revenue? How are you looking at revenue? How are you enhancing that piece of because I feel like a lot of people scale, I've seen a number of businesses start to scale really quickly. And then I, they missed like one or two things and things didn't turn out and then they have to lay off or start over or pivot again. And so I feel like there's a lot of people are like, okay, I got it. I productize my service. I'm doing this thing. This is what I'm known for. I'm going to niche down. And, but they're still not where they need to be, which it's like, okay, well ramp up your marketing ramp up your sales. And they do that. And then they get the business and they hadn't fixed like the whole process because they're spinning multiple plates at a time. I'm curious how, how you would answer somebody offering that as an issue? Yeah, the sort of overarching theme here is that what you described is

the need for revenue operations. So, you know, we need that function to step in, to get the systems humming along, to get the automated reporting generated and distributed so that everyone's working with the same intelligence. And just to help, you know, sort of standardized protocol and procedure and standard operating procedures and things like that. So there's that function that needs to be pulled in at this point to help streamline some of those things. I think the other piece is before embarking on a radical change across an agency, we start small. So let's start with, you know, this new package, this new all in, full in service, flat cost for all deliverables and all support and all enhancement, you know, just the way the client wants it. Then let's think about getting a sprint together to our first revenue goal, quarter million, half a million. Then let's unpack that data. What did it take to get there? You know, how many at bats, how many calls, what was the sales cycle like? What did the customer say? Let's run these transcripts through, you know, and really make sure that we understand the things that are lying between the lines here. Let's make sure we tighten up the messaging, the positioning. So you were saying, you're saying take the transcripts, run them through a LLM based upon pre built prompts that tell you what you could do differently. Maybe you're talking too much, maybe you missed something that the client said, maybe you needed to speak here. So building in that recursive loop for the human that's in the loop. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because that's how we start to, you know, sharpen skills. And that's how we start to sharpen messaging and positioning. And so once we get through that first sprint, we looked at the data, we see that there's viability, right, then let's look at the next sprint, how do we double this revenue? Now, we made the first half million, how do we get to the next million in revenue selling this one thing,

right? As we are scaling this offer, then in the back end is where we start to prioritize. Okay, now that this is a viable option, we're going to let go of these three other services, we're going to free up bandwidth in terms of, you know, delivery, so that we can start repurposing that bandwidth for scaling this one offer. Right? That's the way that we start to shift things. But it can't be a swift pendulum swing from one end to the other. It has to be a validated and methodical and data driven approach, not only to appease all the anxiety of the executives at the top level, but just so that we're doing due diligence to the business, and making sure that we're not reallocating resources where, you know, based on a hunch, or based on, you know, consultants' suggestion based on, you know, successes they've had elsewhere, right? The data is the data anywhere you step into, it has to be leveraged every step of the way. Cool. What other things do you want to highlight, or maybe there's some case studies that you can share to help people understand what you're talking about as businesses go through this transformation? Yeah, I'm thinking of a PR agency that I worked with that's based out of Idaho. And they, the founder, you know, bootstrapped, started the agency, worked in PR for years, brought the first publicists on board, had a business development rep and an assistant, like built the team day one, brought over a roster of clients, had some revenue going just to get the engine going, but ultimately hit this wall where the renewals weren't there, and the inbound wasn't there. And also, everyone was serving at a different level, clients were having inconsistent experiences, the feedback was coming through, the results weren't the same. And so, this was, you know, a quickly, you know, tangled mess, where we needed to step in. And we needed to, first of all, look at the numbers, look at the cycles, look at assessing skills across the

