Automation is just the delivery mechanism, not the message - Talk Marketing 080 - Tim Hyde

Automation is just the delivery mechanism, not the message – Talk Marketing 080 – Tim Hyde

by | Nov 15, 2022 | Automated Marketing, B2B Email Marketing, Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Marketing System, Talk Marketing

Martin Henley
Hello there, my name is Martin Henley. This is the effective marketing content extravaganza. And if you’re new here, you won’t yet know that I’m on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business. Providing that is what you need to be successful is to know more about and be more effective in implementing marketing and sales. So you can have more customers, more money, more profit, nicer holidays, nicer car, nicer house, nicer retirement, all of those good things. So what goes on here is I’m here giving you everything I know about sales and marketing. We bring in Melanie farmer every other week to talk about the marketing news. We review the very best and the very worst of marketing content on the internet. And whenever I can, I pull somebody in with experience that will be valuable to you if you want to be more expert more successful in your business. And I extract that information from them in a process that we call talk marketing. So if you are interested to be more successful in your business, you should like share, subscribe, comment, get involved, and because that’s what this is all about. So today is talk marketing, we do have a guest and today’s guest was let me get to the right page.

Martin Henley
Today’s guest is a graduate of the University of Canberra, where he achieved a degree in Commerce and Banking and Finance. He is a certified Customer Value Optimisation Specialist. Since he graduated, he has run projects and been a business continued continuity specialist and a transit and anti transition manager for Alphawest. I’ll put my teeth in and slow downwards, but we’ll get through this together. He was also the CEO and co-founder of The-RiotACT.com which was a news and views forum based on activities around Canberra. He is now founder and chief fixer at Win More Clients, a business that he has run for almost nine years. What you may not know is that he founded one of Australia’s first social media sites way back in 1999 and started podcasting around 2001. He claims he makes a mean lamb to Gene. Today’s guest is Tim Hyde. Good afternoon, Mr. Hyde.

Tim Hyde
Thank you. It’s great to it’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to sharing and chatting, chatting marketing, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be fun. Fantastic. I’ve never heard I’ve never quite sort of had someone read my bio, like that. It’s kind of like, oh, this is your life?

Martin Henley
Yes. Did I do a reasonable job? I started really poorly.

Tim Hyde
I actually did it degree back back even earlier than that. In 90 in sort of 2002 and one two, there’s no 9192 93 Okay, all that before there was an internet.

Martin Henley
Right? And then you studied banking Did you that I didn’t even know.

Unknown Speaker
I was always interested in banking. I managed to you know, I was trying to live out my my dream to be Uncle Scrooge or what was the you know, Charlie Fox character in, in, in Gordon Gekko Wolf Wolf, not the Wolf of Wall Street was the other one.

Martin Henley
It was called Wall Street I think.

Unknown Speaker
It was Wall Street. Totally changed character in Wall Street. That’s that was my childhood. It was kind of a this mad stockbroker? Marketing automation.

Martin Henley
Okay, that’s cool. was Charlie Sheen, a good guy in Wall Street guy wasn’t what

Tim Hyde
he was. He was the protege that eventually turned in in Gordon Gekko and sort of was the whistleblower eventually.

Martin Henley
Yes, yes. Okay. So he was an ok guy in the end.

Tim Hyde
In the end, he came good. He came out he threw himself upon the sword. And, you know, turned whistleblower. Okay, that’s good. whistleblowers are good or not. We’ll leave that to your own imagination. Well, I can’t remember who played and Gordon Gekko.

Martin Henley
And Gordon Gekko was the guy who went on to marry her off of Catherine Michael Douglas. Yeah, there we go. I was going all the way around the around the houses. So that’s good. So Australia’s first social media site in 1999.

Unknown Speaker
I don’t know if it’s the first one but I’m going to claim it on my as well. There weren’t there could have been that there could have been that many. To be honest. I say the mate of mine was working with a couple of guys working in it in different in different areas. And a mate of mine who was working in the press gallery at Parliament House came to us and said, Look, there’s nothing like this where we are, like, why don’t we create this forum that people can put up their own content and engage with each other. And we just use a bit of tech to connect people up, right? Because at that stage, you know, in the late 90s, was everyone was starting to get this big CRT computer monitor on their desk. And they would take the Yellow Pages off the bookshelf, because that was the, you know, the right height, and then stick it under the monitor, to raise it up to the right, ergonomic height, right. We didn’t know much about ergonomics back in the day, but that’s the thing we’re doing. And of course, rather than going to the Yellow Pages, they were then sort of typing into this keyboard ething to access information on this emerging thing called the interwebs in the internet. And we’ve gone well, why can’t we allow people to talk to each other over this platform as well, because the forums that had traditionally existed, you would go to a forum that might be running a community event. And I remember, you know, back in the late 90s, they were closing a lot of schools in Canberra, and they would run these community events between at 530 to 630, at night in the local school, and of course, about whether the school was going to remain open or not. And of course, parents with kids, what do they do at 530 and 630. At night? Well, they’re actually feeding the kids dinner, you know, or coming home from work and not be able to get to those meetings. And we figured that just by taking that meeting and translating and other online contexts, people could engage with that conversation whenever they wanted to. Right. Yeah. And I can up you know, like it and share it and whatever else. Okay. And of course, that’s what we have in social media. People can express ideas and opinions and photos and whatever else. Under their own profile. They were fatally content creators now, and other people can engage and share and like and, and comment on that stuff.

Martin Henley
So we’re serious, then you really weren’t a million miles away from the woods coming?

Tim Hyde
No, not at all. No, not at all. We you know, as I said, I think a lot of people sort of arrived at this idea at roughly the same time. And I just built this stuff. I’m already we our first seven we bang together with duct tape and an angle grinder. Right. $600 with the parts out at the computer fair? Yes, yes.

Martin Henley
Because I’m thinking like LinkedIn was LinkedIn, the first that was kind of around 2003 2001 2002.

Tim Hyde
Started and Facebook registered in 2004. Right. Okay, now we did have MySpace in I don’t remember when my standard MySpace started, I have to look that up sometime. But again, it was about the same time. And I think the difference between where you know, where LinkedIn got its success was was very much, you know, we’re a business forum. And whenever you if you remember, the early days of Facebook, it was based off the back of hot or not, yes. Let’s put a photo of someone up and see what the hot yes or no. And then it sort of built up with its community. People can put their own photo up and they can engage with it. And that’s what effectively we’ve done, you know, how social media is, is evolved. It’s given people the ability to create their own content, and other people engage in the community around that content.

Martin Henley
Yeah, yeah. So what happened to it, then you obviously stopped

Tim Hyde
running, still running still? Yeah, still running. I got out the end of 2013 to at least 2014. sold it to the current business owners, they’ve taken in a slightly different different direction, more newspaper, you know, online forum kind of thing. We will Wild West. Yes, yes. Yes. We let people see what say all sorts of things. But it was but it was interesting. It was interesting. Community self moderate around that content as well.

Martin Henley
Yes. That’s really cool. That’s really, really cool. And your podcasts, and you’ve been podcasting since 2001? Is that what you say?

Unknown Speaker
2001 yeah. I think it might have been 2000, late 2000, early 2001. You know, this podcast thing, and we, you know, the, my co founders and I, we we kicked off a podcast, which was called the rugby review. I don’t even know it’s still online, it may be it may be might not be. And we would review all of the Super Rugby games every weekend. And we would talk about those super rugby games and give you tips and predictions for the following week for Super Rugby. And, and then we drink beer halfway through halfway through the podcast and, and review the beer as well. And then we eventually got to this point where we go to a pub and they give us the free beer. You know, we just give them a shout out and say this is the power of today. And so yeah, this idea of kind of, you know, content being sponsored, I guess was also kind of this space that was starting to to emerge as well, that if you could create content and talk about someone’s product, they would give you some of that product to review. Yes. And for us, it started with, you know, for us it started with, you know, free gig tickets. And yes, here and then it was like, Well, you know, we’ve got a bigger audience, and it’s now command dollars for it. And that dollars turned into, you know, into advertising revenue. And, I guess, you know, through the naughties. You know, we’ve really saw the sort of emergence of this phrase we now call digital marketing as a, as a space that people are in.

