Click through to the good bits.

00:00 Introductions.

09:33 How are you qualified to talk about data-driven marketing?

25:14 How effective is email marketing?

1:09:34 Who do you work with and how do you add value to their lives?

1:32:39 What is your recommendation to get better at data driven marketing?

1:41:28 What should people read?

1:48:09 Who might enjoy to be a part of the Talk Marketing series?

Martin Henley
Hello there, my name is Martin Henley. This is the effective marketing content extravaganza. If you’ve spent a second here, you will know that I am on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business. So I’m here giving you everything I know, we bringing Mel every other week to bring you the Marketing News, we review the very best and the very worst of marketing content on the internet and I pull in anyone I can find with experience that’s relevant, interesting and useful to you if you are interested to be more successful in your business through your marketing. So if you haven’t yet, you should like share, subscribe, comment, do all of those good things that will help us get this message to more small business owners like yourself.

Martin Henley
Today is Talk Marketing. So what I have is a guest for you. Now today’s guest started out in broadcast media, with Austereo Radio Group all the way back in 1996. He has been involved with the Data Driven Marketing Association and Advertising Association since 2011 in Australia. Mainly what he’s been doing since 2000 is being Managing Director of Action Mailing Lists. My writing is appalling today. He was introduced to us by both Ranil Rajapaksha and Dave Barnes. So he’s in a very unique group of people who’ve been referred to us twice. He is described in one of the, recommendations in his LinkedIn profile as the man and as the person that go to person when it comes to direct marketing. What you may not know about today’s guest, is that he has a really passionate interests in people’s right to be who they are. That is everybody’s right to be who they are. Today’s guest is Abramo Ierardo. Good afternoon Abramo.

Abramo Ierardo
G’Day, Martin. How are you?

Martin Henley
I am extraordinarily well, man. I’m really excited and happy to be speaking to you today. Because by everyone’s recommendation, you really are the man when it comes to direct marketing. And I’m not sure if we’re going to speak today about direct marketing or data driven marketing. Or maybe you can help us with the difference between those things. Are you the man or Brahma?

Abramo Ierardo
I prefer the word guru. I live and breathe by the word guru. So okay. I asked my grandchildren to refer to me as lord or master.

Martin Henley
Okay, that has not worked.

Abramo Ierardo
But anyway, I guess start with the concept of being the guru. Um, look, I think the reason I got something to say is because I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I’ve sort of picked up a trail of knowledge that I’m happy to share. So I let others judge whether or not it’s useful.

Martin Henley
Okay. All right, super cool. Are you being serious about the guru thing? Or is this like a superiority complex that you have that you’re not quite fulfilling?

Abramo Ierardo
It’s probably a complex.

Martin Henley
Okay, super cool. I mean, everybody’s got nice things to say about us is, is what I’m seeing.

Abramo Ierardo
That’s actually lovely. I bet it’s lovely. I mean, like, it’s not good. Any of us actually run their own businesses have this concept I’ve been I’ve always had this confidence. I don’t want to burn any bridges anywhere I go, right. So you kind of try to treat people the way you want to be treated. It doesn’t always work. I mean, like, you know, all of us in business are going to have customers or clients that will refuse to do business with us again, you know, and but it’s not my doing, and it’s never my intent. So it’s, it’s kinda nice when people have nice things to say about you.

Martin Henley
Yeah, it really is nice. It really is nice. And I remember when I started my business, I was a little bit behind you. It was 2005. I started my business. And it went fantastically well. And I remember the first time I lost a client, and I was devastated. It’s like, this isn’t supposed to happen. Shattering chattering Yeah, it’s like, but that is the truth of it. You know, the truth of it is people come into your life. So you can support them, you can help them for instance, take them as far as again, exactly. That’s it. Okay, good. I’m interested in this. You’re saying you’ve done it for 20 years? Is this your business, the mailing list business? Is this your business? It is your business. So you’ve done this for 22 years. And without wanting to overtake it? I think that’s a really interesting 22 years in the history of direct marketing, because, like direct marketing might be when did they start direct marketing maybe 100 years ago, but the evolution that has gone through in the last 22 years is really quite insane. So am I right in thinking that? Or am I overthinking it?

Abramo Ierardo
I know you don’t have written it. I mean, like, when I started off paper mail was huge, a lot bigger than it is now. I mean, outbound telephone work was a lot bigger than what it is now. The reality is that the digital world and digital media options took over from a lot of particularly the paper based mail, opera operations of most marketers, but it’s, I think it’s morphed more towards the where it should have always been, which is this concept of allowing data to drive the communication strategies. So that means that you actually allow the data to tell you, not how not just how to communicate, but what to communicate. And I think that that’s the morphing that’s happened more recently, because of the access to data. A simple a simple equation, if you think about to buy a terabyte of storage in the year 2000 would have cost you about $1,000. Now, it costs maybe 100. So the ability to store data has changed the way we think about holding data, then, you’ve got people that analyse the data, and can actually tell you how to use it to your best advantage. So I think that that’s where direct marketing to Genesis is from direct marketing as a concept has one simple premise. That is one to one communication. That’s all it is. Now, the best way to do that is to send the right message to the right person at the right time. But the only thing that drives that is the data.

Martin Henley
100% Excellent. Okay, cool. This is what I say to people all the time, like really effective marketing is just about landing the right Well, firstly, having the right product, then landing the right message and the right person at the right term. Time. That is the whole gig that is the whole gig. That is the entire gig. Okay, good. You don’t know because you’re one of those generous souls who’s just walked into this quite blind. But there is some order to this. Okay, so there are five questions that I asked everybody. Oh, my God. Yeah. I actually have an agenda. Yeah, I’m here with an agenda. And my agenda is to make you look good, and hopefully get you to motivate people to do better with their marketing. That’s my agenda or look good. Okay, cool.

Martin Henley
So, question number one. How are you qualified to talk to us about one of your specialist subjects? I think you’re gonna say the same thing. But I’m interested to know how we’re going to talk about this. Is your specialty subject direct marketing? Or is your subject data driven marketing? Which of those is it Abramo?

Abramo Ierardo
The specialty is data driven marketing. Every conversation I have requires, it starts and ends with data. Without the data component to this, what you’re doing is putting an advertisement inside an envelope, and just hoping for the best. So it is data driven, is where my expertise leads. Now, how can I be qualified to talk about

Martin Henley
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, don’t get ahead of us. We need the order here, bro. We need the order. So I’ll run through the questions and then you’ll know what’s coming. And it just makes it easier for us when we clip it up and send it out. Or if it’s just a mess, and we just don’t it’s just a hot mess. You know, there’s nothing we can do with it. Okay, so the first question is, how are you qualified to talk to us about data driven marketing? The second question is, Who do you do business with? How do you add value to their lives? The third question is, what is your recommendation for anyone who wants to get better at data driven marketing? Question number four, really easy. What should people read? Question number five, who can you throw under the bus who might endure or maybe even enjoy to have a conversation like this with me in exactly the way that Dave and Ranil throw you under the bus? Okay, so are we clear on the questions? Excellent. Okay, so question number one, how you qualify? Was that a cheat sheet? You don’t get cheat sheet. You don’t get any notice this? This is really what you know. I will remind you of the questions don’t worry.

Martin Henley
Like Now question number one, how are you qualified to talk to us about data driven marketing.

Abramo Ierardo
I started the journey 20 years ago to get into this space. And one of the things I said to myself I would do is, I would be like a sponge. I would talk to everyone that is suggested to me to be an expert in this space, and I would talk to all of them. The second thing I did is Sit down an education path for myself to actually try to push the boundaries of my knowledge. Now I’m a university educated person. I’ve I actually lecture indirect marketing lecture in email marketing in particular, as well. But I wanted to get to a point where I actually said to myself, is there anything more to learn? And I haven’t got there yet. So and I haven’t stopped. And I think that the reason I can speak to you today is that I’ve attended USA, UK, and Australian direct marketing symposiums, I sit there in lecture halls and absorb knowledge, I write journal levels of notes, and I absorb knowledge from everyone that calls themselves an expert in this space. And I’ve been doing it for 22 years.

Abramo Ierardo
What has if you looked at why I can actually absorb this knowledge and actually transpose it is because I have a focus, a laser focus on what I need to know, to drive my clients success. And that’s the stuff that I gather in terms of knowledge. So when the Australian, the Association of data driven marketing, and advertising comes to me with a course content, and it says, This is for you, I look at it and I say, how is that going to make me a better data driven marketer? And often, more often than not, the answer is it won’t. Because too much education is spent a particularly marketing spin around creative around copywriting, which I’m not diminishing as as skill sets, but we spend far too much time on the creative side of advertising and direct marketing, and not enough science and analytics work in the data side of the project. Because it’s boring. You know, like it’s not as sexy. The morphing of the last four or five years, though, is that the people that are paid the most in direct marketing now are actually the data analysts and the data scientists. And I think that that is showing the sign of the times. Because while you, I take it, one of your expertise is digital marketing. And one of the realities of digital marketing is it’s very easy to implement, it’s actually quite hard to analyse. And to actually produce ROI metrics, that means something to a business, because it’s too easy to implement. paper based mail is a lot harder to implement. So people think about it more. But the skill set has disappeared out of the out of today’s market. So that’s where my expertise tends to come to come into play.

Martin Henley
Okay, cool. I mean, the thing is, I do teach digital marketing, that’s what I teach. And I’m always thinking about how you category like, I teach digital marketing, so I’d teach all of it SEO, email, paid ads, blah, blah. So I’m a generalist, I sit at the top, I try and understand how these things work together. That’s, and that’s how I express it to people. Now, I think like, in the way I structure my course, there’s a day called direct digital direct marketing, because it seems to me that the opportunities for digital direct marketing, like before the internet, it was phone calls, direct mail, knocking on doors, you know, this was direct marketing before that. Now, all of these platforms have invested in some direct marketing mechanism, whether it’s LinkedIn messages in mail, or it’s Instagram chat, or its Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, you know, they’ve all invested in it. So I know, because they’ve all invested in having these platforms, how powerful it must be. But the truth is Abramo people hate direct marketing. They hate receiving junk mail. They hate receiving spam. They hate being cold called. So I mean, I am being deliberately provocative.

