[006] Scaling Your Brand Awareness, with Kenneth "Shark" Kinney

Ep5-Kenneth Kinney

[00:00:00] Jason: [00:00:00] Kenneth. Welcome to the scalable call center sales podcast.

[00:00:05] Kenneth: [00:00:05] Thank you, Jason, I’ve been waiting for this moment. Probably most of my life. I knew when I got out of college prognostication, I was thinking I’ve got to get to the scalable call center podcast, someday, whatever.

[00:00:16] Jason: [00:00:16] Yeah that’s pretty impressive considering that nobody knew it existed until recently, but I’m sure he just had that feeling.

[00:00:21]I’ve got to do this thing and it’s there. So I think what’s fascinating before we dive into this is that as of when we’re recording this, we actually met about a month and a half ago at a conference for lead generation world that our friend Michael fray put on. And I say this because I think it’s always fun.

[00:00:44] Online relationships that start to grow and develop, and then you meet people in the real world and face to face. And then how that develops. I just think that’s fine. And I appreciate meeting you and where this is and you being here.

[00:00:57]Kenneth: [00:00:57] Yeah. Especially at that event where some of the few people that were networking.

[00:01:03] Closely together and not just having our jaws hanging open at the bottom of the floor that we were at an event in person getting out after, as the pandemic started to wear off. Thank you.

[00:01:15] Jason: [00:01:15] Yeah. And yeah, it was definitely a good event. Good to see everybody in person. And yeah. And I’m super excited.

[00:01:21] You’re here. As I mentioned in the intro, you are all about marketing agency work branding, lead generation. Obviously I know you through lead generation channels, you have an amazing podcast. That’s focused on marketing and where I want to go with this today. And the value that I think. You have to share.

[00:01:40] We’ll just see what comes up, everyone that knows me, knows that it’s just going to, it’s going to go where it’s going to go. Is that pinnacle point between marketing and sales and where both can be successful? Obviously there’s the constant siloing of sales versus marketing. It’s usually sales versus everybody, if we’re just honest.

[00:01:59]But it’s, sales versus marketing. And where do you see both the biggest challenges? From the marketing side with sales. And then also what can sales do? Be better at working with marketing or what marketing is giving them?

[00:02:13] Kenneth: [00:02:13] Yeah. This could be like another 12 hours. We could discuss this.

[00:02:16] Never come up. So the biggest problem that both sides have is that they live in these silos. And unfortunately not nearly enough marketers and sales and customer service really have a common goal. At most you’ll hear sometimes a CEO talk about having that north star, but the goals that support that north star aren’t necessarily the same, granted your goals.

[00:02:41] Aren’t going to be exactly the same for marketing versus sales. There’s different functionalities. Really approaching how you approach the customer and having that focus on it is dramatically different within each of the different walls that we serve inside of a brand. And again, I’m on the agency side now, but it was just two years ago.

[00:03:00] It was on the brand side for, billion dollar brand. And so saw this over and over again. And then the ones that I’ve worked with my entire career, it’s almost a common cause. Problem across the board is that they don’t support the same goals. And it becomes a lot of fighting for territory.

[00:03:17] It’s a, it’s almost like you’re fighting for, it’s almost political well cloud or budget or whichever way you want to see it. There’s always different pursuits. But they don’t always align, trying to get to the same goal, but if they did have the same goal, maybe some of the missteps could be overcome, but again, there’s so much inefficiency created.

[00:03:37]And your customer doesn’t care. Your customer doesn’t care about any of those silos and it creates these massive problems that don’t fix the problems they need.

[00:03:47] Jason: [00:03:47] So you mentioned it, which is a fascinating way to put it, not just the KPIs, the metrics, but the goals. What are the common goals for marketing?

[00:03:58] What is their goal?

[00:03:59] Kenneth: [00:03:59] So let’s dive in a little bit further since you brought up lead gen a typical lead. For example, if you asked. If you said you had the Glengarry leads. Okay. That would be a totally different thing to a call center manager to a salesperson or a marketing person, the quality of leads and we’re in the quantity as well.

