The Best SEO Podcast: Unlocking the Unknown Secrets of AI, Search Rankings & Digital Marketing

Cracking the Modern Sales Code: AI, Authenticity, and Sales-Marketing Alignment with Geoff Ketterer

• MatthewBertram.com

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Sales and marketing are becoming increasingly interconnected, with the most successful businesses breaking down silos between departments. Digital marketers must expand their skill sets beyond specialized areas like SEO or content creation to embrace analytics, client communication, and sales principles.

• Modern marketing requires understanding that different social platforms have unique algorithms and audience expectations
• Focus on mastering one platform before expanding to others – content that goes viral on one platform may fall flat on another
• We're experiencing a "trust recession" where cold outreach is less effective than in previous years
• Live events and webinars are outperforming traditional video sales letters as they build relationships and establish trust
• The two biggest problems facing sales teams are culture and skillset issues
• AI is transforming sales processes through call analysis and highly targeted advertising
• Data-driven targeting can reduce customer acquisition costs by 40-70%
• The most effective sales approach today is consultative rather than aggressive
• Building trust is more important than being liked – customers need to trust that you can deliver results

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Guest Contact Information: 

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffketterer/

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/  

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Speaker 2:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 1:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. As you can hear from my intro, I have too much data on the cloud and I need to offload some of it. We are rebranding the podcast shortly, so stay tuned for that. We will do a press release and announce it on all the social channels, but until that point in time, we are still here doing it like we always do it.

Speaker 1:

I have a great guest for you today. I think that sales and marketing is essentially becoming synonymous with each other, and I think sales departments and marketing departments need to break those silos and work closer together. I believe in it so much. I have another podcast, called the Oil Gas Sales Marketing Podcast, that I do with the founder of OGGN, oil Gas Global Network. So for those of you that listen to me over there, that's all we talk about, and I want to bring some of that flavor to this podcast and, as we like, expand into digital marketing outside of SEO, which is absolutely changing, like you wouldn't believe, and I have so many updates for you. I just got back from a conference up in New York, super excited. What's going on with information retrieval, with LLMs, so stay tuned for that. Please follow me on LinkedIn. If you're not, I'm going to start posting more and I have Jeff with Rev Boost Recruitment on the line. You might know him from what he did formally with closersio. They probably reached out to you and I want to go in to sales teams, uh, coaching, consulting as like a revenue line.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of great digital marketers, uh, and internal marketers that listen to this podcast and and I think that where we are in the world today is they need to become more. Okay, like you cannot stay in your lane of SEO or social media. Like I just brought on two new people from big agencies. They were doing content Okay, fantastic content Never touched the social media platforms, never talked to the clients, never looked at analytics, and I said for me, to be able to hire you, you're going to have to be able to learn these things. So, like you need to start getting these certifications right now and you're going to have to grow, because right now your skill sets is so narrow I can't I can't do anything with that skill set unless it's applied to kind of multiple hats. And I think marketers are becoming more salespeople. I think salespeople are becoming salespeople. I think salespeople are becoming more marketers.

Speaker 1:

I even did, jeff I know I want to, I want to get you into this, but I just did a challenge, uh, on Facebook, because someone was like, ah, facebook doesn't matter, okay, and I my personal account. I don't post very much. I'm going to post on LinkedIn in the next week or so probably be out before this podcast comes out. But I took an account that had 320 something views in 28 days to over 19,000 views, and I don't have a big following on social. I have nobody that is in my space. Really, I mean a handful of people.

Speaker 1:

The power we have today to sell, the power we have today to build a personal brand, the power we have today to do marketing for ourselves as a coach, as a consultant, is unprecedented in what you had so many years ago. And I hear so many people talk about click inflation and it's a real thing. Okay, you shouldn't be on all the same platforms as everybody else. You should spread it out, like there, there there's really kind of a fan out kind of mentality and building that brand across all different mediums to understand who you are. But it really comes down to the trust and also you got to know how to have a product and sell it, and so I would love to open up the conversation with what you find is happening trend-wise, that's most topical for you.

Speaker 2:

Wow, where do you start?

Speaker 1:

I know it's a lot, apologies.

Speaker 2:

No, you're good Trend-wise. I mean, I've got a few different schools of thought on this. Number one is I'm a firm believer in picking a platform, because it doesn't matter which platform you pick. It could be Facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube, doesn't matter, but they all operate differently. And sure, if you've got a big brand name, you can post something on TikTok and it'll go viral. You can post it again on Instagram, it'll go viral. If you're a smaller creator, you can post something, and I've had this myself. You can post something on TikTok, go viral. Hundreds of thousands of views post exactly the same piece of constant content on Instagram.

Speaker 2:

200 so yeah, so I would. I would say for anybody looking to be able to utilize social media for business pick a platform and learn it first. And there's nothing worse than I know, because I've done this myself. You're trying to do everything. You're trying to do long form podcast, youtube, chop it up, clips, reels, lives, stories, and it's just exhausting. So I would say to anybody that wants to utilize social media just get really, really good at one platform. Learn that, start garnering an audience. You'll learn elements from that which you'll be able to take to another platform. But just posting the same thing on multiple platforms they're so different. They operate so differently.

