The Secrets to Smarter Marketing and Real Revenue Growth with Todd Ervin

Todd Ervin [00:00:00]:
Data is is the thing that powers AI. Without data, it it really can’t do a whole lot for you. So we see a lot of companies that that go into now. And the first thing, almost every engagement we go into, we have to get their data clean. Because A, we want to start doing things Lee, one, doing market segmentation, understanding who their ICPs are, building buyer personas, building buyer’s journeys. You know, all of those types of things are are are things that you need to feed into the model from an AI perspective.

Todd Ervin [00:00:32]:
Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales, and business, the business of marketing podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:41]:
Welcome again to the Business of Marketing. I’m A. Lee Judge. You know, in my book, Cash, A four keys to better sales, smarter marketing, and the supercharged revenue machine, I featured insights from several industry leaders who helped shape the way sales and marketing work together. And one of those voices was Todd Irvin. Todd brought a real world example of how smart marketing can drive measurable business outcomes and how aligning with leadership is key to making all that happen. So in this episode, we’re A hear lessons that apply whether you’re building awareness, proving value to your leadership team, or trying to connect marketing efforts to revenue. So let’s get into it.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:21]:
Let me join us today is Todd Irvin. Hey, Todd.

Todd Ervin [00:01:25]:
Hey, Lee. Nice to be here.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:27]:
Glad you could join again because, you know, I’ve gotten feedback from the book already. It’s been going great A the examples of the book, like the one you gave, really gives A bit of meat on the bones to the A, and so I appreciate that. So I want to get right into it because there’s some things you mentioned in the book that I think, a lot of marketers struggle with, and I even have a case in my own company where you know, we’re dealing with it. And you have a great, awareness building case from a company you worked at in the past, called Primo Water. And you mentioned how you identified a big gap in the market, which was people didn’t even realize that your A, at that time, in home or in A, water delivery was even a thing. So, in that product awareness challenge that happens even before giving someone a chance to choose your brand, What helped you realize that awareness was A real issue A what made you confident enough to shift marketing resources to fix the awareness problem first?

Todd Ervin [00:02:27]:
Yeah, A, Lee. Thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, it was a very unique position at Primo where, like, we were the the leader in home and office bottled water, coffee delivery service. But what we realized that very quickly was that people associated bottled water and coffee delivery service with their office. And people just didn’t understand that, yes, this is something that you can do at home as well to have, you know, clean, fresh drinking water for your families. And the way it manifested itself is when I took over as marketing leader, I quickly saw that the bottom of the funnel, new customer ads that we were bringing in, we were very well optimized. So in other words, once we got someone to engage with us, we were converting. The conversion rates were very high A a marketing perspective.

Todd Ervin [00:03:18]:
But then what I also realized as I started to align the marketing strategy to the company’s revenue plan, that in order to hit the growth that we really wanted to hit, and the company had been growing at a pretty good clip, but in order to hit the type of growth we really wanted, we were missing top of the funnel awareness. So, you know, in in looking at that and looking at the revenue plan and then comparing, you know, the marketing metrics and our budget to that, I knew that there was no way that we were A hit that number if we only A to focus on bottom of the funnel. The other thing that clued me in was just talking to people, friends, family, you know, A col you know, other colleagues from other companies. And when I told them what I was going to go do, and when you mentioned home and office, everybody’s like, home. People have water delivered to their house. And it was it was so many people that I said, okay, this matching with the data that I’ve got that shows that, look, we’re not doing anything at the top of the funnel. People are really engaging at already mid to bottom of the funnel for us. So so it was sort of this combination of qualitative, you know, research that I just done with my own friends, family, you know, former colleagues, as well as matching that up with the data and then matching that data to the revenue plan that I was able to realize that we’ve got to shift some of this budget.

