0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to the Experience-focused Leaders podcast! Today I'm delighted to introduce you to Clare Price, who is the President and CEO of Octain Growth Systems and the author of the book “Smart Marketing Execution: How to Accelerate Profitability, Performance and Productivity”.
Now, what you should be wondering is what you're going to learn today and what you can learn from the book. The book teaches you how to turn a million-dollar company into $10 million, to $100 million, and to $1 billion. And it really goes through the key questions of those of us wandering through the marketing desert, “Where do I go? How do I get there?” All in a lean small business, agile budget.
Clare is also the author of the major marketing playbook “Make Remote Work”. She's an expert in remote work and, which is quite fun, she has written a bone-chilling cyber-thriller, “Web of Betrayal”. Clare, welcome to the pod!
0:01:01 - Clare Price
Thank you, Alex, it's a pleasure to be here!
0:01:04 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, Clare, let's dive in. When I read one of the references in your book related particularly to execution, where you said 40% of the strategy's potential value breaks down in execution, from the HBR article, this really resonated. We used some of the same logic in my past life at SuccessFactors to talk about employee and performance execution. And here, you've really created a system to ensure efficient marketing execution.
A lot of people think marketing is about, “Hey, I have this big idea, I'm going to throw some creative stuff against the wall and hope it works.” And you found a magic system that actually allows lean organizations to get their marketing done in aimful and effective ways. Tell us more about the platform that you've built.
0:01:58 - Clare Price
Thank you very much, Alex. We look at marketing from the standpoint that the first thing that you need to do is build a strategic foundation. We call it a blueprint. You can't build a house without a blueprint. One of my favorite stories is, “You want to see a house built without a blueprint? Go check out the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. And see what it's like to have a house with doors that don't open, stairs that go nowhere, etc.”
We see that a lot in our small business and medium-sized business companies. The critical pain point of not having a strategic blueprint and just doing stuff that I call “frantic marketing activity” is that you cannot scale. You absolutely cannot scale because you're caught in that owner-operator scramble 100% of the time. And the only way to get out of that scramble is to build systems. That is why a $1 million company can become a $10 million company. They can scale because they have systems in place that do not rely on one, two or three people but can create a team around it.
0:03:18 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. I'm going to actually drill in, and for those of you who are listening, go check out YouTube. I'm going to share one of my favorite illustrations from Clare's book, where it's called Five Growth Killers. Some of the issues that you've just highlighted right now about the lack of a system, systematic approach. The one that I think a lot of people relate to is “the hamster marketing” and “the lottery marketing”.
So the hamster and the image that comes next to it is like you're running on a hamster wheel, and you're like, “I'm going to do more outbound” or “I'm going to do more crappy SEO, hoping we're going to somehow outsmart Google.” Tell us a little bit about those. Let's dig into those two just to illustrate the common challenges for a scrappy team as they approach their growth.
0:04:19 - Clare Price
Yeah, let's start with “hamster marketing”. So “hamster marketing”, as you described well, Alex, is the situation where the business owner, the marketing team, is just constantly running in circles trying to find the right solution to their marketing problem. For most of the clients that we work with, which are the scaling businesses at the small and medium sizes, it's lead generation and it is also lead conversion. And unless you have a real plan to reach those clients, get their attention, engage them, and really follow a well-defined customer journey, you're just going to keep scrambling. What happens is, and this is a true story for one of my clients, the people, your top talent starts disappearing. They go somewhere else because they get burned out in that constant struggle to do absolutely everything at 1,000 miles an hour.
0:05:31 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, it's sort of you running your hair and fire all the time. And then I think the interesting part is that one of my favorite marketing tech executives who came here said, “Marketers tend to ruin any party they go to.” And I think the hamster wheel is where we start overusing a marketing tactic, obviously because it's five years ago that it was created. It has diminishing returns for many folks. And so the hamster wheel is actually like a leaky bucket. Oftentimes as well, it's not just a circular thing, absolutely.
0:06:09 - Clare Price
That's a great analogy: to ruin any party that they go to. I think it's because they don't take the time to build the foundation. They don't take the time to build the relationships. I've had this experience with agencies that I've both hired and fired where they will come in and say, “Let's do 75 contacts a day on LinkedIn. It's all a numbers game.” It's not a numbers game anymore.