Martin Henley
Yes, and it seems weird, because I’m probably a similar age to you from the kind of the data that you’re talking about. Like, these things really didn’t exist in 1999. And McCarthy didn’t exist in 2001. So it’s weird to think it really is only 20 years ago. And it’s weird to think actually, how much the world has changed in that time because of the internet. You know, digitalization. digitizer? Yeah,

Tim Hyde
we start to look at, you know, how much power people have, you know, on their phones to create an influence others and marketing, in a sense, is just your ability to influence other people for good or ill. And I watch, you know, watch my kid and his mates do the same thing. You know, they’re constantly on their phones, they’re constantly sort of snapping and sharing and, and talking to each other. And it’s not. And I guess for this for the old school of us who might go, Oh, my God, that’s not marketing, or that’s not, you know, it’s not good. It’s not good or bad. That’s just a matter of perspective. It’s just different from the way we’ve ever we’ve done things previously. And I, you know, to this day, I still come across people who say, Oh, I don’t want to be on Facebook, because I don’t like it very much. And it’s a waste of my time. I don’t really care whether you want to be alone or not, right. But if that’s where your customers are, you need to go where your customers are watering when your customers are hanging out. So if you want to eat, you need to go to the watering hole where your customers are, or you can go somewhere where they’re not, and then you could sort of die of starvation.

Martin Henley
Yeah, well, you absolutely 100% need to be where your customers are, or you’re going to starve. That’s true. I’m wondering if, if attitudes it feels to me like attitudes to the Internet are changing. Like, it feels to me like, people were very excited about all of this stuff up until when? I don’t know 2015 1617 18. It was on bridled excitement, passion for this thing. And I think it attitudes started to change then. And I think they have changed now. Where, I don’t know, I feel like maybe the internet, people think the internet isn’t such a great thing anymore.

Tim Hyde
It looks like anything can be, you know, good or bad. The Internet itself is just a thing. Yes. The it’s a vehicle to convey thought, emotion, through content to other people. Yes. So we can’t go, the internet’s good or bad. The internet is just a thing. Right? What is conveyed in it, I guess, people have now looked at this and gone, what else can we do with this. And that sort of human interaction with the thing can have a value attached to it. Alright, that’s where we can apply subjective and objective judgement, to say whether this is good or bad. I think from you know, if we look over the just the last couple of years through COVID, you would say that people wouldn’t be able to connect with others. In the same way, without the internet, without technology without zoom and Facebook Live and, you know, any other variation or version of those particular sort of platforms. It’s just a thing that allows people to connect in a way that’s meaningful to them. Right in their little communities, however big those communities are.

Martin Henley
Yeah, 100% and I think maybe it is just the application of that. And maybe it really is the very tip of the iceberg. You know, the Twitter’s the Facebook’s the Googles, the you know, the way those corporations may be are working it that maybe is because, yeah, I don’t know. It’s probably not useful to have that conversation right now. But it does feel to me like attitudes to the idea of the Internet are kind of changing like people were it was unbridled enthusiasm previously, like, I remember a lot of people being really excited, like maybe we’ll have chips implanted that was 2022 that was supposed to happen, and they would have been excited. What was that? Sorry? I

Tim Hyde
said, well, listen says I’m not going to put a chip into me because by the time I recover from the surgery, my chips obsolete?

Martin Henley
Yes, yes, yes. I don’t know, it just feels to me like attitudes to it are changing. I think, you know, it’s been questioned at least now, like maybe it went from unbridled enthusiasm to kind of acceptance to ambivalence to like, okay, maybe we should,

Tim Hyde
it’s probably, there’s probably a grief lifecycle involved in that as well, because you’re right, you know, we go back 20 years, the internet, you know, 30 years, particularly against the internet wasn’t a word that people use, there was a version of that we allowed universities to connect with each other. And that wasn’t very exciting. You know, but along came a GUI interface or graphical user interface, along came video, along came this ability to connect in different ways. And we’ve got, oh, my God, this is super exciting, and everyone jumps on. And then we go, and, you know, again, this sort of gets the full spectrum of humanity, that maybe some people weren’t necessarily exposed to previously. But they can now find, okay, and find very easily through Google searches, and that sort of stuff. And that obviously comes with social risk as well. And that just has to be has to be managed. But I think all things considered, you know, the speed of technology has kind of probably taken people a little bit by surprise. And in a marketing context, you know, just to bring the conversation back to marketing. It’s also meant that people have had to adjust really, really quickly to a new paradigm about how people connect, and interact with each other.

Martin Henley
Yeah, 100%, thank you for bringing it back to marketing, because that’s what we’re here to talk about. So that’s cool. And I think I tell you what, I think but you’re going to discover it, what you’re going to discover about me is I’m just a bag of issues, man, I’ve got issues with everything. So so that’s the way there’s always going to be directing this, this conversation, that and the structure. So as you know, there are only five questions. So the first question is your specialty subject is marketing automation. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about. So the first question is, how are you qualified to talk to us about marketing automation? The second question is, Who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives? The third question is, what is your recommendation for anyone looking to get better at marketing automation? The fourth question, really simple. What should people read? And the fifth question, if you’ve had a good experience, I will be asking you to throw a couple of people under the bus who might endure or maybe even enjoy to have a conversation like this with me.

Martin Henley
So question number one, how are you qualified to talk to us about marketing automation, and maybe, in that, you need to define a little bit for people what marketing automation is.

Tim Hyde
Let’s, let’s start there. Let’s start with marketing automation. Marketing automation is systemization of routine or manual tasks, using technology to create leverage in the work that we would otherwise do. Okay, so I’ll give you some examples. Alright. The text message that you get to say that you’ve got a hairdressers appointment, or a doctor’s appointment on that is marketing automation. At work, there is a trigger event, which is the booking of the appointment, there is a time period about when this notification is going out. So either workflow or communication, and then the action, which in this case, is the communication listener, you’ve got a doctor’s appointment, in the same way, the movie tickets you buy online, right?

Tim Hyde
They are delivered through marketing automation, you buy a ticket, right? You don’t want to wait till the following morning, for someone to come into the office and say, I need to put this ticket in the post to get to you. It’s delivered immediately via email to your phone, you know, with a personalised QR code to scan for movie tickets. Okay. So those are some examples of marketing automation. If you’ve ever downloaded an ebook that’s delivered by marketing automation. If you’ve ever got a task reminder to do something in your personal life or your business, that’s marketing automation at work as well. Okay, so it’s just the systemization of routine or manual tasks using technology to create leverage.

Martin Henley
Good. Okay. That’s quite a broad definition of marketing automation, because that’s almost like sales fulfilment type stuff, you know.

Unknown Speaker
It can be self fulfilling, it can be I think, right? I’ve got some I’ve got an automation that I built just for shits and giggles as an example, just to say, it can be for other things, right? I’ve got one that literally sends my wife flowers. Okay, so periodically, it sends an email to her favourite florist, and says I’d like to make this particular order and it changes each time because I’ve built it that way. And they call me up and say got your audit, Tim. What’s your credit card number and I give it to him over the phone and watch is the message based on my mood or whoever does the case maybe. And then she gets flowers the same day.

Martin Henley
Okay? How periodically, like randomly periodically or?

Unknown Speaker
It’s randomly, except for our anniversary because then it stops all the other systems and runs on on the anniversary.