Speaker 1:

So there's actually like matrices that they're looking for in the type of content and what they're trying to do, like whether it's LinkedIn, so you know, it might be hiring related, it might be success or promotion related. So so, yeah, there there's different and I've done that too. I've been doing this test. Like I mentioned, facebook and LinkedIn and stuff that falls flat on this platform will do great on this. But if I can tweak the content, I can do that, and now you can start to leverage AI and there's things that you can do to to help give yourself again that that leverage. But until you really understand the platform and how it works and and that's again what I recommend to people post on it every day and look at the analytics for 30 days, there's nothing about actually doing it that can compare, I mean theoretical, whatever you know. Until you do it and see how it responds for you. We say this with websites all the time hey, you got to come in a couple months. We need to see how your website performs versus everybody else, versus, like the algorithms, and then we can tell you what, where we should go and what we need to do. And I think, jeff, one of the things I think is important, that I think you can speak to, is you got to have an understanding of what your offer is and what your ask is and what you're moving somebody towards, because if you're just posting all over the place on all kinds of topics, one, you're going to confuse the machine learning of the different platforms of like who are you trying to speak to? Because it's trying to help give you what you want, and then you you have to have a very concise message because, well, the attention spans are tick tock Right, and so, if you can't get your sales pitch together of what is your ask and it could be just subscribe, right, or just like our posts, but you need to have a goal and that goal needs to be part of a bigger strategy and you need to understand what that looks like when you are doing it on all the platforms.

Speaker 1:

Right, but let's okay, let's execute successfully on this one platform and then you can actually start to even flow some of that traffic to the other platforms. Once you build that, well, audience, I think that a lot of people just want to sell stuff and how social media works. Is you got to build a community? You got to build an audience. I think that a lot of people just want to sell stuff, and how social media works is you got to build a community, you got to build an audience, you've got to have people care about what you're doing, and that's where those that momentum comes in.

Speaker 2:

Yep, yep, a hundred percent. Yeah, it's bizarre because I managed to build a I don't know whatever it is 70,000 person, I don't know whatever it is 70,000 person follower following on on TikTok, and I did exactly that. I thought, oh great, well, I can build a. You know, I can build an audience anywhere I want. You can't. It's not true. I've got 2000 followers on LinkedIn and you know, it's just, it's so different, it's so, so different. So I, I, anybody that's trying to do that, I feel your pain.

Speaker 1:

Me too. It's a real, it's a real struggle. Um, I I can tell you, uh, youtube for me is the big focus, cause, uh, we were, uh, audio only podcasts for 12 years. So, uh, going to video first is has been a big, big switch and we're working on that. So let's get into sales stuff Like what are, what are the things? Let's just start off with the myths or what. What you find when you come into companies to assess, like, what are the problems that they're having of why they reach out, and then what are the things that you found is the most quick fixes, that is, you're seeing a consistent theme in all businesses. Maybe we can just put that out there for the audience.

Speaker 2:

For sure by a country mile. The two biggest problems the teams that I help are number one, culture. They don't know how to garner a culture inside of their sales team, and anybody that thinks culture is not important is wrong. And number two, good old fashioned skillset. And so those are not always, because everybody gets an independent audit and sometimes the culture is great but the skillset is poor. Sometimes the skillset is great but the culture is poor. Sometimes they're both trash and sometimes they're both great. So, um, but those two things are the the biggest needle movers that I've found is if you can have a great culture and a great skillset, you can scale exponentially. So those are typically the things I look for.

Speaker 2:

First, what are what are people doing? What are they talking about? Are they, you know? Do they have a regular meeting cadence? And if they do, because everybody goes, oh yeah, we have a daily meeting. And then you listen to their daily meetings and basically it's just a beat down for the whole sales team. It's like, well, how do you think they're going to go and perform if all you do is berate them first thing in the morning and whip them with a big old stick? There needs to be a balance of stick and carrot, and a lot of people it's either too much carrot, too much stick or not enough of either. That's the problem. So not enough of either. That's the that's the problem.

Speaker 1:

So you're talking about the daily standup that a lot of people before they they go into the bullpens or or whatever. Now a lot of people are starting to have remote teams right, or or they're using there's all kinds of different blended methods to to build that. So I think we can go into the skill sets. I think that's absolutely important. But culture is something that needs to happen first. Right, because if you have the right culture of the right person, you can train them with the skill sets that you want, and everybody's going to have a different kind of strategy to sell. But but creating culture, there's got to be themes in that that you see. So can you talk about in person and then like remote teams.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I work almost exclusively with remote teams because I deal with people not 100%, but probably 99% in the high ticket sales space. So coaches, consultants, course creators, people have a high ticket offer and they realize very quickly that they are the bottleneck in their business. So they're like well, I can't do all the marketing and all the fulfillment and look after my clients and do operations and do all the sales calls. I need a sales rep. So one of the one of the things we do is we help them find those reps. And then the second problem that they run into is that they go. Well, okay, I don't actually know how best to train a sales rep. I don't know how to keep them motivated, I don't know, you know when to whip them and when to reward them, you know, and all of this kind of stuff. So that's the second factor. So what we do is we source, train and maintain remote sales teams for people in the digital high-ticket sales space Course creators, coaches, that sort of stuff. So the problem number one is where do I find good reps? Um, I'll post on social media. I must have somebody in my network, um, and the problem with doing that is that the best reps are not hanging around on social media waiting for an offer, they're already on an offer. Um, so that's the first issue.