team, and doing a whole needs analysis before we came to a strategy. Once we had that nailed down, then the first thing that we did was we implemented a CRM. One didn't exist in the business. We had, you know, invoicing and some other things that were going on in the background, but we had no way of tracking conversations, nurturing relationships, no way of distributing information, case studies and things like that. And so there was just no way to really start to build that up. And then, in addition to that, there were some folks that were on 3-month contracts, 6-month contracts, 12-month contracts. And we started to take a realistic look at the results. And what we realized is that there was this sweet spot where the short-term contracts were not yielding results that allowed them to have conversations about renewals. The long-term contracts were not properly nurtured because there were transition on the back end. And so one publicist would start with the client, but then they'd finish with another. And so there was a loss of knowledge and an interruption in the customer experience as well. So we dialed it in and we realized that 6-months was that sweet spot of delivering results without any, you know, interruptions and handoffs and things like that, and making the best case possible for a renewal. And on top of that, we started to right-size the pricing. We leveraged the data to look at what she was doing in market with her agency versus others. She was severely undercharging because, again, that fear of, I'm just getting started. I've got a team. I've got all these pressures. I need money in the door, right? Then once we had all the systems in place, once we had the pricing and the client delivery systems in place, then it was a matter of dialing in the business development piece. So let's look at how do we have a consistent flow of book calls. Let's look at performance on these calls, right, beyond the positive response rate that leads to

the call. Let's look at discovery to strategy, strategy to close, right? Let's really fine-tune those sort of micro-conversion moments, and let's look at the ways that you're selling. We don't have visuals. Let's pull those in. She didn't have case studies. We needed to pull those in, right? There wasn't a standardized way of demonstrating to the client what was up ahead for them. And so that's where we started to anchor on a signature method. And then we started to get into scaling, right? And so that was beyond having the tools, beyond standardizing performance and client delivery. That's where we started to really step in and go, okay, now we need to expand market, right? Now we need to go beyond one niche and step into another. So let's go to market. Let's figure out the marketing, the messaging, the positioning, leverage the data. Let's also look at partnerships, right? I'm looking at every way to draw revenue. The company can go find its revenue. The CEO can speak on stages, but then there's also partnerships, referrals, looking at the opportunity to step in and be that preferred partner or that agency of record or something that helps to expand visibility, reputation, and clientele. And so those are some of the ways that I take a business from doing the most to having more predictable revenues to then expanding those revenues. Yeah, I really like that. I would love to hear another case study or story. I thought that was really great. What are things that we've been talking about, but maybe we haven't been talking about? So we've been talking about a lot of different things. We've gone a little bit all over the map. What are some key things that you feel like would be valuable to add into this conversation right now? Gosh, so many things, right? We could talk about AI and the hesitation and the fear around that, that I'm seeing, particularly with agencies that are looking at their P&L. They're looking at the hard lines and they're going, yep, AI is

going to give us some leverage, but then they're also up against customers that are chopping them because of AI, right? So that's an area that I am constantly consulting through. And I think beyond that is, and also tied to it, is just the way that people want to have experiences. I could GPT it, I could Canva it, I could use all these tools and try to get it done. What I'm looking for is someone to do it for me in excellence and someone to prove to me that they can do it, right? So I'm often up against folks who, particularly in my line of work, they want to see skin in the game and results before they ever invest. So they're like, oh, you can help us with our sales, great. We want to see X many leads in the next 30 days and then we can talk about a contract, right? So we have to also think about proving ourselves, skin in the game, case studies, testimonials, but also what's that truffle look like nowadays, right? You walk up to the chocolate shop, you get a little truffle, then they invite you in. That truffle needs to look differently these days. And sometimes that is about delivering a quick win or just a complete transformation and mindset before they continue the conversation with you. Yeah, I can definitely see that. How are you seeing search change today? What are you seeing and what methods are you adapting in that sales and marketing process that maybe wasn't the same two years ago? Yeah, when I'm stepping into a team, right, especially thinking about what we're up against, connecting with the marketing team and making sure that we think about the website and the blog being that knowledge base, less so of a conversion machine and more so of a knowledge base that gets picked up by the LLMs, right, and by the AI bots. We want to be in a position to demonstrate and flex the breadth of what the company can do and make