[00:04:24] But the quality of leads could be a much different illustrated picture depending on who you ask. And they should be pretty aligned with the same. Unfortunately though, a lot of marketing people, especially digital marketing, we think of getting, we killed it for our client. If you over-deliver for a client that doesn’t necessarily mean sending them a thousand leads and they don’t convert well, the call center manager may think your leads are completely junk.

[00:04:52] But you’re not connected to the customer. Who’s on the phone. The call center manager is you’re simply setting up something that they click on through Google or Facebook, for example. And you may over-deliver, but if it’s not converting, there are ton of people in marketing and advertising that still don’t understand that those leads can become a real problem for the people that are servicing them and trying to convert those into customers.

[00:05:16] And then the salesperson who may be servicing in this example. On the backend once they’re, once they become a customer may see it completely different from the customer service team. So again, all of these people with good intentions are trying to answer somewhat the same problem, which is the servicing their own brand, but to the customer, and I’m trying to concentrate.

[00:05:41] Cause my dog keeps snoring. I’m sitting over here doing this recording, just hoping that it doesn’t come through on a directional mic. Those goals can get a little misaligned along the process, but to your customer, they don’t care. They don’t care about any of the sausage making process. And that’s for companies to work out internally.

[00:06:00] And usually the better company that provides the better service and better experience and understands that will deliver convert, service, more customers, and keep them longer.

[00:06:11] Jason: [00:06:11] I love that. And what’s interesting for me throughout my career. Organizations running call centers. I was always in charge of sales and marketing, VP of sales and marketing.

[00:06:24] Several times I was in charge of VPs in charge of sales, marketing, and operations. So basically everybody in the whole chain, because my philosophy is like what you said, which is it’s one customer. They don’t care. So it’s one customer, whether it’s marketing sales, customer service processing. It doesn’t matter.

[00:06:44] It’s one company and it’s one customer and to break down those silos. So what can a, let’s say owner or sales leader do to help facilitate those conversations for breaking down this perpetual silo that just keeps happening

[00:07:01] Kenneth: [00:07:01] well, and I’m going to go back to what you just said also. It’s almost.

[00:07:05] That happens all the time, the roles that you were in, it’s almost always being driven by sales, that role, very rarely do you hear of somebody progressing into that role? Even the CGO growth that we’re seeing coming out of CMOs, not a lot of CMOs are automatically being promoted into CGO roles.

[00:07:25] For example, it’s salespeople being pulled into CGO roles, and that is also a concern. Not every salesperson is the greatest marketer in the world, as you well know. And they. Necessarily understand the customer as well as the call center manager who may be on the phone directly with that person. But to get to, to go back to your question and please repeat your question.

[00:07:47] Cause I had to tell you that, that story

[00:07:49]Jason: [00:07:49] And I agree like sticking with that point, the key is. If that sales person moves up, they’re used to seeing the world in one way, and it’s really rare. I’ve met some, but it’s really rare to meet a person and who started out in sales move their way up into leadership.

[00:08:06] Get into positions you’re talking about or CRO chief revenue officer type role, where they’re viewing everything and not still be bias. To picking the favorite kid, which is sales out of everybody.

[00:08:19]Kenneth: [00:08:19] And so now in your question popped back up, cause I yelled squirrel and the squirrel left. So the way to help break down, some of that is, and this may sound overly simplistic, but the closer that each of them get to the customer and then understanding each other’s roles, we’ll do a lot.

[00:08:37] And here’s the problem. A lot of times marketing teams are. Closely aligned to the customer. They may see data. They may use some of the most amazing technologies. They may use all the super cool social listening tools and have a conversation with them on social. That’s not a real conversation with somebody, especially in the B2B world for fixing anybody’s problems.

[00:09:00]The good tools that you can use in digital marketing might be. As an actual conversation, I know we were talking prior to what with drips, those kinds of conversational technologies are great. And as well, we’re also talking about Invoca and Vocus tools where you’re listening to actual calls for a lot of marketers that’s as close as they unfortunately ever get to an actual customer.

