Growing a modern service business [Sean Campbell]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Sean Campbell, as they will be discussing Sean's background & story, inbound marketing and important aspects for growing a pipeline, Sean's secrets and frameworks used when consulting clients, actionable points for service businesses looking to scale in 2021, and also Seans's platforms and promo.

Sean Campbell is the CEO of Cascade Insights, an author of several books on technical as well as business topics and a well-regarded conference speak. He is the best person we could have in matters of knowledge when it comes to surviving and thriving as a service firm owner or the leader of a practice area inside a larger services firm.

 

Connect with Sean:

Website: www.cascadeinsights.com

LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancampbell/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/seanallencampbell/

Twitter Handle: https://twitter.com/sean_campbell

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro  

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/ 

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu 

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency 

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/ 

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode transcript:

Andrei Tiu  0:13  

Hello there. This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation podcast show. Our special guest today is Sean Campbell, who is the CEO for Cascade Insights, which focuses on B2B market research. He's mentoring companies on how to build a marketing pipeline that won't break the bank and grow sustainable companies with consistent revenue streams. And today, in this episode, we'll discuss growing a modern service business. So without further ado, hi, Shawn. How are you? How's the morning going? 

 

Sean Campbell  0:39  

Awesome. Thanks for having me on. 

 

Andrei Tiu  0:42  

That was short. It's a pleasure to have you here. How are you? How's the how's life? How's the morning going? I know you had a busy one. So how's the energy? 

 

Sean Campbell  1:26  

Yeah, things are great. It's gonna be like 109 on Saturday here in Portland. So which is really, really hot for Portland, like super hot, most of the West Coast of the US is just going to get kind of baked. So I'm hoping our conditioner doesn't die and all the rest of that kind of stuff over the weekend. But things are great. You know, I mean, honestly, it's been a good year for us so far, you know, overalls, business, and, you know, life's Good.

 

Andrei Tiu  1:54  

Good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah, I mean, beach weather all around the globe, I think, you know, we depends on which area of the world you are right now. I mean, you probably have a better time really COVID. And maybe you are a bit more free to travel or there are some areas that things are not that good. But for example, you know, UK is kind of uh, at the moment. Right, right. But some of Europe is doing pretty well. How are things for you, Sean? In Portland. 

 

Sean Campbell  2:23  

Just with COVID? And that kind of thing in general? 

 

Andrei Tiu  2:25  

Oh, yeah. You know, like, travelling restrictions. And, you know, life, in general, isn't back to normal?

 

