Sales Shift: From Marketing to Momentum with Michel Prive Ep. 604

Welcome back to the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. Today I have a special episode for you. We have a great guest, Michael Preve, who is a sales coach and professional. He's done, I'll let him actually introduce himself, but this is actually a continuation for all those that listen to the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing Podcast, which has some great content. I would encourage you to go check it out over there at OGGN. But I decided to have Michael on to continue the conversation and to dive a little bit deeper into marketing and sales strategies. How are you doing, Michael? I'm doing very well. You know, it's nice to be on your show today. Thank you for continuing the discussion. Yeah. Fantastic. Why don't you just do a quick intro of yourself to just people know if they haven't listened to the other podcasts, who you are and what you do. Yeah. My name is Michel Preve. I'm based out of Houston, Texas. I'm a fractional VP of sales. So basically what I'm helping clients to fix their sales issues, sales related issues, either to build a sales organization, fix or repair a sales organization. And I'm working very closely with big clients, small clients too. I'm helping to make as well the transition of the client from marketing to sales to transform it into dollars. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. And you've worked with some huge clients and also you've helped a lot of clients scale up. So a lot of clients listening, you know, you're making some money. You're scaling up. You're starting to think about, oh, I need to hire some salespeople. Let's start with that question. But I want to quickly read a review. This is by your expert tech Inc. I just left a review on our, our Google, my business. I've been studying SEO for seven years. I knew SEO, but it is not until I started listening to the best SEO podcast that I understand it that I now understand it. I never

had the opportunity to send any of my questions to the website because somehow they answer them in the podcast before I even ask them. I am very grateful for the knowledge I have gained listening to this podcast. I only gave, I only gave them five stars because Google wouldn't let me give them six stars. So awesome. Thank, thank you so much for that review. I know that people are starting to send in their questions to me directly as well as post them on the different reviews. We do have someone monitoring that. So if you do have a question, I did have a recent question. I don't have it in front of me. We'll have to answer that on the next podcast. If you're the one that asked it and you're listening, I will answer it. Michelle, Michael, I'm sorry. You know, you're, you're, I will, I will tell you, we got to jump into this. Okay. Because I think a lot of people have this question in mind. When do I start hiring outbound salespeople? Well, you know, first of all, you have to very much understand this question, looking at why your ideal client profile and understanding your client base today and what type of sales process you have. So typically marketing is very good to find, to find those customers potentially. And then after that, you know, the moment that you are ready to trigger the recruitment of the person, this is at the time that almost by itself, the job description should be written by your clientele. You have to go deep dive into your clientele and say, okay, I want to expand more into these markets. And this is the type of clients, sorry, of salesperson that I need to be able to answer very clearly or to the problems that the clients are facing. So in other words, is that identify the problems that the clients are facing and how your solution is, what your solution is to help them. And then after that, you create the job descriptions and

then you start to recruit. So very much, it starts with a very clear understanding of what the salesperson, the outside salesperson will be doing. And obviously, you know, the salesperson before it comes in, you have to have a clear process. You have to have a clear, you know, areas where the salesperson will be going after the clients and business. So we've talked a lot about target personas, which you mentioned, and customer journey, right? So you figure out who your target persona is. You should kind of know that over time you develop that. You should be looking at your data. You should be looking at your metrics. You should be looking at also, you know, how much you make per the product you sell, right? Like because sometimes there are certain clients that or there are certain things that people are buying that may be more of like a ledge offering and it's not your bigger sales. So there's an upsell process, but it should be more of a natural process of adding sales to it because you're just continuing the conversation. So you know, when we talk about like content marketing or SEO, SEO is going to make them show up in Google, right? So you're going to show up at the top of Google organically. People are doing their research, they're finding you, they're resonating with your content, they're going to your website. You know, 85% of the time or the data says that before they raise their hand, they've already kind of done their research. So they start raising their hand potentially later on in the sales process and then they need to talk to somebody. And so, you know, you could have inside salespeople versus outbound salespeople or outside salespeople. But like you said, I think it's a continuation of that conversation. You know, I think that there's a lot of businesses out there. Also, I would even say if you have a product that you're selling that's mainly e-commerce or online or something like that, and you add a salespeople and