[00:09:21]

[00:09:21]Jason: [00:09:21] And that would be great if they did that. It’s the same reason why when I’ve run sales teams, I have them spend time in account management, customer service or retention usually early on, which is why don’t you go listen and handle some calls about people who want to cancel, and that will make you a better salesperson, cause you’ll go, oh wait.

[00:09:41] That’s what people care about. I should sell them and explain things different because it gets real. And I think that same thing with marketers, the more, like you said, closer to the customer and the longterm relationship with the customer service side and, account managers. If they’re listening to that, then they can speak a better conversation.

[00:10:01] Kenneth: [00:10:01] Yeah. And without too much detail, the sales team needs to learn more trust, more in marketing, understand what they’re going through. The same thing has to happen with customer service. It’s not, this is not meant to poopoo on marketing by any stretch of the imagination, but one of the things I’ll often do at digital marketing conversations.

[00:10:20] And I think it’s more of a slide for my own peace of mind, but I remember working at a brand and walking around and I didn’t have any pictures at my cube. But everybody else had pictures of their trips, their selfies, pictures of themselves and their friends. And they were all great, but it sparked a thought for me at one of the conferences where I spoke.

[00:10:42] And I had walked down the aisle at a store and where the picture frames were and I took a picture. And I put it on the PowerPoint and I said, what marketers need to do is buy one of these frames, send me the bill, I’ll pay for it. It was in the Walmart aisle. So this was like $5 frames. I said, take a picture of one of your customers and open.

[00:11:03] We’re not making it, creepy or Buffalo bill or anything, but. Take a picture, take a pee, get to know one of your customers, speak to one, really focus on them and their needs and how you’re servicing them. And that wasn’t a knock against people taking selfies. It just that so often we see.

[00:11:23] Customers as a customer number and brands have this problem, whether you’re in billing, whether you’re in customer service, whether you’re in an email thread, that’s basically set up through an automated drip campaign that a marketer set up. Salespeople tend to know them a little bit closer if they’re tied more closely, but for the most part, what brands are more focused on is looking at that customer ID.

[00:11:48] That unique number with some letters in it, then whether or not their name is Jason cutter and here’s how they had service. I remember one of the brands that I actually fired as a service, and I was particularly interested to see how their marketing campaigns went to pursue me later. It’s one of the stories I’ve got in my book coming out, is that a fired, the service had been doing business with for years, they did a bad job.

[00:12:15] We yelled with each other and on the customer service agent on the other end I beat him up a little bit. And then I said, look, you guys want me back? You got to win my business back. I’ve been with them for years, gave them thousands of dollars. They didn’t call me over a year. What they basically did is they set me up to start getting emails.

[00:12:36] And over a year I got over 500 emails from them and it was one a day minimum. Most days it was two, or there were a few that were three or four, depending on how bad it was. They, I only got three pieces of direct mail and they were all, here’s $125 off come back to us or something like that. Most of the emails would come through and they’d say here’s $125 off.

[00:13:04] This offer expires by midnight. On Friday night, Saturday morning, I’d get an email with $150 off. It was something better. So it was just junk over and over again. And then about every hundred emails, I would get an email that said we were good together. Let’s give it another shot. And I thought about, if you got in an argument with a friend or with your spouse or your child or your parents, would you set them up on this kind of, automated drip campaign?

[00:13:34] And this is how you’re going to try to repair relationships is through crappy retargeting methods, especially with email and a few direct mail pieces. No, they could have picked up the phone one time and call, but that’s one of the problems that we’ve created this weird distance. Through odd technologies and they probably could have earned my business back, but obviously I switched.

[00:13:58] I honestly, I enjoyed the show and never unsubscribed because I, it turned out to be a good chapter in the book. But at the same time, this is part of the problem where we’re getting we’re taking everything we think works with all these wonderful technologies, but we’re not applying it. To where it can really benefit you or me or at a basic level.