I think that's another key component, and that's where the lottery marketing comes in. Just throw your money at whatever that different casino game is, pull the handle and see what you get. And it works just enough to get you to keep trying to pull the handle. We need to get out of those negative marketing issues.
0:07:10 - Alex Shevelenko
And it sounds like the winner! In this case, the Facebook ads and the Google ads teams, they're the winners in some of those games. Or the outbound agency which you spend money on. That's sort of potentially polluting your brand message in your target market. You don't have as much at stake as your business does, and those seem to be the trade-offs.
Anything else that you see that will wake up one of our audience members and say, “Gosh, I got to do this urgently now, right? Because I've got 500 problems. Marketing is one of them, or maybe let's say 50 or 100 of them.” But it's not the only one, right? There's the product, there's other things. Why do you think getting the marketing execution is so key for emerging businesses?
0:08:09 - Clare Price
You can't grow if your marketing isn't effective. You cannot grow because you as a business owner, or you as a team of three, five, ten, can't get in front of enough prospects, enough new customers to bring in the amount of revenue that you need to continue to scale your business if you want to scale it 2x, 10x, whatever. That's why we see so many of the small businesses that are stuck at that revenue level of three to five million and never get out of it.
0:08:41 - Alex Shevelenko
So there's a natural plateau. It's either your network or your marketing tactic that worked at the beginning but is saturated at this point, and without a growth-oriented system, you will be stuck. It sounds like that's also true for small businesses, for venture-backed businesses. There's quite a lot that don't graduate from a pre-seed to series seed, or series A even. So it's going to be that Woody Allen quote, right? Something about the sharks is that they have to move to stay alive. So we have to be a little bit like a shark to keep growing to stay alive.
If you stop moving, you'll stagnate.
0:09:34 - Clare Price
Yeah, if you stop moving, you start dying.
0:09:37 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it.
0:09:39 - Clare Price
There is no neutral position.
0:09:41 - Alex Shevelenko
Makes perfect sense. One of the levers of growth that is highly efficient, that's near and dear to my heart, that you brought up is content. And there's content at the top of the funnel that influences and brings people into your business. And then, once you start on a buyer journey, there's this whole other set of content resources that you use. Let's talk a little bit about that because it sounds like these are some of the things that you help your clients with. And you probably see what are the typical errors and kind of bad content that you've run across.
0:10:30 - Clare Price
I think the biggest problem with content is that it's something that people produce without giving it a lot of full consideration. If you are going to produce good content, you have to understand who the audience is to the individual. Content needs to be personalized, it needs to be unique, to be really directed at small niches as opposed to huge mass audiences. I think we know that from what we see with the way the branding and marketing is gone. Number one.
So you've got to really zero in super tight on who your ideal customer is and not just who they are, because I wrote an article recently that said I don't really care who your customers are. And you shouldn't either, because it's not about who they are demographically, it's about why they buy and why they're going to buy from you. So you need to understand the values and motivations, needs, wants and desires of that group and what their buying patterns are. Once you really have a clear idea of that, then you can craft messages that will resonate with that specific group. What is their pain point of the moment? Not what their pain point was a week ago, a month ago, what is it today? And once you have the customer and the message dialed in, then you can create amazing content, whether that content is video, whether it's a white paper, whether it is a digital ad. That's when you can truly create content that is going to produce results.
0:12:16 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the quotes that I love from your book is good marketing makes company look smart. Great marketing makes customer feel smart, and I think this is what you're saying effectively. It almost doesn't feel like marketing. It doesn't feel like you're trying to sell something. You're just basically articulating a journey that these folks are on. They already want to go from point A to point B, or they're pretty supposed to go, and so you're just helping them uncover that, versus like me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Look at me, me, me, me, me, me, and here's this and here's that, and look at how smart I am. Was this like 90 page PDF nobody could read or even want to read? Absolutely.
0:13:01 - Clare Price
I agree with you 100% and I think that that is the biggest problem that we see with a lot of our clients. When we start working with them, just talking about, still talking about content, is their website present? It's almost always what we do not. How we got started in the small garage. Yeah.