Martin Henley
That’s a great example. If you’ve heard the stories about like, there’s this developer who sits I don’t know, and he sits there and for whatever has his career for 35 years, and then he leaves and then they discover all the automations that he set up like to I don’t know, for the for the, I can’t even remember what any of these things are all these things, stuff like this, like every third Tuesday or something he would be often there’ll be an automated email going to his boss saying I’m poorly today with X random disease, something something and then there’s something to do with. There’s a there’s a thing that runs in the time it takes him to walk to the vending machine and back, or, you know, all those I love those stories. Yeah, yeah. So that’s, that’s

Tim Hyde
effectively the same, that’s a victim, that same thing, right. And we’re seeing a lot of this, I see this, I mean, that this space is, you know, moving so crazily quickly, that it kind of excites me and terrifies me at the same time, to think what it’s going to be like, in 10 years time, because we’re starting to see, you know, a lot of machine learning, and, and I’m gonna say machine learning rather than AI. You know, it’s starting to emerge in that space to create, again, to create communication or task, or, you know, to drive an outcome. And that’s effectively what this marketing automation space is about. How I got into it is actually really interesting space. And it was off the back of the advertising we were doing with the riot act, because we had, you know, literally hundreds of 1000s of users sort of visiting every single month. And in fact, I think we had, you know, 100, over 140,000 people visit the site more than 100 times per month, which is slightly crazy. Considering the population of Canberra is only 400,000. Now 10 years further on. And, you know, we would have is like, how do I create my my interest was, you know, leveraged, my interest has always been in leverage and systemization. And that comes back to the it sort of sort of stuff on how do I create more personal experience with less of my effort. And so we had people logging in every time they log in, they get some form experience. And I was looking at how can we create this sort of leverage in this experience, that makes them feel kind of really special about being where they are. And so there was this kind of driver on one side, but at the same time, you know, through the naughties, we were starting to see on digital advertising, become a thing for the first time ever, you could say, that particular ad with that set of words is generating this much interest in your business. And I’d have advertisers come back to me and say, hey, you know, that stuff, you know, the advertising the you ran for us? It wasn’t effective. Why wasn’t effective, right? So putting my coding hat on, or saying, look, if I, anyone’s in it, we were noticed that sort of the spinning wheel of death on a more on a Windows machine, right? Your experience when you use code is the thing works or doesn’t work, right? When you get in your car, and it doesn’t start, you go, Oh, my car’s broken. But it’s not the whole car, it’s just one thing in the car that’s broken. You know, when you’re when your computer programme doesn’t launch properly, it’s not the whole thing that’s broken. It’s literally just one line of code where the program’s got to and it doesn’t know what to do next. Right. And in a marketing context, I was seeing the same thing, we would have advertisers run campaigns, we can see exactly, for the first time ever, how many people clicked on that combination of words with that size ed, and that colour and that creative. And they would get to the next step in their marketing journey, being customers website, or whatever it happens to be, and they would not progress past that point. And so we start to look at, well, if we need to fix that one thing, how can we fix that thing, so that the customer progresses to the next step in that customer journey? Right? And how can we do that in the most efficient and effective way possible? Right, so when someone emails you through your contact form, and it goes into an inbox somewhere, and you don’t reply, because you’re off down the beach, you know, surfing or whatever you’re doing, and the customer is sitting there going, well, you’re going to get back to me, you’re going what’s going on, they just go on to the next business. But if we were using to an automation, in that process, we would say, what do I need to do? Well, I need to manage customer expectations about how quickly I’ll reply to them. So I’ll use automation to say trigger event you’ve requested as we get in contact. Automation says I will reply and say, Hey, Martin, thanks for getting in touch. We’re just down the beach surfing, we’ll get back to you ASAP creates a better customer experience using leverage while you’re off doing something else, which has got higher value to you.

Martin Henley
Okay, cool. 100%. So I think you’ve gone straight to the issue. The issue is almost people don’t like marketing automation. You’re not supposed to do marketing automation. You know? Do you know what I’m saying?

Tim Hyde
Yeah, like, I think what they don’t like is not the automation itself is they don’t like print being. They don’t like the impersonal.

Martin Henley
Yeah. And so what was the way you put it is like, how do I express more personable nurse without it taking up more of your time? Is that the way you express it? Yeah.

Tim Hyde
Because we know it, right. We know, as we scale our business, we’re going to have to deal with more people. Yeah, we will deal with more customers, we will deal with more staff, we will do more suppliers, we will do more strategic partners and JV partners, we will do have to deal with more people. Okay, so our challenge as business owners is how do we scale without losing the intimacy that makes those relationships actually effectively work for us, but not take up more time and resources. And if we can crack that code in our business, that is the thing that gives us a competitive advantage over everybody else in our space.

Martin Henley
Okay, so people don’t like marketing automation? Just say no, they don’t. And the thing is, I can be more specific about the kind of marketing automation they don’t like. And maybe the very best example, the very best example, are these LinkedIn bots, you know, the bots that would go out and send a connection request. And then immediately you’ve had that or you accept, then they’ll send you something else, which will say, you know, something completely stupid. It never says, Thanks for taking the time to connect, I think that’s what it should always say, it always says, oh, you know about me now. And I do this. And I do that, and I do something else. And I do just like the worst marketing ever. So that’s the marketing automation that people really don’t, oh, that’s the best example of the marketing automation that people don’t like. Because people aren’t looking to crack this code. They’re just looking to smash the shit out of everything they possibly can, like, in their marketing, you know? So again, it’s like, the internet isn’t bad. It’s the application of the internet, that might be bad. So marketing automation isn’t bad, but it’s the application that is bad, I think is the situation. Yeah, absolutely.

Tim Hyde
And again, you know, as we connect with people, we want to increase intimacy, not decrease it. 100%. And so what we’ve seen over the last, you know, 20 years, as we’ve gotten our databases are a good thing. Because of I clicked more names, I will be able to sell more stuff. Yay. Right. But in the process of trying to sell more stuff, we’ve tried to, we’ve tried to go or everyone’s at the same point in their journey. And so therefore, everyone will buy from me, right? If I send out the same message, course, they won’t do that. Right? You know, person A, you know, Sally hasn’t gone through five dates before you pop the question. Yes, Jeanine. You’ve been on 15 dates with Janine and she’s absolutely ready to give you a peck on the cheek, or whatever. Right. But it is it is a bit like that if we if we went to someone, you know, if we went to it and sort of line up for people and said, I do want to buy from you, you want to buy from me you want to buy from you to go and buy for me? Yeah, absolutely. You’re going to find one person eventually, who says they want to do that. But everyone’s on their own journey, if we start treating everybody the same, they’re going to be less likely to buy from us. And so we’ve got this sort of, you know, this difficulty I want to sell to more people. But I’ve also got to increase the level of intimacy those people with each of those people in order to do so. And how do I do that? In a way that actually means personal.

Martin Henley
Yes. And this is the trick then is okay, what I want to say I want to say so much, I definitely want to say so much. I used to do this thing. In the trainings where I would draw a line, I would say like this should be the customer journey, where basically they might see an ad, they might see a social post, they might receive an email, they might sign up for some email, they might come along attend event like this is the journey that they go on to becoming to know more about you. And then there might be a day might come to the event, you might have a conversation afterwards. There might be a phone call, there might be a proposal, there might be a presentation, you know, all this stuff. And what I would say to people is that your mission is to get to the point where you end up being godparents to their kids. So it depends on what you’re selling. Obviously if you’re selling I don’t know pads, you can’t be gold Parents to every one of your customers kids. But you know, that’s that should be the mission. And the mission should be to get face to face as quickly and efficiently and appropriately as as possible. You know, I mean, because that’s when the integral, that’s when you achieve a quality of interaction. What’s the point of this? The point of this is that people forget that people don’t care about that. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, because because I worked in South Africa for five years, what would happen is you meet someone in South Africa in a work context. And they decided in about 30 seconds if they like you. And if they like you, they’ll invite you to their house that weekend for a bribe for a barbecue. You know? What’s the point of that? The point of that is, yeah, in South Africa, literally, I would be trying to pitch a client trying to get ahold of a prospect. And someone would say, Oh, he’s housemates with so and so this other supplier, so you don’t ever stand a chance, you’re never gonna sell to that person, because they’re mates do you know, I mean, this is all being forgotten. With the way that we’re working on the internet, like all of this personal, not personalization, actual personal, actual, being interested, actually engaging with people I feel is kind of going out of the job. And it’s going out of the job because of marketing automation, which is directing these bots just to spam people all day, every day.