Abramo Ierardo
Welcome to discussion.

Martin Henley
Okay, so people hate this stuff. So how on earth have you been able to sustain a career in direct marketing in something when direct marketing is so despised by everyone? It can’t be effective, because everyone hates it. That’s as challenging as I can put that question.

Abramo Ierardo
And my challenge to you is to say to you that spam is in the eyes of the beholder. If you are in the market for Viagra, is it still spam?

Martin Henley
You want me to answer? No, it’s not. I mean, if if I’m in the market for something that’s something arrives in my inbox, which is about exactly that thing, then I’m not going to, I’m not going to consider it spam. So I’m 100%. With you. This is exactly how I define Spam. Spam is in the eye of

Abramo Ierardo
that that’s where the data is the key component. Because if I know that you’re in the market for something, or I know that this suits people have your profile, whatever their profile is, then it becomes less interesting, doesn’t it? So yes, in direct marketing, we talk about the pyramid of intrusion. At the top, middle, intrusion, intrusion,

Martin Henley
intrusion, okay, yep. Good.

Abramo Ierardo
Yeah. The top of the pyramid movement, fusion is a telephone call. But if you get a telephone call, like I did this morning, I got a I got a random phone call, not expecting it from my electricity supplier. More contracts about to end, we’d like to keep you as a customer. What can we do to help? Is that is that annoying? No. Is it welcome? Yes. So you see how the data is told that telemarketer that my contract is about to end. So that phone call comes out. That’s the point here. The point is that if you use the data that tell you what you need to know, you can drive the messaging in terms of when you can drive the messaging in terms of what you can drive a message in in terms of outcome. And that is the real discussion now where it gets annoying for me and where the part I want to punch someone in the face is spam phone calls that have no data behind it other than a phone number, spam email that comes to your junk mail folder that has no purpose being in their spam junk mail that has no purpose in being in your letterbox. Because it’s not data driven. It is, in fact, spam or junk mail, whatever you want to call it. And the classic is this, I am not in the market for solar energy, yet I get between five and 10 phone calls a week often beside why? Because the cook the calls are coming out of the end Indian call centres that are charging nothing for the call, or the client is paying only for leads. So it doesn’t matter how many phone calls they make. Doesn’t matter how they butcher the solar energy companies brand. They turn generate leads. So they’ll ring 1000 people to generate one week. That’s not direct marketing. That’s just junk. So like you and Greg are so delighted that you’re the first person who’s ever asked that question. Congratulations. That’s a great question. Great question about direct market. Now in amongst all of these. There’s legislation that protects you. There’s the anti spam Act. There is the Do Not Call Register. There is a do not mail file. There is the privacy legislation. There’s lots of laws that protect people from actually getting stuff that they don’t want. Just use it to your advantage. And you don’t get stuff you don’t want. Because all the legitimate direct marketers in Australia respect every piece of legislation.

Martin Henley
Yeah. I mean, I’ve also, I don’t, I think what do I think I think the legislate I mean, my business changed. When I started doing email marketing. I always did the first 1012 years of my career, I was a salesperson, but I always worked for those shitty businesses that never invested in marketing. So I had to do my own marketing. So I was doing telemarketing. That’s the way I was doing it. That’s the way you had to do business. What’s the point? When I started my business, we were like a sales consultancy. We were kind of like a canvassing prospecting kind of consultancy. And we then people wanted us to do telemarketing. So we did and then when email came into the equation, my business my business took a step change. It is just insane. How many more people I was able to engage with because I was doing email marketing and hands up. I wasn’t doing the data driven kind of marketing that you’re talking about. I was begging stealing borrowing. If someone was stupid enough to publish an email address, it went into our database, we had the dirtiest, filthiest nastiest database of that you could possibly imagine. It was

Abramo Ierardo
We all did. We all did. All of a sudden, we could send emails to 1000 people, and it would cost two cents. Yeah. Brilliant, which is where I started before about this whole digital marketing space. I mean, like, the lessons of digital marketing are part a. Part b is what’s it actually worth to you? And what does it actually generate any business for you? That’s the corner analysis. That’s a commission critical in any marketing you do. I mean, I don’t want to sit here and talk to clients about the fact that a campaign didn’t work. I want to sit here and talk about a client about how we can improve performance. Yes, and only one way to improve it, if you’ve got to have the data in front of you that says, This is what I this is what I do. And this is what happened.

Abramo Ierardo
Yes. Then you move forward, you know, 100%?

Abramo Ierardo
Yeah. But I mean, the whole, the whole kind of junk mail spam discussion, is something that I welcome. Because I don’t want any of it. I do not want to send one piece of direct marketing out there, that a consumer rejects.

Martin Henley
Good. Excellent. You see, I think the reason my business is called not the reason, I thought it sounded good. So I call myself a call my business, the effective marketing company. The thing is, effectiveness is on a scale, you know, so and, and what you learn is that you become more and more and more effective, as long as you’re doing stuff. And as long as you’re applying yourself to doing that stuff, and looking for the feedback and the the data that can then drive your business. And I think that people, I think the reason people hate direct marketing, is because it is done so incredibly badly. It’s the reason people do it is because it’s so hugely effective. So when I did it, in product, probably the worst way you can possibly imagine, not the worst way everyone I was emailing was a business, you know, but in a pretty shoddy way. It brought about a step change in my business, we went from here to here we went from bit taking on any work we could find to being able to pick and choose the clients that we wanted to work with. That was the difference it made in my business. So it is so incredibly effective. But people don’t take the trouble to do it. Well, that’s the issue. And your big thing, it sounds to me from what you’re saying is about the targeting. But then there’s also about the the approach. And there’s there’s also about how people extricate themselves from the situation if it’s not going well. You know, if, if you’re going to do this in a rude way, and and be offended when people feedback, like, this isn’t what I want or need, then I think you’re always going to be in trouble if you’re doing direct marketing.

Abramo Ierardo
Correct? Absolutely correct. To be quite frank, I mean, some of the campaigns that I’ve run in my history have been against my better judgement. I mean, in that I’ve literally stood there and told clients don’t do this. It’s a waste of time and energy of money. In fact, I remember saying to one client, you might as well go and hire a helicopter to drop leaflets across this metropolitan area of Melbourne. That will be just as effective as what you’re doing now. I mean, I even told another client, if you really want this to work, then your best approach is stand on Flinders Street steps and give away $100 notes. Yes, because that’ll be that’ll be cheaper than what you’re about to do now. So this is the point about this is that without the data component, direct marketing is always just going to be annoying. Yes, if you get the data component, right, oh, my God. People literally are almost running to the letterbox to pick it up. Yes, and I’ve got plenty of examples. So the other part of it about direct marketing, when it does get annoying is the fact that there’s a lot of it now. I mean, like the sheer volume of communications is probably one of the other things that gets consumers on the wrong side and what market should look like. And I classic example that is email. I mean, like, I’ve started the process. Now I’ve really pruning by inbox away from the things that I used to subscribe to all these services and I just stopped pruning, start pruning, stop pruning. Now, if I’m a typical consumer, and I’m pruning, I’d say I’m probably not a typical consumer, because I prune. Typically, today says I’ll set up my promo box inbox for my junk mail that comes in like Yeah, and you know, I’ve got people in my life that literally have 10s of 1000s of emails sitting in in folders that they never look at. And some of them are coming from brands that they know and love and trust and all the rest of it, but the sheer volume is too much and and I wonder what what are you going to do about it all it happens there is that readership drops. I mean, I’m sure you understand better than I do. I mean, like in email marketing space already, I mean, we’re seeing open rates half of what they were five years ago. Why is that? Too much?

Martin Henley
Yeah, I would say too much I would say overwhelm. But what would I say? But then I would say, what I like to do here is make up percentages, and talk about them like they’re true. So I’m gonna say, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say that 70% of all emails that go out on perfectly valid campaigns, is absolute waste, like there is there, they’re not targeted, that they’re not the right person. Do you? I’m gonna say that. And that would then account for I mean, the spam, the forget, watches, the stock advice, all of that stuff, stuff. That’s not actual business stuff. Well, that’s what it is, that might be 80% of all email marketing anyway. But 70% of the legitimate stuff that where people actually are trying to add value to people’s lives, I would say is wasted. So where are we at, we’re at something like 93%. Because I’ve made these statistics up. 93% is just completely wasted. So it’s a complete

Abramo Ierardo
waste of the knowledge and knowledge is the 91% 91% of all email traffic is spam. Right? So so that’s what I made the deaf, the true definition of spam, which is unsolicited, commercial electronic message that’s actually spent 91% of all email traffic is that so nearly deaf with 9%, it’s actually legitimate traffic. On top of that, you have the added problem of the volume of emails that brands want to send out there. So let’s say for instance, you are, let’s say your Mercedes Benz, and you want to send email out there. And so and that’s, that’s a poor example, because Mercedes do a very good job of their DNA. The M’s are very important part of the marketing mix. But the reality is, is that whatever brand you’ve got, why are you sending that email message today to that person is not asked enough. What they’re generally saying to you is that we’ve got a weekly email we send out and we send it to everybody. Okay. So to me, you get the results you deserve.

Martin Henley
Yeah. And the thing is, I’m guilty of this, because I the only real cost of sending too many emails that is sending like a weekly or bi weekly, or monthly, or whatever is, the only cost of increasing the frequency is the loss of subscribers. And this is what I tell people, but really, that’s a really poor indicator, because like you say, people don’t bother, they just send them to inboxes that they don’t even look at. And this is the effect is the same. You’ve lost that recipient, you know, so I think that’s true, what you’re saying, I think that people maybe do send too many emails, and then also people don’t send enough.