0:13:27 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, actually I want to take one of your another, one of my favorite charts from your book I'm going to screen share here really quickly about the sort of, particularly the sort of, top influencer content that's sort of up for a little bit up front in the earlier part of the cycle and you can see that case studies here in the chart is 47%.
Webinars are high Third party analyst reports, so this I'm thinking of G2 for more smaller businesses and software and services and they use the reviews type of content and then white papers, video, etc. Interestingly, blogs very, very low on the list 24% of influencer. This content is found valuable by B2B buyers, Even though like that's when people say content, that's what 99% people think right and even like, and we like to think of the word content led growth as what we do it, for example, at relate to. We're creating content led experience here right now together with you for our joint customers and audiences. But the when people say content, they think like a shitty, you know, SEO oriented blog post down by outsource team that barely knows your idea, your, your well, that's a whatever outsource location.
0:14:50 - Clare Price
Barely know where you go with that one.
0:14:53 - Alex Shevelenko
Right, and you know again nothing. Not a geographic thing, right, Like, but it's just generally they're not experts and what they're doing is you're just finding somebody else who's done an authoritative pause post and they're trying to regurgitate that in a slightly unique way and that feels atrocious, frankly, like it just feels like it's never going to work in the long term. It feels like you're pretending to play a game of some kind and the customers are pretending to trust you on this and I don't know why do you think that sort of the you know this contrast between everybody thinks it's blog and SEO type of content and then, in reality, a people don't find it valuable that much and be you know, in reality that game is going to get much, much tougher. You know, going forward was generated of AI world and the speed of creating, you know, spammy, light, garbage content, yeah, yeah.
0:15:50 - Clare Price
What are your thoughts on that?
0:15:52 - Alex Shevelenko
I would, I would have strong opinions, as you could see.
0:15:55 - Clare Price
Yeah, and I agree with pretty much everything you said. I think that most blogs do not relate to the customer. They're from the point of view of the company. It's like, “Well, we want to tell you about what we're doing, about our product, about how we help you. The best blogs I've seen out there that are passed around are blogs that teach, educate, get the company out of it and put the customer in front. And the other thing I think in, in, if you look, I think if we did that chart today because it's charts a couple of years old, we would see that one of the biggest things available now that companies need to take advantage of, and I will underscore the word “need” three times, is user-generated content. Content provided by your customers, as opposed to content generated just within your internal teams.
0:17:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, absolutely. I want to give a shout-out to one of our guests, Godard Abel, who is the founder and CEO of G2, which actually allows you to capture customer reviews and sometimes some of them are great reviews. Some of them are legitimately hey, you need to improve this. But that builds trust Absolutely. And we love G2 and we can if we. We.
When we first started out marketing for our own product, you know that was actually one of the first things we said well, we might as well learn from our customers and you know, if they, if they like the product, fantastic, right, like, they'll kind of spread the word and if they don't like it, will make us move much more furiously in fixing some of the issues. Because you know, it's kind of drives accountability. Ultimately, nothing drives accountability like a customer who gives you a thumbs up or thumbs down in public Exactly Interesting. So back to the sort of the challenges of content. When you think of what's people say well, okay, content is important. It's sort of an effective channel. We believe marketing is important. Why are people producing mediocre content or wrong content types? And, in our case, why? Why is that content not as effective? Is it just the format? Is it the medium is the message issues around it as well, like what are your takes of the biggest challenges for people who already believe that good content is good, but they still struggle to deliver?
0:18:37 - Clare Price
So I think there's a couple of things, Alex, that we have to look at. The first thing is do they really understand their audience well enough to to create content that's that's targeted to them or will resonate with them? Number two I think that a lot of times, the content is bad because people are just, you know, they run out of time. They got quotas to meet that's. That's another let's. Let's talk about that for a minute. That's another issue for content, particularly in content teams, is having a quota of having to have, you know, xyz content out per month, per week, whatever 200 word blog posts that X times right Like, is that right?
And again, there's no, there's no room and there's no time and there's no ability to create, to craft something that is unique, that really has the better value for your customers.