Todd Ervin [00:04:42]:
And we were so optimized at the bottom of the funnel that I knew I had room to shift more to the top of the funnel so that we could just start to build that awareness. And I knew that if we got more people in, we built that awareness and brought more people at the top of the A, our conversion rates would hold at the bottom of the funnel. So that’s where we’re gonna get our revenue lift from. Without that, we would A stagnant, which was, you know, good growth, solid growth. Marketing was meeting or beating its number even, you know, without hitting, the high getting more people into the top of the funnel. But really to truly get to where we needed to be, we needed more people to be aware that A that, one, the service was even a thing. And then, two, Primo was your choice to go to for that.

A. Lee Judge [00:05:26]:
Do you think it happens a lot in companies where if they have maybe they’re okay with where they are being stagnant or their growth is is A, but it’s it is growing. Do they don’t even think to look at building more A? Lee, they’re so established in their market that they think we’re good, let’s not touch that?

Todd Ervin [00:05:44]:
Yeah. I think that does happen sometimes. And I think the other thing that’s at play there is is, you know, unfortunately, there’s a gap in mark in some marketing leaders being able to connect that awareness building back to revenue. So when you’re in these companies that are growing pretty well, everybody’s budget constrained. Right? No company I’ve ever worked for, I think, didn’t say they’re budget constrained. So when you look at that and you say, well, marketing’s hitting the number or they’re beating the number, but then you’ve got this high level of growth that you’ve gotta go get, and A gotta be a third of that, you know, for the A. I I think it the the the shift that you have to make and the shift that marketers have to make is being able to talk numbers with finance, with the c with the CEO and and colleagues in the c suite to map out what it means for the full funnel if you start to do that awareness building. So I think there’s there’s a bit of a gap there where, yes, there’s a bit of, you know, kind of complacency and, you know, why do we need to spend A? Why do we need to shift budget? But then once you can tie that awareness building to the full funnel and then show the metrics of if I get x percent into the funnel at a high A, at the at the top of the funnel, this is how it trickles down, and this is ultimately what it means to revenue.

Todd Ervin [00:07:04]:
That’s where you hit the sweet spot, and that’s where marketers then are able to have that tough conversation with the CFO. Because if you can speak A numbers and you can show the CFO the path to getting that return on marketing investment, it makes that conversation much easier for marketing to sell in.

A. Lee Judge [00:07:20]:
So you’re trying to build this case for shifting budget to awareness. And I think it’s one of the biggest issues we have as marketers is sometimes the thing we know we need to do is the hardest thing to report on. It’s hard to get numbers on top of the funnel. In fact, by definition, the awareness people are ones who are so far, they’re the furthest from a deal of all of our prospects. So how do you start making that case when you know, especially, I know it varies per industry, your sales cycle could be you know, a month, six months, could be a year. How do you what are some of the things you use to justify that to the CRO that, hey, I A invest in this campaign? You might not see a result for eight months.

Todd Ervin [00:08:02]:
Yeah. Well well, one thing that that we did is we’d never had a brand awareness tracker, in in Primo. So one thing that you can do is stand up a an awareness tracker. Now, again, that’s gonna be a little bit lagging because you’re gonna launch that initial tracker. You’re gonna get a baseline. And then as you run campaigns, you can start to tie that tracker back and start to understand when certain campaigns are in A, when you see that awareness kinda that that needle marketing up in in your brand tracker survey. So a lot of companies, don’t have that tool in place, and it is a way to start to track awareness, both aided and unaided awareness. And then you can start to tie those metrics into as awareness goes up, you’ll start to see your conversion rates down funnel start to A, and you’ll start to see those new customer ads come on.

Todd Ervin [00:08:52]:
But it does take a little bit. It is a, you know, as you know, you don’t turn on marketing overnight, especially in the digital world, and it starts working tomorrow. So it’s really being able to go in, build a business case. And I tell all marketers, if you can build that business case with finance, bring finance into that A. Because if you’ve got a good finance department, especially one that has finance business partners assigned to marketing, to sales, to to to the individual functional A, they can build that business case with you. And now it’s more of a conversation of we’ve got a solid assumption based on actual numbers that if we do this, if we start to build and put it and build an awareness and then we can start to see that awareness go up in the brand tracker survey, we can now tie that back to our business case to say that, yes, this is in fact working. So here are areas we need to double down on. You know, here are certain areas maybe an awareness that we may need to pull back on.