Tim Hyde
Direct, absolutely great. It reminds me of another young fellow who was from South Africa, but living had moved to New York. And we were chatting about his automation and his systems. And he built some funnels off the direct marketing, sort of mindset, where it was like literally going to run ads, and the shame our product, and then I’m gonna upsell upsell, upsell your down sell you and then see you later, here’s your product, piss off, right? It’s become so transactional, in that nature, right? That yes, you will absolutely get some business for the short term. And then you’ll run out of you run out of opportunity, because you just burning every single relationship that you create. And if you traded your friends and family like that, you wouldn’t have them around for very long. And I recall asking him and said is that how you buy when you buy from somebody? Is that how you buy some things? Right. And unless you’re filling in immediately, like shit flowing out of the toilet, or I’m starving, and just give me food, or I’m, you know, I’ve been in the desert for 12 days, and I haven’t had a single glass of water. People don’t generally buy from that, I think what happens is that people buy from the people they like, and when you need to remember that, and that’s why that’s why massive brands like Coca Cola, etc. Do such an incredible job of trying to build a personal brand identity, right, that people can connect with and like, but if you think about all the the all the major purchases that you’ve done, you know, in living memory, I can almost guarantee you that you bought from people that you go actually really liked that guy or that girl, I’m gonna buy that thing. I have a need for it, but I’m going to buy from you over somebody else. Right? Whether it be a fridge, a car, you know, dinner, whatever it happens to be, you’ll, you’ll generally go to what was the, the, as you say, the personal relationship that I had with the person selling the thing to me. Because I felt like you’re more likely to trust what comes out of your mouth. And if I trust what comes out of your mouth, I’m more likely to buy the thing you’re trying to sell me. Right, because I believe it will make a difference to my life. Yeah. Okay. And obviously, there’s visibility if I don’t know who you are, I can’t buy from you at all right? But those three, you know, it’s sort of like three legs of a stool. I got to be visible. I’ve got to be likeable. And I’ve got to, you know, know what the hell I’m talking about. I don’t need to be the expert. I see. So much of marketing now is about let’s try and out expert each other and I’m like, I get that. That’s a, that’s a mug’s game. Right. Just be more likeable.

Martin Henley
Yes, yes. Yes. I do. Because I think there’s a Do you know, Mark Carter, if you heard of Mark Carter? I spoke to him a few weeks ago, he’s written a book called add value. And one of the values he talks he’s got like this five, five value model thing. There’s like five aspects to this. And one of them is the relationship. And I think I’ve always been a relationship salesperson. I’ve always made friends with people so that they buy from me you know, that’s, that’s been my that’s been my drive. But I think because that’s going out of fashion, or or becoming increasingly rare. I think that’s going to be the thing that people value more in the future. I 100% Do I don’t make a decision to buy something without seriously investigating. If I get how quickly how easily I can get to a actual person. If something goes wrong, do you know I mean, but it feels to me like getting into an actual person 100% is becoming increasingly difficult, you know, strategic, like Dave decided people are expensive they don’t want people engaging with with people.

Tim Hyde
What? Yeah, it’s counterintuitive. Yeah, totally Eridu. To me, I don’t understand it. I mean, I got referred to a company the other day. And it was just given us sort of landline numbers, I called it up and I got through the, you know, I got the robotic voice message. And like you get with some of these bigger companies. And like, if you don’t know, the extension of the person you’re trying to reach and I go, and I don’t, so and they go, please leave a message. And we’ll get back to you. And of course, they haven’t gotten back to me at all. I haven’t heard anything back. It was not even an opportunity to put my phone number in and say, Here’s my phone number, other than as a voice message, presumably, someone can understand my accent. But of course, I haven’t heard back from them. I’m like, Well, I don’t know if I want to work with you now. Because you’ve given me such a terrible experience of your product. I’m not surprised that, you know, I’ve been referred to you to work on your marketing. Because if your customers have this same experience, I can almost guarantee that they’ll get to go, this makes me really feel real special. Yeah, no doubt at all. Let us go. I’m gonna go somewhere else. And we know that you know, when you know, when you call one of these big companies, and you get someone on the phone, who goes, You know what? I can actually hear you. Absolutely, yeah, I get that. Let me see how can I help you? And you go, Oh, my god, wow. A real person? A real person helping me a real person Listen to me. Yes. And yes, it is expensive. Right. But you know, with the automation side of things, we want to look at how can I create leverage in what that person has to do? Okay, so I might have five canned emails that I need to respond with? Choose number one, choose number two. Great. Okay, it’s got the attachment already done to it. So I can leverage that human touch but not replace the human touch?

Martin Henley
Okay, excellent. I think we have to be really careful about defining what it is that you do. Because oh, maybe we don’t. Because I think the whole idea of whether you call it automation, digitalization, all of it, I’m gonna say, and I’m making this up. So I can only be right 97.8% of the intent behind all automatization digitalization is to generate more profit. Irrespective of the needs of the client or the staff member or the whatever. It’s all driven, I think 97.8% of it by increasing profitability by reducing the human element. That’s what I want to say.

Tim Hyde
Yeah, I would agree with you. And I think that’s where people get it wrong.

Martin Henley
Yeah, 97.8% we settled,

Tim Hyde
or give or take, you know, 10% confidence interval.

Martin Henley
Okay, so then the question is, why do people get it so wrong?

Tim Hyde
I think it’s, I think you made a really good point, just a bit earlier on when you drew that, draw that line and talk about this idea of customer journey. Customers do go on a journey with you. And the first thing is they’ve got to become aware of you. What happens is that people get impatient, and they try to skip to the end. Right? But if you would go out on a date tonight, and go up to the first person you meet and say, Hey, you’re a bit cute, I think we should have 10 kids. Alright, I suspect your success rate is going to be incredibly low, it probably might increase a little bit, the closer you get to 4am in the morning. But it’s generally going to be really low. And I think that’s what happens with companies, we almost, you know, we talked about speed to sale, but we almost was rushed to the sale without actually getting the customer there. Our goal is to get a sale. Right? Absolutely. And the goal of any business is to make more sales, right solves a multitude of sins. But we want to make more sales. But if we get the thing that we want our customers to do is not necessarily their priority. And this is really important. The thing that I want my customer to do is not necessarily their priority for today. And so if I tried to jump ahead through those stages of intimacy that we like, I’m not ready for that yet. I’ve got other things to do today, right? In the same way that if you were asking a kid to clean their bedroom today, I can guarantee you they’ve got about a billion and things to do ahead of cleaning the bedroom, which is why as parents, we have to ask them like 15 times, because they were having to clean your bedroom late, or unpack the dishwasher or something like other shit to do, that’s a higher priority for them than the thing we want them to do. And in business, it’s very much the same. I want to sell you a new car, I want to sell you a CRM system, I want to, you know, get you to run Facebook ads, that’s great. But today, I’ve got to pick the kids up from school, and I’ve got to get the medicine for the pet for the dog. And, you know, I’ve got to have that difficult conversation with that staff member who’s, you know, hasn’t been coming into work, because they’ve been sending me an automated message about what they’ve got every three weeks on a Tuesday. You know, there’s other priorities that our customers have. And we need to be patient with our customers to meet with them where they are at, not where we want them to meet us.

Martin Henley
Good 100%. Now, this has been an issue for me, I told you I had issues here they come. This has been an issue for me my whole selling career. Because if I’ve ever had sales training, for example, what they will try and impress on me in exactly the way you’re saying that we try and impress on clients that they should buy, when they may not be ready to buy, what will they will impress is their sales cycle. And I don’t care about the company’s sales cycle, I care about making it easier for my customer to buy. And the way that’s done the most easiest is by stepping into their buying cycle. So I will say how do you want to buy this thing? You know, what has to happen next? Who needs to be involved? You know, what, what do you need from me all these kinds of really obvious, easy open questions unless you are literally not caring about your customer at all. So this idea of like customer centricity is quite fashionable to talk about, but nobody’s doing it. Nobody’s even really interested in doing it is my experience.