0:19:41 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, yeah, and I think I will go further with you on this. Okay, so what is there's this, the people creating the content, let's say, in the content marketing team or outsource thing? They're pretty far away from the people driving the revenue sometimes and if you could, you know, get more of the people driving the revenue to input their expertise, the subject matter experts, to enable like the types of content that customers would care about and that would probably help, right, I don't know what your thoughts are on this, like, because it feels like the the to know the customer and to create something that customer cares about. You got to be talking to the customer and I think there's a lot of marketers and that I find that they would be like terrified of actually hopping on a call was a customer and that, which is sad to me to see that pattern. How do you break that?
0:20:40 - Clare Price
And that's interesting that you said that, because in my book, smart marketing execution, we do have a chapter and we do have a have a module in my system on sales enablement and one of the things that we recommend is right along marketing riding along with sales could be physically, if they're going door to door, or could be virtually, if they're showing up at meetings, to actually experience on a minute by minute basis in that meeting what the sales person is doing, how they're interacting with the customer. A lot of the time it's a mindset. What I say is, when I think about marketing and sales, I say, “Well, marketing is looking at the forest and sales is looking at the tree.” They both have to understand each other's viewpoint in order to create content that's going to resonate with the individual.
I do think that marketing sometimes I have had this experience in my corporate career marketing has the attitude well, we've done the research, we've created this, we know best, and they do not let the you know, they don't bring in the sales person who's actually talking to the customer. I think that's a mistake.
0:22:09 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, I think we have a buzzword that we've developed that marketing in this current world like where it's much more digital, most of the sales cycle happens in digital context.
We have a saying that marketers need to be selling and salespeople need to get their DNA into the marketing content. They need to have conversational marketing content that mimics some of the traditionally early discovery conversations that would be done by sales.
So it's sort of like bridging of these two worlds and I'm sharing with the audience now one of my personal favorites from your book, like the visual of the buyer journey when the different types of actions that the buyer needs to make and then the content that supports it. And what I find terrifying, frankly, is that, and one of the symptoms of the problem that I think persists, in part because of the technology industry from which I come from, is that the marketing tools are different than the sales tools, and so when marketing creates a downloadable link to downloadable thing on a blog of some kind or a lending page, the salespeople can't use that necessarily because they don't want to send their client who they know who they are, to go and be registered in a marketing resource. When marketers send the PDF, salespeople can't. How do you put that PDF inside a PowerPoint?
You can't, and so you end up having these sort of really disjointed emails that have like here's my DAC and here's like three links to these case studies and here I downloaded this PDF for you so you don't have to go to our landing page and give your email. And, by the way, at page 54, here you could get that answer to the question that you had. It sounds incredibly painful and it just if you're using the wrong tools, how do you connect Like, how do you help customers get around that?
0:24:25 - Clare Price
Well, absolutely, you just described a couple of my own personal horror stories and working with people and the issue, I think is again understanding and this goes in a little bit of a different direction, but I think it's important to the conversation understanding the difference between a marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead.
So, the content that we're talking about here in the customer journey graphic that you just showed is really for marketing qualified leads, not sales qualified leads. So it's to get the marketing lead in the door so that marketing score it and then let sales know if it's a warm, hot or cold leak. So there has to be different content for marketing sales. So marketing content is looking for somebody who is interested, and they may be, but what we're wanting them to get to is that point of conversion. So they need to take them down that journey to the point where they are ready for a sales conversation.
One of the biggest issues that happens with content is the content that's sent out there, and then it's like our job's done. We sent out some content, and the salesperson isn't really given the level of lead that they can work with. I think that's one of the areas that creates the finger-pointing and the friction between marketing and sales. Sales qualified leads and the content that sales has. And this is based on the interviews I did for my book with my sales professional colleagues. It has to be specifically targeted, uniquely targeted, to the pain point that the salesperson is discussing with that prospect at that stage of their journey, at that stage of the conversation. So the initial sales conversation content is likely to be let me learn more about you. Let's have a demo. I'm just using examples here.
And then the second conversation is going to be okay. I now, I like the demo, I'm interested in the product. I want to know what other companies have experienced with this product. So then that would be your case study or your user video testimonial, something like that. So that's the pattern that I would see.
0:27:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Right, and I'd say this is very true for the world from which I came from, a enterprise, large sales at places like SuccessFactors and Salesforce.
