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S2 Ep22 Navigating the CMO Landscape- Insights from Bryan Smith on Marketing with Heart
46 Plays8 months ago
In this episode of Dial It In, we had the pleasure of hosting Bryan Smith, the founder of Tuned Consulting, a fractional chief marketing officer organization. Bryan shared his journey from corporate marketing to starting his own business, emphasizing the challenges and triumphs of transitioning to entrepreneurship.
We kicked off the conversation with a nostalgic trip down memory lane, reminiscing about the music of the 90s and how it helps us focus during work. This set the stage for a deeper discussion on the importance of simplicity in marketing and the power of humanizing business strategies.
Bryan enlightened us with his approach to marketing, which he describes as "trilingual," adeptly bridging the gaps between sales, marketing, and product management. He highlighted the significance of aligning these teams to enhance customer-centric strategies and shared how his unique perspective helps businesses streamline their go-to-market approaches.
A highlight of the episode was Bryan's recount of a successful campaign from his tenure at Tennant Company, where they celebrated school janitors. This campaign not only generated significant brand engagement but also showcased the impact of community-focused marketing initiatives.
Bryan's insights into overcoming imposter syndrome and the importance of valuing one's work resonated deeply, offering valuable lessons for professionals at any career stage.
For those interested in learning more about Bryan's work or seeking guidance on marketing strategies, he can be found at Tuned Consulting or on LinkedIn.
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Business Growth Strategies
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:24
Speaker
You ever, Dave, just listen to Spotify and then you find an old friend of a song that you haven't heard before in like 20, 25 years, and you're like, oh man, add to cart. Yep, all the time. I just found an old Joe Cocker song that I absolutely adored when I was in college because I was a big Joe Cocker guy in college, which made me seem weird because I went to college in the 90s and why was I the sooner guy in the 60s?
The Role of Simplicity in Marketing
00:00:53
Speaker
It was all about the simple things and it helped me remind myself that in all the grind that we do as marketers, sometimes as much as we want to over-massage a message and over-complicate things, sometimes there's just some simplicity in targeting the right person, finding the right message, and getting the right result.
00:01:17
Speaker
I reached deep into my bag of tricks and actually not only brought out an old old Joe Cocker song from the nineties, but an old friend of mine from the nineties.
Insights from a Fractional CMO
00:01:26
Speaker
My friend Brian, who is now running his own fractional chief marketing officer organization called tune consulting to not only learned about the CMO world, but also about some of his just really classic Brian isms because he's a he's always been the standard bearer for me on.
00:01:47
Speaker
how to do it right and how to do it with heart and how to humanize marketing and actually get great results. So happy to have my friend Brian here today as our guest. Welcome, Brian. Thanks, guys. Great to be here. Trig, I just had a poll from the 90s too on Spotify recently. I rediscovered the KLF.
00:02:05
Speaker
Oh my. Nice. I've been enjoying that a lot. I used to get a lot of guff in the corporate world when I had to really focus. I listened to hardcore EDM and trance music. Yeah. It's the ADHD in me where actually I think the more frantic music helps me focus.
Focus and Productivity Techniques
00:02:25
Speaker
They called my office the Ultra Lounge.
00:02:29
Speaker
because it was always had some sort of thump coming out of it. Perfect. That's so interesting because I'm the same way. If I need to really batten down and focus, I will throw on something loud and then I won't hear.
00:02:42
Speaker
what's going on, but I'll be getting a tremendous amount of work done. And so speaking of the 90s, my wife, the other day I was working later in the evening, my wife came down into my home office and she's like, what are you listening to? And it turned out for some reason I had Whitney Houston's It's Not Right, But It's Okay on repeat. For the last 45 minutes, and I was like, oh, I don't even know.
00:03:04
Speaker
She's like, um, do you want to come upstairs now? Yes, please. Did she start just yelling? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Time to get time for dinner. So anyway, Brian, uh, you have a long and straight history and, uh, and marketing with a lot of really great examples, but you combined a year ago, you decided to go out on your own to become a fractional CMO.
Transition to Independent Work
00:03:27
Speaker
I did, yeah. So I've been doing fractional work as well as kind of project work and things like that. And it's been great and horrifying and exciting and terrifying and all the things all at once. And the further I get away from a corporate gig, the harder it feels like if I ever had to go back, it would be.