then you need to maybe pay a sales commission so you know, you have to come up with a comp plan. Well, the thing I've seen with a lot of small businesses, they transition to get those outbound salespeople to go after maybe some bigger size deals or B2B deals or whatever, is they don't include in their price, the COGS, customer acquisition costs, right? Like, you know, and so maybe you could talk a little bit about, you help businesses figure out their plan, right? Like you help them figure out their sales comp and not just like the hiring is like one component, there's a lot of different kind of components to this. But if you're a business that is ready to start scaling up or, you know, a lot of venture capital companies come in, they buy a company. I mean, what are what are they doing to run those metrics to figure out, OK, we can sustain a salespeople and then, OK, this is who we want to go after, which we will go into a little bit more thought leadership and content marketing and actually how to get those high quality leads. But but, OK, you have you need a salesperson because it's a complicated sale potentially, right? You need to walk them through the process. It's a consultative sale. Like if you're a business thinking about that, what are some of the things you need to start thinking about first or what's the checklist, I guess? Yeah, the checklist is very much a continuation to what I was there was saying before. Just before that, it was very much understanding what your customers or customers personal. Then after that, you know, you identify if your customers, the way they communicate and what I've seen very, very much, you know, efficiently working is to first, we could, you know, good sets of insights as people would be very much engaged into upselling the product, the original product with additional solutions. They are the ones most of the time who are handling the initial transactions. They

are building up the report with the client. They should they are in a very strong position to ask additional questions of what else can you buy from me? So training these people, you know, these insights as people who are a privilege to be in contact with their customers is huge. Not only you are gathering information from your clientele, you can gauge as well how good or strong the customer's journey is. And also it gives a very much insight. This is like a survey while talking. You have the opportunity to bring to us for referrals. And then after that, you are building up, in fact, your sales from your existing customer base. The cost of acquisition for addition sales is low. Once it's identified that you want to go beyond the transactions, you want to go strategic. This is where you need to upscale, you know, potentially the discussions with people who would be required to visit the customer. It could be a sales manager. It could be the owner, the business owners. But that requires some planning. Customers, when they are very happy, when it's easy to do business with, they want to do more business with you. And whoever is the interface, the customer should be trained to be able to trigger that discussion and then to do something with it. That's what sales is about. No, I love that. Like having a tiered ladder process of offering more services or other opportunities. I think that's the best place to actually start selling is your existing customer base. Sometimes we run like a special or something like that for existing customers to pull demand forward or to get certain kind of actions, which, you know, spiffs and stuff like that from the sales side of things are to to get to direct behavior. Right. You're trying to direct behavior. But one of the things that you mentioned, and we really haven't talked a lot on this podcast, and maybe you could go into a little bit more detail about it, because I think it's

highly important when when you're trying to decide that next step in the business is market research. OK, and going out there and talking to customers and doing surveys and and boots on the ground, talking to clients, whether it's internally or you hire like a third party company. Can you just go into even more detail about that? Because that is a topic that I don't think we've ever talked about or if we've talked about it, we've only talked about it a very few times and that this is in six hundred something podcasts, right? Because we're mainly focused on marketing. So right now, this conversation, this is a pivotal podcast for us is we're bringing in the conversation of sales. And and the funny thing is, I started. On the direct sales side, so I did phone call sales, I did in-person direct selling, not like door knocking, like in the the pharmaceutical medical device industry. So a lot of the experience that I took kind of came back into marketing and it's like, hey, I can take this sales process that I'm doing over and over again to try to find this ideal client, walk them through the process, and then I can do it in mass with marketing. It helped give me a great baseline for that. Well, a lot of people are on the marketing side and they're now moving to the sales side. And I think that there's probably a gap between them and the customer if they haven't had salespeople or it's been the owner interacting or they have a small internal team where they might not know all the information, because I've seen this with a lot of businesses. They think they know who their target customer is, but it may have shifted over time. Right. The market had changed or or they're adding new products and it might be a different target persona or you're trying to brand to go after a different market. And in one of the big areas where you're just guessing with marketing, unless you have