Todd Ervin [00:09:51]:
But it it has to start with with some form of all things reverting back to the revenue model. And that’s how you get finance on board, and you get finance to to basically buy you a little bit of time, which is the time that you Lee. So but it has to be a a A conversation around the financials, or you’re never gonna get there the marketer.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:13]:
Marketers and sales Lee, if you wanna close more deals and drive real revenue growth, you need cash, and I don’t mean money. I’m talking about my new book, Cash, A Four Keys to Better Sales, Smarter Marketing, and a Supercharged Revenue Machine. It gives you a proven framework to improve the four areas that impact revenue the most, communication, alignment, systems, and honesty. You need a stronger sales and marketing Judge, and this book will show you how to build it. Get your copy now at A. Now back to the content. You mentioned the brand tracking. I know different industries have different ways of doing it, but and I won’t nail you down to any particular software or tactic, but give me some idea of how you’ve seen in the past or some things you know about where if a marketer’s listening now, they’re probably going, okay.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:07]:
We hear you. We A track our brand, but it’s difficult. You know, there’s ways you can do it. There’s always software platforms. There’s social listening. There’s surveys. What are some of the ways you’ve experienced?

Todd Ervin [00:11:19]:
Yeah. A combination. You know, back in the day, it it was just surveys. So when I started out as a marketer, we had a brand tracker survey that went, you know, this was back in the wireless days, you know, I was A. And our brand tracker at that point was running weekly Judge because wireless is, you know, it’s it’s constantly changing. But, you know, as I went through and went to different companies, you know, that brand tracker would run monthly, some of them, you know, A. It just depended on the industry. But then, you know, as marketing and A, you know, really came on board, you start to really be able to look at things like sentiment analysis.

Todd Ervin [00:11:52]:
You really started to be able to measure, engage A media engagement, and then tying that back. And then the other piece is is as you’re launching, you know, these awareness campaigns, especially in a digital world, and and I know a lot of people say, well, you can’t mix you can’t mix awareness with demand generation. Right? But you can. Right? Because at the end of the day, nothing should go out even from an awareness perspective that doesn’t have some sort of a call to action to it. So as you start to launch these campaigns that are more top of A, and you’re launching things A you’re putting things out Lee brand videos A and you’re putting things out, you know, that that are really meant to track to to attract that user to really A pique their interest for A first time, there should still be a call to action to it. So now you’ve got them in the funnel. You’ve got it where you can track it. And even your awareness campaigns, you know, a lot of marketers out there, most of us are running, you know, HubSpot, Salesforce A Cloud, whatever it might be.

Todd Ervin [00:12:52]:
All of your awareness campaigns should still be still be tagged so that you’re getting that that connection back in in form in the form of real data. Now that’s that’s obviously the the digital world. Right? You can track everything in the digital world, whether it’s in their awareness campaign or not. The things that were you know, that people describe as softer in marketing, you know, so things like running radio ads or out of home TV, those certainly are, you know, a lot harder to start to track. A, again, there are techniques that you can use to add simple things like a promo code to to an ad that you’re running, whether it’s TV, radio, print, whatever, or out of home. You can do things like that that now, again, can tag right back into your marketing automation system. So now you have the numbers that show that engagement, and then you can start to track that engagement and see the lift that it has all the way down funnel.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:48]:
You know, it’s interesting you mentioned radio and television because I had A early career. Early part of my career was in radio and TV, And I even did some marketing then. And at that time, it was normal to not know exactly who saw or heard your ad. We we measured it differently. And I think where we’re at now is marketers are having to learn that old school kind of measurement again. You know, I’ve talked about case studies recently like the old Coca Cola billboard case study. They knew they sold more where the billboard was, right? Versus where it wasn’t. And at that time it wasn’t, you know, how many views did you get? How many bottles did you sell per billboard? They just knew it worked or it didn’t work.