[00:14:21] Jason: [00:14:21] Yeah. And I think with that story, one part that resonates with me other than. Being on that same side as you with that followup campaign, except in personal life, not in professional life. So I’ve been there and it doesn’t, it also doesn’t work. But it’s the fact that so many organizations and this, you can see this in the culture of the company that you didn’t work with anymore.

[00:14:44] As as a client of theirs is that they it’s a numbers game, right? It’s let me put somebody in a sequence and let me just use technology. To run this process and then numbers wise if I get a conversion and if we scale that, and then I get some more funding, then I can buy more of this and then I can just hit more of the world and hopefully someone will do it instead of.

[00:15:07]More, more unscalable things that are also more relational depending on your business model. But again, to me, that’s a corporate culture indicator, right? Like when a company has no phone number on their website, because they really just don’t want to talk to anybody over the phone. They want people to just sign up.

[00:15:26] Via a form.

[00:15:27]Kenneth: [00:15:27] Probably to give you a better example, that’s not too heavy customer experience wise, but I’ve used in focus technology in particular to think about this because I’ve seen it happen over and over again with leads is we will create ad campaigns. That start where obviously nobody that’s creating the campaigns or setting them up in Google or Microsoft or Facebook or whoever it is.

[00:15:52]They’re not going to know exactly who that customer is. They’re going to know who the ID is or sorry, they’re going to know. The target persona that they’re going after and they’re driving that. But what happens a lot of times too, as well, is that they put just to give you an example, they put on you can get, if you sign up today and click through here and fill out the form, you can get this for 29 95.

[00:16:19] Yep. So they click through, they go through the entire process, they fill out a form and then if it’s a complex sale, they get to a customer service agent who follows up with them. And then it turns out it’s not 29 95. It was 39 95, or it’s 50% off. And it’s something that costs you $50, not 30. This happens all the time.

[00:16:44] And I’m telling you having used these call intelligence platforms now for years and seeing this with large brand name clients that would shock you how much money they spend in often waste when they don’t analyze this, is that the. Customer first sees, ABC 1, 2, 3, and by the time it gets to the call center person, it basically becomes rubber baby buggy bumper and they are confused.

[00:17:09] And when you confuse customers by not aligning your strategies correctly from sales to call center to marketing digital marketing in particular, it can really cause confusion for in that journey that will hurt your. Sales process throughout, and it drives customers away nonstop. And especially in the era that we’re in now, where more people are switching to new brands.

[00:17:36] And I hear all the wonderful stuff about creating super fans all day long, but to the general public, if you upset them in the process, Unless you were the only company named apple making iPhones, right? There’s a pretty good chance. They’re going to change to another brand. I have a, I have an amazing TV made by a well-known manufacturer that I absolutely love if they screwed up the process.

[00:18:03] I wouldn’t, it wouldn’t take me two seconds to go buy some other brand that I find on Amazon or best buy. And that happens across the board with people today, especially in the digital world, because we work on building up some of that brand loyalty. But when you confuse this process and don’t enable your teams to work more closely together, it really drives a lot of conversions.

[00:18:26] Jason: [00:18:26] Hey, it’s Jason here. We’ll be right back to the podcast in a moment, but first, are you ready to help your inside sales team close more deals? In my experience, there’s a certain percentage of your team that acts more like order takers than sales professionals. The first step to creating a scalable sales team is to equip your reps with the right mind.

[00:18:43] And proven strategies to transform them into quota breakers, to build a team of authentic persuaders that will crush their goals. Email [email protected] or go to www.cutterconsultinggroup.com. I love that you brought that up because that conversation that the customer is having potential customer, current and future customer is having with your brand, with your company, with your organization. They’re having that conversation in their head based on everything that’s happening from the first exposure to the brand, to your marketing, even if you’re buying leads, right? Because we met in person at lead generation world, which is about performance-based marketing.