data and that's a great advantage of digital marketing is you can iterate and you get that data. But let's talk about like a true kind of market research plan. What would that maybe look like if they did it internally or if they were hiring a company to do that? Like, what would that entail? Well, it would it would it would start with once again, I'm coming back with the ideal client profile. And so you have the you could have maybe three or four different ideal client profiles. Once you identify this, you go deep into very much what problems you have, your solutions are solving and what are the other solutions that we have and why the customers are not buying those solutions. So this is this introspect type of activity needs to happen first. Once you understand this, you can go back to your current customers to start testing your survey, the survey to the market, so you test it and eventually by testing it, you will find some additional sales, but you will also test that the validity of what you are doing. So once you get a good plan, you know, you know, you know the gear to go to fish, you know what to fish, you know how to fish. Then after that, you can go at larger scale. You can buy database, you know, and marketing databases is key and understanding from your ideal clients the problem that you are your services are solving. Who would be interested to talk to you? So you have to make your questionnaire and the appetite for the buyer persona to answer to your questionnaire to be seen as someone that you already understand the customer's problem. And you just validate that they have the same problem as your previous customers you had before. And then after that, you can start to engage with those customers. And there's a good way because one of the things that what post-COVID or COVID did is that we got so far away from our clients, so far away

that we don't know them well either anymore. Behavior change, the age change, the way people communicate change. We start to see now transactions using WhatsApp, you know, tools that we never seen, you know, buying huge dollar value. You have to reassess. You have to reassess who your customers are. I'm coming always back to this. And then after that, you can manage your plan to be able for you to deliver the same solutions, the solutions that that you are very successful with with a client. The face-to-face now to address the face-to-face remain the most important part. What we do here on the video, I don't count that completely to a face-to-face. Two things is happening is that COVID or let's say the behavior related to COVID stopped to have the human interaction, very much the human interaction. I'm not talking about, you know, going to lunch or anything like this. But when you are in front of someone, if you are a well-trained salesperson, you will at the after half an hour listening, you will understand the pain of the other party. You will understand very much how important this person. Those problems for this person is then after that for the company and how your solution will be helping the individual, the buyer, it could be an engineer, it could be whatever to be to feel better and and how you would be able to be a star in the company as well. But to be able to have this discussion, you physically has to be there and to be there or to be accepted to be there. It starts with discussions once again from the inside sales. And obviously, once you want to when you engage with the care account management, you know, there are different ways to call it. But when you want to sell, when you identify clients that should be buying your 10 products that you have, but they are buying only three. And you have to understand why they are not buying the 10. Who are they buying it from?

And to be able for you to grow the business, you need to have a clear strategy. This is when you need to show up. A phone call is not enough. A Zoom call is not enough. You have to be in front of your customer. I hope. No, I think that that's a great question here. Here's what I had a lot of thoughts rolling around my head. And let me try to kind of catch up the conversation. And I think this is a great jumping off point to to to talk about how selling and social selling has kind of changed. I would say you and I, our last podcast was in person. You're right. Right. And it's different. And there's been, you know, years now that have gone by where people haven't seen clients, where everything was done face to face. So you've absolutely lost touch with customers. And, you know, that's so critical today. You you need you need to take those steps to go reengage with customers, have those conversations. You're right. Face to face and even things that happen on WhatsApp. You were telling me about a huge buy that happened in WhatsApp. And I think that that might be generational as as people are taking over. They're more comfortable with with some of these platforms. But, you know, if you're sending a quick message or text or something like that, you're not going to get all the context. Right. And things could be miscommunicated. So I do think that social is important. But what I would tell you is I'm working with a client now, a bigger client. And, you know, I don't think they have a marketing issue. OK, like and I think it's like a product strategy issue. I think it's a, you know, a channel issue with their with their partners and the channel selling that they're doing. I think they need to figure out their their their messaging for this new product that they're launching a little bit better, because, you know. Like you can market it on

