In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast we speak with Louis Gudema to talk about his approach called bullseye marketing, check it out. John Jantsch: One of the things that I’m going to put out as a premise of the book is that we’re all getting excited about big data and AI and voice search and social media, but many businesses that I work with, and you certainly contend this in your book actually need to start way before that, that that stuff is actually not important to them or could be important to them, but it’s probably not a priority, is it? What does not marketing mean? John Jantsch: One of the things that you talk about and I completely agree is there are so many people out there that they have customers but all their focuses on how do we get new customers and a lot of what you talk about in this book is to break down “Hey, let’s start with exploiting what we have already” our existing website customers email list. Louis Gudema: Yeah, so that was … as I worked with companies, I kind of realized as you have, that they were kind of jumping ahead and they weren’t taking care of the basics first and they were … “Oh, we have to do social media or we have to do advertising or we have to create a lot of content”, And they didn’t take care of what I call the marketing assets. First of all, is just talking to customers, and a lot of what I say here will be … to some people will be “Well, of course”. And I think that’s a thing that a lot of people miss, is that there’s so much more opportunity in their existing customers. Louis Gudema: Oh, yeah, for sure, and that … one of the things about those customer interviews is they’re not sales calls, but I would say one out of five times when I conduct them, customers will say “Hey, by the way we need this, can the company do that for us?” And so they actually generate a lot of new business just from talking and listening. A lot of times when I go to work with a company, one of the first places I look at is their sales process or what happens when the phone rings. Louis Gudema: Yeah, absolutely, and so that’s another one of those marketing assets people aren’t taking advantage of, their websites because, again, in my survey, I found that about three quarters of these B2B companies had no calls to action, no conversion devices on their website, and a lot of them had pretty poor messaging too, but that’s a little more subjective, but just 99% of the people would come and go, and the company would have no idea who they were or what they wanted, or if there was any opportunity there at all.
Transcript
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John Jantsch: We all want to go out there and chase that new customer, get those new leads but the truth of the matter is for most businesses, some existing assets, existing traffic, existing customers, existing email list, that’s where the money is. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast we speak with Louis Gudema to talk about his approach called bullseye marketing, check it out.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Louis Gudema. He is the president and founder of Revenue & Associates and the creator of The bullseye marketing framework and we’re going to talk about a book built on that called Bullseye Marketing: How to Grow Your Business Faster. Louis, thanks for joining me, welcome back, I should say.
Louis Gudema: Hey John, It’s great to be back. Good talking with you again.
John Jantsch: One of the things that I’m going to put out as a premise of the book is that we’re all getting excited about big data and AI and voice search and social media, but many businesses that I work with, and you certainly contend this in your book actually need to start way before that, that that stuff is actually not important to them or could be important to them, but it’s probably not a priority, is it?
Louis Gudema: Yeah. That’s real graduate level stuff, and most businesses aren’t taking care of the one or one and one or two kinds of things. I actually did a study on this a few years ago, and I looked at 351 B2B companies with 50 to 1000 employees, and there was a huge difference between the software companies and the non software companies. The software companies were by and large great marketers and the non software companies … and these are not trivialized companies, these are sizable companies. They were doing in manufacturing or medical devices or professional services, many other fields doing almost no marketing.
And it was a shock to me because I had kind of been working in this tech marketing world, and I assumed everybody knew about these tools, and yet outside of the software industry, almost no one was using them, and then I came back to this just this year, and I looked at the same 351 companies and for those non software companies, there was very little progression and I think that a big reason for that is that marketing has become so complex.
John Jantsch: Yeah. What does not marketing mean? They have a website, they probably have a sales team, is that kind of where it ends?
Louis Gudema: Yeah, pretty much and trade shows and brochures. What I did was, I had … when I’ve done business development, I had developed this digital marketing scorecard essentially and I was doing business development. I had my own agency for a dozen years and then I did business development for a couple other agencies after I sold my agency 10 years ago and so I had developed a way to look at what were companies … what were prospects doing before we talked so I could have a more intelligent conversation with them. You can tell without ever talking to someone, do they have a marketing automation program?
Are they doing search engine advertising? Are they doing anything on social media. This was more important four years ago than now, but did they have a mobile friendly website. And so there were these nine programs that I looked at and thought of it as kind of a digital marketing scorecard or maturity model, and for the software companies, the median was that they were using seven of the nine programs and for the non software companies, the median was that they were using two of the nine. And you got one point just for having Google analytics on your website, so effectively-
John Jantsch: Another point if somebody actually knew the login, would that be for good analytics[crosstalk]
Louis Gudema: I couldn’t tell if anyone ever looked at it, but if they scored a two, I kind of assume they probably didn’t. Then I also looked at those software companies and found that this actually correlated very well to revenue growth, and the companies that were using eight or nine programs regrowing about five times faster than the companies that were using zero to three programs. It was a real affirmation both of … well, it was a shock to see how different it was between software and non software companies, but it was a real affirmation that marketing does work and it does drive revenue growth when it’s done well.
John Jantsch: Does this scorecard still exist? I’d love to see it, If it does.
Louis Gudema: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll send you a copy of the report. I haven’t put out the update yet. I’m going to put that out shortly. I can send you that 2014 report and you can see it.
John Jantsch: One of the things that you talk about and I completely agree is there are so many people out there that they have customers but all their focuses on how do we get new customers and a lot of what you talk about in this book is to break down “Hey, let’s start with exploiting what we have already” our existing website customers email list. How would somebody go about … it seems so obvious but why are people not doing it, and if they aren’t doing it, they’re listening today. What’s the way to unpack that?
Louis Gudema: Yeah, so that was … as I worked with companies, I kind of realized as you have, that they were kind of jumping ahead and they weren’t taking care of the basics first and they were … “Oh, we have to do social media or we have to do advertising or we have to create a lot of content”, And they didn’t take care of what I call the marketing assets. They didn’t take advantage of the marketing assets they have already owned. That’s the center of the bullseye, and the center of the center is the customer. First of all, is just talking to customers, and a lot of what I say here will be … to some people will be “Well, of course”.
But as I was saying to much of the business world, this is not being done today. Whenever I work with a company where I’m doing consulting, and I interview their customers, the CEO or the owner always is “Oh, no, we know what our customers want, We know what they think” And yet when I come back with the results of these interviews, they’re invariably shocked and they find out all sorts of things about what their customers want or need or think about them, think about their competition, what’s important. Secondly, taking that information to create a great customer experience.
Forrester does an annual survey of 10s of thousands of consumers, asking them about their customer experience of hundreds of major brands, and that actually has gone down for the last two years. Customer experience, again, is not something we should take for granted, because many companies are not doing it well, and the ones that do, do it well really profit by it. And then the third thing about the customer is to focus more on customer retention and growth and not so much on new customer acquisition. Not that, that’s not important also, but companies over emphasize it.
And maybe it’s just a kind of holdover from when they were just starting out and they had to really, really, really work on getting those new customers, but you get to a certain size … and Salesforce knew this from the beginning. They were focused on customer success and retention and growth very early on, and it’s important for all companies because it’s so much more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain and grow an existing customer.
John Jantsch: Well, not just more expensive, I think it’s a lost opportunity a lot of times too. That customer that already trust you, that is…
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