Abramo Ierardo
And I think this is why it’s, again, the data is the critical aspect of this right? We have a brand here in Australia called Catch. Catch is probably Australia’s biggest online retail. They said 66 emails a day, to some customers, yes, a day. Now, their analytics will tell you that that produces sales full stop. Yes. And I think that that’s the part that’s actually really the missing link. And a lot of email marketing is what is the data telling you about your engagement rates with the audience you’re sending it to. So start a plan and then that plan is a probably a month in the making. I didn’t minimum you need to run test campaign in over three to six months, and carefully analyse what happens. Changing the message structure, changing the message tone, changing the message content, and letting the data tell you what happens along the journey. I send one email out every week that has a between 70 and 92% open rate and a click rate that’s in the 40s Wow. Now, it only goes to 200 people and it’s my local parish church. And it’s communication to their to the parishioners of the church. What’s the what’s the lesson in? The lesson is highly engaged audience that’s waiting for the weekly bulletin every Friday, or every Saturday. It’s a message from the parish priests directly to them. There’s the clues includes surgeries. And so if you are brand, I send it out this week specials. Great. Other specials related to any part of my shopping history? No. Okay. So I’ve got this one brand I like from the US that clothing brand. It’s great because it actually looks stuff fits. And it’s well made and all rested, too expensive. But everything last I like it sends me women’s clothing specials. Like, how could it be? Yeah, that’s the point.

Martin Henley
Okay, and I’m torn. I tell you why I’m torn is because like you’re talking about brands and brands understand the value of marketing, they do it and they overdo it occasionally, that’s fine. Really, the people that I’m most interested in are the people who don’t do anything like enough marketing. So I’m always torn. So the question is, the opportunity across the whole of digital marketing is to be incredibly targeted to deliver real value, like so for example, when people put our pay per click ads, and it’s for one thing, and then they send you to the home page of their website that’s still going on in 2022. Right, people will not navigate from page. Yes, astounds me. Yeah, yeah. So the opportunity is to be really, really effective and really, really efficient in these things. But people don’t. I want to give you one example of someone like we have to sprite now. So you can do your your next thing. But I’ll give you one example. I was doing a training. And there were a couple of guys there. And they were talking about how often you should send emails. And they said, I said, What happens when you send an email? They said, we make $75,000 Every time we send an email, and I’m like, wow, how often do you send the email? Every time we develop a new tool? And I’m like, How often do you tell develop a new tool, these are software tools, they’re like three times a year. So they’re sending out three emails a year. And they’re making $210,000. Now, I think if they were to double that, because their open rate is probably around 15% 85% of those people don’t even know that you’ve got this new tool. Do you know I mean, so. So that’s an example at the other end of the scale where people aren’t doing enough. And I think where sensible people like you live is in the middle. So what I’m really interested to do is identify where that middle is. But we’re only going to be able to do that tomorrow, because you’ve got more important things to do right now.

Abramo Ierardo
All of you just one thought on that topic alone. I don’t think the answer is to do more. I think the answer is to find out if doing more is better.

Martin Henley
Okay, good. And that is exactly what I would expect an expert in data driven marketing to say, Okay, super cool. Thanks for your time today, man. I will catch you tomorrow.

Martin Henley
Hello, again, Abramo. Thank you for being back. Thank you for also not respecting continuity. Everyone knows we had a break of a day to think about this. Come up with some really significant answers for people. That’s cool. So where we finished off yesterday is I was telling you about the experience. People were in a course. And they were only emailing every three or four months when they develop something new. There was software developers, they were making 70 or $80,000. Every time they did it. My recommendation would be that they send that much more regularly. Lord knows if I had something that might be $70,000 every time I emailed it, I will be emailing it every 20 minutes. You’re saying more emails isn’t necessarily the answer. I think that’s where we left off yesterday.

Abramo Ierardo
Yeah. It could well be the answer. But what I would do is say test the hypothesis, right? So if you’ve got a database of 1000 people that you send an email to just shave off 100 and change what you do, and see if you get a different reaction. So that 100 might get six emails or 12 emails, once a month, emails, whatever it is, and then just measure it and just see what happens to that, in turn the context before you actually throw the baby out with the bath. Right? So it’s just important in DM, because and particularly in the digital space, because you can measure it, you absolutely should, every single time. Because the results are instantaneous. And I’ll give you a quick example, just on your example is that, for instance, if the open rate on the three amounts I’ve said is that 50%, you suddenly send it every month, and it drops down to 10%. There’s a message here? Yes, it’s a very simple metric. So that’s the point.

Martin Henley
Okay, and I say this to my groups, when I’m teaching digital marketing, the answer to every question in digital marketing, is test, you know, because the whole point of digital marketing, and especially now, these direct marketing platforms that we’ve got is the feedback and it’s instantaneous. So historically, we’re gonna put, I don’t know, 10,000 pieces of direct mail into the post, and we’d have no idea what happened to them unless somebody actually phoned up said, look, I’ve got your thing, and I want to buy something. Whereas now we know exactly how many we’ve seen, we know exactly how many arrived, who opened them all of these things. So you’re nodding and you’re agree with me. But on

Abramo Ierardo
that point, do you also warn your students that the greatest cross they’ll ever bear is the fact that we now know how many people got it? How many people opened it, how many people clicked. So they’re actually putting their marketing on test every single time they send out an email campaign, every time they do a digital ad, every time they create a banner, every time they create a website, you actually now know how good you are as a marketer. That actually is a cross to bear for marketers now. Because we no longer have the excuse that our it’s good for the brand. It’s good to get awareness out there. direct marketers have lived by the sword since the 30s. And the reality is, is that we’re only as good as our last campaign around and good as a response. Right, Richard? So that the thought process I’m saying to you in terms of teaching this stuff would be that I think it needs to come with a warning load. If you’re about to become a digital marketing person, be prepared, you’re going to be accountable for everything you do.

Martin Henley
Okay, well, that’s interesting, because I come from the other way. And like, because I don’t want to motivate these people to do it, you know, so that’s why I keep it as positive as possible. But I come from the other way, which is that we now have this, we now have this feedback. So whereas previously, before the internet, the marketer would be sitting there, hoping that the boss wasn’t going to come and pick on them. Because what could we say we put 10,000, a piece of pieces of content in the post, we don’t know what happened, we put up a billboard, we don’t know what happened, we ran a TV ad, we don’t know what happened. Whereas now because we have this feedback, that we can, we can now tell the story of this is what happened. This was the effect, this is what we’ve learned, this is what we’re going to do next time. So I come the other way. But I think you’re entirely right. And it comes to something that I am interested in, which is this idea of actually being in the game, you know, because I think lots of people go through their entire career without quite putting themselves in the game, you know, without quite difficult questions.

Abramo Ierardo
A good boy, yeah, you’re actually putting, you’re actually putting yourself right in the battle. When a tumour or a customer’s attention and their actual response. I mean, without putting yourself in that battle. It really not doing anything. And I will pick up on my point, I actually think we used to have great metrics around the marketing we used to do. Remembering that marketing is not just advertising or communication strategies or whatever. Marketing actually is a mix of product, price place, physical presence, physical evidence, physical people, all those things. things that are actually part of the marketing mix. What we’re really focusing our attention on a lot these days is marketing communications. And in back in the 60s in the 70s, and the 80s, when we didn’t have the internet to worry about, you would run a television commercial. And yes, you would literally feel the sales come in the door. It’s very different now. Because I don’t think you feel it as much when you actually generate sales activity. So you get back to David ELGamal, his book on advertising? And what’s the number one premise he presents to you? Is that if the advertising doesn’t sell, it doesn’t work. Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, like, so he focused all of his account managers, and people that were client facing on the concept of in growing a client’s business, not on producing great ads. But to grow the business, you produce great ads, because great ads get attention, and they get response, which generates more sales, when major clients grow, and he becomes a better agency. So it actually was the it was a lot easier back then than it is now. But a digital marketing person now is faced with the gauntlet of being responsible, accountable, measurable. A Kenny actually feel the sales, particularly in a bigger corporate environment told me that too.

Martin Henley
Yeah. Well, I think even in smaller environments, it’s like the business never wants to give you It’s interesting what you’re saying, because I think it’s true. But the business never wants to give you the feedback they never have the business never wants to let you know how successful you’re being, you know, so as much as possible, they will hide the sales figures from marketing people. Yeah. So and that actively goes on, I’ve got no idea why because for me, this should be like a virtuous cycle, where you do something, you get the feedback, you see the sales, you see the value, you see the profitability, and then you kind of go back around and you do it again. And the effectiveness gets better, and the efficiency gets better, because you are continuously honing it. The best. Yeah, but business owners don’t want to let salespeople know what’s going on. And what you’re saying is interesting, because I don’t know when the awareness thing became the thing. But it did at some point. So there’s a brilliant guy, Barnaby winter, in the UK who’s like a brand guy, and he’s behind like, lots of household brands names. And we’re, he’ll tell you, they weren’t household brands, but he picked them up. And his thing is he calls it, I don’t know exactly what he calls it. You might call it the fallacy of the broadcast industry, or not the fraud of the broadcast industry. But what happened at some point is that the broadcast industry got it into everyone’s heads that everyone in the world needs to know about their products and services. And I think you will also argue that that’s not necessary. And it’s not the case. What Barnaby says is, if he needs to make 10 sales, he doesn’t really want more than 10 people on his website, you know, because it should be that targeted, that directed that easy, that you can just convert those 10 people.