00:03:50
Speaker
I've said it, the idea of kind of going back to corporate right now feels a little like the idea of putting a wet bathing suit on. Yeah, totally. Like I could do it, but it's just
00:04:04
Speaker
It's been a real joy. Even when things have been hard, as far as finding business and some of that, what's kept me going is the level of generosity people have and their willingness to help. It's remarkable. The number of people I've met in the last year who literally have been introduced by somebody, we've had a Zoom call and they're just opening their network to me.
00:04:27
Speaker
bending over backwards to help me find business. It's really cool. And so at those times where you feel like you're an imposter, you feel like you're going to fail or all those kinds of things, I kind of keep coming back to this gratitude for just people really want to help people be successful. And it's pretty inspiring.
The Story Behind 'Tune Consulting'
00:04:45
Speaker
So it's been a journey, but it's been a lot of fun.
00:04:49
Speaker
Amazing. Brian, tell me about the name Tuned Consulting and where that came from and how does that tie into your focus? Sure. Well, it's threefold. On a personal level, two big passions of mine are music and cars. Tuned for me applied to both of those things. I do a lot of singing and choral singing. The difference between a good choir and a great choir is very minuscule.
00:05:19
Speaker
And the difference between an okay running car and a great running car is also pretty minuscule. And I think what I found in my career is a difference between an okay marketing program and a great marketing program is also pretty minuscule. And so getting into those ideas of how do we
00:05:37
Speaker
How do we pull the levers? How do we tune the notes? How do we go through in a pretty meticulous way to get things working in kind of a tuned and harmonious way to be the most effective it can be? So that's where the name comes from.
00:05:55
Speaker
I love that. I think because Dave is also a car guy, so we're going to get this out of the way because otherwise, I'm just not going to get anything in for the next half an
Vintage Jaguar Collection
00:06:04
Speaker
hour. Your wife has actually allowed you to have three Jaguars, vintage Jaguars in your house at one time? Yes. Well, one of the rules is they can't all be here at the same time.
00:06:16
Speaker
They have, I have two other places where they live. But yes, I bought one a few years ago, and it's been a great passion. And then I accidentally bought two more.
00:06:29
Speaker
I've been a part of the Minnesota Jaguar Club and I was talking to a guy at an event who just kind of wanted to get out of it and he told me what he had and I offered him a ridiculous amount of money, low amount of money, and he just said,
00:06:47
Speaker
And then I was like, Oh, no, now I have to talk into it. And I bought two cars and a whole garage full of parts for a obscenely low amount of money. So I'm going to flip those two. And they're, they're in process. They're both in pretty rough shape. So I'm for sure.
00:07:04
Speaker
in the process of getting them ready to sell and I'll keep my convertible I've had for a while. It's a labor of love, man. It's good to have three because then you have one running. It's like a puppy. Well, you can't really just get one because they need friends. Right.
Value of Tangible Hobbies
00:07:25
Speaker
Exactly. I think it's important for anyone that's in
00:07:29
Speaker
the kind of space that we're in where we mostly operate out of our heads and in ideas and thoughts to have something tangible. So Brian, you and I have cars to play around with.
00:07:40
Speaker
Trigby does a lot of woodworking and he has just a gorgeous desk table that he made alive. It's like a live interior edge on the table that's filled in with epoxy, right? Yep. So I took a piece of red cedar from a guy who does chainsaw art.
00:07:59
Speaker
And then I cut it down and made a mold that was sort of desk size. And then I filled in the gaps with boat epoxy that I dyed black. I thought it looked really pretty and it really accentuated the wood. So it was this beautiful western red cedar. But I shared it with a friend and he was like, oh my goodness, look, you made a giant slab of bacon.
00:08:25
Speaker
I actually made this desk. This is old bowling alley. Oh, that's cool. Bowling alley is thick though and it's so heavy. It is, yes, both thick and heavy. I bought a big slab of it and took four of us to move it into the garage. Then cut it up for the desk and then I have a matching shelf made out of it and then still have a whole bunch I'm trying to figure out what to do with.
00:08:55
Speaker
Yeah, I actually ended up because it was the finish that they put on is so awful. I ended up renting a floor sander, like a diamond floor sander and put it on the floor and just use the diamond floor sander to get it cleaned up because none of the hand sanders I had would even touch it.
00:09:14
Speaker
No, yeah, you would go through so much sandpaper. Yeah. I actually have a friend who built his own house from scratch. And when I say built his own house, he flew to Belize, cut down an I pay tree, and I pay as kind of like teak, had the tree sent here on a boat, and then soyered it, and then made his own doors and windows out of the tree.