Todd Ervin [00:14:29]:
Right.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:29]:
And I think now with this zero click marketing where we can’t track as much as we used to, we’re losing cookie access due to privacy concerns and browsers. And marketing are A to have to learn to understand what I turned on versus what I turned off. Is the thing that’s on working? Now A struggle there is it could be a six, eight month, you know, twelve month lag of what you turned on. And then I’ve dealt with overlapping campaigns where you turn a campaign on, someone says it’s too much, you turn it off, turn a new one on. And the funny thing is you turn the new one on and the deal comes in, it could have been from the last one that you turned off four months ago.

Todd Ervin [00:15:10]:
Mhmm.

A. Lee Judge [00:15:11]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:16:04]:
I know you mentioned something about dashboards. Uh-huh. So, you know, we have these these, lagging indicators when we do this marketing and things come in Lee, and we we try to make decisions based on historical A, which may not always be accurate based on where we’re trying to go to versus where we’ve been. So give me some of your some insight of your experience of trying to build dashboards, explain what happened, what is happening, and use that dashboard to to to help get more budget and attention for your marketing efforts.

Todd Ervin [00:16:36]:
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, so first, you know, when it comes to building dashboards and, you know, at Cortado, our our revenue A team, we do this for a lot of clients. You know, we build these dashboards. And one of the things that we see often when we go in and we’re working with a client, especially if it’s in the marketing team, is they A build this dashboard sort of in a silo. So they want, you know, marketing wants to be able to track marketing metrics. Sometimes they wanna put up a put up a wall and don’t want anybody A really see the metrics that, you know, that are sitting behind it sitting behind the wall and only share the metrics that they want. But the first thing that you have to start with with building dashboards is you’ve got to get buy in.

Todd Ervin [00:17:13]:
So you got to find out, one, who are the key stakeholders in the company that need to have access, need to use these dashboards, need to have certain views for themselves, whether it’s A CEO level dashboard or a finance level dash board, it it all starts with A do I need to tell people? What’s the story that I need to tell the rest of the organization here? So when Lee talk dashboards, it’s very important that it’s a collaborative effort when they’re built to begin with. So that way everybody A, here’s what we can track, here’s what we can’t track, here’s how we can perhaps use data to kind of triangulate some things, you know, between the data that we within the data that we do have so that we can start to tie things back and and get baseline. So that’s that’s the second piece. So I mentioned this thing about getting a baseline. A conversation that a lot of people do understand is, look, we haven’t done this before. We haven’t measured this before. We’re standing up these dashboards. Haven’t done this before.

Todd Ervin [00:18:07]:
We haven’t measured this before. We’re standing up these dashboards with the goal in mind to get much tighter on our tracking. And, you know, in order to do that, we have to get a baseline first. So, you know, typically, the c suite understands baselines. Finance understands getting a baseline. So when they say, well, you know, what’s your goal? You can set some soft goals based on assumptions that are agreed upon by the team, but make sure that those goals are set and and make sure everybody’s aligned that what you see in the dashboard to start, let’s not panic. Let’s all get together and say this is the timeline when we expect to start seeing A. And it takes a little bit, you know, of you as the marketer to know and understand how long it takes certain things to take to be able to set those expectations.

Todd Ervin [00:18:55]:
And then once you’ve got that set, everybody’s agreed on the dashboards, everybody’s agreed on what’s tracked, what’s not, and then how we can triangulate and and, you know, A, you know, bring different pieces of data together to start to get a view, then you’ve got you’ve got buy in from the team. You’ve got alignment. So it really has to start there. Then this next piece gets to you you brought up something around, you know, we don’t know whether, you know, the you know, this person came into a campaign off of something they saw two months ago or something that they saw further down funnel once, you know, they’ve already they’re already aware that they have a need, right, as part of the buyer’s journey, and now they’re they’re evaluating their options. So we don’t know exactly where they came in. So the other thing that that we taught our clients Lee a lot about is is attribution. And the organization has to agree on what attribution you’re gonna use. And what I tell marketers who are just starting out to try to get some of these measurements, look, at the end of the day, the easiest one to measure is first touch attribution.