And I think now, right, and you know HubSpot very well and we had great guests like Scott Brinker from HubSpot Like HubSpot has migrated right from a more traditional hey, there's marketing driving, you know, from MQLs to SQLs, and then there's, like this sort of other sales content. They've drawn down the path of more product-led growth and more of this hybrid where you're expanding from one product to another. And that world, in my view, is incredibly messy and it does not fit like, while the pipeline metaphor still works because there is nothing better, but in reality it's sort of like quantum physics version of that pipeline was like stuff moving around randomly and then one interaction was an electron drives you off into back into the funnel and then forwards and that's all things take steps back, right. And so the point is in my head is the world where we could separate the MQL to SQL to a customer? That world is gone, right? That is sort of. It's a nice illustration, like any model. It's still a good place to start if you're learning about marketing 101, right.
And that's not the reality of how customers actually buy most modern products, most multi-product offerings. They're kind of there are people that are on stage zero, they don't know, they're kind of figuring out what this company does, figuring out what the products are. There are products you know nothing about and then you could be very deep inside something, and if you're deep inside something, you're deep in a sales cycle. Marketing created a bunch of case studies, but they sit in some sort of marketing library that's very different than what salespeople use. There's that quote that 90% of marketing content never even gets used.
Right, and that sort of. That's because another tragedy where, because they're using different tools, different systems and the person doesn't know how to integrate that marketing case study that you were talking about, and so that it makes it even worse. Right, because the tooling is separate. Right, oh, this is for your, you know, crm, but it's not for your marketing automation and it's not for your sales force automation. And then we, you know, email is completely different. What's your kind of take on where the future is going to take us? Do you agree with this assessment that it's all getting blurry or do you still see more traditional pipeline kind of work in some places?
0:30:05 - Clare Price
No, I would agree with you, I think, I think it really is, I think that the fundamentals still are still there in terms of understanding the difference between the two types of bleeds. But I would agree with you 100% that in terms of the actual customer experience, that it's very different, that it has to be related to differently.
0:30:29 - Alex Shevelenko
And so let's talk about customer or buyer experience, right, and we talked about content. So, let's say, somebody's brought you on, you've kind of helped them, you listen to their customers, they created this beautiful content that either supports later stage sales process or earlier educational content, and but the content is delivered in the let's say, old fashioned experience and maybe not a very consumable experience. Right, and because B2B, as you very well know, is a few, a decade or two behind maybe what's happening in B2C world. But at the same time, some B2B buyers are, you know, gen, whatever Gen, right, like it's an earlier Gen than I am, right, whatever that is. And then some of them are, and even people like myself, right, we're increasingly conditioned by all the media that we consume to get distracted, like our attention needs to be captured.
You know we have limited bandwidth to process something, and so here then we show up, was like, look at how smart we are, like we got this, maybe even a great message, but there's like people get lost at the very beginning and they never come back. That's the pattern that we see. What are you seeing from your customers in terms of the great message, not connecting with the audience?
0:31:58 - Clare Price
Are you saying that? Why it doesn't connect with the audience? Yeah, like.
0:32:01 - Alex Shevelenko
So let's say we got the message right. Right, let's say we invested, got the message right. Let's say we paid a boatload of money to Google and got the right message and the right audience and they still somehow like, don't really like you said, they are not getting this. They downloaded, they signed up, they download the ebook, but they never read the ebook, as a good example. And so why like? We have some hypotheses that relate to why they don't right Like, but what's your take where there's this sort of you know, like a leakage, like where, hey, somebody's interested, motivated, but the way we present the information is not connecting with the recipient of that information and so the message doesn't get through.
0:32:44 - Clare Price
I, yes, I would.
I would absolutely add to that that it is really becoming more and more how the customer experiences the content in terms of their first look at it.
So, for example, one of the things that people really needed to rethink is you know these massive white papers and all of this.
You know large, heavy text content. You would be better off doing something and this is something that a client of ours did really successfully and that is creating little serial videos. So they did weekly content, like like the old time serials and old time magazines where you know, every week they would get a little video message that was five minutes that just shared the next nugget of information. So you're waiting, then, to see, like, what's going to happen. So they're creating expectation, they're creating experience and I think, most importantly, Alex, they're creating relationship with that, with that client. I think the missing ingredient in a lot of times in the kind of content that you're describing, that that, like old fashioned content we need to get rid of, it has not only does it lack experience, it lacks relational information, it lacks, it lacks creating a relationship with the customer, and that has got to. It's got to be driven back from the relationship through the experience, then to what you're trying, the message you're trying to convey.