00:09:44
Speaker
Wow. He would give me his remnants. I don't know, they just have windows at Home Depot you can just buy.
00:09:55
Speaker
and stains that will probably... He's one of those people that doesn't watch TV, so he's just barely on the sanity level. And he would give me the stuff and I would try and work with it and it's just so oily that I went through, I think, two hand sanders right away.
00:10:14
Speaker
We've now devolved into three middle-aged guys talking about their hobbies, so maybe we should bring this back to business. Thank God for editing. Brian, what's the hardest part that you've found of starting your own business?
Imposter Syndrome and Pricing Challenges
00:10:29
Speaker
I think fighting the imposter syndrome has been the hardest part. And it's been hard on a number of levels. One, just feeling, who am I to be selling my services to people? I'm not relying on a team anymore in the same way as I am me. And it's very easy to get in my own head of thinking, geez, who do I think I am?
00:10:54
Speaker
But it even continues more of, you know, when you get opportunities, even in pricing, sometimes I start to price out a project. And I, you know, add up all the resources that I think it's going to take and I get a number and then I start second guessing going off. I'm not worth that much money. And, you know, and for some reason, I don't have as much trouble asking for a good salary. But asking for
00:11:19
Speaker
one fifth of that salary for an important project seems to be hard. I've really had to work hard to get out of my head to say, no, this is what I cost. I don't get a lot of pushback on price. My biggest competitor is typically doing nothing, whether they want to move forward or not. But I think that's probably been the hardest part for me, especially when
00:11:47
Speaker
things are a little slower and you're out selling and things aren't happening as fast as you want them to and that voice in your head can get very loud very quickly and really having to lean on the people who love and care about me to remind me that I'm actually pretty good at this and that I do bring a lot of value to my clients, but it's very easy to get down that road really fast when you're in this office all by yourself all day.
00:12:15
Speaker
That's not unique to you though. I think anybody who's really good at marketing or really good at selling can't sell themselves or can't really market themselves because it's so much easier to solve somebody else's problem to turn it inward. That's incredibly difficult.
00:12:36
Speaker
Brian, I think you had the perfect quote in our pre-interview and it was the label. Yeah, it's really hard to read the label when you're in the bottle. Yeah, it is. I broke every rule. I broke every one of my own rules starting off. First, I did not want to position myself. I didn't want to limit. I didn't want to define myself. I was going out to potential clients in the beginning and I'm like, well, I do marketing.
00:13:03
Speaker
Well, what does that mean? I'm no good to anybody. If I'm trying to sell everything to everyone, I'm selling nothing to anybody. It's not helpful. And it took me a good six to eight months to sort of hone down, get comfortable with finding a niche, get comfortable with defining what I'm good at and the problems I solve.
00:13:27
Speaker
It doesn't mean I'm not going to get other work, but yeah, it was really hard to get disciplined about that again because I didn't want to say no to anything. It's been a challenge and I think it's scary when you don't have guaranteed income to think that you might be turning away business in the way that you're marketing yourself. I think it is constructive though, or instructive,
00:13:56
Speaker
when you're working with a client to walk through that path yourself and be thoughtful about it. So you took this recently and you know the job of a fractional marketer is literally to have that conversation and to get people in their head out of their heads and on paper from their customers perspective. So what what where did you point yourself after you
00:14:23
Speaker
reconfigured where you're going, like what is your focus now then?
B2B Marketing Strategies
00:14:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I've always been B2B focused, at least that I started with, but where I've really focused, so the way that I went about it, first of all, is I took a step back and said, what are the parts of my career that I've had the most impact and enjoyed the most? And ideally, I want to do that.
00:14:44
Speaker
What I found was a unique space, a unique place where I've added a lot of value. My career has been the fact that I started in sales, I've worked in marketing throughout my career, and I've also had a number of stints in product management. I can speak all three of those languages. So often within B2B organizations, those three teams are at loggerheads about one thing or another.
00:15:09
Speaker
Usually for no good reason. All the time. All the time, right? And so where I've been the most effective is when I've been able to create go to market strategies that are inclusive of all three of those teams that get those teams bought in early, working together, focused on the customer instead of each other.
00:15:29
Speaker
and have a sense of ownership in this strategy going forward. So often marketing will kick out a marketing plan and sales is like, well, that's adorable. Thanks. I'm going to go back to doing what I was just doing. And product says, that's great, but we have a five year roadmap. So hope your plan meets our roadmap. And it's sort of over.