Abramo Ierardo
Which is never the case. But but the fact is, you’re going down this path where this concept of generating awareness was a justification for spending more money on broadcast media. Yes. So it became this point of difference where broadcast media was your branding tool. That’s how you actually brand and a product. And the direct marketing, for instance, couldn’t achieve brand. That wasn’t, you know, you can’t build a brand using direct marketing. I actually used to lecture on the basis that you could. But the fact of the matter is, is that there’s a perception amongst marketers is that the only way to build brand is you got to be in a broadcast environment, which includes outdoor advertising and includes radio, newspapers, all the rest of it. But these days, you will notice that a lot more advertising that you see in the broadcast environments tend to be direct response. So come into our showroom, come and visit our website, go and buy this today. A lot more of it is down that path rather than that classic brand message. And very few marketers now actually spend the sort of budgets I used to spend on brand work. And it’s a probably a sign of the times where marketing is becoming a bit more accountable. You know, you’ve got CEOs saying, Well, yeah, I’ve just spent $10 million on advertising, what am I got to show for it? You know, and that’s where you end up with net promoter scores and brand index surveys and brand equity reports. And so even that side of it is become more accountable, which is a good thing. It’s a good thing. But I mean, like, it means to be a marketer in a corporate environment, or to be a marketer, for a medium sized enterprise is not simple anymore. It is, it is a career path where you have to be part scientist, and part artist. And that’s the part that actually is excites me, because that’s almost describes my personality type. But I mean, but a lot of marketers go in there because of the imagery and the creativity of marketing. Not so much the science part of it.

Martin Henley
Yes. Okay, so you’ve hit on another one of my issues, I call it or the Kardashian effect. Wow. Yeah, we’re at the point where so many people know you, it kind of becomes really easy to make money. Do you know, I mean, at the point, I tell you, who really annoys me with this is I don’t know if you’re aware of a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. Are you aware of Gary Vaynerchuk? No, okay, good, you are blessed. Because what this guy does is he’s like the most famous, he’s like the Kardashian of all of the marketers. And what he says is not really very interesting or useful is it’s wrong is what he says. So I saw a talk of he’s and I critique sometimes like content on the internet, and his content is on the internet. And one of his recommendations was, I can’t remember which brand it was, but it was one it Who was it was Salesforce, he was saying, if I was Salesforce, I would take out an ad during the Superbowl.

Abramo Ierardo
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Henley
Because everybody knows that everybody who likes football, is also charged with buying CRMs for their organisation, everyone knows that, you know, this is the thing like, absolutely. So to bring perspective to it, he benefits from the Kardashian effect, everyone knows him. And there are people who will want to who will buy into that and will want to employ the most famous marketer, because that’s what they think they need to be is the most famous, even if it’s in their industry, do you know I mean? So there is some effect, if you are a Kardashian, and you’ve got 100 million followers, and you produce a shoe, a couple of 1000, or a couple of 100,000 of those 10s of millions of followers are going to buy that shoe. So there is a level where it works. But my argument would be, firstly, it’s hugely wasteful, wasteful, grossly inefficient. And not appropriate to 99 point something percent of the businesses.

Abramo Ierardo
You’ve just described the definition of helicopter marketing. Yes. You hire a helicopter. You fly it over the city of Melbourne, and you just keep dropping leaflets, yes. On the principle that one of them will fall into one person’s hands, it’ll go and buy the product, multiply that out by the 7 million people that live here. And you sell a couple 1000 products. Yes. In the meantime, you receive all these complaints about the litany of growth caused. And in a digital world. We call it spam. Yes. And spot. The problem with spam is and this is the only problem with spam. Is that it butches the media? Yes. So there’s no respect for the media anymore. So you get an email in your inbox and you get again, piss off.

Martin Henley
Yes.

Abramo Ierardo
Because he started then dismantled your respect of the media, because all this stuff arrives, and you didn’t ask for it. And it’s the same as on my Instagram feed, for instance. And I’m very particular about my Instagram afraid. It’s only family, only friends. It’s very personal to me. I don’t want a lot of stuff coming through to it. But if it does come through, and it’s relative, relative to what I like, I love it. Yes, yes. Yeah. Now, for whatever reason. Instagram seems to have it right. I only get stuff in my feed that I like to see. Even though it’s an ad. Now if it’s I’ve I’ve suddenly got sales for CRM software being offered to me, I go, What? No. So yeah, completely agree. And I think what we’re going to do is start to think about it as marketers is actually respecting the media that we’re going to use to reach our audience. So all those things are important. Respect, media, and the audience, all those words come together to create a campaign that’s more meaningful than dropping leaflets out of a helicopter.

Martin Henley
Good. I think that as well. And I’m glad it’s come back around to spam. Because I’ve got another question about this. I’m with you 100%, that spam is in the eye of the beholder. Like, if I receive it, I don’t like it. And I think it’s spam than it is spam. And whoever sent it has got no argument as far as I’m concerned. And there is a tighter definition around if it’s unsolicited, or, you know, there’s it varies in different parts of the world in the UK. If a business has published an email address, it’s fair game, you can send unsolicited mail in the States, you can’t, you know, so there’s variations in that. But I think the bottom line is, if I receive it, and I don’t like it, and I feel like it’s spam, then it is essentially spam. Correct. The question I have for you is to what extent are the regulators or the regulations to what extent is the regulation effective in preventing spam or preventing spammers? And there’s depths to this, I’ve got this whole issue for some reason why cybersecurity has become an issue. I’ve interviewed a few people around cybersecurity recently. And what they told me is that 93% of all cybersecurity breaches come from email. So you talk about trashing the medium that really trashes the medium, you know, if absolutely, and then as email marketers, what happens is, we get lumped in, because it’s in the eye of the beholder. We get lumped in now with the fraud fraudsters, the Nigerian, Prince’s we get lumped in with the, the fishers, we get lumped in with all of these people. Now, we’re not like who are actual criminals. We’re just not very good marketers. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, it’s not a crime, what we’re doing. And it seems to me like there should be three categories or two categories. At least, there should be a, this is junk. I don’t like it. I don’t want it I don’t want to see again. And then there should be this is fraud, send someone round these people’s houses to lock them up. Do you know I mean, but because there’s no distinction between those things. We all get lumped. We are all just spammers, the Nigerian prince is the Viagra stuff, the watches that stock advice that all these things, the fishers, the actual the hackers, you know, we’re all lumped in together, it seems to me like there isn’t much discernment around that.

Abramo Ierardo
There will be if you as the email marketer, respect your audience more, right. And we remember we started this conversation talking about personalization and data, right? Yeah. And let the data drive the communications. Yes. So Matt, if you came in and bought a set of shampoo products from me, and I knew who you were, and I had a special next week on that sample product, and I sent you that email. Because you bought that and made those connections within the email that I’m sending to you. You see how that starts to reduce that kind of credibility problem with the media, because the data is driving the columns. And I’m only sending it to you because you’re a purchaser of that product. Where I get annoyed is that the legislators actually have no influence or power or have had any effect on the amount of unsolicited commercial message and get that gets sent out there. In fact, in the time, the legislation has been in place, which has been, which is about I think it’s about 15 years, maybe 17 years span, which is unsolicited commercial messages have probably quadrupled in that time. Yeah, it’s had no material impact whatsoever. The other issue is that most of the bureaucrats that run these run these organisations have actually no understanding of the technicality around Sydney than EMA. Do they understand anything about D marking or DKM and HTML code and the fact that you can wrap emails for 15 different servers before you actually deliver it to an inbox Email is a complicated, dark, dark place to actually craft an email and send it out, get it delivered to where it’s intended to be delivered. Is, is that is as scientific as you ever want to get, and as technical as you ever want to get, whereas our bureaucrats who run these organisations are probably, you know, I can’t expect them to it’s a very complicated field. But to be quite frank, they don’t have any idea. Now, in terms of cybersecurity, all the rest of it. The best I’ve ever seen with that is this. And this is what this is the sort of stuff I love, I love to read about this, I now have an organisation here in Melbourne, where the IT department sends out phishing scams to their own staff, to teach them not to actually click on known links from unknown emails. Yeah, and what they will do is they’ll send them something. And when they click this link, they get this lovely little warning message that says, You’ve been caught, don’t do it again. And that teaches a lesson. But what that does to our industry is, is there every time you get an email? Are you going to click a link? Maybe, maybe not. I’m scared, should I be scared? This is the problem with with all of our digital world. Now, it’s because everyone’s almost too scared to click away. In the moment, if if you get an SMS with a link in it, you’re going to click it.

Martin Henley
Well, increasingly, is the answer. Yes,

Abramo Ierardo
delete. So here’s the rub on this. Number one. The brands that do this well, and there are a few that actually do it really well will not only seek your permission to send an email, they use what they know about you to personalise that message to you. So they build credibility with you. Yes, number two, they really seek your permission on a regular basis. And they’re not scared to delete email data off their database from people who won’t revalidate the RE monitors. But just delete it if that means cutting their database in half. So be it. We only want to be emailing that the people that want us to email them. And they have a regular cleansing and validating process across the year to try to ensure that as many people are as engaged as possible. Is this easy? Absolutely. categorically not. Is it necessary? Absolutely. Yes.

Martin Henley
Yeah, so I think what do I think, okay. Firstly, I think the bureaucrats are peculiarly singularly poorly equipped to address these issues, because it only ever will be a bureaucratic solution. So what I say to my groups, because I want to motivate them to do marketing, is that spam is in the eye of the beholder. But also, the beholder might be in a different mood, you know, so I will, if I’m in a great mood, I’ll be much more tolerant of bad things that happened to me, like receiving spam. And what they’ve kind of done, I think, with the regulations, is they’ve made it so that they don’t expect to catch many people. But when they do catch you, it’s going to be a horror show. So some of them in the UK, I think is 10% of turnover is the fine. So 10% of turnover, a temporary percent a turnout. So that is business closing kind of penalisation. Yeah, the thing is, I might be in a bad mood, the day that I’m really upset about the email, but I’m not going to be sustained that bad mood for the 14 months this takes to go through the courts. So I don’t imagine anyone has ever actually been found guilty and charged and pay 10% of their turnover. And this is the rub for me, is the only people that deters, because it doesn’t deter the Nigerian princes. It doesn’t deter the industrial spammers. It doesn’t deter the fishers. Because like you say they’re hiding behind 20 servers, you know, no one’s finding them. The only people it deters are the small business owners that could really really benefit by having email marketing working for them in their business. And that for me, is the row.