Tim Hyde
I think that’s somewhat driven by the short term cycle of leadership. Whether it be in politics, where we’ve got three or four year terms, and I spent the first year trying to get out of my election promises, second year doing some stuff in the third year trying to get reelected. You know, the short term cycle of leadership positions, particularly saying corporate is also the same sorts of issues. If I know I’ve only got my job until I get my next promotion, and I’m going to do everything I’m going to do to maximise My short term gain, right? So it’s localised benefit, what will benefit me most right now, and that’s the behaviour I’m going to drive, not what is going to be the global benefit for us as a business as a whole, or for my customer as a whole. And we driven by that short term, immediate gratification, sort of thinking, but the more we can shift into the global benefit, the more likely we are to get business outcomes or and customer outcomes that serve our business’s growth in the long term.

Martin Henley
Yes, 100%. And I think like you were alluding to before, he didn’t quite say, We’re all obsessed with making the sale. But nobody seems to appreciate that the real value in in a business is having customers not having singular sales, like selling to lots and lots of people, having far fewer customers who buy from you regularly, is much more valuable than having lots of one off sales. Good.

Tim Hyde
I think, I think for most businesses, i Let’s go to small meat, let’s let’s not worry about some of the corporates. But I think for most businesses, you know, in sort of small micro small, medium, sort of space, if you were to add 100 new customers, right, that would completely in the next 12 months that will completely change your business. Yes, transformed, transformed, you’d be something completely different. But what happens is that we just connect with more and more and more and more and more people hoping that we’re going to find the next one today. And so rather than going if I had to if I could only ever take on 100 Customers ever in the future, right? How would I go about doing that? And to be honest, I wouldn’t try and make a sale today or tomorrow or the next day. I would probably wait a month, two months, three months, four months before I tried to pitch anybody anything. Right? At month five, maybe I’d say unless someone really says you know, Hey Tim, how do I buy from you and you go absolutely well, this is how but I suspect if you did nothing for month one, nothing month two, nothing about three nothing four. By the time you get to month 10 of building really serious relationships with your with your ideal prospects. You would find that by month 12 You would have 100 customers. You will absolutely have 100 Customers In 12 months, if you were patient enough to wait for 12 months to do so. Right, in the same way, if you were to win lotto, right, when $20 million, lotto invested at 5%, today, right, and not spend anything for the first year, every year, thereafter, you would have a million bucks. But if you spend a million in the first year, you’re gonna have less and less and less and less and less.

Martin Henley
Right? Yeah. So

Tim Hyde
yeah, it’s changing the thinking about how we approach our sales and marketing, to be a little bit more patient to connect more deeply and more personally, with our prospects, our customers, with their partners with our staff. And, you know, you get them, you actually, I think, be better off.

Martin Henley
Now, 100%, you will be better off like 100%, you’ll be better off. I mean, they did a thing. I don’t know, if they did a thing in the UK that we talked about a thing they did in the UK, where they surveyed businesses, and they found it 17 times more expensive to find and win a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer. And that’s the process that everyone’s in everyone wants more customers, more customers, more customers, nobody’s in the business of making sure that they are firstly delivering the maximum value for their for their existing customers, and extracting the maximum value from those customers. You know, so I think there’s definitely something very wrong here with the thinking. And

Tim Hyde
what immediate desperation is immediate results. If I bring on you as a salesperson, and you don’t deliver in month one or two, like, now suddenly really nervous. Right, but three, right, you’re out? Let’s start the process again. But, you know, if you’re built again, if we that’s the sort of local benefit thinking if we started to think more globally, right? Yeah. What are we building towards? What’s the strategy? In a marketing context? Have we got our key indicators that tell us whether we’re moving in the right direction? Or not? Rather than just going? Did I just look at the end result? If we look at the evidence is a cake rising? I’m confident that I’m gonna get the cake at the end. Yes. But if I keep taking the cake out and going, why isn’t it cooked yet? 100% It’s never going to be cooked. And I think, you know, this is possibly one of the the biggest mistakes we see with with how people are doing that marketing approach right now. I’m so desperate to win my next customer. That comes, it comes across as desperation. Yes. Right. And our customer as a result of that is starting to look at us going to look a bit desperate.

Martin Henley
Yeah, 100%, like, these people are too pushy, or they smell it, if you’re desperate, you know, they smell it. And say, I would go beyond your I like your I can only have 100 customers in in the lifetime of my business. I like that. But I would go beyond that and say, if everything’s gonna be cool for the next 3040 years, how many customers do I actually need? You know, because I don’t need every customer. I can desperately drag and drag and drag into my business, you know, how many do I actually need? And if people weren’t back from that, dollars and cents? I need this amount of money. And and how many customers then? Do I need to? Do you know, I mean, it seems like, I don’t even know if this is relevant. But it seems to me like that there’s something in the unlimited nature of people’s aspirations in running their business that causes that desperation that causes them to have to have every customer they could possibly have, and have no time to slow down, say actually, am I adding value to this person’s life? Or are they actually adding value to my life? I just need more and more and more customers? Yeah. Good.

Martin Henley
Let’s bring this back to what you’re doing? Because I think the question has to be, how do given that everyone does it so incredibly badly? This idea of marketing, automation, automation, digitalization, whatever it is, we’re going to call it given that everyone does it so badly. What we need to do is how you do it well?

Tim Hyde
Yeah. Yeah, I think I think it’s, you know, again, we’re just looking at what’s the leverage, what would you do? What sage what particular customer at the same time, right? Do I need a human touch point at this particular point in my customer journey, and that’s why, you know, it’s so important when you start looking at automation in your business, is we look at what that customer journey looks like. And where I’m going to automate something in my business will it add, subtract, or be neutral to the customer experience in taking them to the next step? Alright, I think if we if we start talking going, okay, will this actually detract from my customer experience, and make things less personal Do I really want to automate that and just make it a kind of generic text message or a generic email? Right? If it? If the answer is yes to that question, we should change how we, we either don’t automate that. Or we look at how else we can automate it and create a different experience for a customer. So I think that’s the first thing. If it’s, if it’s neutral, or going to add to something, right? Then just take the example of the movie tickets, right? By automating movie tickets, it actually adds to the customer experience, because they get immediate gratification for the thing that they want. And they don’t necessarily need human interaction on touch point at that particular stage. Alright, so yeah, is the automation going to add to the customer experience? Or, or take away from it?

Martin Henley
Okay, cool. And I’m thinking about it maybe a little bit more. Basically, again, I’m a base kind of a person is what, like we’re saying that people buy from people. So what are the characteristics that people are looking for? They’re looking for honesty, they’re looking for reliability, they’re looking for maybe insight, they’re looking for all these things. So the question then becomes, how do I become? Well, honesty is the elephant in the room. But how do I how do I present as more honest, reliable, insightful? Like, how can I use automation? Like and reliability is probably the one that you’re talking about there. With the movie tickets, don’t buy movie tickets from me, because if I walk away, I will forget immediately that you bought those those movie tickets, and you will never get them. You know, so like delivery of of things that I commit to doing. That makes me more reliable. The elephant in the room is this honesty thing? Like, because your was the words you use seem more personable, or personal.

Tim Hyde
You know, this is where we go, you know, don’t try and pretend it’s not automation, when it is automation. Yes. Say, Hey, this is an automated message. Yeah, that’s, that’s okay. If you’re, you know, honest and transparent with people, again, it’s going to build that, that that trust relationship with your client. You know, if you try to pass it off, and you pass it off really badly, say, This is me. They’re gonna think you’re actually just a terrible copywriter or go, why would you tell me that? You know, you’re connecting with me. You know, when using automation, yesterday’s LinkedIn, when I’ve seen messages that say, Hey, it’s great to connect with you really authentically. If you’re gonna connect from me really authentically, don’t use an obvious system. That that says it’s authentic. You know, automate the task for me, it’s for you to go and do it manually.