LinkedIn and you can you can get people to raise their hand, but if but if it's a complex sale, you got to make sure that that target persona is right, you got to make sure that the message is right. You got to understand what is the problem that you're actually solving that you want to amplify and market. And so, you know, a lot of this strategy where people skip over and they move straight to the execution like, hey, I got to get marketing immediately. But, you know, it's kind of the analogy of measure twice, cut once. I really like that is you can spend so much money on on on social channels, LinkedIn, what have you, very, very quickly. OK, and then realize you have nothing to show for it. I think Google's very saturated as well. We've started to look at some some other strategy. I think they're spreading the value around too much. I mean, when things were used to be a couple of cents a click there, you know, you know, tens of. Hundreds of dollars per click, it depends on on on the industry. Right. But I think I would love to hear your interpretation. We didn't go deep down this route. OK, we're we're maybe like starting to talk about account based selling, but. To warm up cold contacts from a social selling standpoint, I'm seeing that happen on the rise, right, because you can use social media to get to know somebody, to engage somebody, to decide, hey, I might be interested in hearing more and I want to take that next step. Right. And and you can use social media. And well, Twitter, I think, is actually fantastic. LinkedIn's fantastic to communicate directly with potential buyers that you might not have been able to see before if you weren't at a conference or they weren't speaking because they're, you know, like I remember the times, OK, Michael, where we would call in to to a company and we would have a directory and you would put one number

up and one number down, OK, and try to figure out who was at what desk, OK, and then you would have to map it out like so sales today. You're through all that so much faster, the sales cycle sped up, you can connect with the right people, but if you're not messaging the right information, well, it's not going to work. So you need to do that research on the front. And I think, you know, we've covered that. Let's move on to maybe social selling and how marketing and sales could engage now that you know who the target persona is, you know, kind of what your messaging, how they're going to buy it like, OK, how do you view marketing sales and maybe like the combination of like social selling or even appointment setting? Well, you know, it's we are one of the great things is that, you know, that that was brought up for the last four or five years is tools you have, we have access to many, many, many, many tools to be able to be to have an appointment, to have an appointment taken. Now, the hard work starts, you know, to me, that's the way I see it before it was to get the appointment. You have to be ready to have an intelligent discussion with the buyer, whoever the buyer is. In other words, you have to be ready before the call, understanding exactly what the company does, what this person do. So it requires some work. What you know, we are bombarded by emails every day from marketing, you can see this is the machine sending it to you once you prepare, you have an appointment, even when at the time of building up the agenda, proposing an agenda. I've seen that this disappear. People are not building up an agenda anymore. This is the first communication you propose an agenda. To a meeting and you have the opportunity for the customer to modify the agenda and you have to be ready that at the time of the call,

the agenda will be changed. So to get on to your point is that once you engage with you, you have now the audience in front of you. You have to be sure or you have to be ready to present the best lure to the customer. So the best lure is that I you know, the reason why I contacted you is because I'm working with similar companies. They are facing this type of problems. And, you know, it's we we we fix these issues this way and this way and we have been very successful. And because, you know, customer satisfaction is close to our heart, we would like to to to to have a discussion with you to see if we can help you as well. Something in those lines, you know, that would be a resonate with the customer. Obviously, once if you sell to B2B and into niche markets, like maybe potentially your customers launching a product that it's a launch of a product, they might have they first validated that the product that they are about to launch is needed by every customers that they try to market to. Or is it very limited to a certain niche of product or of customers that would be that will not need the solution that is provided? So the so the things I heard, OK, that I think is is really, really critical that I want to reiterate for the audience is. Well, if you're selling something, people want to know what your approach is, right, like or if you're solving a problem, if you're selling a service or something like that, like what is your approach? You're trying to get them to buy into your approach and how you do things or what this product does, because they're they're typically trying to solve a need in some capacity. Even B2C, they're trying to solve a need, like if you're selling a beauty care line, right, like there's a need that they're trying to solve and you have to articulate that. And well, well, what is