[00:19:25] And so that’s more about people who are generating leads. That they’re then handing over selling to other companies. So you might not even be in charge of that, but that first experience is starting a conversation in their head. And if that’s different than what your salespeople are saying, Then that’s a big red flag.

[00:19:43] And then if they become customers and what sales said is different than what’s true about your product or service, then you have retention problems and a reputation problem. And it’s about that whole thing being continuous.

[00:19:57]Kenneth: [00:19:57] That’s just as important with affiliates too, because so much more what we’re driving now as affiliates and just putting your logo on something.

[00:20:07] Or some brand similar looking logo off in the distance isn’t going to necessarily help that thread get pulled through.

[00:20:14] Jason: [00:20:14] No and I think this goes back to what we first started about, which is these silos, where everybody is focused on their own goals, their own metrics, what they think is success for themselves.

[00:20:25] And so they’re trying to tell the best story possible to win at the game that they’re being given. So you think of marketing, here’s your goals? Marketing create this many leads. Okay, cool. I can do that. I just got to figure out what story to tell that may or may not be accurate, but I just got to figure out what story to tell until somebody tells me different.

[00:20:43] And most people default to whatever’s going to help them win a game. If there’s not enough parameters, where do you see things like technology reporting, transparency, helping with. That communication with breaking down silos in let’s say just sales and marketing.

[00:21:01]Kenneth: [00:21:01] So the most important thing. From from technology standpoint is that I wish that more people would get to our shared and common dashboards.

[00:21:12] You can build up amazing things in Tableau or any other, tool that helps report something in a pretty way. But if people that’s one easy way to align people on goals, they can March forward in their department and they’re a way to drive towards that piece of it. But when. When everybody knows, this is what we’re working on, this is what we’re supporting, and this is our dashboard.

[00:21:36] As opposed to my department’s dashboard, it can make a massive difference. And there’s very little transparency in a lot of, especially larger corporations that have amazing elaborate dashboards that I’ve seen over and over. But when they’re partitioned or driven off, or you don’t understand. Why your department’s dashboard looks like this and their metrics look like something totally different.

[00:21:58] That’s a real problem. Second of all, another thing I think that will help eliminate more of this is this is a marketing thing in particular, but it applies to both sales and call center. Attribution, the more that people understand where your lead came from, the more transparency through the journey, the more, less reliant on it.

[00:22:22] It was converted last on Google so that we just got to give all of our money to Google. That’s not the path that you or I, or any normal human take is just see one ad, one place somewhere. And that’s it. Google’s a fantastic tool. They search engine that they created the world’s greatest attribution tool.

[00:22:40] If you will with, their analytics. But that, but they’re one channel and social, for example, places so much more importance in today’s journey than it did. Even five years ago, TV still plays an, a massively important. Part of our existence, whether we call it digital video or anything else, but really understanding how to connect all those pieces together and understanding where to connect the dots is not easy because we’ve been reliant on some bad attribution models for years.

[00:23:13] And so having a, an understanding I’m going to even use sort of the, I’ll take the Y find your why the Senate version of that, but find, find your understanding your customer journey. Can make a real difference and understand what path your customers have Contra. And again, this is not easy.

[00:23:31] It’s why I work for an amazing company that has a patented attribution technology. Just being able to look at that journey helps you understand where customers go through a threat. And unfortunately, too many departments think they’re the especially sales. I know when I was a sales person, I was a lot more arrogant and thought that the customer started and stopped with me.

[00:23:52]And then when I was in marketing, it was the same way we all do. It’s, we’re all but understanding that the customer, again, give a damn about sales or marketing or any of those walled gardens you’ve got internally, or, or on any actual wall garden with an advertising platform, you’ve only.

[00:24:09] It doesn’t matter to them and they’re not taking the time to, to worry about which department you’re in or somebody else’s in, they’re buying your product or service. And if it doesn’t fulfill their needs or moving on.