Martin Henley
Yes. 100%. Okay.

Tim Hyde
Somebody else if you need to, yeah. It’s not you connecting through your, through your Facebook chat. It’s your VA, get them to say, hey, it’s you know, Tamara, you know, Tim’s VA here. Just wanted to reach out arrange a time to connect with Tim. Is that does that work for you? Yep. Absolutely.

Martin Henley
Yes. I had one today. It’s ridiculous. So this woman who’s some sort of influencer, such as LinkedIn marketing, sort of a person, the message rate, something like I was impressed by your background. So I thought I would reach out and connect. And tea obviously isn’t?

Tim Hyde
Yeah, but you can see that right? Because you can see who’s looked at your profile. Right. So yeah, it hasn’t broken. I’m impressed with your background. Let’s connect right? You got one Hang on. This is it this is disconnects between this authenticity, authenticity and the actions that we can see, to actually get there. So if you’re going to use and use an automation that actually checks out someone’s profile, and then comments on something specifically that they’re doing? Yeah. Again, the goal of connection is, is actually connection, not disconnection. Yes, and this has been I want to automate for automations sake, we want to automate where there’s a compelling business case, that advances our business goals to connect with their customers not takes that away.

Martin Henley
Yeah. 100%. And then the thing is, I think there’s something else that’s going on, which is she’s decided that she’s going to she’s like a attractive female. So we know on LinkedIn like attractive females do way better than everybody else, you know, because they’re targeting sad middle aged men like me. But she’s kind of leveraging that. And then going with this hollow flattery. I responded and said, that doesn’t sound likely. Then she went completely on the defensive and within five minutes, she blocked me Because I was being rude and shouldn’t be doing business with women apparently or something I don’t know. So there’s that as well. But what is the point? The point is that people don’t really like a much better I think, is some sort of expression of this is how I can add value to your situation. In that message, whether it’s automated or otherwise, like, I work with people like you helping them to achieve this thing. And then I read that, and I think, well, that sounds cool. Or no, it doesn’t, you know, I mean, yeah,

Tim Hyde
I didn’t take that further. Again, if you’re gonna do that and say we work with people in this day, this is the kind of result we achieve. Yeah. Is that something you’re looking to do right now? Yes, or No? Just shoot me a quick yes or no? Yes, yes, yes. No, no, we won’t. And no, is like, hey, nephrons at all? Yeah, if I can be a resource to you in the future? Please reach out. Not that’s okay.

Martin Henley
Yes. Because there’s, there’s lines here, isn’t there? Where is like, where is? Where is it? That’s marketing. You know, nobody expects 100% hit rate on their marketing. It’s like, here I am offering value to people like yours, resolving these kinds of issues, achieving these kinds of results. That’s marketing, you know, and like you were saying earlier, it doesn’t have to be today. You know, if you’re the right person, I don’t know, it seems to me like AI. The day, I’m all over the place today. But the danger is, if you don’t know how to do it, well, if you don’t know how to do it, well, don’t code it to domain because then what you’re doing is automating really bad markets.

Tim Hyde
It’s going to accelerate your demise. I’ve seen a bunch lately and says, Hey, you’re just reaching out, we’re trying to connect with accounting agencies and accounting firms and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s great. I’m not an accounting firm. I don’t know how I got on your list. Yes. But it again, immediately disconnects, it says you haven’t done you haven’t cared enough about me. Right? To want to connect in a way that I know that says that I should care about you.

Martin Henley
It comes back to who do you want to do business with? People want to do business with people who are honest and reliable? And hopefully a little bit better equipped to resolve their issues than Hey, are? You know, I don’t think the criteria even goes beyond that. You know, and so the honest thing is, yeah, why not?

Tim Hyde
If you’re incompetent, don’t tell people.

Martin Henley
Yeah, yeah. Well, this is what I mean by a little bit better than they then they are to equip their issue, even if it’s just because you’ve got the time and I don’t know, whatever. So really, then this, this idea of marketing automation, for me, needs to support me to be able to, to be able to be more honest and reliable and available to sort out their issues. Yeah, maybe we should get to question number two.

Martin Henley
Question number two is, who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives?

Tim Hyde
Well, a lot of what we just talked about is how we add value. But we’ve got a massively eclectic list of clients, everything from clairvoyants and sex workers to you know, agribusiness, ecommerce, professional services, medical imaging, you know, mining companies, finance, and so on, typically, have done a bit of ecommerce and retail as well, but not in hospitality, but tend not to do a lot of that sort of space. But it’s generally people are looking to, you know, having this sort of issue in their business about how do we, how do we continue to grow? Without necessarily, you know, but growth through live growth through leverage question is the big one that we we often get, and so, you know, that might be at different stages of growth for different people. So, you know, if you’re a coach or consultant, it might be, you know, you might be getting into that at, let’s say, 10k a month in revenue and garden. Shit, I forgot to follow up on that invoice, or I didn’t send that proposal last week, or, you know, I send that proposal six months ago and haven’t heard back from them. What do I do now? Kind of thing, right? And so, you know, that might be that stage. You know, if you’re a mid seven figure business or mid eight figure business and suddenly gone. Alright, we need to break into a new market. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Well, how are we doing? I think a lot of mid seven figure businesses also throw their marketing at the most junior person in the business. And I think marketing is probably the most important function in a business that you could possibly do. Because that’s the oxygen. That’s the oxygen that feeds everything else. And if you don’t get it, right, you’re gonna be in real trouble.

Martin Henley
Yeah, 100%. And what do I think about that? I think that people don’t seem to understand that they do think that as an as a consequence of this digital thing. It’s like, well, these kids have grown up with it. They must know how it works, but behind Ain’t that is nothing. They’ve never sold anything. They’ve never engaged anyone they’ve never, you know? So how are they equipped to have those conversations? I’m wondering now is the key to this not just having absolutely brilliant copywriters, who can make these automated messages appear natural and personable and all of those things?

Tim Hyde
Both. So the automation itself is just the delivery mechanism. Yes, not the message. And I think it actually requires both. Because the automation is going to look at how people interact with the message, and then update and route people to the next part of the conversation or next part of the journey that’s unique to them. Right? If we do ABCD, and everyone gets the same experience, it’s going to be very robotic, very impersonal. But if we go, you know, for you, Martin, you need a B, you know, J, K, and, Tim, you need A, B, C, F, right? That creative journey that’s personal to me and makes me feel more connected with you as a brand. And this is where there’s this sort of symbiosis exists between the automation and the technology, and the messaging that that automation technology conveys.

Martin Henley
Okay. It sounds to me still, like it’s more sales fulfilment that you’re doing than marketing?

Tim Hyde
Yeah, look, I think there’s a there’s definitely a bit of an overlap. Yes, you’re in there at some point that the value exchange is going to turn from attention to infant Reno. Attention for information, or attention for entertainment is the value exchange you might have at the early part of a customer journey. And at some point, it’s going to exchange you know, we’re going to have a different exchange where it’s money for product or money for service. And then we’re going to change the value exchange further down the customer journey for loyalty for you know, further attention or loyalty for referral or maximisation. And so, you know, there is there is definitely a symbiosis and but it’s not just sales, fulfilment. I think if we if we think of, if we think of automation and think of the stuff that we do, for example, as just being around the salesperson, absolutely. That’s a very important part of that. But it’s not just that part, right. It’s this whole customer journey that we want to look at Systemising.

Martin Henley
Okay, cool. So what I imagined we’d have a conversation would be more about funnels? No, no, we weren’t gonna have a conversation about funnels because you don’t like funnels, so that if I think marketing automation, it’s about how do I get these top of funnel people to become customers through, for example, automated email threads. Like if they do this, they get that emails, something, something else? It doesn’t sound to me so much as though like, that’s the kind of work you’re doing.