00:15:48
Speaker
Whereas when you can start at the front end, get those folks working together and understand what does the customer actually need from you? And what story are we going to tell them? And what story do we tell them in marketing? What story do we tell them in the choices we make in our product development? And what story do we tell them when we're sitting across the table from them in the sales meeting has to be consistent and powerful.
00:16:08
Speaker
And if we can do that, that's great. I was kind of workshopping this with a whole lot of people that are also kind of independents trying to get input because I also find I actually have my best meetings often talking to people. So I try to find these sort of kind of pseudo colleagues that I've built a network around that I can go to. And one of them is like, yeah, it's like you're trilingual.
00:16:32
Speaker
I'm like, oh, boom, yeah, trilingual marketing. That is kind of what I'm trying to approach. From a targeting perspective, I've been focusing on professional services and manufacturing, largely because they all have this problem. And professional services, I think the real challenges there are just, I mean, you go to most consulting firm websites, and I defy you to tell me what they do.
00:17:00
Speaker
Right. They optimize the paradigm by cross-functional strategic alignment, driving growth strategies like that. But you know, puke, puke, puke. Um, the rule that I learned was when I was a recruiter 20 years ago was if you shouldn't take anybody seriously, if they use words or phrases that also describe your dog. So hyper task focused. Nope. Nope. Real go getter. Nope.
00:17:29
Speaker
Nope. Work hard, play hard. Nope. Yeah, totally. One of my favorite activities with young marketers when I was in corporate still was to go to trade shows and to walk around and just ask them to tell me as we walked by each booth what those companies did. And it is so amazing how often you can't tell what they do and how they show up at a show.
00:17:57
Speaker
Now there's your marketing idea, Brian. Let's get a whole bunch of business cards with check boxes on them and just hand them to all of the booths that we go to next time and say, I don't know your brand. I don't know your product. I can't tell what.
00:18:12
Speaker
It's totally true. That's the professional services piece a lot around positioning, but also around wrangling those groups together. On the manufacturing side, it's often more about getting them out of focusing on just their products and what they do, and understanding better what do they do for their customers.
00:18:34
Speaker
and that can be a big challenge for them. Again, a challenge that sales, marketing, and product often have three very different ideas about. I've worked in tech, I've worked in some other spaces. I feel like tech right now is a pretty volatile space and there's also a lot of people who do what I do in that space. I'm certainly willing to take the work there, but I'm not focusing my efforts there right now because I feel like I've got a little more unique opportunity within those other two industries.
00:19:04
Speaker
I think CMOs right now are kind of like the same thing that you find with realtors is I think half are doing it as a transitional mode and then half of them are actually really talented and have a lot to offer and have that background that you have, Brian, where you can bridge the divide between product marketing and sales.
00:19:28
Speaker
to say, no, what we're really trying to do is get the logo to win, not an individual department. Yeah, and I think sometimes as marketers, we've done ourselves a disservice to where we lose the vision of we're trying to sell stuff. And if what we're doing isn't turning into revenue, it's a waste of time. And I tell my clients, I don't care how many people come to your website if they're not buying anything.
00:19:56
Speaker
I don't care how many people click on your ad if they don't do anything after that. A click's not a win. A click is a little step to a win. I think there's a lot of marketers who get really focused on those metrics, those activity metrics, and because we can measure them, and sometimes measuring the actual path to sale can be tricky. But I think sometimes our function
00:20:24
Speaker
is seen by other functions as being sort of fluffy or not real business or some of those kinds of spaces. We're not always seen as a kind of a critical business leader within the organization. And you think about how many CEOs actually come up through marketing in the B2B world, not many. And it's too bad because I think to your point, Drake, the good ones are the most sophisticated and broad business people.
00:20:53
Speaker
It's just that the hobbyists make it kind of hard sometimes. So I want to tie this all back together and talk about a Brian use case and especially to help you with your own imposter syndrome can roll out.
00:21:08
Speaker
a classic, but I think before we do that, I think you're absolutely right. One of the things that we get frustrated all the time with at BusyWeb is we can show the activity, but the result, we can't sell for people. So we can tee the ball up exactly how you want it. But if you can't bring it home, is that on us? And that's what I often refer to as
00:21:34
Speaker
the Dave's mom problem. So if you hire BusyWeb to do lead generation for you and get more customers, okay, great. Here's Dave's mom's name. Here's Dave's mom's number.