Abramo Ierardo
All of this except that a couple of things right. First of all, in this country, the fines are not 10% of turnover, but they are substantive. Take pride. And you are 100%. Right about the fact that it’s actually quite well known brands that get punched in the face here. Oh, man, it’s not some, you know, some Nigerian prince sending out emails. Yeah. But we have to insist on the concept of getting better at what you do. Right now. We’ve got legislation that’s been in place there for 17 years in this country, but spam legislation yet I still get questions asked about whether I can do something. I got all the answers. No. I mean, you can’t do that. And it’s pretty black and white. I mean, that’s not. I mean, it’s a little bit of grey area now legislation. But it’s not that not that much of it. I mean, so if I’m a small businessman, and I’m actually doing an email campaign, to consumers, and I’ve gone and bought some list of email addresses, and it just decided to go smash it out there. Well, I’m going to be quite frank, you’re an idiot. Don’t do it. I mean, there’s some basic premises here about email marketing. One is if you don’t have their permission to send an email don’t just don’t. So if you don’t understand that, well, maybe you do need a little rap over the knuckles to maybe make you understand it. I mean, I’m not here to I don’t think that there’s any real great merit in saying that our legislation needs to be tighter. No, I don’t think there’s any great merit in saying we’re more need more bureaucrats chasing this No, I do feel that there’s a need to actually run some sort of broad based business orientated education programme that says, Do this, not this. But then if you choose not to, well, you’ve probably probably in the back of your mind, or even subconsciously, you’re now you’re doing the wrong thing. So maybe you deserve a bit of a fine. Now, the fines here are not 10% of turnover. So here, they range in, like immediately after a million dollars, but I mean, like to get to a million dollars, you’ve done a really bad thing. But you know, that’s substantive enough to teach you a lesson. So I am, I want to see businesses doing the right thing with all of their marketing, right? Remembering that we also have a Do Not Call Register. So leaving aside email for a second, I mean, if you’ve got a business that’s doing outbound phone calls, and ringing, people that are on the do car, Call Register, or you’re an Indian, don’t do it. If you’ve got people that have told you that they don’t want to receive any communications from you, and you send them communications, you’re an idiot, stop doing it. I mean, it’s kind of kind of where I sit with this. The other part of it, too, is educating consumers about this, and actually teaching them what to do, about the fact that they’re getting stuff they don’t want to get. I mean, you know, I don’t know what else to do to actually say to a consumer, other than if you don’t want to receive something, make the phone call, send the email, send a letter, whatever you want to do. But tell the company that’s writing to you to stop writing to? Yes, yes. In the mind. One fact not in the mind, everybody I’ve ever worked with. All is that request.

Martin Henley
Good. This is the way and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The truth is, and it might be the most idiotic thing in business, is that businesses just don’t respect their market. They don’t respect their customers, you know, that’s correct. A change that’s gone on, I think, where and I think it’s because of this kind of automation. And I think it’s because of this kind of, it’s all going through this filter, it’s all digital, it’s not you it’s not face to face, it’s not voice to voice, you know, I mean, so there’s this filter is that bit more removed. But I think, I think what you’re actually communicating if you are spamming people, and I think I’d be much more liberal, about you know, how you collect data and who you send to, then you, but that’s fine. I think there’s room for that to happen. I think the principle of database marketing, which is what we’re talking about, is you can mark it to the whole world. Or you can just mark it to that bit of the world that has shown some interest in you. It’s like fish farming, you know, you can fish the entire ocean, or you can just cultivate this little bit that has exactly what you need in it. And if you’re doing fish farming, or you’re running a trout farm, what you don’t do is throw every piece of crap you can find in there because it’s gonna it’s gonna make is going to make your farm that little bit less good. So I think that’s the principle and I think If that should be the criteria, the criteria should be? Are you respecting your market? Are you respecting your database? And because that, to me speaks volumes about, actually, whether you are the sort of business that businesses should be doing business with or otherwise.

Abramo Ierardo
Yeah. And I think that that’s such an important word in any form of marketing. It’s actually that concept of respect. Now, yes, the respect means that I know who you are. And in particular, I know that you’re a previous customer of mine. Yeah. So out of respect to you, I’m offering you something that I think you could be interested in, because I know who you are. Now, that’s likely to have a completely different reaction to the example I gave you yesterday, which was, you know, I got an American brand, who I buy clothes off, sending me the women’s rage. Now, why, why am I getting this, while I’m getting to this is what they’ve done is that part of the database gets everything, this part of the database just gets something else. And it’s, to me, it’s this whole batch and blast type of approach, which is just a nonsense. And you know, we’ve got CRM systems now that are so affordable, and so powerful. And again, why are you doing this? You don’t need to spend the time, either find yourself somebody that can help you, or spend the time to learn itself and get better at what you do. Because to tell the truth, what we do is not rocket surgery. No, and it’s, most of it is process driven, and your ability to just learn some simple tasks. And just be diligent about the tasks you perform. And yeah, not that complicated. Right. Now, I think if you talk about some of the technical aspects of marketing, like, you know, pre production or producing the HTML website or something, yeah, there’s some, there’s some skills that you need there. And quite frankly, if you don’t want to learn them, that’s fine. There’s plenty of people out there that will do it all for you. But I think that one of the parts we want to stick around to is how do you find people that will help you?

Martin Henley
We are coming to that real good. We are 100% coming to that. There’s something else that I wanted to say about? respects it’s like the, I think, well, I’ve got some answers to the questions that you’re answering. I don’t know if they’re the right answers, but they’re my idea. Sure, this idea of mass marketing, mass media mass, mass, mass, mass, mass more is better always, I think contributes to the fact that everyone is just filling their databases out with rubbish. Because here’s the real thing that I think is that businesses don’t believe that they are in the world actually offering value or delivering value. And so they’re hoping that something that falls out of your helicopter lands at the feet of someone who is stupid enough to buy at one time, so that they can at least make a little bit of money. And this is where it comes to me where it’s 180 degrees, the opposite of what you think is true. Just offer value, don’t mean just be respectful, just because if you’re if you know your database is full of junk, you’re not going to respect anyone in your database. Whereas if you invested in our database, yes. So if you know that the people in your database are going to take value from what you’re offering, and are potentially going to be a customer and are potentially going to contribute you to to you having a nicer car and nicer holiday and all these things, then I think that that respect will come. There was one other thing that I wanted to say, which was let’s not go there. Let’s go to question number two, because question number two is really important. Do you want the good news? No, you don’t want the good news?

Abramo Ierardo
I definitely say no, because most people say this.

Martin Henley
Okay, so you don’t want the good news? You want it or not? I’m not sure. What is it? It’s really good news. The good news is I think you’re eminently qualified to talk to us about data driven marketing. So we can now go into question number two. Okay, so question number two. It’s always a relief when we get here it always is. Well does.

Martin Henley
So question number two is, who do you work with? And how do you add value to their lives? So this is your opportunity to have a bit of a boast about how you actually deliver success for your customers, and maybe give us an indication of what you have to do to deliver that success. Does that make sense? Yeah,

Abramo Ierardo
it’s um, you are in some ways, it’s a really interesting question, because I wish I struggled to answer this in a way because I If I’ve got such a diverse clients client base that who I work with is, is a question more broadly answered by this concept of high involvement purchase decisions. So I work with clients where the delivery of information is critical to making the sale. Now, a good example of that is property investment. So, where I work there is if if someone is building a high rise apartment building, and they feel that one of their audiences might be property investors, I help them target property investors, because the methodology I use is about delivering as much information to that property investor as possible to make a purchase decision. If you’re selling cars, if you’re selling software services, if you’re selling so none of the stuff I do is sits in any way shape or form near that fast moving consumer goods space. So you’re not going to use data driven marketing to sell shampoo, you’re going to use primarily you’re going to use things like broadcast media and other tools to actually sell that type of product. Having said all that, yes, there are some niche players and all these things that use of data driven marketing to try and actually sell products for and, you know, when you’re talking about low involvement purchases, and all the rest of it like that, it tends to not be as effective as you would like. So the sort of clients I work with, I’ve got a broad range. My sweet spot is customer acquisition. So what I do for a living is help my clients find new Greenfield customers, the methodology I use is I do a deep dive into their current customers, profile them and try to find people that look like them. At an individual level, not household level and an individual level. And I’ve got data sets available to me that actually allow me to do that. What we then do is run through a period of experimentation and testing modules to actually work out which is the best approach that produces the best ROI to deliver to them new customers. I also do, they separate to between business to consumer and business to business, data driven marketing. So an example is a business to business campaign, I worked with a company that sells software that manages infrastructure, in local government environments, very tight audience, very tight product. The problem is that the data set that they want to use doesn’t exist. So you have to go and build it. So one of our projects was to employ someone to sit on the phone, ring, every local government in Australia, find out who the right people are there, put them onto a database, and then start the prospect journey after that. So as you can see, my claim to fame only sits in the concept that I do bespoke campaigning based on the needs of the particular client, I don’t have a plug and play package, I’ve never worked like that, much to my chagrin, sometimes Martin because it drives me nuts that I’ve got to do literally bespoke, and planning every client. So I don’t take on board a lot of clients, I tried to do a lot of work for a smaller number of clients. If I had a secret source, it is about the deep dive and the analytics around their current customer to drive what we do to find new customers. An example I’m doing, I’m doing some work for one of the major LPG gas companies. The analysis that I want to do involves if their target audience is spray painters, how many do they have? Now? Where are they? And where are the gaps and market to the gaps to acquire more of the same industry? That gives me a point of difference I believe from a lot of other direct marketing mentors. So I believe that that’s kind of a it’s a secret sauce. Now, it’s not impossible for someone to replicate that secret sauce. No, but the fact is, that’s what I do. And that’s how I do it.