Tim Hyde
Both. Yeah, we definitely do both. I definitely. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And even even sort of beyond that, right. We can automate and systemize an onboarding experience once someone’s actually purchased. It technically, you wouldn’t call that sales. But if someone if you’re sort of pushing someone into your course, and as a product, you want to make sure that they complete the course and get value. Because if they don’t complete the course, and they don’t get value from it, they’re never going to buy the next course.

Martin Henley
Yes. 100%. Why? With funnels because you said you don’t like funnels?

Tim Hyde
Oh, I’m not really a fan of funnels. I mean, funnels as a concept is great, but I think we’re you know, funnels has been hijacked by the direct marketing, crowd design, I’ve thrown a bunch of ads out there, I’ve got you, you’ve got money in your pocket, I’m going to take as much of it as possible right now and then on PC off and get on to the next person. I think if we if we think about our customer journey, more like a pipe, that all the people that come in one end, come out the other. Right? It changes the dynamic about how we think about stuff as, as the people who come into our, into our world being expendable. And yet we know, I mean, the whole, I guess the constant, that sort of loose concept of a funnel is we bring a lot of people, we bring attention for a lot of people and we narrow them down to people who actually want to buy from us. But again, if we think about it a pipe, if we’re doing a service that, you know, has broad appeal. We’re only reaching the people we really need to reach in the first place, not any one at random. And we’re bringing everyone through that journey at their own speed.

Martin Henley
Yeah, because there is something about the gross inefficiency of that kind of funnel marketing. I had a brilliant conversation with a guy called Barnaby winter. I told you about this before. And he said, If I need eight customers, I only want eight people on my website, you know, so this idea that you you are talking very, very, in a very targeted way to only the people that you can add value to. And I think there’s something really important in that. I think that you know why the whole world this is he calls this the I don’t know exactly what it calls it. He calls this the advertising industry swindle or something like they convinced everyone that the whole world needs to know about their products and services, and that they

Tim Hyde
used Facebook years ago, when they Facebook first started advertising that they had their advertising solution. Obviously, they use their own platform on Facebook to to advertise it. They’re the one of their ads that ran very early on was like there are over a over a billion people on Facebook. All of them could be your customer. Yes. Can’t imagine that billion customers, they’ll be horrible.

Martin Henley
It will be horrible. It wouldn’t be what these are all that I was telling you. The other day, I said like I think people are 190 degrees wrong. In everything. They think about sales and marketing, like and one of those examples is customers like when it comes to customers, less is more, the fewer customers you have, the happier you will be 100%. And yeah, it’s I don’t know where this constant hunger for more customers, more customers more customers comes from. And it used to happen when I was an agency that I after I did a talk there’d be a little queue of people want to talk to me. And it would always be we need more customers, more customers, more customers. And I got into the habit of saying, Well, what happened to the customers that you’ve had already? And the answer, of course, is they didn’t take very good care of them. They didn’t offer them very good value, or they didn’t set the expectation properly, or they didn’t know exactly what they needed back in return in terms of value. And so they just people get on this ridiculous cycle. There’s a guy who I think does marketing automation, and he’s on these pre roll YouTube ads. And he says, if you’re not getting 200 leads a day, then you’re going out of business essentially is his message. But leads to work unless you’re automating those leads. I don’t know.

Tim Hyde
Yeah, I see a lot of messages around, you know, will flooding, you know, will flood the sales calendar. And, you know, you could get sort of 30 to 40 qualified appointments per week and 20, you know, 20 sales meetings a day. Like, I don’t want 20 sales meetings a day. I don’t know what I do with them all, to be honest. But it’s, it’s it’s, you know, and this whole, this whole idea of leads, I guess is what is a lead, right? Is a lead name, a phone number and a name and an email address. Is that a lead? Okay. Certainly some marketers out there would say Yeah, absolutely. That was a lead and therefore I want 1000 leads and which is 1000. names, emails and phone numbers. Great, right. One of my favourite films is Glengarry Glen Ross, right? Where the goats the leads are bad, you know, the lead to good performance by Alec Baldwin in that one if you get a chance to watch a really good cast as well. But they’re talking about what’s a lead? Right now. I think the goal of marketing is to get a effective what we call a sales qualified leader is someone who has a problem that they want fixed, has the budget to fix it, and likes you enough to want you to be the person to fix it for them. And then when you get into a sales call, is that you deciding whether you like them enough to want to fix it for them as well? Yeah, it’s their problem. Right? That would be a sales qualified lead, right. And that’s the job of marketing, the job of marketing is to create that person who has a problem, once that problem fixed as a priority and has the budget to fix it. Right. And lastly, likes you enough, that they’re interested in having you solve the problem of all the other people that could solve it for them.

Martin Henley
Yeah, I think slightly differently about because this is a whole other kettle of fish. I think if it’s an if someone’s completed a form, like if, here’s what I think a lead is when someone puts their hand up and says, Yeah, I’m willing to, like a marketing qualified lead them for me is where someone has put their hand up and said, Yeah, I’m willing to have a conversation with you about this thing. And then it becomes one to one, and then it’s 100% sales. But we have provided people with data. So people come to us and say, can you get this kind of data? And we say, yes, there’s 5000 available, and this is what it costs and blah, blah, blah. And then the very next conversation is when they find out the next time is, when are we getting our leads? And those aren’t leads. Those are names and email addresses on a piece of paper. Do you know I mean, it’s like until somebody puts their hand up and says yeah, I like the sound of They’re willing to

Tim Hyde
find in the phone book anymore, but

Martin Henley
yeah, yeah. But this is again, this is exactly where people are 100% wrong with what they think about sales and marketing. You know, it’s like, a lead is when and marketing qualified lead is. Yeah, I’m prepared to have a conversation with someone, then they throw the ball to sales. And then sales is job and is just to do the qualification. Can we actually help this person? Do they actually have the budget? Do they like us enough? Do we like them enough? You know, that should be the qualification, but it’s not the way that it works. Yeah, I think the missing ingredient, the secret sauce, people like to talk about secret sauce is just caring. You know. And then I think it doesn’t matter if it’s the neatest automation or the clumsiest automation or the whatever it is, you will get away with it. If actually, you genuinely care. You know, and I think the issue comes in, where you don’t really care, where you are just throwing shit at the wall through automation. And then when people like this person did today, people don’t react exactly the way you want them to. You think they’re horrible people? You know, that’s, that’s the worst of it. So I

Tim Hyde
yeah, I had a really, I was on a call earlier today, with a with a former client of mine who sort of reached out to us and said, you know, we want to do some more work with you. In terms of reengagement strategy with this list, we’ve we’re about to buy lists of customers. And they’re like, I know that the message is sent me was automated. Yeah, but it didn’t feel automated, it actually felt like you are connecting directly with me. And I think that’s the key on automation creates leverage. But we still need to be able to connect authentically, and show that we care to the people, we connect with

Martin Henley
100%. And you can do that, if you understand your prospects well enough, and you have a good enough copywriter, then you can do that. And I’m with you, it’s like, it would almost it would be 100%. Better. I think if a LinkedIn message read, this is the automated message that I send to people who are like the people that I do business with, they’re typically in this situation, they typically need this, that and the other. And this is how I typically help them this is the outcome. Do you want to connect? Do you I mean, that then, is just marketing, you know, and you could tell people, it’s automated. And they might, I think they would appreciate it more. And I think the issue then is, like I alluded to before, is how are you going to add value to my life. You know what you can knock on my door? Anyone can knock on my door. But don’t knock on my door and tell me you think I’m handsome to you. I mean, knock on my door and say, Look, this is what I could be doing for you. Do you want to have a chair or not? Do you know what I mean? Because it’s opening with that to see, like I was you had a really interesting background? What the actual fuck are you talking about? You know, I mean, I’ve just gone to work like everyone else for the last 2030 years, and had a pretty medium Lee. You know, there’s nothing impressive about my background. It’s just a hollow lie. And then she closed that loop. But essentially, she was at the end, I hope you don’t do business with too many women. I don’t he said, it doesn’t matter doesn’t matter. What’s the point? Let’s go to question number three.