00:21:49
Speaker
Did I do my job? Well, on the one hand, yes, I gave you a lead, I gave you a number, I gave you a contact. On the other hand, really, really know because Dave's mom is a sweet old lady who's retired, who likes living at the lake, and she's probably not going to buy your manufactured product. Right.
00:22:09
Speaker
Well, I mean, it goes back to I think one of the reasons I was inspired to go off on my own is just this dynamic of when things are great, it's because our sales teams are brilliant. And when things are terrible, it's because marketing sucks. Yeah, I could agree with that. And one of the things I've been talking to my clients about as far as this trilingual approach is credit is free. Credit doesn't cost us anything.
00:22:36
Speaker
We can all take credit for a win, and we can all take responsibility for a fail. And I think to understand if you win a big contract, it's because you had a good sales team. It also means that you probably told them a great story in the lead up, and it also probably means that you had a great product to sell them, right? As well as lots of other things within the org, but just within those three teams, all three of those teams contributed to that.
00:23:01
Speaker
It's just the sales team often is the one that gets the recognition for that because it's sort of how they're wired and that's good that they need to be wired that way. Otherwise they would go nuts. But to be able to share that credit as well as share that responsibility is really important and it doesn't cost us anything.
00:23:21
Speaker
I think that's a great prophetic thing to stop and take a break on because I think so many organizations don't do that and don't understand that credit can be shared. And credit is an important motivator for people. It builds culture. It builds an esprit de corps. It builds a commitment to the business. And it's more than just happy, fun times.
00:23:47
Speaker
How many times in your career have you felt like, I love this job because I feel like I have impact? That's true. It's not just fluffiness and give everybody a green ribbon. It really comes back to how to build a winning culture, a revenue-driven culture, and a collaborative culture that people are excited about. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back more with Brian Smith.
00:24:19
Speaker
Today's episode of Dial It In is brought to you by BusyWeb, your partner in driving growth for business service and manufacturing businesses online. Are you a business service or manufacturing business eager to expand your online presence, generate leads and boost revenue? BusyWeb has what you need.
00:24:36
Speaker
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00:25:00
Speaker
visit our website at busyweb.com. That's B-I-Z-Z-Y-W-E-B dot com. Or, give us a call at 612-424-9990 to start a conversation. As a special offer for our dialed in listeners, we're offering a free download of our newest eBook.
00:25:20
Speaker
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00:25:47
Speaker
All right, we're back. I wanted to circle back because Brian, you pooch the lead a little because I asked about how's it going. You're like, oh, I'm fine. But you're actually considerably more talented than most people in marketing. So I'm going to force you into a golden oldie and a classic hit of one of yours because I think it's
00:26:15
Speaker
Not only is this a good explanation of what a real marketer can do for you, but also it's a great example of heart and belief, which then translates into actual dollar revenues. So tell me about the janitors. Well, thank you. And thanks for keeping me on track. I would say I'm sort of an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.
00:26:45
Speaker
which leads to all kinds of crazy. I like that. I'm going to steal that. I was a tenant company for about almost 10 years.
Celebrating School Janitors Campaign
00:26:53
Speaker
Tenant is a manufacturer of floor cleaning machines. If you go to Costco, the floors and bony's that go around cleaning the floors. The 150-year-old company, great company, awesome products, good people, incredible commitment to their customers, and just can't say enough good things about
00:27:13
Speaker
them as an organization. But it's a competitive market. You're having more and more global competitors coming into the market at lower price points, lower quality levels as well. But it's getting more and more competitive.
00:27:28
Speaker
And so we were really trying to figure out how do we tell the story of Tenant in a way that is more human, right? And to look at the product, I'm sorry to interrupt, the product is not all that exciting to look at. It is a large blue box. Yeah, and it's worked stuff on the floor, it brushes it around, and then it sucks it back up again. Yeah. That's it. So it's not exactly Wonka-esque in its colorful glory.
00:27:57
Speaker
No, it's not. It's funny, having worked there and agencies I've worked with and stuff, you start to see them everywhere. They were invisible to me before I worked there, but they're everywhere. We just ran into some at the university a couple of weeks ago with my kids' robotics tournament. I get sort of excited to see them still even though I'm not there anymore.
00:28:19
Speaker
But a really important market for tenant is the K-12 school market. As you can imagine, keeping schools clean is a pretty critical job and there's lots of schools out there, so it's a big market. The cliche then is to say, okay, from a problem solution standpoint, we're going to show kids being messy and then how we clean them up.