the approach? Like maybe it's like, you know, the these ingredients that are not harsh chemicals or it's all natural or whatever it is of like who you are and and what your approach is. You're trying to get them to resonate with that. There's there's also that transfer of enthusiasm, which we haven't got actually into actual selling yet. But I like the agenda, OK, and I want everybody to know like you're getting you're bombarding people through automation, which I don't actually recommend, I think really target approach where you do the research, you know, the people like like if they're going through a merger acquisition, right, having that list, knowing that they're doing the problem and and sending a very targeted message in to the right people that might be dealing with something like that is far more effective than just spamming it out there. And to your point, the customers, like if all the customers don't need that product and you're mass marketing like a toaster to everybody, right, not like and you and let's I'm trying to use an analogy of something that is very specific to cooking. It's not like a toaster that everybody needs. So you can't mass market it. You have to build strategies. That target is particular individual as we get into kind of talking about account based selling, but also you your messaging and that customer journey and that target persona can be absolutely different. So that whole marketing campaign like so you might have a stacked marketing campaign where you're running multiple marketing campaigns, but a lot of people that I've seen when we come in and audit their stuff, we do a lot of audits is they're running one campaign for all personas, for everybody to that mass market. And so there's a ton of waste that's happening and it's reducing their engagement rates, which is costing higher cost to show it to the people because people don't want to see it. I mean, that's something that I think everybody needs to know is these platforms and these

algorithms, if you show something to somebody that engages with it, they want it. They take some kind of action. You have a clear call to action, your cost per click if you're doing, you know, PPC, it goes down. OK, so so all these platforms are trying to match people up. They're trying to help you match people up and do that. Right. But I think having that agenda, someone's like you don't want to just wing it when you get into a call. You want to say, hey, here's what we want to talk about. If this is your problem, I would tell you a lot of people at least look at like I'm talking three seconds per email, three seconds per post or whatever. A lot of people are seeing what you're doing if you're sending out these messages and if it's not relevant to them and you're just spamming them, it hurts your brand. OK, that's what I can tell you. People are auto like sending me stuff and it's like auto messages and it's not even relevant to what I do. And I recognize like, who is this? Who is this company? And then I'm like, not good. Right. But if someone is sending me a very targeted message, they're speaking to me. They're telling me what's going on. And then maybe they say, hey, I want to talk to you about these things. I can tell you if I'm dealing with that specific issue, it's going to catch my attention. It's going to resonate to me. And guess what? I'm going to set up an appointment to see if I like what it is they're selling, what it is that does it solve for me, what is their approach? So I'm trying to discover more. And I think that that's so critical and I agree with you. I think that agenda, I have not seen an agenda be be thrown my way in any kind of conversation or even kind of any kind of follow up when people are marketing me. When we market

to people, the back and forth is really like we're going down point by point and it's somewhat arduous. But they're trying to figure out assess because there's big dollars at stake here of do we like this people's approach? What is the expectation of what we're going to get? What is the ROI going to be? Because you're spending big dollars, right? I mean, how is that with sales? Like, I mean, if you're going to invest in a sales team, I mean, tell me what what you would say. Well, on average, OK, if you're a let's say you're a 10 million, 20 million dollar business, maybe you're a five million and you're growing really quickly and you're like, I need salespeople. I know every industry, technical, not industry. It depends. But like what's the expectation of the cash outlay that you need to hire a salesperson? Because you typically need that first person that can sale and then maybe be the manager to start building a team or what's the philosophy that you need to think about? And maybe price price doesn't matter as much. But like when you're trying to hire that person, you know what you need, you OK, I need to hire somebody. What do I need them to be able to do? Because this is like maybe you're you're first or like you're going to truly build a sales team. Maybe you have people that are kind of doing a couple different things. They might need to stay in operations or whatever. What like what what are the things that companies need to think about if there was like actionable steps? Yeah. So, you know, it's you first, you know, you said that you already know what you need. So this is very important to know what you need. But to be sure that what you know, what you need, you look at your metrics, you know, what are your important metrics? I'm not looking at I'm looking at the leading matrix. What what is it required for me to the level of