sure that all that knowledge is searchable and reachable, but with less emphasis on things like backlinks and more emphasis on transparency and results and methodologies, full structures and sort of thinking and laying it all bare so that it's searchable, right? The other thing is just meeting the customer where they are, right? It used to be that customers had to go through their entire education with you and then search came around. Customers were about halfway of the way there when they got on a call with you. Nowadays, a customer is about 75% of the way there, right? And so you have to actually stop selling and you have to just focus on consulting. Yeah, you're probably working with GPT, talking to another agency. Cool. What is it that they're not doing that you're hoping that I can? What is it that they haven't done that you're hoping that I will, right? And what is it that you haven't tried that you're hesitant to, that maybe I could be the one to walk you through, right? And making sure that it's, again, the conversation is focused on the customer and the outcome for them and a whole lot less on features. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I feel like that data point, I've seen that data point. I've shared that data point. About 75% of the search is happening online. That's also happening in B2B. Another interesting data point that I recently saw is more updated. Remember it was something like 11 touch points to get to a sale. For B2B, it's actually 30 now. So there's 30 different pieces of content, touch points. What does that customer journey look like? What is the target persona? Now you got multiple, like a buying counsel or what have you. There's different stakeholders. So you have to speak to them all differently. There's a lot of different factors that go into closing deals depending on the size today than it used to be. And how people are finding you online, searching online is kind of like everywhere, right? Like you

need to optimize everywhere. A buddy of mine actually trademarked that, I think. So we're seeing with LLMs trademarks be something that can be rooted on you. You have a couple systems. I would love for you to maybe share your frameworks, if you could. Yeah. One of my signature frameworks, the revenue recode method I described earlier, I step in and I look at that cheesecake factory menu. We look at how do we deliver that prefix curated experience, premiumly right size pricing and all of that. And then how do we then translate that methodology to offers? How do we then methodically go to market with those offers? How do we enable the people that are selling those things? How do we enable the customers that are buying those services, right? My methodology is all really about signature method and then the entire sales motion, packaging, pricing, and everything based on that method. The other system is my book busy paid system. And so once you've gone through recoding your revenue and your offers, then it's a matter of leveraging the tools and the automations to buy you oxygen, right? To make sure that all the notes are captured in the CRM coming off of a call on automation, making sure that all the things are being fired off to improve appointment attendance and show up rates, making sure that the customer experience is streamlined through the delivery experience as well. And making sure you're leveraging the data, right? So how do we set up the proper dashboards and views so that you are not like my client that I mentioned earlier, stuck on that spreadsheet, looking at the wrong things, but instead looking at the full breadth of your business and really the pulse of it. Yeah, no, I hear you. So what is one unknown secret of internet marketing that you feel that is underserved today? Gosh, wow. Are there any secrets left? Because at this point, we're in the information age. I think we're in the AI overload age. I think that the most underestimated

thing is we talk about authenticity as currency, and I think now it's actually just human connection. I think people know that the text was AI generated, the video was AI edited, that cartoon wasn't made by anyone, right? Like, it's cool. What we need is connection, right? I'm seeing the pendulum swing. People are seeking in-person connections. There's a rise in conferences and things like that on the B2B side because people want to get away from their screens. They want to get away from their feeds. They want to get away from being on LinkedIn all day. And they want to converse, and they want to connect, and they want to share space. And so I think that that's something that is completely underrated or underestimated. And I actually think people are unprepared. I think there are certain generations that aren't ready for that in-person connection because it's just not something that they're used to. I love that. I feel like people know that there's a lot of people out there that could do the things that they need, but they don't know the right person that they can trust, and they're trying to build that relationship with them. And so I think that that's something that you highlighted there as well. Last question for you, and then I want to give you an opportunity to share some of your sites and what you're working on, how people can find you. I was curious, what is your preferred tech stack when you go into a company? Now, it just seems like there's a lot of CRMs and content tools and digital marketing tools. Everybody's competing. There's a couple of people that have a stronger voice than others, which have been sponsors of this podcast in the past, but it's very noisy. And when you go into an organization, you don't really want to change their current tech stack unless it hasn't been updated forever. I'll give you an example. There's a client that we're working with right now that their CRM is not cloud-based, so you can't log