Martin Henley
Okay, so it really really comes down to the targeting then it really comes down to understanding their current customers, and then going out and looking for more. So one of the ways that you’ve acquired this data then is on the telephone, identifying the people getting their data that way, how else might you go about acquiring data,

Abramo Ierardo
ah, in the business to consumer space we might actually use A behavioural targeting online, I’ve got access to a, some very substantive email databases. So we might run some cost per click or cost per acquisition activity in those email databases, where we might offer some incentive to leave your details. And then they will take all sorts of forms. Sometimes there’s competition entries, built and competitions built around the product category. And if you’re a travel company, and you want to build a database of people that are interested in travel, you know, you might offer an incentive to complete a survey about travel intentions, and then maybe details and then they can remarket to you. If you are a b2b marketer a lot a bit more complicated, but I mean, you know, can be done in the same sort of line as well. So, I mean, for instance, I’m running some campaign at the moment for one of the major universities to sell their MBA programme that’s done on a cost per click basis, where we target people that are likely to be in that kind of career stage that might be interested in an MBA. But as you can see, there’s a bunch of different techniques, and I don’t have a package approach to it. So what is your audience? Where am I likely to find them? And then we’ll work out how we’re going to get to them.

Martin Henley
Okay, super cool. And for you, if a campaigns going well, what do the metrics look like? Like the receive rates, the open rates, the click rates, those kinds of things? Where do you feel comfortable that you are doing it? Well, that’s why I’m interested to know.

Abramo Ierardo
When the client tells me we’re doing well, okay, but guys debate to be quite frank Martin, you can’t be glib about this. You can’t be universal about this. A client that used to getting 4%, open rates and a quarter of 1% click rates. I mean, it’s not comparable to someone’s getting 80 or 90%, open rates because of the technical nature of the of their marketing. So what I tend to do is actually, again, deep dive into the campaign. And so what are you? What are you What do you what are you expecting to achieve out of this, ultimately, what most of my clients want, because my clients tend to be small to medium sized enterprises, I don’t really deal with corporates. What they want is sales. Couldn’t care less about how not quite sure I’m just being dramatic, make a point. But if the cash register is ringing, they’re happy. So the my good, clever clients understand that there’s a there’s a journey, they got to take a prospect through. So my job is to fill their prospect funnel. But I’ve got to fill it with the right sort of prospects. So when you talk about what is my measure of success, is the conversion rate? Yeah, how many prospects have I given them that are converting into customers? That’s the only metric that matters. And that is a deep relationship with your client, because they have to share that. If you share that, generally speaking, I don’t really want them as clients.

Martin Henley
Yeah, well, you’re just throwing shit over the wall. If you don’t, if you don’t get their feedback, you know, that’s 100%. And the reason I’m putting a face is not because I’m disagreeing with you. But because this is the learning for me of these conversations that I’m having, because I always felt, I mean, I think I still feel to some extent, but there has to be a quality check in there, you know, is that, like, there’s a process, they have to receive it, they have to open it, they have to click, do whatever you want to do, you know, I mean, there’s that process. And so I think what I’ve always done, certainly in the marketing sense, I mean, I came to marketing from sales. But I’ve always, I’ve always felt like if if we get those numbers, right, then the outcomes will be right. But they’re not necessarily the case. The key 100% of sales people want and like, I don’t know, if you’re interested in actual football aid, like actual football, like we play in the UK, is that with the round ball? That’s with the round ball that would they kick it with their feet, and now you’ve got about half a dozen sports that you call footy in Australia, I just need to take

Abramo Ierardo
a red marker and just put a line through it.

Martin Henley
So you’re not interested in real football. Anyway,

Abramo Ierardo
overall ball a lot harder to hit. And I try not. I don’t mind soccer. I’m just not a massive fan of it.

Martin Henley
Okay, cool. So let me fill you in. There is this beast that has just joined the Premier League called Harland he’s six foot four. He is just a machine. It’s insane. He has already scored, he’s just broken the record for the number of hattricks, the number of games it achieves it takes to achieve that a number of hattricks. The previous record was 48. He’s done it in eight games, it seems something like 11. Yeah. His name is Harland H, a l, a, n d. And so what’s interesting about this is that he in a game might have six touches, he’ll score three goals like that his entire involvement in the game is that he touches the ball six times. And he scores three goals. And he says his mission is to touch the ball five times and score five goals, you know, that will be his perfect game. And you have to agree with that. And that, but this is what I’m kind of learning about marketing from people like you from people like Barnaby winter, is that actually, if it’s really going to be efficient, it could be as efficient as that. You’re talking about landing the right message on the right person at the right time. I’m also talking about that. But what I do I’m doing is I’m dropping leaflets out of helicopters. I’m landing messages on everyone all of the time. And so very occasionally it will, yes, and this is what Gary Vaynerchuk is doing. And this is what the Kardashians are doing. And I think it works. But it’s not it’s not replicable. It’s not like someone can knock on my door and say, I want to do what Gary Vaynerchuk does, it’s okay, let’s rewind 20 years, and let’s just make sure you’re on the top of the wave on everything that’s coming through. So first of all, it has to be email, it’s gonna have to be SEO, then it’s gonna have to be and then 20 years later, you will have 6 million people watching your YouTube videos, you know, so

Abramo Ierardo
yeah, no point Oman. And that’s This is that. I mean, one of the best lessons I learned in the very first year I got into direct marketing was that you need to be thinking down this path of what you’ve just mentioned. It’s so your thought processes, what do I have to do to get 100% response rate?

Martin Henley
Yes.

Abramo Ierardo
What is it I’ve got to do to get that? And I gotta say that actually having that as a thought process changes the way you think about your marketing, right? Because it means that it’s not about dropping leaflets and helicopters anymore, but it is, is about if I could send five messages and get five new customers, then I’m a hero. Yes, I’m an absolute hero. But I’ll give you a quick example. And I’m just gonna reach down into my binder to show it to you. But this is a classic example of what we’re up against. In today’s world. One of the pharmaceutical companies has got a product recall, this is a mailing paper mailing, it has to go out and therapeutic goods Association guidelines. So authority guidelines, has to go out to all this audience. So it’s more one, it’s 350. And they have to actually either QR code, or call to say that they’ve received it and actioned. Right, so this is pretty important. So it goes out in an envelope that looks like that. Okay. Good, you see what, like, that person has actually rejected this milepost and sent it back.

Martin Henley
And it’s come back to you are you sending these is I’m sending those on behalf of the client, you’re sending these on behalf and they’ve rejected it. And they’ve sent it back. Why?

Abramo Ierardo
Because they probably thought there was some sort of marketing scam. Yes. Because it looks a bit marketing, doesn’t it? Because it says urgent product before Yeah. It kind of looks a bit marketing. In so I go to you to say that it’s not that straightforward to get 100% response rate. But if you are actually in a mindset that says, What am I gonna do, at least you’re working hard to try to get there. And that’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to say to yourself, I need to work hard to get to that Nirvana, to never achievable. Understood. But if you don’t have that mindset, you are never going to get better at this stuff. Right? You’re gonna keep getting just going along with the flow and pushing messages out there and hoping for the best, right? And I think that that’s the part that I can. And that’s my mindset, my mindset with my clients is this is what are we going to do to get better response rates? Okay, so if you’re suddenly getting that half a percent, how do we get from half a percent to 1%? Then how do we get from 1% to 2%? That’s what I’m thinking about.

Martin Henley
Yes. And the thing is, it’s like the frogs and the princess, isn’t it? It’s like you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find And a prince is the attitude to marketing. But I would go further than what you’re saying. And I would say it’s not just about response rates, it’s just your business should be designed around knowing exactly who you can help, and exactly how you can help them. And then the marketing is essentially just a mechanism for communicating to that to other people that you could be helping. So I think it goes to the very base. Firstly, yeah, know exactly who you can add value to exactly how to add that value, and then how to communicate that to other people. I don’t feel like that’s what’s going on in the world. I think what’s going on in the world, is that people are just hoping that people are going to take some value out of what they’re doing, or no, they’re just going to give up some money one time, you know?

Abramo Ierardo
Yeah. But the primary reason that’s happening now is because digital marketing is cheap.

Martin Henley
Yes. This is what you said at the very beginning. Yeah.

Abramo Ierardo
If you said to me that you said, multiply the digital marketing CPM rates or multiply them by 100. And charge waves if you’re charging $2 A click now, charge 200 per click. Yeah, changes. What do you want to change?

Martin Henley
And the change would be the focus. Yeah,

Abramo Ierardo
but the focus would change. All of a sudden, you say, Well, hang on, I got to pay 200 bucks every time some Bozo clicks, that I better make sure it’s the right Bozo. Yes. And that’s what happened. It’s the same as when we were running television campaigns for I worked in TV, I sold advertising space in TV. The fact of the matter is, is that when I went out to see my client, and sold them some space, I knew very well, I’d be back there the next week. And I’d be the first question it’d be asked was, and we go. And if you looked around the showroom, and the place was empty, you went to pick up snacks came back. But if you went in there, and he had the sale, or look on his face, having spent 20 grand and got nothing to show for it. How do you reckon that conversation goes?

Martin Henley
Not so well. But

Abramo Ierardo
What digital media has done, though, is almost taken away the pain or, you know, you could spend 20 bucks on Facebook and see how we go.

Martin Henley
That is so true. That is so true. And I think what I’ve been guilty of before this conversation, because like, we’re all subjected to these awful approaches on LinkedIn, you know, where they like, can we connect? And then the next thing is, can you buy something? And then you’re like, I don’t really fancy it. And then they’re like, Well, you then you’re an idiot, I don’t like you do you know, I mean, it’s like, it’s awful. It’s awful. But then we’re also subjected to these people who come out and go, people should be much more targeted, and considerate and bla bla and intelligent about what the way they do it. And I think what I do is, because there’s clearly somewhere in there is there’s the line, I’m always, I think, much more generous to the idiot marketer who at least is trying to do it, you know, I mean, I want there to be space for those people to go to grow. But what’s the point of that? The point is that maybe I’m being too generous, you know, maybe the entire focus of your business, I think should be on who is your customer? And how do you actually add value in their lives? And the more you know about that, the more effective and successful you will be, and doing anything else.