Speaker 2:

The second issue is then they get a rep on board. They don't know how important a daily stand-up is. They don't know how to develop that culture. And that culture really stems from good, old-fashioned, strong leadership. And that doesn't mean that you've got to be a bulldog every day and issue beatdowns left and right, but it does mean that you need to be a strong leader. It does mean that they need to look at you as somebody that they would you know, for want of a better phrase follow into battle.

Speaker 2:

And I think that's where a lot of creatives and entrepreneurs because a lot of entrepreneurs in my space are visionaries. You know, they're great at what they do, they're good at running marketing campaigns and all this kind of stuff, but then, when it comes to leadership, they find themselves out of their depth. And that's very often where we'll step in. We'll take over the leadership on a fractional basis, we'll help manage the team, we'll help train the team and we'll certainly help supply good quality reps into that team as well. So the two biggest issues number one where do I find good people? Number two how do I step into leadership and really be the leader that my team needs to perform at a high level?

Speaker 1:

and really be the leader that my team needs to perform at a high level. So when you're coming into the conversation with some of these brands or high ticket sales coaching consultancy groups, you know I can understand the zero to one right. I, I'm, I'm the operator and I need to add somebody. Um, and how do I do that? And I, and I certainly think that there's probably even like a, a course you could have or you might have that, that that offers that. But if someone has a, already has a sales team, that's really scary that they're burning. Like they have a sales team, they've hired up a couple of people and it might not be working correctly. Like and and they've added people. So now I mean, every time you do a standup, like it's everybody's hourly rate plus your own, like in that call Right and like that was the first thing that I noticed as, as our team started to grow, when I had company-wide meetings and my accountant's like going, this is the cost of that meeting and this is the cost If you talk for 10 minutes more like, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1:

And and uh, I I think that getting a handle on your numbers is is super important. I think salespeople really appreciate numbers and comp plans. I feel like comp plan drives the right behavior. And, to your point, uh, good sales reps, uh, they're either in an opportunity or someone's trying to pull them away from opportunity, but they're not looking for an opportunity um ever, uh, unless they're part of a program. I guess that offers uh outsource solutions of that selling. And, um, I don't know, can you kind of speak to uh some examples, maybe some case studies? You know, just anonymize the data of who it is, but like some businesses you looked at and like why they called you in what you saw and and what were the kind of broad strokes of of fixing their issues.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, certainly. One particular company that I'm working with at the moment had a small sales team, so you know, a couple of setters, as we would call them, people that are outbound dialing leads, that have come into the funnel but not booked an appointment, and then they had three closers. They still have three closers and two setters. The biggest issue by far is nobody had a handle on the numbers and nobody had set into stone strict KPIs. So this is what is expected on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. If you are behind at the end of week one, why are you behind? More importantly, what are you going to do to get in front? Right, and so they were like well, well, you know, we're just supplying them with leads, we're just booking the leads into the calendar, and that's great.

Speaker 2:

But everybody needs structure, right, everybody. We crave structure and you, you know, you, you notice that when somebody doesn't have structure, they kind of go off the rails, they get lackadaisical, and I know this for myself. If I have a structured diary, if I have a structured calendar, I know what I'm doing hour to hour, day to day. I'm far more productive. If my calendar is open, I might end up scrolling something or there might be something interesting on Netflix and I become insanely unproductive. So just helping business owners understand how important structure is, how important KPIs are, and those KPIs you know, when we were talking previously, before we started recording that, we were talking about MQLs and SQLs, all kinds of stuff like that so, so important. But also the KPIs that you set your sales team to the standard that you set for your sales team. So, if we develop 100 leads and the show rate is 70%, I am expecting you, if you have, you know, 70 conversations out of every 100 leads. This is the close rate that I'm expecting.

Speaker 2:

If not, I want to know why. Is it a skills-based issue? Is it a skills-based issue? Is it a culture-based issue? Is it a lead issue? Like, are we just attracting the wrong people through the funnel? I tell every single team I work with you know you can never blame the leads. It's always your fault. You've just got to take it on the chin.

Speaker 2:

However, having said that, sometimes it's the leads. You know, if you've got one particular company I work with at the moment, they're running, uh about, you know, thirty thousand dollars a month through meta. So you know, not not the biggest ad spend, certainly not the smallest and, um, they just couldn't understand it. They're like every single lead we get through show rates, terrible, you know, the closes, the setters, must be doing something wrong. It must be this, it must be that. And then when you, I said, okay, I'm going to do a funnel audit, I'm going to go in, I'm going to go and have a look. I didn't need to get any further than their front end ad, and the front end ad was saying things like you can do this with none of your own money. Well, if you suggest that you don't need any of your own money, guess who you're going to pull into your funnel? People with no money. So what we did is we just shifted the messaging yeah, the message.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, just shifted the language. I said look, the offer can stay the same because it's a great offer, but stop talking about passive income, because there's no such bloody thing unless you win the lottery. Stop talking about you can do this with no money passive income, because there's no such bloody thing unless you win the lottery. Stop talking about you can do this with no money. And the second we shifted the messaging. Everything started to flow through the funnel, sales team and now reporting back oh my god, the leads are. The quality of the leads is insane.