It's not going to make a message and then and then figure out how to make it an experience and then figure out how to create the relationship. It's like start with the relationship. Step back into the experience, then create the content that is going to truly create a new relationship. You can use a dating analogy. So the first time that you connect with that customer, you want to give them coffee and a bagel. You don't want to give them, you know, a full meal. The next time you want to give them, maybe a little bit more, maybe it's a lunch, you know something, something along that way. And then more of an experience the movie, the movie, date night experience, and then maybe cooking a meal together.
0:35:09 - Alex Shevelenko
So they are getting, you know, really interacting with you and really getting immersed in what you're trying to give them, that's as opposed to like, as opposed to like hey, you know, here's a, here's our hundred page, you know, document which is kind of the equivalent of like let's get married right now because you know exactly Because it sounds like we're interested in. It sounds like you're interested in the same stuff we are interested in.
0:35:36 - Clare Price
Here's what we're paying you Exactly Okay.
0:35:40 - Alex Shevelenko
We have a slightly interesting take on this. I'm curious what your thought is there's like in using the dating analogy there's been one of my friends has read this book called the Game, which was popular around. Like. The broad idea is like how do you create, you know, quicker, how do you create an environment where you could go faster, deeper when connecting with somebody? And I think, generally in this digital crazy world that we live into some degree, there's something to this as well. Like it's like how do you create maybe different experiences during one date to have a sense of like? Okay, well, we had the coffee and then we went for a walk and then, like, the walk is very natural and you know we're getting hungry, and then maybe we grab a dinner and so we sit down at a different restaurant and then maybe we go for cocktails and something like that and then end up in a nightclub, etc. So you now had five or six different mediums to interact with that person and, assuming the magic is there right, you can't force it, right but assuming there's a connection and that there is a resonance, what's happening, in my assessment, in that metaphor is what you actually are having five dates effectively right, Because there's an environmental switch.
Now, when I take this back to the B2B universe that we live in, right, Like if I have nothing but a wall of text and not even a particularly good illustration, this is like a really long, boring date that I will never want to have another experience with. But if I have a little bit of text and then I have like, maybe, like an exciting, you know, movement of some sort, because we are all crocodile brains, we need some movement, novelty and then I have later, I have like, oh well, this is an area that I'm interested in, so let's, I want to have our date in this direction and then, like, you go in that direction, you choose, so you're making a choice and there you're drilling in stuff that you're interested in. Then there's a video there right to your point, and I want to listen to that video, or maybe an audio podcast. So, you know, playing with that metaphor, it feels like we could create we don't need to wait for weeks, right, Like we could, but we don't need to if we create an opportunity for people to take the next step when they're most interested. And that to me seems like the magic If you have the right customer, if they are interested, why are we putting these crazy barriers in them?
Like I just filled in my my personal details, Now I have to go look for your email out of my spam folder to download something. Then I downloaded it and it's like I can't even click into like this 80 page thing. I don't because I have to go go manually like page by page by page, and I'm intimidated by the fact that I see 80 pages is the first thing that I see there. And so do you see what I'm? Where I'm going is we're creating. We're like killing our dates and romantic opportunities, like that, Instead of like, yeah, we could start with no pressure and then move further along if there's an interest. How do you think about this metaphor?
0:39:01 - Clare Price
So I think that exactly what you're talking about works for one core reason, and that is when you are building a the dating sequence that you just talked about you're building relationships and you're building on top of what you know from the last conversation. You're not just saying, okay, here's more information. You're saying, oh well, we talked about the fact that you, you know, you love to cook meals. Now let's build on that, and I think that's something that the B-C brands do really well is they capture the data, they capture the data.
And then the next interaction is more personalized. Oh, I'll give you a great example. So I'm doing my Christmas shopping, like a lot of people are doing right now, and looking for certain clothes items for you know my sister and people, and one of the brands that my sister likes a lot is Madewell. Now I looked at something on Madewell and I didn't do anything about it, I just I clicked on it, I looked at the prize, I just got busy, didn't do anything back, and so then the next email I got was oh well, you know, you check this out, you can get that and you can get this. And so, like they know what I've looked at, they know what I wanted to get, they're suggesting ways to make it easier for me to buy it. That is something that B2B really needs to learn.