activities? What are those activities in sales to be able to acquire more business? Is that more transaction? Is that more valuable transaction? You have to look at your business attrition. You know, when you start the year, try to reduce that business attrition. And I'm coming to the point. You have to look at the task of each salesperson, what they are supposed to do when it's a post-marketing pre-sale, it's sales transactions and then post-sales customers journey type of activities and loyalty. If you are in a business that you only have very little amount of market share and you are talking to clients where you can get more market share, well, you know, you should be looking at inside sales because it proves that, you know, this is working well. If you believe that or if the business model or your clientele tells you that, you know, do you are on to an additional service or brands that you want, you could go after outside sales. So to answer your questions, that is. The acquisition of the cost of acquisition of an additional salesperson, you first have to understand what more will they do into which sector post-marketing, I call it post-marketing pre-sale, pre-sales or transaction or post. And then after that is that business development that requires to position physically, not through the marketing, but physically the company and talk to more strategically to the to the to the customers. So you have also two things to look at, and sorry if my answer is long, is at the beginning of the year, you first have to defend, defend the sales of previous years. You have to make sure that these sales will come back again when you are in growth mode. So whoever has done a great job on sustaining those sales have to be there. If in this group you have people who wants to go up, who wants to evaluate inside the company, you have to be very careful to listen to this because missing or losing these people could be a disaster.

So you have to look at project yourself, in fact, not one year, but two years worth of revenue where you want to go and then strategically recruit the people for what you want to go to. And the very important part, I'm coming back to this, is the leading matrix of activities. Do I am I doing the right activities that will be leading to more customers sales, to increase the value of the transactions, to increase the quantity of transactions? You know, the measurables and are each one of my salespeople the same? So obviously using a CRM will be very much of help, but but once you understand. You know, I'm because I'm an engineer and maybe I think that way, you know, in an engineer, once you and that's the reason why my clients are successful, because we go back to this basis. And then after that, when the business is strong, then after that you can build up and you can build up fast. So you eliminate all the noises. You have the right team to do the right type of job to fulfill your business strategy. No, I I really the thing that resonated me on the last podcast, like it resonated with me personally, was. A lot of times people think that the marketing function, the sales function, maybe the delivery function, accounting function, whatever, they're all different functions and they operate within silos and and you look at them independently, right? Oh, I need to add a sales function. How do I look at that? What you really laid out was it's a business strategy like what is the overall business strategy and and incorporating sales into that's going to impact everything. It's going to impact, well, can you handle the demand, right? Like if if you get salespeople, because I've seen that a lot, I've seen that a lot with marketing, like scale it up, get them too many leads. They they can't deliver more. Right. And so it's more of a business planning, business strategy of like, OK, we're going

to take this business to this place in the next two years. What are all the things we're going to need? And then how does sales interject, impact that in that way? So I think that that's a great place to kind of transition. I want to spend like the last 10 minutes here talking specifically about sales and marketing. So most of the people listening here are very, very strong on the sales side. Maybe it's e-commerce, maybe it's web development. You know, we want this website to sell. Right. And it and you can add email automation, marketing automation. You can add SEO, you can add paid ads. You're driving everything to to a website to convert. And that's why e-commerce, you can track everything. It's it. You know, it it makes a lot of sense. But there's a lot of businesses that leverage digital marketing to sell a service or B2B or account based selling or some of these type of things where you do need the sales function. It's not all marketing. Now, I personally believe if you understand sales, marketing is just the sales conversation online. Right. And the better you can get at that, the further you can get people down the funnel. But there's absolutely different touch points that people have to convert. Right. And if you look at the conversion funnels of a lot of clients, I mean, they're going back to the website, I don't know, 30 times sometimes. Right. They're going offline. They're looking at social media. There's something called dark social. You don't see what's happening. People sharing emails, people doing all kinds of stuff like you don't know what that that touch point is. Customer journey offline. Offline does. But adding sales to it changes it. Maybe if you think of it as a 2D marketing, let's just use that analogy to 3D with that that sales interaction, that human interaction, getting involved in that. And I think that it opens up a lot of different possibilities. Right. And so I wanted to go through with you just