Speaker 2:

I'm speaking to people that can actually afford to buy our product, you know so. I think that's so important is just having a handle, and you said right at the start of this conversation, sales and marketing being intertwined. The way I see it is that the two independent cogs inside of the same mechanism and they've got to be married up because otherwise you you could be trying to and I see that people try and fix the wrong problem. It's our setters, it's our closes. They're not closing anybody, it's okay. Well, they're not closing anybody, it's okay. Well, let's take a look at a and end up at z and we'll figure out what the problem is, because it's not always a sales problem.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes it is a marketing problem so we do a lot of like account-based selling for b2b clients. Uh, it, it's essentially a dressed up funnel um, there might not be uh, setters, uh, but you, you're booking people into business development people. And there's a big complaint A lot of times when we go in on the quality of the leads right, and we got to look at, well, where are the leads coming from? But, yes, what is your offer? What are you fishing with? What's the bait you're fishing with? And if you're fishing with this kind of bait, you're going to get this kind of fish right or whatever. And once you change that, like I've seen it, small clients and I'm talking multi-million dollar deals that, okay, take a long time to close, but if you have the right bait and also if you're generating what we're trying to help clients with, generate the content to help feed that funnel. So it's not the outbound salespeople. I mean, when we, when we started hiring, we have kind of a quasi like your account manager and you're a salesperson, um, because when they sell you we want the same person, kind of that relationship where it's not handed off, not saying that's like the right, like long-term solution, but it, it works really well for us because you want to talk to somebody that's intelligent, like. There's nothing worse, jeff, for me, when I get on a call, thinking I'm going to like get a demo with a product, and it's just like a setter to like qualify me right for like a lot of the, and I and I just feel like a lot of that could be done with AI or bots or or or something to speed up that process. And I understand, like enterprise technology, they they want to make sure to fill the day of of clothes and salespeople.

Speaker 1:

Well, but I'm telling you right now, if you put out the right content, if you put out the right offer, right Like, so content's just an extension of top of the funnel, of whatever the ad is that you're running, and if you have that right ad, you will get the right kind of people and you and these algorithms can find the right kind of people. If you've distilled your offer out, um, I mean, I've just like, I think that, yes, they're the exact same thing, but sales has to talk to marketing um and has to understand it, and they have to do that analysis. Like, let's, let's look at these leads. Let's not just look at the top line number, like is this a qualified lead. How are you rating If this is a qualified lead or not? Is this the kind of lead that sales wants? Because what sales does at the bigger companies? They cherry pick the good leads and then throw out everything else. Right, but salespeople which I would love for you to speak to this and when we can just jump into AI after this. But, um, like I, I have been a salesperson for a lot of my career.

Speaker 1:

If you look on LinkedIn, I've done cold call selling. I've done in-person selling. I was classically trained as a salesperson and once I understood digital marketing and the one-to-many selling just like this podcast we could talk to a lot of people. There was no going back for me. I'm not going to go. I'm not going to do cold outreach.

Speaker 1:

You know, I would much rather have someone come to me that is interested in what I'm offering and let me explain to you like, how it might look to work with us. Like, are we going to solve your problem? I would much rather spend my time doing that where, where, where, they're coming my direction, versus that cold outreach. But that works. It's a numbers game, right? But also the more like enriched data that you have to understand where those problems are, where those needs are, where you prep your call list. That's great. It sounds like you're doing a lot of let's run ads to a funnel, let's get people interested in or get their email of some kind of lead magnet, and then we're going to follow up with those people that don't actually book a call and and try to get them back into that funnel. Is that kind of the standardized process you work with mostly?

Speaker 2:

Yeah for sure. Some some of my clients have large organic followings so they don't actually need to run any kind of paid media, which is great. You know, half million million people YouTube channels really well, optimized, great, top of funnel, all that kind of stuff. Other people are running exclusively sort of meta and YouTube ads. So obviously the lead quality is massively different. Right, if there's an organic lead that's been watching your channel for a number of months and they get on a sales call, close rate is typically through the roof for those kind of leads 50, 60% and up.

Speaker 2:

Cold, and there's a definite shift in the market recently. Cold much, much harder. Go back five, six years you could run a meta ad, get a cold lead through the funnel. They watch a 10-minute VSL or maybe a 60-minute webinar. They book a sales call and 60 minutes later you're taking thousands of dollars off of them. That's getting harder to do. It's. It's okay, you know.

Speaker 2:

And somebody said to me the other day they said, oh, yeah, well, tony Robbins does it all the time.