How to do Is to build on the interaction with the next interaction, not just say, oh, you liked my content, so let's give you more content. Or let's give you more content, let's say you liked my story about XYZ. I think software that does that specifically very well is proposal software. I don't know if you've looked at any other proposal software out there, but what it does is, when you use proposal software and you give your client a proposal, some of the systems will record how much time that buyer is spending on that section. So, for example, if they're spending a lot of time on price, then you can come back with them and say oh, we just wanted to let you know, we have a pricing discount coming up and you can take advantage of it for the next five days. So you can actually build on the experience they're having.
And I think we need to do that.
0:41:39 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, yeah, so this is year and year. I need to do better job educating you what we're up to relate to, but we actually power digital proposals as well as digital. Like we are a leader in that on G2, which is customer reviews, and digital sales rooms, which we don't like the word sales because it's more about the buyer, but like I'd say it's a client or a buyer room and if you're doing, we call what you're capturing, there's digital body language and this is one example is like how do you follow up? Another example is like who do you not follow up with? That's sort of really valuable right, because there's people that are just using you and writing you along for somebody that they're gonna choose, and a lot of small businesses could, or mid-sized business or any large businesses, don't have the resources to pursue every opportunity and they're effectively being strung along because you're sending documentation. People don't look at it. So it's been really interesting to see that thing. So we agree with you on that and I think the insight allows you to then follow up intelligently. So last question, Clare, on kind of the way you've described something in you know throughout this conversation is this sort of default to what people know?
And I think there's one of your posts there like that you say we commonly see, under pressure to make things happen, is clients typically default to what they've done before or they go after the latest brightest shiny object that has appeared in marketing. And you know, our philosophy is that we need to go to foundational principles, right Like so, versus the shiny objects. What do you think is the counter to the sort of shiny object syndrome? Right, oh, podcasts are cool, let's do all the podcasts. And then we do half you know, half ass pardon my French job at doing this and then we move on to something next. Right Like versus, you know, making a deliberate decision. Is this sort of the planning stage of the blueprint? Is it really doing experiments? And then you know, quickly, and then you know, doubling down to make to bring those experiments, picking the right experiments that work. How do you help your clients with that?
0:44:03 - Clare Price
So that is actually in the second component of our model, Octain Growth Systems. It's strategy, execution and automation. So the smart execution model actually calls for the building of the roadmap and we do it differently in the fact that when we are building the roadmap, we are actually evaluating multiple alternative routes before we recommend a campaign or strategy and we evaluate them based on what we can predict and we do have a formula for predicting. It's not exact, but it can give the company and the decision maker a pretty good idea of what is the best ROI.
0:44:46 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it, so you have a good one an ROI predictor to help people avoid to default.
0:44:51 - Clare Price
Right because otherwise, you know you can do 100 things in marketing. There's probably two or three you should do. How do you choose? You start benchmarking how well that campaign has run, and there's an easy way to do that Look at what your historical results have been, look at what your agency's historical results have been and then look at what the industry benchmarks can tell you and you can get a pretty good indication as to what the return on investment of different programs for your industry are gonna be. Got it.
0:45:30 - Alex Shevelenko
Sorry, go ahead.
0:45:31 - Clare Price
I said, a lot of people don't take the time to do that.
0:45:35 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I'm glad I took the time for this conversation. This was amazing. I got a huge ROI from it already. Clare, how can people find you and follow up with you?
0:45:46 - Clare Price
So what I'd love to do for your audience, Alex, is give them a special offer. If they go to my website, octangrothcom backslashmyoffer and that's octang spelled O-C-T-A-I-N. Growthcom backslashmyoffer, they can download the first chapter of my book and if they're interested, they can book a discovery call with me. And what we will do in that call is we will not try to sell them a program. We will. That call is to help them solve a problem in real time.
0:46:21 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I'm signing up for that. Thank you very much, Clare.
0:46:24 - Clare Price
Thank you.
0:46:24 - Alex Shevelenko
You got an audience already Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us, Clare. Octangroth system bringing marketing execution to the world. Thank you, Clare.
0:46:36 - Clare Price
Thank you, Alex.