kind of top of mind. It doesn't have to. I mean, I'm just going to turn it over to you. But I want to hear from you all the ways of how you see marketing and sales fitting together, maybe even give some examples of that. And then and then after that, in about 10 minutes, I really want you to talk a little bit more about your business and how people can get in touch with you. Because, again, this conversation, I think, is super valuable. I think our last podcast, the marketing and sales podcast on OGN, super valuable. But but I think that you can only glean so much right from the podcast. You need to talk to somebody at some point to to really understand your specific situation. Now, we are starting on OGN and I am starting with EWR, a small business coaching program, because people might not be ready to hire a full on salesperson. Right. Or they might not be ready to read a few books, watch a few podcasts, and they're ready to do it on their own. They might but they might want a little bit more facilitation. They might want a little bit more coaching, counseling, consulting. And so that's where I think that that next piece can handle it. But also a lot of people want that that personal one on one attention. And I think that you do a great job of of looking at that situation holistically from that engineering mindset and really kind of figure it out so people don't miss that. But I want before we get into that, I want to I want to just like because not a lot of people we don't talk at least on this podcast or maybe listen to other ones that don't talk about sales and marketing, how interconnected they are. And I just want to hear you talk about that for a few minutes. All right. So I'll take an example. I won't name names because of confidentiality for clients. But I was recruited about, you know,

on outsourcing or fractional with a with a large company could be a very small company. The problem is remains the same. And when I did the evaluation of the of the process, the company, we are looking for two things, you know, selling more to the existing clients and to to add new clients. Well, we I discovered during the discovery calls that there was not a lot of branding, but even soft branding was not done properly. So two things we did almost immediately because they were looking at additional sales is that we focused on the fastest route, which is very much, you know, put people back on the on the treadmill and doing the right task at the right moment and, you know, measuring the progress. But in parallel, almost immediately, we recruited an external sales marketing companies to help us, in fact, to repositioning this very specific business. So we created logo messaging. And in parallel, the inside sales team of that customers were conveying a survey from clients to with very specific questions where nothing was was was was hidden. You know, it was when it was good. It was good when it was bad. It was bad to allow us, in fact, to fix it. Of course, when you do a survey and you ask difficult questions, you have to follow through with with solutions. Once this was done, we we we very much with the marketing agency, in fact, when we modified a little bit our message on the positives, what what makes us strong in the survey, we were asking how strong our competitors are and why this is important for our customers. So suddenly we had this piece of information as well. So we started to, in fact, rebuilding the brand. We rebuilded the messages to that goes on the inside sales, the outside sales team. We started to go at different trade shows and either participating or walking. And this is this is this is happening as we speak now. And obviously we wanted to have that customer's brands