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And actually, so that this all sort of started with a project we did, it was an idea of my friend Carrie, who I worked with to interview kids of tenant employees, and interview them about why it's important to keep schools clean. So I interviewed
00:29:02
Speaker
almost 40 kids in a day. We had a studio, we had them come in and out. We picked a day that Minnesota was off school and we just kind of cycled these elementary school kids in and out. It was a blast. One of probably the best days at work I've ever had.
00:29:18
Speaker
My kid was in it and whatnot. And we got hilarious stuff out of these kids talking about, someone barfed in my class and they had to come clean it up and all this kind of stuff. But one of the things I walked away with at the end of the day was this moment of realizing that every single kid I talked to knew the names of their janitors, knew the names of the people that cleaned their schools.
00:29:45
Speaker
And I thought, I've worked in corporate offices my whole career. I don't think I know the name of anybody who's cleaned my office over that period of time. Yeah, I don't either. And at the same time, we were also out visiting a lot of schools and doing a lot of customer outreach and really getting up close and personal, not just with the executive level folks, but in the schools, working with the people that operated our machines. And the other insight we had was that these folks,
00:30:15
Speaker
love their jobs. And you don't hear that in the cleaning industry a whole lot. You know, most cleaning contractors have four or 500% turnover. But most cleaning contractors have between four and 500% turnover.
00:30:32
Speaker
It is really difficult. But within the schools, you have long-term employees who are highly engaged in what they do and speak in a very positive way about what they do, even though for a lot of us, it might not seem like a very nice job. And so we thought about that. We thought about those two pieces of information we picked up and the conclusion we came to is that the difference is they're part of the community.
00:31:00
Speaker
They are a valued part of the community. They are known. The kids know them. The teachers know them. They are the ones that either kids and teachers can go to when they're having an issue and they fix stuff and they clean stuff and they make this environment for children to learn healthy and livable and comfortable. And there's a purpose to that. That was the insight we had.
00:31:23
Speaker
And so another colleague of mine, Melissa, came up with this awesome idea to say, what if we just did a program where we ask people to nominate custodians in K-12 schools who are going above and beyond the call of duty and we give them some sort of a prize?
00:31:41
Speaker
So I thought that was an awesome idea. So we ran with it and we created this program where we were going to give away like, we gave away a $15,000 package basically. So we're going to give 5,000 to the custodian who won and 10,000 to the school. And we expected, you know, maybe a hundred nominations, something like that. That was sort of our goal to get at. And the first year we did it, we had over 2000 nominations.
00:32:12
Speaker
2065. I pulled the number. Thank you. And it was unbelievable.
00:32:17
Speaker
and we promoted to some degree, but like 10, it isn't exactly popping up on everybody's social media feeds every day. It's also important to note that 2065 were for 800 custodians. We had a few very popular ones. They were repeat customers. Yeah, I think there was one guy that had like over 100 nominations. Wow. Yeah, but the stories we got were remarkable.
00:32:45
Speaker
There was one story I remember about a woman up in Alaska who was a custodian there. You can imagine when you play in the basketball team in Alaska, for you to have an away game is often an eight or nine hour drive. Not even a tournament, just to go play another school. This woman would help drive the team.
00:33:08
Speaker
to games and things like that. There was another story about a custodian who there was a child who was neurodivergent in the school and in elementary school was really struggling with having a locker that locked and being able to unlock that locker.
00:33:24
Speaker
This custodian did a bunch of research, found a locker lock that was designed for kids with this type of neurodivergence, installed that lock on the kid's locker so the kid could get in and out of his locker. But then when the kid went to junior high school, that custodian went over to the junior high and installed it there.
00:33:44
Speaker
and two years later when the kid went to high school, the custodian kept track, went to the high school and installed this lock for him in the high school. Seriously? Yeah. That's spectacular. I love that. We got to the point where we had the finalists and we're reading the stories and we're sitting around a conference table in a big corporate office and everybody's crying at the table.
00:34:05
Speaker
because of these incredible stories. When we announced the winner, we got local news coverage, we got a tremendous amount of earned media out of it. Trust me, floor scrubber companies are not getting on your local news often.
00:34:20
Speaker
Well, let's back up a second because for the newbies in the audience, explain what earned media is because that's where the victory lap really comes into play. For sure. I pulled the stats. I found some stats on this campaign. Thank you. You do your thing and then I'm going to talk about how great you are.