Speaker 2:

I'm like, yeah, dude, he's Tony Robbins, like he's got one of the most recognized brands in the world. He could, he could run an ad of him sleeping and it would convert, you know, but for the smaller people who are not as well known, and stuff like that, then I'm definitely seeing a shift where I think we exist in a trust recession. Yes, and it's because people have been burnt, they've bought bad programs, they've they've, you know, ended up being scammed, whatever version of a scam. Some people actually have their money stolen. Other people just end up in a program and go, oh, this is trash.

Speaker 2:

Um, you know, I've got no support. You know they're not actually teaching me to do what they say they can, and so we exist now where the marketplace lacks a ton of trust. So I'm finding what is working is people going back to things that work previously, things like live webinar, podcast, stuff like that, things that will build a relationship with somebody, because they require more nurturing, and the psychology is almost like they need to go from thinking that being able to get a result for themselves is possible and they need to get to the point where they think it's probable. And it's getting harder and harder to do that with a 10 minute VSL and a 60 minute sales call.

Speaker 1:

Well, like, again, the trust recession. I love that I might have to borrow that Um and uh I. I mean there's click inflation and there's a trust recession and you know there's just stagflation happening everywhere, right, and I think that people do business with people they know, like and trust, and it's just getting so noisy and people's attention spans are all over the place. I think that that's what some of that algorithm is meant to do. And then from TikTok and then Instagram and YouTube shorts have adopted that. So there's just so much noise and there's so much stuff Like how do you cut through it? It's it's trust. It's like people want to know you're the trusted advisor and that you're going to consistently be there and they continue to see your message and they, they build that trust over time and they want to follow somebody that they believe can help them. Right, like they, that has maybe done it before or has testimonials that they've helped other people, but it's not going to happen. The first touch, like it's not going to. So you're running that that ad. I mean it's got to hit them like 11 times or more before they even get recognition of of it and then they haven't spent enough time with your content. The long form sales letters did that because you got to know them through that point, but they didn't have all that baggage. So I love the idea of webinars. That's something actually we're going to start start doing here shortly, cause I think that there's a lot of kind of longer form explanation that can't happen on shorts or social media that if someone's truly interested, hey, like, this is going to take a minute to unpack. Um, I mean, what, what are you? What are you seeing um working the best, or like. Can you give an example of a case study of like okay, they were doing that, they're running the ads and here are the conversion rates. And then we implemented this webinar, um, or uh, we encouraged them to do xyz and, like it turned around their business.

Speaker 1:

Because I think there's there's two people in my mind that I think we're speaking to. One is like I was going to do a webinar and you know people give me comment if you, if you think it's a good idea, but I was going to run, uh, an ad on Facebook going what the WTF is happening with my marketing, like, because everything's changing and the things that used to work are not working. Okay, and everybody in there being inundated with all this stuff and AI, which I do want to get into this. This call after this is, but it's like so much stuff's changing, so many things are not working. I'm busy running my business and then you know, not just click inflation, but like real inflation, like things are getting more difficult, harder and time is just being stretched so they don't know what there's going on.

Speaker 1:

And then there's other people going, okay, like I need to make a pivot. Whatever I'm doing right now is not what I want to be. There's going to be a lot of people, I think, with automation and everything else, starting to lose jobs. I was at a in Texas. It's a little bit different story because we have a president that's positive towards, you know, energy. But in New York and also in California, the tone was very different of the level of the economy in the U S. I don't know specifically UK, but I've I've read things online. It's it's kind of everywhere.

Speaker 2:

There's all the old, true.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, right, like. So I don't know, like, what do people do Right? And and I want to I want to get into the specific person you can help the most, because someone someone is looking for a lifeline, someone's looking for someone to throw a life preserver too and, um, I know your background and what you've done and, like, I want that person to hear it you know, sure, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So typically if somebody has, I guess, two, two types of people, mainly number one, somebody who's figured out marketing, but now sales or sales team is the bottleneck and they're like you said, click inflation. Cost of leads is getting more expensive, booking a book call is more expensive, so they're like well, how do we get the team to convert higher? So that's one person. Another person is maybe what they were doing previously worked for them. Specifically one client that I have at the moment. They'd run a VSL for the longest time, metarad VSL application call booking setters reach out to the leads in the funnel, simple work, great. They were doing half a million a month and all of a sudden, half a million a month went to 400K, went to 300K, went to 150K, but now obviously operationally they've still got all of the hard costs of a business that is at half a million a month. So they had to cut really, really hard and really fast.

Speaker 2:

And with that particular client I I had an inkling. When I looked at their leads and I looked at their sales process and all the rest of it. I said I think you're dealing with a trust recession based on bloat in your market there's a lot of people talking about the same thing. There's a lot of people spouting. You know, everybody's got a unique mechanism, you know. And so the avatar is essentially sat there thinking, well, who the hell do I listen to? All the price points are roughly the same. Sounds like they all do the same sort of thing One-to-one coaching and all the rest of it. And so I said, if, if, if, my hunch is true and we're dealing with a trust recession here, then let's take that VSL and instead let's run a two day event as a test. Right, just a test. It doesn't mean you have to do it, but we're going to do a two day event, two hours on a Friday, two hours on a Saturday morning to catch the people after work. And, you know, saturday morning they can do two hours instead of mowing the lawn, whatever it is. And they did.