Todd Ervin [00:19:57]:
Right? So let’s just start there. And before we start getting into A touch attribution or, you know, you can get into last touch, which I know some companies like to use as well. But the easiest one to get is let’s just start with first touch, and then let’s let’s just A see where we go where we go from there. Let’s get a baseline there. And as we go, we can start to get more sophisticated. And then as we, you know, bring our systems and processes for measuring online, then we can start to get into A and start to attribute things to very specific campaigns, very specific tactics within A campaign. But you have to start A. And if you don’t start, you know, immediately with really kind of the easiest thing to track, you’re A spend a lot of time just kind of spinning your wheels and and convincing people.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:44]:
You know, it’s interesting you mentioned I want to dive into a couple things there. So A attribution part, you know, I worked in marketing operations for a long time A have tried every form of attribution there typically is out there. And what I learned was a lot of it depends on your, your sales cycle and what you’re selling. So for example, if you’re an e content you’re say Amazon, sometimes the last touch is the one to measure. Like they’ve been researching A for months. What was it that made them pull the trigger and buy the thing? Because it’s also the closest to the purchase. But then with the longer sales cycles, because there’s so many touches and there’s a lot of dark social, a lot of dark word-of-mouth stuff going on, the first touch is often the best one because at least you know where our leads came from. A then the multi touch, I say, well you know A, it exists, but hardly anybody can do it.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:37]:
I mean, it takes a lot of data.

Todd Ervin [00:21:40]:
Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:41]:
It takes people dedicated to working that data. Absolutely. I mean, I had a job as a marketing operations person and and a sales ops person, and my job was to examine data all day for marketing specifically.

Todd Ervin [00:21:54]:
Right.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:54]:
In that case, A touch was closer to being A, you know? Yeah. But unless you have that kind of structure in your company, multi touch, I wouldn’t advise anybody to touch multi touch, and decide first touch or last touch based on your sales cycle. Does that make sense?

Todd Ervin [00:22:12]:
Yeah. No. It A makes sense. And you’re right. You know, I I you know, there are a lot of people who say, oh, yeah. We do A touch attribution, and you ask them to explain it, and they can’t explain how they do it,

A. Lee Judge [00:22:22]:
or it’s it’s a little bit wishy washy. A, yeah, you’re exactly right.

Todd Ervin [00:22:25]:
You know, those longer sales cycles, you know, the first touch certainly makes sense. And a lot of, you know, the companies I advise now are primarily primarily b to b. In Primo, we have both b to c and b to b. So building that awareness in Primo and tying that attribution back for the consumer segment was actually pretty quick. You know, consumers are going to, you know, once they’re aware of something and they start to evaluate it, you know, on their buyer’s journey, they start to evaluate their A. And then it’s kind of, you know, it’s, you know, resolve my concerns. Okay. Well, let me just kind of double check a few things.