00:34:39
Speaker
Thanks, Trig. Paid media is pretty straightforward. We're buying ad space on social or through search engines or in the B2C world on billboards or TV, radio, whatever. You're paying for communication. Earned media is when you get typically news organizations, but maybe other kinds of organizations to cover what you're doing and they're covering it as news so it's free.
00:35:08
Speaker
And it's typically a much wider audience and is, I think, in many ways seen as more credible because you're not paying for it. It is someone who felt that whatever is happening is important. So earned media to me is always a
00:35:24
Speaker
You're right, it's a victory lap. It's really valuable. And it's, I guess one of the best examples I think is the old Apple ad, right? The old Super Bowl Apple ad from 1984, that literally they paid the air once. And how many times have we seen that ad over the course?
00:35:42
Speaker
Right. 40 years later, we're still talking about it. They paid to show it once. That's a great example. I think of earned media or just, you know, anytime you get covered in the news. So yeah, it was, it was a, it was a big win from a brand perspective. We're going to actually talk about what the brand, what, what the big win is. So your little nominate the janitor program.
00:36:04
Speaker
at Tenant not only got the 2000 nominations and highlighted an unsung hero in the schools, from an earned media standpoint, it got picked up by 12 different publications, 29 online print and social placements for about a 72 million person reach. Dang. Yeah, not a bad day's work. Yeah.
00:36:32
Speaker
I think they're on year five or six of it now. It's become an annual event and they're still doing it and they're doing a great job and the stories are still coming out and they're still getting that engagement every year of these folks. Sometimes as marketers, it's gotten harder, especially on the B2B side for us to value the brand work. It's harder to measure, it's harder to
00:37:03
Speaker
sometimes show the ROI to executives. They love the demand work because we got all kinds of numbers up in there and go hire Busy Web to go and get us those numbers. And it's pretty concrete. But I think in some ways, we've done ourselves a little disservice of forgetting about the brand side and that what enables that demand work to be effective is to have the power of that brand coming in ahead of you.
00:37:31
Speaker
It's breaking the trail. I think it's a really great illustrative concept of why branding is so important. Because if you think about the concept of the campaign that you just talked about, you weren't selling the product. You weren't talking about the features. You weren't talking about the benefits. You weren't talking about how tenant is better than anything else.
00:37:52
Speaker
You were talking about something else entirely that was related to it, but working in concert with it. But by doing it with the heart that you did translated into real actual revenue. And so I think a lot of times it's so easy to fall back on the feature benefits, problem solve. Great. Let's, let's make an ad, but.
00:38:19
Speaker
The world is so loud right now with all that kind of stuff that even if somebody has a genuine problem, how are you going to solve it if all you hear is noise? It's the thing that actually gives you heart and gives you pause. Right. And the noise is always the me, me, me stuff. So I think the brilliance of that janitorial campaign in particular was that you were focusing on the community.
00:38:47
Speaker
That's truly what people are most interested in is the people local to them. So that's super powerful. We got kind of flipping that to an example. That's probably the opposite is a back in the day. I was in media relations for a large, larger agency and we were working for a whiskey.
00:39:12
Speaker
like a consumer brand whiskey. We did a DIY all-star campaign. It was the same where people would write in and say the projects that they were doing. But then what they did is they got together and we would have events where people would drive a tractor with a trailer on it backwards, hammer in so many nails, and paint a fence.
00:39:38
Speaker
nothing to do with the drink, nothing to do with the community, nothing to do with anything. It kind of would have been like if you would have had tenant machines just going out to local communities and just driving an obstacle course with the scrubbers. Completely self-serving would have fallen way flat and our program sucked. It was just not great.
00:40:01
Speaker
So, and the point about doing highly tactical things for a whiskey is kind of interesting anyway. It's like, are they going to get hammered and then hammer in, hammer in nails and like hit their fingers or what? So it was super weird. Well, that would have been funny stuff like that in my career too that was not smart. Like we're talking about one of the wins here. So it's, yeah, but I think part of what
00:40:27
Speaker
I think part of the subtle message that went with this too, though, was that Tenant had a unique understanding of the market, a unique understanding of those people. And I do think there is a sort of a soft benefit that is being communicated through something like this in a really subtle way that was important. Connecting to your community. Yeah, that we get it. And that is something that I think, for instance, a new
00:40:56
Speaker
competitor coming into the market would have a really hard time establishing that. And they might be able to say that they have a faster RPM on their brushes than we do. But at the end of the day, nobody really cares.
00:41:18
Speaker
What were some of the lessons that you learned moving forward from that janitorial campaign exercise?