Sean Campbell  2:30  

Yeah, I mean, Portland's interesting. Oregon, kind of locked down really early. Like, because we were surrounded by California to the south and Washington to the north. Washington had a pretty aggressive policy as a state. And then California just got hit with a lot of cases pretty early. So Oregon kind of followed suit. But that was even before we had a lot of cases. So it kind of kept the overall numbers really, really down here. I mean, and that's not to take away from any tragedies that have happened to families and whatever I mean, any tragedy is, huge, but like, but in terms of like statistics, COVID didn't really hit Oregon that hard compared to the surrounding states. And, and we took a little bit longer to open up same thing, the government here was kind of conservative with kind of its approach overall, I think that worked. All right. And, yeah, I mean, things are, I wouldn't say they're back to normal here. I mean, there's still a fair amount of kind of mask wearing, I think we're only at like 70% vacced. Here, maybe, maybe 60, I can't remember the latest stat. And the other thing that's interesting about Oregon, in particular, where I live is that there's a very kind of Stark divide between the urban area, the state and the rural area, which is extremely rural. So like, you know, you have a very urban core that's kind of well known for being fairly trendy, fairly hip, all that kind of stuff. And then at the same time, you've got another part of the state that is literally cattle ranchers, right, completely different opposite end of the spectrum. You know, probably the closest analogue in the states would be kind of like Austin, Texas versus the rest of Texas. And I'm not trying to say one's right or wrong. I'm just saying we have a pretty big political cultural divide in the state, more so than some and I think that was also one of the things we're still dealing with the COVID. You know, I don't know if you want to call it.  It's funny, I think of a quote from Churchill all the time, when I think of COVID. He said something at the end of the battle of El Alamein, which was in 1942, he said "this isn't the end, it isn't the beginning of the end, but it's perhaps the end of the beginning." And I don't know if it's the end, the beginning of the end of COVID right now, or it's the end of the beginning. I don't really know. And I don't think anybody knows, you know, what the Fall is gonna look like and everything else but right now not seeing a lot of cases, business is getting more and more back to normal people are going back to offices. Lots more people in the streets and in stores and those kinds of things. But that was a little bit like that last summer, too. So, you know, I've been telling my staff, when it comes to like how I think about this, from a business standpoint, I've been randomly saying October 22, which just kind of a made up date. But I basically just say, once we get about six weeks into the fall, and kids are all back in school in the States, because in the States, at least, there's been a little variety there, state by state, whether kids have been able to go back to school, but it's pretty clear in the fall, pretty much every state will have their kids back in school, most people will be back in office buildings. It'll be interesting to see, you know, six weeks into the fall, if we're sitting at 70% backs rates, and, you know, so I, you know, I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic of what will happen in the business community in the fall is what I'm saying. But I'm, I'm, you know, we've been talking about it a lot as it relates to business travel, and when we should get on a plane again, you know, a lot of our corporate clients to larger corporate clients. Most of them aren't really back in the office until the fall, like a lot of move kind of picked Labour Day in the States was falls on the first Monday of September. And so, you know, that seems to be kind of the unofficial day that a lot of these large companies are going to get folks back in the office. But even so, we're going to do in our probably our first business trip as a team, roughly in about three to four weeks just to kind of test the waters. You know, so we'll see, I get a little bit that a sector-specific though, like, from a tech sector standpoint, tech basically was able to work remote faster than everyone else, you know, if you're selling services in the manufacturing sector, y'all might have been in the office a couple months ago, and you're probably on planes a couple months ago. So some of that is unique to kind of who we serve.

 

Sean Campbell  3:20  

And now that you mention about business and tech, let's present people a bit with your background and your story, as a professional entrepreneur, and now CEO of  Cascade. So tell us a bit about you like how you started, you know, in the technical space and how he founded the company. A way back.

 