[00:24:20] Jason: [00:24:20] So it’s fascinating. You talk about attribution, which I don’t discuss it. Very often, but it’s very, it’s a great reminder because I see it and I deal with it all the time with my clients and when I was in organizations, but it doesn’t come up a lot in these kinds of conversations, which is that attribution is so difficult.

[00:24:41] And in my experience is it will always lead to hurt feelings in marketing because marketing. Wants credit for it or wants to know what they did that caused this deal to move forward and close. But as things have gotten more interconnected and interlaced with, like you said, there’s social, there’s email, there’s video there’s commercials.

[00:25:05]Especially if we’re talking longer sales cycle, you, even, if you bought a lead, somebody, you bought somebody filling out a form. Now you’re calling. If they don’t close in that one phone call, which very few Sarah sales cycles do. If they don’t buy in that one moment, and then you’re doing a follow-up campaign or retargeting or any social media, then how do you say okay, they bought a week later.

[00:25:29] Is it because I called them right. Or is it because they saw us on social media and they said, Hey, I really liked this. And now I’m ready. Or was it the email or was it nothing at all? And unfortunately, salespeople, and this is for managers out there it’s is really important to understand salespeople don’t care who gets the credit for why it closed other than them.

[00:25:48]And it’s just being fair. That means marketing is missing that feedback to go, where should we spend our money? And am I winning? Because otherwise it looks like nothing is happening and somebody is going to get mad at somebody.

[00:26:01]Kenneth: [00:26:01] I brought up the example earlier where, an advertisement started with ABC 1, 2, 3, or whatever I called it.

[00:26:08] And then it got to the call center. So if the call center didn’t convert. Whose fault is it the marketing team that pulled together the bad ad or the call center person who didn’t convert them. And, you’re probably gonna, that’s where you get in the fight of which one are the quality leads.

[00:26:23] And so often there’s a lack of knowledge of understanding what actually started and stopped. And that doesn’t mean that the call center person needs to sit with your ad copy. Or tell Google’s engine, heres how we want to here’s the verbiage we want to put on creating your ads, but it does require at least that you have these kinds of conversations and a sort of empathy.

[00:26:44] If you will, between teams to at least set up the conversation. And then another focus, at least with attribution, that’s really more on the. Larger advertising and marketing ecosystem is that if you think about models in general and what most companies you use as modeled attribution, and some of it has to be modeled across the board.

[00:27:06] Not everything can be actualized because you’re not going to recognize, a billboard, for example, in us, it has certain unique qualifiers, but it fits into your on 50 different channels. You got to figure out the best way to navigate the noise so that you can put more money to it. But if you think of 2019 data versus 2020 data, I wasn’t predicting a pandemic in 2019, but my budget, if I’m CFO, I got to pivot my dollar substantially to know that we’re spending a lot more time on digital than we were out of home.

[00:27:38]And now in 2021, My model data isn’t worth, or my historical data for 2020 or 2019 isn’t worth anything. So the models are broken. The more real-time you look at what created that trigger, not just your internal company dynamics, but how you focus on a, I watched a TV ad the TV ad made me pick up my phone and convert, on an e-commerce page.

[00:28:08] So who gets them? Is it? No, because you’re going to recognize it in GA and Google analytics as it was a digital. Because that’s where I searched and converted. I didn’t touch a screen on my TV. So it becomes a problem over all the time with ad platforms, not recognizing that, that journey, which takes a lot more than seven touch points.

[00:28:33] That was what we used to say. But you’re talking about, hundreds of touch touchpoints, if not thousands, depending on how many ads we’re bombarded with all the time, recognizing those touch points and understanding what I saw on social media. Maybe interested for example. And then I saw a TV ad and then I picked up my phone and I can, I pulled it up on the search engine and I converted.

[00:28:59] So all three of those are Walgreens. Yeah, you’ve got Facebook and social media competing for dollars, Google competing for dollars and Microsoft competing for dollars. And then you’ve got TV. Even whether it’s digital or not, you may have, dish or Comcast or whoever it is fighting for dollars as well.