Abramo Ierardo
I mean, I often wonder, like LinkedIn is a really interesting environment for somebody like me, what do I use LinkedIn for? What’s its what’s its primary purpose in my life. And I go, I think number one for credibility of there, so you can find me. There’s some client endorsements or so which kind of say a moron. Do I ever use it as a marketing tool? Maybe I’ve tried it a couple times, tinkered with it. Not really done much for me, but it’s out a little bit. But you know, like it’s not. I am. I feel that out of respect for the people, I would actually approach on LinkedIn. Surely you could because so that’s where this this concept, but there’s no excuse for not doing it. By the way, too. If I’m about to send you a message on LinkedIn to try to connect. Surely it should be targeted. Because I can look up your profile. I can see what you do for a living. And the message I send you should be absolutely rifle point targeted. So drawing a connection between my business and your business. No excuse Yeah, I get approaches from everybody that sells anything.

Abramo Ierardo

Martin Henley
Yes, yes, yes, you should do, you should do LinkedIn because LinkedIn is amazing. Like if you took, because LinkedIn essentially is a direct marketing platform, that’s, that’s what it is, like, whatever you might think about it is, that’s what it is. And people are doing it so incredibly badly. But if you were to take what you know about direct marketing, and apply it to LinkedIn, you would do enormously well for you. And for your class, you really

Abramo Ierardo
no denying it. The only thing is for me, these days, it’s all about capacity. For me, yes. And I don’t live, I don’t live a life by a lot of the models that I come up with, okay? Like a good example is, you know, like, I was taught a long time ago, you should spend about 10% of your day prospecting, no matter how busy you are, spend 10% of your day prospecting, right? Because you can fill in the new fill your own funnel, and then you’re on obviously always be busy. I don’t do any of that stuff. I’ve got a good set of clients now that are okay. I welcome a new client that comes on board. But realistically, I’m okay. But I agree with you 100%, in the sense that LinkedIn is the perfect environment to do this properly. Yes, the only example I was saying to you is that I see so much of it, which is done poorly on there that really disturbs me, because you need to do the work. And I could go through my 1000 I think I’ve got 891. Anyways, connections on LinkedIn. And yes, what I should do is go through them all and make the connections or some of the connections that the organization has to be. So again, this is the analysis, you know, I could go in there and I’ve got a connection with somebody cuantas I’m never going to approach cuantas to sell their marketing services. It’s not, I don’t have the capacity.

Martin Henley
So yeah, no, I think that as well. Yeah, there’s no reason that it shouldn’t be as targeted as that. And you’re right. It’s not like, but this is true of the whole of marketing, like everyone is doing it so incredibly badly. And I think that’s what brings up. I think that’s like you’re saying they’re trashing the platforms, but I think it makes it easier to stand out when you’re doing it. Right. You know, so I think that’s, it does. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Okay, super cool.

Martin Henley
Question number three, can you in one or two minutes, so we can clip this up and put it on tick tock, give us your recommendation for people who want to get better at data driven marketing.

Abramo Ierardo
One or two minutes, come on, man, I’m trying to summarize a lifetime of this crap.

Martin Henley
Good. That’s how you start a tic tock video, you’re on the right track.

Abramo Ierardo
In one or two minutes, what I’d say is this, first of all, make sure that you’ve got some facility to store data about your customers, and about your prospects. Number two, build an engine that queries that data to produce you a subset of the data that’s worthy to receive your message, then make sure your message is using the data to deliver the message specifically to the audience that should be receiving it. Now, that’s a right a kind of convoluted way of saying to get the right people to get the right message at the right time. And be respectful.

Martin Henley
Brilliantly, so you were perfectly capable of it. And you resisted, that’s okay. What did I want to say? Just thinking about

Abramo Ierardo
resistant to talk is what I’ve resisted on every media social media platform except tick tock,

Martin Henley
where you’re going to be tick tock now, whether you like it or not. Good. So I’m just remembering back to like, I remember when I was a salesperson when I had my first sales job. And I like you say you’re saying part scientists, part artists. I say part geek part creative. I used to love it when I get to work and I’d open my database and there’s all those empty fields. And it was just like, it gave me so much joy to put information in every single field. Do you know what I mean? Is get that that was satisfaction enough for me. Do you know I mean, like, using making the sales was great.

Abramo Ierardo
I guess that’s when I open up the contact record and it’s got empty feels like oh, what’s going on? Yeah, fine. Why don’t I know your business title? Give it to me now. Thank you. And, look, I do want to I mean, and again, you know, it is sometimes a case of the the expert preaching approach process that he doesn’t actually implement themselves, but I tend to be quite a bit. You know, good, detailed about some of this sort of stuff. Yeah.

Martin Henley
Yes, yes. And I think that’s what kind of data driven marketing database, you kind of have to be part scientist, part nosey Parker, part creative. Do you know? I mean, you’ve got to be really, I think, interested? You’ve got to be interested to be interesting. That’s what I think. And yeah, yeah. Good.

Abramo Ierardo
Yep, the wild thing. The last thing, I’ll say that the whole database marketing thing is not the last thing. I’ll show you other questions, but is that there is a special thrill at getting this stuff, right. And sometimes it’s a bit of adversity about it as well. And a bit kind of, I’ve ran a campaign recently, where this gentleman rings me up and says, I hear that you’re, you’re sending out mailing on behalf of client XYZ. How’d you know that I was in the market for a BMW. I said, Now, that’s just a coincidence. Now, I’m telling you, you knew this because you sent me an offer from BMW. I didn’t know that. But thank you, for me validating the fact that my targeting was right. So when you get that he was quite upset about it, and felt that there was someone watching him and all that sort of stuff, which was all kind of, you know, I can’t get it. But when I finally got off the call, I literally literally did the little dance of joy in and around my office, you know, because that’s validation that whatever you did, in terms of the targeting, you got it right, you know, I can sort of, and the result was really, it ended up being one of these kind of leading indicators that the campaign actually turns out to be a stunning success. You know, the dealer enough selling 50 cars, but just, sometimes you could just get it right,

Martin Henley
you know? Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, I think, like most people are hoping and spraying most people aren’t even on the mission of, they’ve got no conception of what right is, you know, I mean, they just Yeah, they just hoping to get lucky, you know, and I think that’s the way most people are doing their marketing. And I think like, especially now I’ve had this conversation, the absolute the opposite is true. Like, you can get it right, you can send out five messages and get five sales. And that should be the objective. And you have to come back and test one other

Abramo Ierardo
thing, no, which we must actually put as a little caveat on everything we’re saying it’s because we build it up this story that David Mark had been amazing. I think there is a caveat in today’s world. Today’s world is media clutter. And the amount of volume of media all the rest of it means that the number one project that you’ve got, is actually to get their attention. Because unless you’ve got their attention, nothing else actually matters, right? So a good example is in an email campaign, classic example of what I’m talking about. If that subject line is a file, everything else can just go flickering into the distance, you must be building the kind of environments where people actually take notice of you. So that involves an entire process on its own. There is a creative discussion in that there’s an offer discussion in that, but there’s also this kind of permission to market to them. concept in that. So creative speaks for itself. It needs to be gorgeous. And it just needs to be good and represents the brand well and presents the product that we offer really well. The other part too, that I spent a bit of time with some of my clients is talking about the offer. Now, an offer doesn’t have to be a discount, it doesn’t have to be a you know, buy this and get a set of steak knives. No. And that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the offer being appropriate to whoever you send it to. And you must take notice of it. There is no discussion point about that whatsoever. So if you’re going to send out an offer for a new credit card, and it’s not competitive with whatever else isn’t available in the market, don’t waste your time. Because no matter how much targeting you’re seeing, people are not idiots. And the assumption that they are is really quite disrespectful. The last bit of that is this concept of having permission to market to them. So in essence, they’re almost expecting your message. That’s a very a difficult thing to achieve, but it’s achievable. So when your message goes, they say, ah that, I want to have a look at that

Martin Henley
100% That

Abramo Ierardo
could be a synergistic effect of some other advertising your own. For instance, you’re running a broadcast media campaign, and you also back it up as a direct marketing data sets gives permission for them to have a look at it. So all of that stuff is important in the context of, yes, we can have great targeting, we can have great data, great levels of personalization. But if no one looks inside the envelope, or no one looks inside the email. Because people’s attention is being grabbed at by everything that’s going on around them. What’s the what’s the analogy they use? Each of us are exposed to three and a half 1000 advertising messages a day. I think it could even be more than that. Now. It used to be on YouTube. Well, you think about the fact that you’re still on a YouTube ad and a YouTube video, you might actually see seven or eight messages there that you can avoid.

Martin Henley
Yeah, I relented, I pay Google $10 a month. So I don’t have to look at the ads in

Abramo Ierardo
which I don’t, because I want to see what the ads are, what the ads are and how they actually approach them. And sometimes that’s an answer for one of my clients. So

Martin Henley
yeah, I see. I thought that for the longest time, but my life’s got better since I’d give them to $10 a month and really as Okay, cool. Question number four, what should people read if you read something that actually changed your life or you think would actually have an impactful benefit? For people who’ve got this far into the video?

Abramo Ierardo
The very first book anyone in marketing communication should read is David Ogilvy on advertising. Written in, I think it was either written in the 70s, or the 80s. That’s the most important book in advertising. However, in my opinion, the reason is, is because, as I said before, there’s a premise in his book that says, advertising that doesn’t sell doesn’t work. Which case, he has built an entire career in the early parts of Ogilvy that built around that, and some of the most classic famous ads of all time, are in there. Another book is written by a guy called Drayton bird, he’s written a book on direct marketing, he comes out of the UK, he’s one of the Dorians of the direct marketing industry. There’s another book written by wicked Warren with this because the titles on Edward Nash, in one, he’s written a book on direct marketing. There’s an Australian book called direct marketing fundamentals, written by Stan Giles, and a couple of other guys. That’s, that’s very much an academic book, it’s a textbook. Now, when you pick up any of these books, they’re very outdated. So just ignore the fact that they talk about things that are kind of not no longer done in terms of you know, computer programming and mag types, you know, that, look at that, look at the concepts around or D, but how they are used. The other thing I’ll say to you is, there’s a whole pile of subscription services online that you can actually get into. Don’t get to head up in all of this. I would actually recommend that people don’t read a lot, but also but interact and network with people in your industry is going to be a much better process. Now, it’s not something that direct marketers do very well. Sorry, just something popped up for some reason. do very well. But there is the DMA conference in the US. There’s the UK DMA conference. Is it still on? I don’t know. And there’s a there’s an ad Ma, or a DMA conference. It’s here in Australia as well. Listen, and learn from the people doing the best work. Find out what they’re doing. It’s the best places that these conferences and spend the time and look at what they do. It ends up being the best way to learn it. Because we always deal with this concept of test, learn and roll. Well, if someone else has done it, why wouldn’t you listen to what they’ve done them What they found out and then work from there. The rest of it Boston boiled down to just networking with the right people.