Sean Campbell  7:15  

Yeah well, I wanted to be a college professor, I didn't necessarily want to be technical. And I didn't necessarily want to own a business. I meet guys all the time, who, since they were two or whatever, maybe they were watching Shark Tank episodes, which is a show in the States, you know, maybe they were doing that. And they've always thought like, they want to be an entrepreneur or whatever. I didn't. I didn't even really want to have any sales responsibilities. My dad was in sales, and he did really hardcore cold calling based selling insurance in the 80s. When it was 100% commission sales. That was my image of it. And I didn't, I didn't really want that. And what happened was, I met a beautiful woman who ended up being my wife and still is, and I didn't want to be a starving college professor, I kind of wanted to provide for us. And she was happy to do it. We always joke she says, I would have followed you to Waterloo, which is Waterloo, Iowa, which is where the PhD programme was going to be that I was going to go to, and so she would have willingly went. But anyway, I left my master's degree where I was teaching. This will date me a little bit, I'm 51, but Windows for Workgroups, and office on like when it used to come on 34 diskettes used to be a stack about this high of little diskettes, you would feed into a computer. And anyway, I started teaching people how to use productivity software, back in the era when like a mouse was new to people. And that was how I got my start, because I still love teaching. And that kind of snowballed into a couple teaching gigs. And then I ended up deciding I wanted to become an independent trainer. Teaching, at that point, networking and databases and programming, and me and two other guys got together and we decided to found a company together so we can kind of co-market the independent training services we were doing. And that slowly snowballs over about four or five years into about a 25 person company that we ended up growing and selling. And then after I sold that company, I took about nine months to a year to kind of decide what I want to do. I even worked for an outfit for a little while, decided I didn't really like that as much. I didn't really want to go work for somebody necessarily. And my one of my two original business partners, Scott Sweigert, we decided we want to found another company. And so we founded a company focused on competitive intelligence research actually in the tech sector because we've been doing a lot of competitive analysis in tech. Kind of taking one technology stack and comparing it to another. And that was the kernel of Cascade Insights. And then Cascade Insights eventually started doing more broader market research based initiatives in tech. So kind of a full gamut of qualitative and quantitative research. And then we've also gone ahead and included some marketing services that we do base off the research we do. And that's now become a company that's that's slightly over 25 people we're in like, 10 different states in the US, because it's all virtual. And, and that's the journey. But if you'd asked me at the start, when I was in college, is I watched the guys that were in business programmes trot off to early classes every morning at 8am, or something like that. And I was a liberal arts major showing up for classes that didn't start till like noon or whatever. I had no dreams whatsoever of being a business owner. It's not like I thought it was a bad idea, I didn't have a problem with it. It's just it wasn't on my radar, I wanted to teach and I wanted to learn, it's kind of a bit of who I am, like, every time I learned something, I want to go teach somebody like just by default, like, I don't know how to stop that, like, if I learn something or read a book, I turn around and want to teach somebody. If I learned something new about fishing, that's a hobby of mine, I want to put six kids in the boat next week that our friends and family and go teach them how to fish. And what I realised is that while the business isn't really just about that, there's a huge component to that to growing a successful business, which is that you have a passion for learning, and that you have a passion for teaching. And you also have a passion for adjusting to what you learn.

 

Sean Campbell  11:38  

That last part, not all business owners have, unfortunately, I think a lot of them kind of get stuck on whatever vision they had for the business originally, or their role in the business or what the business was supposed to do for them. And I've always been able to pivot pretty readily. If I feel like the data, and what I'm learning is showing me we need to make a change. And I just think that's huge. And the other place I think that's helped me a bit is in services firms, you're selling the people that are there. You can wrap around it whatever thing you offer. Sure, whether it's marketing services, or sales services, or PR services or Research Services. But at the end of the day is the people that you're selling. And so those people are trained effectively, and apprentice effectively, then you're going to be really successful. So I don't wanna go too long on all of that. But like, in a weird way, I ended up having a job that gave me a lot of chance to learn and to teach. But I wouldn't have expected that in the beginning. And that's not to say it's all been roses, there's certainly stressful moments of owning a business, there's good years and bad years, there's things that happen. I mean, as a college professor, I wouldn't be responsible for hiring and firing people. You know, that's not always the best joy of your week if you have to let somebody go. But the funny side story on that like not to make light of it. But like, we fortunately haven't had to let a lot of people go over the years. My business partner and I fell into a bad trap of we let a couple people go one year and we had we had the meeting with him to let them go at this nearby coffee shop, which it makes sometimes that'll happen, right? If you have a small office, you wanna to kind of have neutral territory to have that conversation, never really sure how that will go. And we took an employee a couple weeks later said, Why don't we meet you at this coffee shop? And he said, I'm not going to be fired, right? I mean, it only happened twice, but the whole staff and notice that we gone to that one coffee shop twice and let somebody go over like a six month window. And fortunately, again, I can actually count across both businesses, I can probably count on a grand total of two hands, the number of people we've left go, which isn't so bad. I mean, that's at most, you know, one every other year, over 20 years of ownership. So I feel like we've got a reasonably good sense of who to hire but even so that's a tough part of the job. So it's not it's not all teaching and learning but it's incredibly stimulating. I mean, no in a business because there's always something to go solve.