in call notes unless you're in the office. Wow. Now, they've been around for a long time, but I'm like, okay. Talking to the national head of sales, it's like, this is an issue. We need to get y'all migrated over to something that's a cloud-based tool, and I don't even really care what it is. We just need to be able to enter in the calls right after we do them in the field because waiting for everybody to come back to the office to enter their calls at the end of the day seems really, really silly. That's just one example for me. When you go into an organization, what do you like to see, I guess? Because some of these tools work together better. They have automations. I can tell you when I try to install my Outlook email with my Google email, they should work seamlessly, and they don't always work, and I think that that's intentional. I think that those companies don't really want it to work, but what is the tech stack that you like to see, and what do you recommend people that are starting to upgrade their tech stack, what should they go to, what should they be looking at at least if it's not a specific tool when they do that? Let's just clear this debate right now. It's going to be Google over Outlook any day, so that's going to be step one, stepping into the tech stack. At this point, I've worked with Salesforce, HubSpot, High Level. I've worked with so many CRMs. They all have their pros and their cons, and it really depends on the size of the business and how the business is structured. That will ultimately dictate the recommendations I make. I personally don't care. At the end of the day, just log the things, give me the report, and then give me some intel so I know who to turn to when the numbers are tanking. What I care more about is performance. There's a part of me that, yes, I can be the

chief revenue officer and all of that, but there's a part of me that's a coach all the way to my core. I'm looking at revenue intelligence. If your company has the cash flow, let's implement something like Gong, where we can analyze the calls, implement scorecards. I can asynchronously coach up your team, right, while also helping to unearth the sort of micro-conversion moments that we need to really be focused on. If we don't have the budget for something like that, let's use something like Fathom. Love Fathom, you know, also capable of recording and analyzing calls, gives me just enough intelligence to work with to be able to coach and train someone. Beyond that, you know, I'm also looking at the ways that the reps are enabled to develop pipelines. So, you know, yes, we've got the leads that are coming in through marketing channels and efforts. We're also expecting the reps to be doing their own prospecting and outbound. The reality is that they, because there are now 30 touches before a B2B conversion happens, right, let's honor that we want them selling as much as possible. So how can we automate some of their prospecting? There are tools like Hayreach that automate some of the LinkedIn outbounding and connection requesting and things. There are tools like Instantly, you know, which automates some of your outbound cold email. Those are things that I think are friendly for enabling individuals, right, versus some of the bigger systems, Marketo and all that, to enable marketing for the bigger company. But I'm really focused on rep performance. Because here's the thing, I can come in, build the systems, automations, dashboards, get these executives bought in on strategy and all that jazz, right, we can go through all those hurdles. But if the team isn't doing the consulting, the prospecting and the things that need to be done on excellence, then the whole system just won't work, right. There's still that human element, because it's B2B, but it's still a human-to-human interaction. We don't have an AI bot from one

company signing a contract with an AI bot from another company when we're talking about agencies. Not yet. We're getting there. But it's still human-to-human. And so I want to make sure that the humans know how to connect with other humans. Yeah, no, I agree. So Lewis, how do people get in touch with you? How do they follow you? How do they hear what's going on in your head? Where are you posting content, that sort of thing? Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. You can hang out with me there. And if you want to see what I'm up to behind the curtains, check out BookedBusyPaid.com. Very cool. Well, everyone, hopefully you found this call useful. Thank you, Lewis, so much for coming on. I think everyone needs to step out of their business every once in a while and look at the holistic picture of what's going on. You can be the best at search. You can be the best at paid ads, SEM, search engine marketing, or anything else. But you need to make sure that your business is running well, as well as, I think, delivering consistency to each of your clients. So that's what people want to buy. They want to buy outcomes. They want to buy PEs, want to buy certainty. I feel like there should be a premium on certainty, and that's how you get to that premium offering, is we know what these outcomes are likely going to be like. We're going to bake the cake the same way. It's going to taste the same. That's why McDonald's or any other business, as you scale up, you continue to go to it because you have the same experience over and over again. So I think that's great. Everyone go check out Lewis's stuff if you need help. Remember, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, you should reach out to EWR, which is our sponsor, which is the agency I work for. I don't mention that enough. EWR for more revenue in your

business. We specialize in search marketing. We do other things. We have great people in our network like Lewis that we can connect you with if it is something that we don't do. Thank you so much for listening. Please like, share, follow, Shiko us. Really appreciate it. We are trying to grow on YouTube now. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. I can't even speak today. Bye-bye for now.