Speaker 2:

That event got a still running meta ads, got a hundred people in the room and off the back of the event. 15 of them bought, 12 of them piffed, paid in full, so they were like holy cow. So every hundred people we get into our funnel, 15 of them buy. And and you know, whatever the percent, yeah, whatever, yeah, yeah, 12 out of 15 is. I don't know what it is, my math is horrible 80 something without a calculator, I don't know but a lot, a high proportion paid in full. And that was the indicator that it was trust in the market, specifically in their market it was. It was um becoming so oversaturated and that made all of the difference. So they went from 10 minute VSL to live two day event. We've now just implemented that. They run a live webinar every single week on a Monday and they're back up to a half a million again and we're we're scaling up from there.

Speaker 1:

So just a interesting piece of data to bring into this that I've, I've, I've seen personally. Okay, Um, I don't think people see this when they run ads, right, Cause you're just forcing like, if you're running meta ads, it is shown in that the ads costs more over time. Does that make sense? But you're throwing so much money at these ads, You're just forcing it to be shown to people. Google or, sorry, meta, is trying to tell you hey, these ads aren't working as well, this messaging is not working as well, and so we're going to charge you more. We're going to show it to less people right Now.

Speaker 1:

If you do that organically, if you post a commercially based, creative, whatever you're putting together, you'll see it in the, the, the, the engagement you know. You'll see it in in how many people it gets showed to. If you're looking at the dashboard and like creator view, Okay and always, just how it works is create a commercial post Don't typically do as well. Now I've found a way, like because I've been playing with it to to incorporate it in where I don't know if it gets um categorized differently by the algorithm so it shows it to more people. Um, because even high engagement posts posts, if they're commercial intense there. The algorithm doesn't like to show it, so so there, I think that there's a way of of how it's categorized to find a better post. But if you find a post that has done good organically, then put the money behind that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that's one piece that I would like to bring into that I've seen. And then the other piece is this has been for years Okay, and I just don't think people have noticed it, but now people are starting to have to pay a lot more attention because you can't just force things through anymore. On meta, for example, people never want to share a sales related post, but they will share an event related post all day long, they will engage with it, they will like it, and so I think that that feeds into even kind of a broader expectation of what works has always worked. It's just more important to work better now because you need those those higher conversion rates. More important to work better now because you need those those higher conversion rates. All right, so I want to transition into what are you seeing now? People leverage with AI. Where do you think it's going? Just what are your overall views on AI in general in the sales process? Because I've seen just some insane stuff that the future of agents is going to be incredible.

Speaker 2:

It is, I agree. So there's a couple of different areas where I utilize AI. One area is because I work with multiple teams. One of the most important things as a manager or a fractional sales manager to do is to do call reviews right. You've got to understand what people are saying. Where are they struggling? How good are the leads? How is the pitch landing? All of this kind of stuff Very, very hard to do. So I trained a GPT that I can essentially take the transcript from every single sales call and I can feed it into a GPT and the GPT will analyze it as me and give me a blow by blow.

Speaker 2:

This is what needs improvement. This is what was good. This is how the pitch landed. It will analyze how the prospect felt. It's not a hundred percent accurate but what it means is that yeah, I can feed all of this data into the GPT.

Speaker 2:

It will spit out all the data and then I can just put it in a graph and I can say, okay, our biggest bottleneck at the moment is the pitch. The pitch is not landing. People are. They're humming and hawing at the end and you know, when they're asked a kind of temp check question, how does that sound? You know, kind of one to 10 scale one horrible, 10, great. They're like like yeah, sounds okay. I guess I'd give it like a six or a seven. Okay, we need to revise the pitch like yesterday. Do you know what I mean? So that's that's one way we use ai.

Speaker 2:

The other way we use ai is I have a data scraper for specifically for people that need help with marketing. I have a data scraper. It's got about 200 million data points from Google and it is specifically looking for people that type in certain search phrases and then we pull all of that data and we then upload it into our clients meta ads as an example. This is not in my niche, but if I owned a watch store and I sold Rolexes, we can pull all of the data points from Google for people that have searched for you know, day, date, day, just. They just for sale. Rolex for sale buy a Rolex, all of these things, and then we can upload that into the meta dashboard.

Speaker 1:

So now the ads are only going to be displayed to people that have used those search terms inside of the last seven days are those on site or are you scraping ip addresses, like I mean, I know that in the uk there's a lot more rules around, uh, like cookie list targeting and pixeling. Um, how are you getting that data? Are you buying that from pvv lists? Or like how are? How are you acquiring that data on the front end apollovv lists? Or like how are? How are you acquiring that data on the front end apollo or something?

Speaker 2:

like that. We've got two ways. Number one is a data aggregator and the other is ips. Uh, and you're right, you do have to. You do have to be cautious about how you use the data, but we're, we're, we're tracking ips and we're um, we're purchasing the data from aggregators, essentially. But what typically happens when you upload that into Meta is because now your ads are only being shown because it's hashed.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a lookalike audience Basically, it's a custom audience Literally.