Todd Ervin [00:23:00]:
They’re A make decisions, you know, in a lot of cases much more quickly. In A b to b setting, it’s often that that that first touch is where you have to go because to your point, a lot of the organizations I work with now, they are longer sales cycles. There are more members of the buying decision team that are part of that as well. So you’ve got to bring multiple people along on this journey before you actually make a sale. So that first touch is really the way to go, in my opinion, for those longer cycles. Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:23:30]:
A I’m thinking maybe we should introduce the term A touch understanding. Because in a long sales cycle, one, you won’t see all the A, but if you gather enough data amongst all those A, you might get a higher understanding of what the process looks like. You can’t attribute it to just one thing or two or three things throughout that. You know, I wouldn’t even call it A, but I was explaining to someone the other day of where we’re going with AI in terms of using our data. And my theory is that, and that’s not even theory, we’re almost there, every software we use now is injecting AI into the software. So your CRM has AI in it, your marketing automation has AI in it. But where we’re very close to A we get past the internal privacy issues is that AI will be our user interface. And we’ll be able to just say, you know, instead of going into each A, software, we’ll just say, look, across our data, is there a correlation between trade shows and closed deals? Is there a correlation between email open rates and the deals we had this quarter? Because AI can look at all those touch points more so than we would not even look for, and might uncover some things we hadn’t thought about to say, you know what? When you had an email that started off with how to, those emails A to be associated with more A, more companies who closed deals at this dollar amount.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:56]:
And it’s a crazy thing to think that a human could actually figure out. But with enough data, AI can help us uncover some interesting things, I think. And that brings me back to the data part. A mentioned the A. So what about these companies who, don’t have the data yet? Lee, I I talked with a construction company last week who, not company, construction brand, who had several different branches and dealerships, and some of them were just starting to A CRMs. And my encouragement to them was, okay, you’re not there yet A data with AI, but you can start gathering the data. Mhmm. So A do you say those organizations who haven’t quite yet began to gather the data they could be using?

Todd Ervin [00:25:40]:
Start now. If you don’t if you don’t have the data, you’re dead in the water as far as AI is concerned. Hey. A. AI A is is the thing that powers AI. Without data, it it really can’t do a whole lot for you. So we see a lot of companies that I go into now. And the first thing, almost every engagement we go into, we have to get their data Lee.

Todd Ervin [00:26:04]:
Because A, we want to start doing things like, one, doing market segmentation, understand who their ICPs are, building buyer personas, building buyers journeys. You know, all of those types of things are are are things that you need to feed into the model from an AI perspective. So it starts to understand who your customers are. It starts to understand how you’re going to market. And then from an analytics perspective, the data has to be you have to have it, number one. It has to be Lee A it has to be structured properly in order to understand anything A it. So I tell anybody out there who’s who’s talking or A any of the sexier parts of AI, you got to put in the work first to be able to get that. I described it to one content.

Todd Ervin [00:26:48]:
Like, it’s it’s like going to the gym. We’re going to come in and we’re going to build we’re going to do a lot of data A stuff for you. We’re going to we’re going to really kind of make sure that your data is in order. You know, everything is structured so that we’ll be ready to use AI A everything from content creation to measurement, all of that. But we got to do the hard work first. You don’t like to go to the gym, but we’re going to go to the gym. We’re going to build that muscle. That muscle is called data.

Todd Ervin [00:27:16]:
And guess what? Then you’re gonna have your beach body come come summertime.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:20]:
You’re gonna be able to do all

Todd Ervin [00:27:21]:
these sexy things with AI. So that’s that’s really the way you have to think about it is it really does have to start with the data, and it starts with making investments in whether it’s people internally or you’re going to bring in third party consulting to do it and do it probably quicker for you to to get that house in order. But then you’ve got to have the people inside the company that are going to manage data governance. So once you’ve got good Lee data, you have to have somebody who’s responsible, one, for feeding that data A AI so you don’t end up with a mess there. And then, two, you have to make sure that all of the users, all the input people inputting data are keeping that data structured and A to the guidelines that are set.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:06]:
Well, we’ll wrap up on this. So I love that we’re talking about AI. How do you see AI changing the way the work you do happens today, and A the clients are asking for, and how you approach it, how you’re using AI to do better work?

Todd Ervin [00:28:23]:
A way we look at it is we first use and test AI on ourselves as A, And and we advise our clients to do the same. So, you know, start with AI, using it as an organization because what you need to do is get the organization used to and comfortable with AI. A call it making the making the organization AI ready. And then you have to also understand kind of that human and AI A. Right? It’s not the robots aren’t coming to take over the world. The robots are coming to work with us and make our lives easier. So once you can start to understand how AI helps you in your daily job to basically deliver great products, great services, whatever it might be to your customers, to your clients, then you can start to use it for more things to engage your clients and engage your customer base. An example of one of the things that we do is is, you know, going back, I’m also a market researcher by trade.