Martin Henley
Excellent goods, talking of networking with the right people. Somebody has introduced me to Drayton bird, the invitations gone out on LinkedIn. It was about six months ago. We’re just waiting for Drayton bird to open LinkedIn and say,

Abramo Ierardo
I, he’s an older guy.

Martin Henley
He’s in his 80s. Yeah, yeah, he’s

Abramo Ierardo
in his 80s. So don’t be surprised if he doesn’t ever respond. If you’re one of the someone else to talk to, I would probably talk to someone like Malcolm hall here in Australia. So let’s Malcolm,

Martin Henley
and then Okay. Well, we’re, we’re we’re coming here now. So this is cool. We’re coming here. Training bird, I’m going to up the ante. He did accept the connection requests. There’s got to be a telephone number. I’ve been told he’s in his 80s. And it will be a very, he loves to have these conversations. Apparently, there’ll be a very colorful conversation. Yeah, I need to push.

Abramo Ierardo
Great. Share this. There’s another guy.

Martin Henley
Okay, so before we do this, we have to do it properly. So firstly, I have to check in and see how you’ve enjoyed your experience of being on the talk marketing show.

Abramo Ierardo
Oh, nice. Be great.

Martin Henley
Because I was tense again,

Abramo Ierardo
I enjoy a chat about MySpace. I mean, I don’t struggle with the concept. I love it. I love chatting to people. I probably do about five or six podcasts a year for people who are running these sorts of things. I am, this has been good, because you’ve asked the questions that don’t normally get asked. And I think that that’s appreciated, I actually appreciate the questions. So that’s really cool. The thing that I’m actually surprised about is that the length of time you’ve dedicated to this, far too many times I have these discussions where they try to compress it to appeal to people’s attention spans in today’s world. Alright. And I think the subject requires the kind of length that we give it. So well done.

Martin Henley
All good. Brilliant. Thank you. And I think a couple of things. What do I think? I think? Yeah, I’m going both ways. Like we take all of this time, I don’t want to be contributing to people’s collapsing attention spans, you know, I don’t want to be contributing to that. I agree. I agree. 100%. And I do want to get beyond the veneer. The trouble is with marketers is that we’ve done our little bit of marketing, we’ve done our positioning, and this is kind of where we stand and we build, like the facade in front of us do you know, I mean, so I just want to get beyond that. The thing about asking the questions is, these are the questions that people put to me when I’ve been teaching them or I’ve been pitching them the service? Yes. And these are the questions that don’t get answered. And these are the questions that, that prevent people from actually getting involved in doing this thing. Direct Marketing is an amazing thing. Every business I think, should be doing it, too, in some way or other. And they should aspire to get really good at it in the way that you are. But if people don’t get question answers to these questions, then they just don’t do it. You know, it’s as simple as that.

Abramo Ierardo
That’s why I welcomed it. I think it’d be brilliant.

Martin Henley
Okay, super cool. Well, I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it, because that should make it that much easier than for you to throw a couple of people under the bus in the way that renewal and Dave both threw you under the bus. People that you can introduce me to who you think might enjoy. Or maybe just enjoy to have a conversation like this with me. Who have you got in mind?

Abramo Ierardo
I got Malcolm old old a you LD,

Martin Henley
you LD, excellent.

Abramo Ierardo
Well, he’s kind of the founder and owner of an agency up in Sydney that I think would be worth a conversation. And he’s been around as long as I have it not a bit longer. So he’s got some very strong views about certain things. Another guy called Mike shutter. Mike is a very skilled direct marketer worked in high end agency land. So he’s worked with much bigger corporate accounts, so I can speak on that subject. But also more recently, him and his partner actually have put together a quite a lovely, not for profit charity that has this premise around being thankful for whatever we have, and, and sharing our thankfulness. So he will be a nice one to talk to you about. Maybe bring in that kind of social conscious into your cooperation. Who else are thinking about who else?

Martin Henley
Okay, that’s super cool, too. Is it enough like we have like a 50% kind of hit rate. So if you recommend to then

Abramo Ierardo
why don’t you gain 100%

Martin Henley
Because I think we’ve been a bit baggy about our attitude to This

Abramo Ierardo
so you’re not doing the hard work the hard yards, put in the

Martin Henley
hard yards we need to be the thing is we probably are. I mean, when you’re gonna be episode 280 Something you know, so this is going really well, I kind of feel like it’s at

Abramo Ierardo
that’s huge, much. Yeah, there’s 15 I think 15 is the drop off right now. 85%? And yeah,

Martin Henley
yeah, I kind of get I really like having conversations is the thing. So I think we’ve put up episode number 75 this week, and there’s five or six records already. So it’ll be five or six weeks before this goes up. So yeah, you’re gonna be at 182, something like that. And then it boggles my mind, I think about I’ve got 30 years experience, you’ve got 3040 years experience, like few times that 80 by the decades of experience they’ve got there’s like, 1000s of years of experience in these companies. Yeah, yeah,

Abramo Ierardo
I tend to very much look you up and, and have a look at some of the previous episodes to say who he’s spoken to.

Martin Henley
Yeah, there’s some really cool stuff in there. There’s Do you know Simon Bowen? I do. I think both Simon Bowen does a thing called the model’s methods. And he’s all about drawing and diagrams and all these things. I spoke to him, it’s gonna be three or four weeks before that one goes up. That was an amazing conversation. There’s a guy I spoke to his went up a few weeks ago called Mark Carter. He’s written a book called add value, because he spent 20 years asking sales managers what value is and none of them knew. So he had to write this book about it. It was insane. Like, it’s, it’s really it’s kind of university driven, because I’ve got no idea who’s gonna recommend who. And yeah, I’m loving this. It’s a really cool thing to do.

Abramo Ierardo
Now, well done, I think that does some of this stuff. Part of it is the interview as in like, You got to ask the right questions to get the right response. And the other part of it is, like the response has got to actually be able to answer the question with some sort of, with some sort of passion and energy that actually delivers the message. Well, I mean, like, you know, I think that that’s the key to this. But there’s certainly people out there that mean, someone else, I’ve got someone else in mind for you to speak to, but I just want to check whether he’s up for it for actually refunded, but I might, but I might just connected to him. I mean, he’s he’s led an entire consultancy around this concept of Dassault design led thinking. So you actually allow the design of the product or service drive the business rather than the other way out? This is the Apple Model B, Apple, designed a phone with the user. It’s step one. So if I’m the user, what would I want my phone to look like? Feel like be like, do like, and then I actually develop that into an actual product. And it’s quite cool thinking brilliant.

Martin Henley
Yeah, because when I think about these things, the one thing that is the one thing that you can get wrong, that will actually kill your business is the product. You know, everything else you can work on, you can get better at. But if you really don’t have a product that delivers value, that’s that’s the only time I think that your that’s the only terminal mistake you can make in your marketing.

Abramo Ierardo
Yeah, absolutely. Because there’s a wonderful expression out of out of Microsoft of mother’s era, which is, you know, you can’t make a leather purse out of a sow’s ear. Now, and I think that that’s a very important expression and in the context of the product, the product has to do what you promise it will do. Now, it has to be a promise that it will do it not because you think it will, it might do what it normally does, but distorted. What’s the promise that the product will do this? When it doesn’t, what are you going to do about it? That’s part of the product. Yes. And we started off conversation just today talking about the lack of customer service in our world today. Right. And the reason is far too many organizations and brands are not prepared to back the promise. The product will deal with yourself. Yeah. And it’s but so they hide. They hide from the litigation. They hide because of, you know, bad publicity. They hype it, you know, and I’m not sure you’re aware, but Optus had a data breach here in Australia and that was significant and nasty data breach. And I asked them a friend of mine who applied go with me he’s an honest customer and he was communicated to say that his driver’s license passport details all his identity has been lost. I said what did Optus do to help? They sent two emails was the response Have

Martin Henley
you seen a CEO came out and said we’re devastated?

Abramo Ierardo
Are you serious? Yeah. You know what you’ve done. So my friend George has had to go and change his driver’s license had to get a renewal passport issued to her do that he changed all of his passwords on everything he owns. It just goes on, he had to alert his bank. So if sent to email, really, so.

Martin Henley
Alright, okay, this has been what we’ll do now is we’ll say goodbye for the benefit of anyone who’s made it this far into the video, we’ll thank them enormously. We’ll remind them they should like share, comment, subscribe, do all of that good things to support us. So we’ll say goodbye now for those people. And then what we’ll do is we’ll stop the recording. And we’ll say goodbye like normal human beings.

Abramo Ierardo
Is that cool? Oh, yes, absolutely.

Martin Henley
Lovely. Do your best to be like a normal human being.

Abramo Ierardo
I’m just questioning whether or not that’s actually what’s happening here.

Martin Henley
It’s what’s happening is what’s happening. So here’s what I want to say to you. I have thoroughly thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I think this is a really important thing that that most businesses could be doing immediately that will impact their success. And my recommendation for anyone who wants to do it is they have a conversation with someone as generous as you. And so I want to thank you for your generosity today. This has been a really cool chat. No problem. My pleasure.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?