to be very, very visible for the strengths and the uniqueness that were completely hidden. No one, their clients knew why they were buying products from this company, but the prospect didn't know. And no one was talking really about those strengths. And that was a big mistake. And this is when marketing comes in to make sure that we market very much those strengths. What makes us different than our competitors and and and also start to instead of having us to say how good we are, it was that to have our customers to tell us or to tell the world what we're there or what is their customer's journey from the beginning to the end. And that works much, much, much better than anyone else trying to put. Into a sentence, and this is working, so we are we have been growing sales, in fact, on the sales at repeat customers. We grew market share. We did the account management part of it and marketing is in progress as we speak now. And but we will be marketing what not what we believe was good for our customers is we're going to be marketing what is the customers are telling us. There's a much better chance that if all the customers similar to our current customers will be listening and will be resonating and pay a little bit more attention to how, you know, I have a similar issues. What are they doing? Why don't I engage with them? And obviously, on the sales side, we are reaching out to them. That's an example. No, I would tell you, I've seen that trend of kind of CROs where there's one person in charge of revenue, right, for a company where we're really sales should inform marketing. And I think marketing is hungry for understanding sales if those two functions are not interacting because, you know, things that are working in one market may work in another market. And so bringing those in to the marketing department of what a lot of people use on the sales side,

I call it like the homemade materials, right, like maybe not company approved materials. And it's not that they couldn't get approved. It's that they've just kind of done what they do that works and they haven't shared it. But a lot of times bringing it into the marketing function and then and then really marketing as a function of amplifying what a salesperson is doing in the field. And like you said, like sales has to inform, is that messaging right on the soft side of things? Because they're they're kind of like air cover for the boots on the ground, right? And the boots on the ground know what the issues are and what the environment is. And that's why marketing and sales should should should be working together. I would say, you know, if you're a salesperson, you need to bring your marketing person along. They need to understand what's happening in the field. And and combining those two functions, I think, is is absolutely the the right way to go. And I would go even further. Why don't the marketing people, you know, personal come along with, you know, with sales guys to do sales goals? Absolutely. To understand, to have the ability first and to see what the customers are, needs are, you know, and be able to understand the way that they are sensible to receive messages, where they are, what are their habits? Are they reading specifically literatures where you should be? In fact, you know, you should be advertising it. Are they part of a group that you should be walking through that group? You know, the OGGN, for example, if you are selling to or from the old patch, you really do want to go to those events because you're going to be meeting the right people. It's so it goes beyond, in fact, the traditional transactions is to meet the people would be understanding, in fact, what you do more clearly and what problems you are solving, how you do this and eventually ask, you know, this is a conversation.

Who are your clients? And there's a good chance it will resonate with them as well. So, you know, what I've seen with SEO's company, and I could get, you know, black eye doing this or just saying this, is that. When you try to sell your service, you have to, it's like in everything in sales, you have to be sure that you listen carefully to your clients, what they exactly need, when they need it for a very specific purpose. It's if you try to push it, push, push, push, push, push. And suddenly those companies, sometimes for a website, it is going to cost, you know, a five figure. It could go to six figures or more. Before committing to six figures or more, they need to trust you. They need to see the value of what you are bringing. What I've seen is not only with SEO's guys as well, it's also with others, is that you try to go after the whole elephant and you still have not tested, you know, the one of the leg and the customers will not be committing big dollars without trusting you. And this is a journey and that's part of your strategy journey to have your pipeline to have customers, which are different pieces in your journey to be able to get this six figures or seven figures large contract and build up your brand. So, you know, that's maybe my black eye. Yeah, no, absolutely. No, I think we've created some great content. I really like the conversation. I think we should continue. And I think we could we've opened up a few things that we could go down some more trails, rabbit holes, if you will. I think you could be a great guest in the mastermind program that we're developing. We definitely have to have you on again. Michelle, how do people get in touch with you right now if they really like what they hear and they want to continue the conversation with you directly? Yeah, so, you know, the best way to to

reach out to me is LinkedIn. I'm you know, I pay very much attention on LinkedIn. And so that's the best way to reach out to me. Well, fantastic. I will put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And thank you again for your time and sharing some of your wisdom. Thank you for the discussion, Matt. This is exciting. You know, I like those discussions because they are very valuable. And, you know, COVID made it such a way that sales started to disappear. Marketing taking over. And it shouldn't be that way. It should be both. You know, it should be both together to go and market the product because that's what you want. You don't want to market the product. You want the revenue from the market of the product. And that's where sales comes in. I like absolutely. Well, until the next time, everyone, continue to go on this journey with me and grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.