[00:29:18] Hulu, any of them. That is a much different understanding of where your leads started and came through when pulling them through that journey, let alone whether or not you figure out that the ad copy that the marketer wrote, do something wrong in their ads. And then it gets to the call center and who gets blamed.

[00:29:40] So again, this is a little broad, but really focusing on connecting the dots. Other than just the spray and pray mentality, which has worked for a lot of people can drive much better conversions, the better call center teams. That’s where they’re killing is not because they have the, always the nicer more well-trained agents.

[00:30:01] That’s extremely important, but that’s the kind of team that focuses on connecting the dots between sales marketing and your customer service or call center rather can really drive a much better lift. It makes a better experience for the couple.

[00:30:15] Jason: [00:30:15] Yeah and I think one of the biggest things I’ve seen speaking to the call center sales owners, especially the owners out there who are listening to this is to also automate and make as much of that automatic for the attribution to put together those stats and not rely on a person.

[00:30:35] So most of the time, the default, especially in a CRM is the sales person is putting in the lead source or tracking some things or whatever. And of course you’re relying on a human and relying on any human to do anything day in and day out perfectly is just never going to work. It just, people are people, we’re all people.

[00:30:53] And so that can really mess up the data. So the more you can have. Automatic where it’s giving the attribution, giving credit along the way and building that story for marketing so they can replicate it. I think always helps. So you’ve spent a lot of time on the brand side. Now in the agency side, obviously you’re dealing with the marketing end of the businesses and seeing things post marketing.

[00:31:17] Where do you see? Because this is a call center sales show. Where do you see the near future of call center sales? Going, especially omni-channel with everything going on in their strategies, whatever comes to mind, where do you. Thank going in the near future.

[00:31:33] Kenneth: [00:31:33] Yeah. Yeah. And I have worked closely with call centers as well and have been a call center agent for a brief period of my life as well.

[00:31:42] But I escaped cause I think they have a tremendously tough job. I am excited about more of the technologies being able to, for example, we’ll listen to call center conversations, creating. Out of those conversations, creating better optimizations, leveraging those kinds of technologies to drive better performance on ad performance.

[00:32:09] For example, like Invoca, and I’m not in a sales pitch for them, but there are other competitors out there. But being able to take something like that. To listen to a call center agent and then take it and apply it towards a Facebook ad or a Microsoft or Google ad is something we’ve been getting better and better about over the last few years.

[00:32:31] And that’s worth its weight in gold. I am excited as well about where these conversations come up, especially with text messaging, why, which is why I’m a big, conversational text messaging, which is why I’m a big fan of drips. But I do think that the most. E-commerce evolves into more complex capabilities and we’re still light years away from replacing that conversation you can have with a salesperson.

[00:32:59] You can’t, there’s a lot of things about life insurance, for example. Or solar panels for your home that is just not going to work with an automated bot. And we’re 10 years away from that. I don’t care what anybody says 10 years ago. They said we’d be done and we’re not, but the technology is getting better and better.

[00:33:19] So the biggest thing that I think people will need to really do to succeed is be able to start. As I mentioned before, connecting understanding how to connect the dots between the three groups call center sales and. Marketing we’ve gotten over the last say five years to co-dependent on platforms and channels.

[00:33:43] And I don’t get excited by anybody ever telling me here’s 12 tips to make your Facebook campaign grow by 38% next year, because that’s what we did last year. None of that means anything because if it doesn’t again, If you’re not looking at a lead that came through all of your channels and understanding where did it, what did it say correctly or incorrectly?

[00:34:05] Where did it convert with what type of graphic, how did it get to the call center and interact with them? And why did it not? You can’t blame a group and you can’t praise a channel. And that’s where we’re really going to have to start spending a lot more time on it.

[00:34:23] Jason: [00:34:23] And I think it’s great. You mentioned the tools, the technology the call, Lennox, the call, listening to feedback, the more AI driven texts, those kinds of tools.