Listening to Customers and Community
00:41:25
Speaker
What are some things that we can take away from that? I think one of the things that you always preach to me is slowing down in order to go faster. Yeah, of listening. Those ideas came out of the fact that we were listening to our customers and that we were listening to not just
00:41:45
Speaker
the quote unquote important people who made the decisions, but that we were listening to people, the operators of our machines, that we were listening to the kids who go to the schools, that we were listening to the supervisors who are on site every day, making sure these, I mean, some of these high schools are huge, right? And to have a staff of 15 to 18 people having to maintain that building,
00:42:12
Speaker
It's a big job and there's a lot of complicated elements to it. And so to have that sort of empathy and curiosity really paid off and to not pretend like because we're 150 year old company that we knew everything there was to know about cleaning floors. We know a lot about cleaning floors, but we don't necessarily know a lot about what it takes to clean a school.
00:42:37
Speaker
What's a great example of, I know a lot about cleaning floors. I need to get other people excited about cleaning floors my way. Yeah. And to build that brand affinity, there is an element of when a school district looks at replacing equipment, they're asking people who operate the equipment what their favorites are and why.
00:43:00
Speaker
you know, those folks have a fair amount of influence on that decision. And, you know, if they're coming back and saying, well, XYZ scrubber is broken every other week, you know, that's, that's going to have an impact, or it's really hard to use, or it makes my hands hurt, or it's, it doesn't clean very well, you know, whatever. Yeah, that stuff matters.
00:43:25
Speaker
So I think the punchline to all of this is, and you don't have to reveal actual numbers, but were you able to create revenue attribution for this campaign? Could you point from the campaign to actual real dollars? It's hard. Yes. It is hard. We have a small element of this campaign where we did direct follow-up with
00:43:54
Speaker
school district decision makers who had nominated people where we had our reps do direct follow up with them. We were very clear with the call is to thank them for nominating someone and to offer help and to then shut up.
00:44:15
Speaker
And that's brilliant because you didn't want to go, Hey, we, we, uh, you nominated a janitor. So can, can we rely on you for our next day? You don't want to cheapen it, right? Like a whole idea was that this was not cheap, but right. So respect the message and what it is. It's also a very warm call.
00:44:39
Speaker
And so we didn't want to lose that opportunity either. So we had very good conversion rates out of those phone calls. And that was promising. But yeah, I mean, as far as the broad brand impact, for a number of reasons, it was very hard for us to measure that. Part of the challenge is most school districts are served through third-party distributors.
00:45:05
Speaker
So we don't always know who we're selling to. But getting back to your original point about how sales and marketing are often at loggerheads, if sales decided to go in and not listen and trample on the message, all of that amazing work, all of that earned media, and all of that goodwill just would have been ruined in one phone call.
00:45:29
Speaker
I will say though, our sales team was so excited about this program because it gave them something just really great to talk about with their customers and their prospects, right? And that wasn't...
00:45:42
Speaker
feature-based and that was just really feel good. And not problem-based either. No, it was a great story to tell. So much sales is negativity. Tell me about where it hurts. I want to know where it hurts and then having to deal with the rejection. So any salesperson, 75% of their life is dealing with negative things. Totally.
00:46:03
Speaker
I think there's an element too where I think particularly executives and salespeople just love to see their companies in print. It's a feel good for folks. I think that was an element as well. It was one more step along the way of us building credibility with our own sales team too. Absolutely.
00:46:29
Speaker
Brian, thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for rolling out a golden oldie. And we'll just skip over the fact that we're all about the same age and we'll remember what 93X was before it was 93X, which is a local Minneapolis joke.
00:46:45
Speaker
Brian, as tradition on the podcast, we like full blatant and naked promotion, so where can people find you online? I am at ToonedConsulting.com, or if you search LinkedIn for Brian Oliver Smith, you'll find me there with a name like Smith, you got to use your middle name too. And Brian with a Y.
00:47:04
Speaker
Yeah, Brian with a Y. And just general plug, if you see an old jag on the side of the road, please stop to help Brian. Yeah, because his wife is going to be tapping her toe with her arms crossed, wondering where he is. Yes. And my son will probably be sitting next to me making fun of me, which that's what 15 year olds do, I guess. Hey, I've done that to Dave. He had a car with an air ride that punctured and I had to go pick him up. And do you remember what happened when you got in the car?
00:47:34
Speaker
He was playing low rider That was the last time Dave asked me for a ride