Speaker 2:

But the most hyper likely audience to buy, because we all know that Meta is interruption marketing. Right, People are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Oh, that looks good. Well now, if you put your ad in front of somebody that's looked specifically for your product as, as an example, we just implemented this with my client in the real estate coaching space. They teach people how to, you know, do HMOs and all this kind of stuff. Well, now, the data is only only displaying the ads to people that have indicated they're interested in HMOs, so you're getting people further along the awareness graph. Instead of being problem aware, we're now managing to get people who are solution aware. So when they see the ad, they're like, oh, this is exactly what I was looking for. So you know, obviously they close at a much higher percentage. So those are the two ways I specifically use. It is analysis and data, and the note-taking bots to capture it.

Speaker 1:

We're pushing it to GPT right now basically some custom prompts to spit out some recommendations, and then we push it to the person that created the call on our team. So whoever created the call gets an email report just automated. Here's what you could do better. I'm sure we can improve that and we could enhance the prompts. Created the call gets an email report just automated. Here's what you could do better. I'm sure we can improve that and we could enhance the prompts or even utilize like a custom GPT that you create, where I'm seeing a marketplace there where to use this GPT it's five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month or whatever it is where there's a. I think the business is changing right. I think everything's changing. It's kind of like internet 2.0 sort of thing and there's going to be so many businesses that are built off the back of this. But you have to shift with what's going on.

Speaker 1:

I actually had a couple of calls that were actually inbounds, that needed marketing of sales, coaching organizations, and I was like this is what I'm doing for my team of like three people. You know you could create a lot of leverage in this to utilize this at scale and if you think about a 3% improvement, right, they read the email, they actually implement it. Because you can upload, even like spin selling or whatever you're using as your sales metric. It can give you recommendations based on that and if you're constantly getting those recommendations and you just do that, the leverage off of that could be exponential. Of of those percentages, and I feel like that's what people want is like, okay, jeff, and you're like, hey, I don't have time to work with all these clients, but you could utilize my GPT and we could set this up for you, and blah, blah, blah, and it becomes like a SaaS sort of thing. There's a business right there, right, uploading the data, absolutely Like the hashing data.

Speaker 1:

I mean, facebook knows more about us than we know. Like everybody thinks the ads listen and I do think on maybe some of the platforms in the terms of service, they are listening. But there is ways to protect yourself and Apple, for example, does a pretty good job of limiting some of that stuff. Now Google, the phone is called the Pixel. Okay, they're making fun. These engineers are like Easter egging you Like. You are, like we're doing this to capture everything that's happening, to sell you ads and everybody's on their phone all the time, and and so I think this stuff is is super powerful, and to be able to uh utilize that data in a way that you're not just running cold traffic to everybody but you're only showing like a billboard to uh the person that potentially wants to buy it becomes that much more effective. Your marketing goes that much further. I think those things are phenomenal.

Speaker 2:

For the teams that we rolled that out with Matt across the board, the least so it cut the CPA, obviously because the ads are more relevant. The least it cut the CPA for any of those.

Speaker 1:

Those teams was 40 and the most was about 70, so they went from you know, double your money right there.

Speaker 2:

Cpa was, yeah, cpa was like two grand down to less than a thousand bucks, just by using the correct data yeah, no, I think this is great.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I want to kind of open up the floor. I've've covered the things that I think are super relevant. I'm sure that there's blind spots in what I'm seeing, because I'm more heavily on the marketing side than the sales side. What are things that we didn't talk about in this conversation that you think would be relevant to just kind of add in there, as we're kind of starting to wind down?

Speaker 2:

I think there's a big shift in the way we sell specifically coaches, consultants, course creators and it used to be quite an aggressive selling style and I don't think that's going to cut it much longer. In fact, I know because I look at the data every day. It's not cutting it. Now, people you said it perfectly. You said people want to know, like and trust, and I agree with that, and I think the most important element of those three is trust. If somebody trusts that you can get them the result, they don't necessarily have to know you particularly well, sometimes they don't even have to like you, but if they trust that you can get them the result, they'll be like okay, I'm on board. They'll be like okay, I'm on board.

Speaker 2:

And I think the way that people sell in the, in the kind of you know 2020 style, is no longer working anywhere near as well as it did, and people have to understand how important building trust is. And the question then becomes well, how do I build trust on a sales call? And it's everything to do with that communication with that person, and it's almost like going back to having a good, old fashioned human interaction. Stop looking at it as a quote unquote sales call. Have a conversation with that person. Do you need to follow a framework? Yeah, sure, but make it a conversation, make sure you connect with the person, make sure you're relatable to them. Don't make them feel like they're trapped in a sales conversation and I think the quicker people can pivot back to I don't.

Speaker 2:

I suppose the easiest way to explain it would be a consultative type of sale. You know, consultative, a consultative. I think the faster they can make that adjustment away from this. You know, kind of bro-y hard closer, you know, and like, I don't mind anybody being aggressive in sales. I've been in sales for nearly 20 years. I don't mind aggression, but the aggression needs to be interpreted as aggressively going after the deal rather than overtly being outwardly aggressive, because that is not cutting it any longer.