[00:34:36]I think that’s good. I think it’s important for call center owners out there listening. I think that’s important to have a balance of the tools. And then also the conversations, because as long as you have something that requires one human, your potential customer to get help or advisement or guidance or wisdom from another human, which would be your sales team, then as long as that’s still the case for some population, there’ll always be people who are like, yeah, I can order solar panels online and I’ll install them myself.

[00:35:05] Okay, cool. That’s not the customer that needs to talk to you on the phone. Give them the. They can do that. Absolutely. But otherwise they need to talk to somebody. And to me, I see the success being when you have those technology, those tools that are facilitating the conversation, supporting the conversation and setting it up, not replacing the heavy lifting for the conversation.

[00:35:29] Because when you try to abdicate it to okay, SMS platform is going to sell for me because my sales team socks. And I know that they’re not so good. So let me see if I can have other things, do it for them, or have this call listening platform. Just tell me what’s wrong. And hopefully just fixes it for me, like babysitting my kids so that I don’t have to raise them.

[00:35:48] I’m like that doesn’t work. So there’s always that.

[00:35:51] Kenneth: [00:35:51] Yeah, those, and again, these are just two examples of response technologies. I think one of them is an inbound. One of them’s an outbound that we mentioned. I think we got to the point where we got a little bit lazy with sort of a Salesforce mentality and we felt we could just push everything out.

[00:36:07] This is not picking on Salesforce by any stretch, but we just felt like we could just spray and pray. And then what they could show in Salesforce would fix a lot of it. And that’s, that hasn’t really turned out to be what we thought. And and again, one other thing that I want to bring up the better trained that each of the people are, as opposed to just the technologies is going to make a real difference as we go forward.

[00:36:31] I think in particular marketers, and this is my bias because I’ve carried a bag in sales before I do think more marketers need to be. More performance-based. And I’m all for creating heartfelt moments and the, all the fluffy stuff that goes with all that marketing. It’s extremely important. I don’t mean to be dismissive of it, but you’ve also got to have a little bit of a killer mentality as a, hate to call sharks killers especially somebody that’s nickname one, but you’ve really got to lean into if you’re on the marketing side, Your sales aspect, other to me other than where we’ve pushed some of it away.

[00:37:12]And I’m not really certain why it went off into other directions. But you can be a great performance marketer and still create emotional moments that trigger, conversions and sales. We just gotta be better. Got

[00:37:26] Jason: [00:37:26] it. And I think that’s a great place to stop before we wrap up.

[00:37:30] I just want to share with everyone as we’re doing this new podcast, what cutter consulting group does. And I know you’re familiar with it again, having met in person and shared a conference together, but for us, we focus on helping frustrated business owners by creating scalable sales systems, as well as training and coaching around the authentic person.

[00:37:49] Framework to help those quote order takers, go to quota breakers, and you can find out more information at cutterconsultinggroup.com. Kenneth, thanks again for coming on the show. Super excited that we made this happen. I know that you have your website a shark’s perspective. Dot com. So people check out your podcast, which is great.

[00:38:11] Again, like I tell people when I talk about you, I am somewhat jealous because you have the shark branding thing. I do have a degree in Marine biology, but I stopped dealing with shark stuff. So you’ve earned it. You hold that title, you do shark stuff all the time. So I love it. I also know that you’re really big on LinkedIn.

[00:38:28] People can find you at linkedin.com/kenneth Kenny with two ends and two ends. And then you also have AI media group.com. That pretty much cover it, all kinds of great stuff. They can find you everywhere

[00:38:41] Kenneth: [00:38:41] anywhere and everywhere. If they look up Kenneth “Shark,”Kinney and I was just in the Caribbean over the weekend, swimming with sharks.

[00:38:48] They can’t find me in the water. They can find me either at AI media group a shark’s perspective or on LinkedIn.

[00:38:55] Jason: [00:38:55] That’s awesome. Kenneth, thanks again for being on scalable call center sales podcast. I appreciate you. And this conversation, hopefully it was valuable. Thanks.

[00:39:03] Kenneth: [00:39:03] You’re welcome Mahalo.