Martin Henley
The question number three is, what is your recommendation for people who want to get better at marketing automation? And if you can keep this to a minute or two, we’ll chop it up and put it on tick tock,

Tim Hyde
I would say don’t hire somebody. Okay, no, there’s not. There are certain ways but I think again, it’s coming back to mapping that customers customer do. All right, I was about to sort of share a joke and say, look, there are 10 steps, right? The first step is call me and I’ll take care of the other nine. Yeah, the key is to map the customer journey, right? What is the thing we’re gonna do, and as adults, we’ve become very good at simplifying our lives into, you know, just sort of generic statements, right? If someone does knock on the door, right now, you just go and open the door. But just going to open the door requires lots and lots of steps, you know, from a motor neuron perspective to go and do that particular task. And then what happens after you’ve opened the doors, the next set of tasks. Building an automating your business is around breaking that down into, you know, steps that an autistic two year old could do over and over and over again. Right, and all the possible permutations of that particular thing, right? What if their dog have to you have to walk around the dog? What if it’s your parents and they let themselves in? What if there’s nobody there? What if, what if, what if, and it’s mapping out all those possible permutations that our brain natively does For us, as it’s developed over, you know, however long your brain has developed for some people, it’s like, not very long, other people will be more mature. But our brain has simplified all those things. But our systems, we need to kind of do that for our systems, we need to teach our systems what it is they’re doing. Because they don’t know they’re not intuitive. Right? They’re an autistic two year old that have never done this thing before. So we need to teach our systems what to do in all those possible permutations?

Martin Henley
Yeah, 100%. I think that’s the right advice. And then I think, like you were saying before, you need to really look at the business benefit. But also, I think what people don’t do is look at the customer benefit. You know, if I think you’re automating something, because I’ll give you the worst example, I hate myself for this, but I really enjoy McDonald’s breakfast. And they put these kiosks in where basically, you don’t get to speak to anyone anymore to order your breakfast you do on this, this big screen. And of course, the big screens break and the big scenes, screens need maintenance and all these things. But the biggest issue with it for me is that when you used to be in the queue, you would have the entire menu above the thing. So yeah, everyone will be looking, what are we going to eat? I don’t know. Yeah. And now they have to browse all these different categories to find out where the things are. It takes an absolute age for anyone who isn’t as tall as me and just knows exactly what they’re going to order every time to do that. The point of that is that what they’ve done is they’ve done that to cut out the human interaction. They don’t want me engaging with a member of their staff, because that’s too expensive. They’ve done it just to save the money. And the point of that is I think this has to be customer centric. I think the first question should be, how does this add value for the customer? And on those grounds, I think maybe it’s justified to put some automation together. And then before that, you need to and everyone needs to understand that you’re in business to have customers profitably, you know, that’s why you’re in business. I’m on one, I’m sorry. It’s got a question number four.

Martin Henley
Question number four, what should people read? Is there something that you’ve read that you recommend that people read that has changed your life or your business in some way?

Tim Hyde
God? Yeah, look, I, I mean, not specifically related to automation. But I think, you know, in terms of business writing, I would always recommend the E Myth from Michael Gerber. I reckon that’s probably compulsory, should be compulsory reading for anyone in business. Really enjoy the book and try to read it on a regular basis. And the other one is the old enough, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And I read that, probably about the time I was first quitting my my corporate day job. And my big takeaway from that book wasn’t, you know, like Gerber talks around around systemization. And, you know, that sort of stuff is obviously critical to grow. Tim Ferriss talks in four hour workweek about how to kind of make yourself redundant in your job. But my key takeaway from that one was actually designing your work around your lifestyle, not your lifestyle around your work.

Martin Henley
Yes,

Tim Hyde
okay. And I think as a business owner, that’s a really important thing, because we can’t get lost in this thing we creating, and forget that it is there to serve us and the lifestyle we want. Not the other way around.

Martin Henley
Yeah, I would go further. And I would say like, it’s, it’s almost impossible not to get completely lost. Like since I became self employed 2005 I don’t remember sitting down and enjoying like a movie, or a holiday or somewhere in my head always is, there is something that has to happen for my business. So I think that’s

Tim Hyde
what it’s this thing. Your business is this thing that will take every single hour of every single minute of every single day for the rest of your life, and still have more to do. Yes. But that’s not serving us. And that was my big takeaway from that book. Right. It’s there to serve me. Not the other way around.

Martin Henley
Okay, super cool. How you doing with that?

Tim Hyde
I can get in there.

Martin Henley
The thing is, I think, just recognising that that’s necessary is an important the most important step understanding that it’s an issue that’s that’s what they say is that the first step

Tim Hyde
is knowing there’s a problem.

Martin Henley
Okay, super cool. So how I can’t I can’t believe how quick this errand 15 minutes has gone. It’s gone fast hasn’t. It’s gone like super fast. I think this is the first like very often people say I can’t believe it’s gone that quickly. But for me, this has gone like super fast. I think it’s really interesting and useful. And I think the thing is, this is the last thing I want to say is that people aren’t particularly reliable. So if you need reliable things to happen reliably, then automation under percent is probably the best way to go. But you have to remember, it’s about the customer.

Martin Henley
Okay, good. How is your experience have been? How has your experience been appearing on The Talk Marketing Show?

Tim Hyde
I love the talk marketing show I love I love podcasts in general, it’s gonna find good fun. And, you know, the opportunity to just do a guest share experience and share stories is is awesome. And you know, as a content creation device, we’ve just created months and months of sound bites and content that we can use

Martin Henley
100% That’s the mission that we’re on. The thing that blows my mind about this is I think you’re going to be episode 82 or 83, something like that. So I’ve got now 1000s of years of experience in these in these conversations. Like you’ve been in business for 20 years. It’s one guy was in business for 50 years, he was working in agencies in London in the 70s and stuff. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting like that. But the reason I check in is because I’m going to ask you to throw a couple of people under the bus now.

Martin Henley
So who do you think that you know that you can introduce me to my enjoy to be part of this programme?

Tim Hyde
Noting that you don’t work well with women? I’m gonna I’m gonna nominate my my very dear friend, Samantha Riley. I think she runs an incredible podcast, as well. I think she’d enjoy it. And I think I think probably two people Daxon Milan and Michael Griffiths will be good. Good podcast guests as well. And so Michael does a lot of work around referral business. And Jackson’s a fantastic wealth coach, a lot of experience a lot of insight in there as well.

Martin Henley
Excellent. I was Declan tonight, Declan is it’s excellent. Jackson, Jackson, and Michael. Okay, super cool. And might you be able to put together like a little LinkedIn

Tim Hyde
or some intro emails?

Martin Henley
Okay, super. Cool. Cool. Excellent. Man. Thank you so much for being here. This has been like I said to you before we did this. Like I’ve always the principal like you serve a funnel works across all that kind of marketing’s I’ve never done the marketing automation thing, obviously, to the extent that you’re doing it. Yeah. So it’s interesting for me, really interesting for me to hear it from your perspective.

Tim Hyde
Yeah, absolutely. Man. It’s been great to be here. And thanks for the opportunity to jump on and and have a chat. I’m looking forward to having you as a returning guest.

Martin Henley
Okay, super cool. We can definitely do that. So what we’ll do now is we’ll say goodbye for the benefit of anyone who’s still listening, and then I’ll stop recording. And we can say goodbye like normal human beings.

Martin Henley
Cheers, man. Thank you for being here.

Martin Henley

Martin Henley

Martin has built a reputation for having a no nonsense approach to sales and marketing and for motivating audiences with his wit, energy, enthusiasm and his own brand of audience participation. Martin’s original content is based on his very current experience of running effective marketing initiatives for his customers and the feedback from Effective Marketing’s successful and popular marketing workshops.

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