Todd Ervin [00:29:21]:
So, you know, I’d run focus groups or, you know, 16 to 20 individual interviews. Coming out of that type of a project, it would take me two weeks to go back, listen to transcripts, you read transcripts, listen to audio, start to pull out the common themes and this and that. Now I can do that with AI. Takes me A, heck, less than thirty minutes to to Lee A go through it and to pull out the common themes and and move down the ladder of kinda content to ask the AI questions so I get it narrowed in. So not only does it take me a lot less time, it’s also more accurate because AI doesn’t have researchers A. You know, we all we all have biases as researchers. So I found that AI, you know, A enabled me to become a faster marketer, which means I can turn around projects A I can speed things up for my clients in terms of delivering what they need to go to market. And then two, I just feel that I’m getting a much I’m getting a much less biased, you know, output from the AI running that analysis.

Todd Ervin [00:30:27]:
Now I still have to look at it and and put the human lens on it because I was in the interviews. I ran the interviews and and heard certain things. So there is some massaging that happens. But then I can then take that research or, you know, I can use that AI, you know, that came out of the research, and I can use that then to to build a first draft of buyer personas. And then from that, I can take that same AI, run a query once I’ve loaded those personas in, and have it build me messaging pillars. Then I can take that and have it, you know, build marketing campaigns for me, you know, right down to email content, LinkedIn ads, whatever it is. So we take all of that, and we use it ourselves to deliver. We that’s the way we A, was using it to deliver projects for our clients, much more accurately and and much faster.

Todd Ervin [00:31:13]:
And then what we’ve done is now we’re productizing what we’re using for ourselves to then build a capability for those clients. So now it’s Lee walk the clients through. Here’s what we’re doing as we’re building this for you. We’re building your foundation. And while we’re going along, you’re gonna be learning this because now we can actually build those same AI bots for you so that when we leave, you’ve got all this to use. You’re ready. You’ve got clean data because we did that for you. You’ve got your persona.

Todd Ervin [00:31:42]:
You got your ICP. You have everything that you need to input into that AI model to then make your sales organization, much more efficient, make your marketing organization much more effective and much more efficient. So so that’s that’s the way I would, you know, recommend that anybody or any company that’s that’s looking to start to try AI, try it first internally. Build some things. Build it with the lens of how do we take what we’re doing to to to really make ourselves better as as marketers, as salespeople, you know, whatever it is. How do we then take that now and bring it to our customers versus just looking and trying to go out and do something sexy with AI first to attract customers? Yeah. It’s probably not gonna work because you haven’t really tested it nor are you really truly understanding how how to use it right, how it works.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:33]:
So it’s utility, not just a a pretty fun thing. It’s something you can actually have utility with.

Todd Ervin [00:32:37]:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, it it’s funny when you see you know, when we’re working with clients and we Lee, you know, we’re walking through this process, and then you see they’ve got this light bulb A. They’re like, oh, now I get it. That’s why we had

A. Lee Judge [00:32:50]:
to do all of this stuff you had us do before. You know, it’s it’s

Todd Ervin [00:32:54]:
kinda like the the mister Miyagi wax on, wax off. Right? He’s Lee, well, no. Daniel Sun, you can’t do actual karate yet. You’ve gotta

A. Lee Judge [00:33:01]:
get He’s gotta do the work. Like you said earlier, put in those reps first.

Todd Ervin [00:33:04]:
Gotta get the foundation built. That’s it. Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:33:07]:
Awesome. Well, again, Todd, man, thanks for joining me. Always a great conversation. And thanks to the listeners. If you’re listening to the podcast and want to also see Todd and I video A podcast and others are available in the podcast section of content. Catch you next time.