Speaker 1:

So, so when I, uh, I asked my team to get reviews right and I say you can only ask for a view that you've earned, right, and I think that goes the same thing with with the selling, um, you gotta know what you're talking about and you gotta know what that ask is, and if you don't feel like you've earned it, you you shouldn't do it. Um, and I I like that. I think. I think that that's a good takeaway. I've always said no, I can trust because, um, I've always kind of approached it from the consultative, like I want to work. If I'm going to work with you, I want to like like this has got to be a good experience for both of us, sort of thing.

Speaker 1:

Um, but there are definitely a different kind of people out there and, depending on what you're selling, I feel like have you seen a difference?

Speaker 1:

I feel like the real funnily, funnily looking stuff online, right, like with all the like, different, like emojis, check marks, like I feel like people just see that and then they immediately like put up a wall and like they, they've just had it, they bought it before, it didn't work or whatever, and there's all this baggage, and as soon as they see some of that stuff, they just immediately put up a wall, and so the thing that I have to continue to remind myself is there's somebody on the end of this conversation, like it's easier to talk to you, but if you're doing like a, a video where you're just talking to the mic, you know you got to imagine a person being there, and the more you can connect with somebody, uh, the, the more, the the the message is going to be communicated.

Speaker 1:

Because if, if that message doesn't get communicated or you're just broadcasting right, and I feel like there's a lot of people that are just I'm going to be louder and I'm just going to broadcast more I don't know, I haven't seen that work as well organically on social media and, um, I think that it's just that's how people are handling the noisiness of the market.

Speaker 2:

I'm just going to be louder and I'm just like yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it comes back down to understanding your avatar. You know, like you said, the emoji check mark. You know fast paced stuff. Well, that's great If you want to attract to probably an 18 to 23 year old, but if your avatar is not 18 to 23, that's probably not going to cut it. You probably want to do something a little more reserved.

Speaker 2:

You know, and certainly with a couple of companies that I work with, they've had that style of marketing. They've run ads like that. They've, you know, seen the cost per click go up, the cost CPA go through the roof and I've said, said, look, refilm that ad, but just do it selfie style, just do it walking along by the, by the beach, through the park, whatever it is, and just use the same script, but just riff the camera immediate, lift in results, immediate, and I think people are getting back to just wanting something that is real and a bit more natural and a bit more believable, rather than flashing lights, neon signs and emoji check marks.

Speaker 1:

I love it. Okay, how do people get in touch with you? Give your pitch, I think people know you know what you're talking about and you've helped a lot of great people and companies, and so I I just want people, if they need your services, to know who they are and how to get in touch with you.

Speaker 2:

Sure, easiest way is probably LinkedIn. So that's at Jeff Ketterer, g E, o, f, f, k, e, t T E R E R. Although that's not where my biggest audience is, that's probably the platform I favor. Um and uh, they can reach out to me there for sure. Um, I've I've also got something that for anybody that wants it um, the elite sales team OS blueprint. So anybody that's currently running a sales team. I did a masterclass and um, just laid bare some of the things that I see improve sales team. So if anybody wants that masterclass, they can just contact me on LinkedIn. Just shoot me the message team 25 and I'll send that across. But, yeah, probably LinkedIn at Jeff Ketter is the easiest way to get.

Speaker 1:

Do you have the automation set up on TikTok or whatever, wherever? You said you're big, that if they put team 25, it just automatically sends it to them. Do you know what? Or are you team 25?

Speaker 2:

it just automatically sends it to you uh, do you know what?

Speaker 1:

or are you manually?

Speaker 2:

doing it. I'm just curious. I do have a many chat set up, but I do not have it set up on for that, and the reason for that is because you know, I appreciate what you're doing, um, and I I know you know, building what you've built here, matt, is not an easy task. So I also want to encourage everybody to go, and anybody that's listening, go and and give a. If you've listened this far, go and give them a five-star review, because what you're doing is great and you're helping a lot of people and it's not easy to do. So I appreciate you for that. But I do not have automation set up on LinkedIn. That is manual and that's because those are the kind of people that I want to connect with a little bit more closely and I don't just want them having going through a many chat funnel.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, and and LinkedIn has some rules around some of that, so you got to be careful of what automations? And you don't want to get banned. So, um, but yeah, I, I would love to uh get that file. What is it Team? Say it again.

Speaker 2:

Elite team OS blueprint. So if you just send me the word team 25 on LinkedIn. I'll send it All.

Speaker 1:

everybody go get that. I think it's a great resource. Okay, jeff, thanks so much for coming on. Hopefully, everybody found this conversation helpful. I love having real conversations with people and not having people come on just pitch their services because, well, we're in a trust recession. So thank you for your time, jeff, and sharing your wisdom. Yes, if you like this, if you need some help, if you want to leverage the most powerful, largest tool on the planet the internet, and everything that's happening in with these search algorithms on all social media channels, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.

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