 

Andrei Tiu  14:18  

Sure thing. So in terms of the work that you do right now with Cascade, because I would like to sort of direct the discussion. As we were briefly discussing in terms of our audience, many of them are marketing professionals and marketing managers, leaders in this space. Now, I think it's very interesting for everybody really, right now since we are heading to summer, and it's going to be you know, depending on where you are in the world right now, but some of the countries might actually be more freestyle and everybody going on holidays now that they can. So this can cause a bit of, you know, a bit of a shake up in terms of business or revenue coming into the business. As well as the funnel overall, because it might delay some things. And then marketing, of course, together with sales have to deliver towards the business growth element. So one thing that I wanted us to chat about is the way that you handle and you consult with your clients in terms of building sustainable growth, inbound channels. Looking at the marketing and sales alignment, and then looking at the service businesses, and to have a discussion around, you know, what are the best steps for leaders in the space to do for the summer, or also in general in the post COVID world? To really perform very well.

 

Sean Campbell  15:43  

Summer is an interesting one. I mean, I think for it depends, of course, what kind of services business you're in. If you're in lawn care, or pool maintenance, you know, your summers, like your high season or a buddy of mine does h back repair. So all summer long, he's fixing air conditioners. But for a lot of high end consulting services like ours that are sold to large companies, there is a little bit of a summer siesta of sorts that happens where like these large companies, kind of certain people kind of disappear from the building, and it makes it harder for them to make decisions. There's just not enough people in the building, because of all the vacations and all the time people are out for a critical kind of purchase decision to be made. So, I mean, in short, on that one, I think it has a lot to do with just knowing that's going to happen, filling up your coffers with work beforehand. And then, you know, honestly, having enough cash to ride the wave. So this isn't directly what you asked, I'll get to kind of the marketing strategies in a minute. But I think a lot of service from owners just don't keep enough cash on hand. I think that's, that's the biggest problem I see. You know, one thing our accountant always says is like, you guys keep a lot of cash on hand in the business. And I say, Well, yeah, because I feel we have a responsibility to the employees here. If we have a downturn, we have the ability to basically weather that and not have everybody freak out. And unfortunately, I think a lot of small service firm businesses, the the distance between the company bank account, and the owner's personal bank account isn't far enough. There's a little too much kind of instant transference, when things are going well. And I think you have to be mature enough to watch your business bank account get much, much, much larger than your personal bank account ever has a right to be, and be okay with that. And I've met owners over the years who really struggle with that. The minute that business bank account grows, they feel like they have to kind of reward themselves with some big pull from it. And I would say that's when you really got to go to your accountant, or you've got to go to whoever's doing finance with you, and and let them kind of tell you, when it's a good time to borrow against the equity of that business, not in the literal borrow sense, but to pull money out. And anyway, I think that's a huge thing. I think a lot of service businesses just run habitually cash poor. And that makes them under stress when they run out of things. As far as a marketing strategy goes, though, I think the biggest thing I'd say is have one website. I mean, in a lot of services firms, their websites suck. That is the only way to describe it. And they may suck in a variety of ways. It may be that the messaging is poor, it may be that like they don't have a good acquisition strategy. So the site could capture people well, but they don't have really good SEO, they don't have pay per click, they've never even thought of those terms. Or whatever their writing is somewhat pontificating. That's really common in service firms. Like they write up blog posts and ask their mother and their brother and their uncle and their top three clients "Do you like what I'm writing?" And they go "Yeah, Bob, that's great stuff" And they never asked themselves anything converting off what they have. If you ask most service firms, like how many leads they're generating off their website, you have this interesting dialogue, but always run something like this. You say, hey, how's the website doing for? And they're like, Oh, yeah, it's great. We really like it, you know, tells her story all right. You get any leads off it? Yeah, some of those good leads. No, not always. How many you get a few? Like, what's the view? Oh, a couple of months, right? And they slowly kind of tell you that like the website isn't performing and then they quickly say, oh, but services, it's a relationship business. It should all be referrals. Totally wrong. It's totally wrong, though. It's completely wrong. And I can tell you exactly that. I live I live both sides of it. But go ahead what question you get. 

 

Andrei Tiu  20:00  

No, actually, I just wanted to press like, totally agree with you. And what one thing that I want to ask you from your experience, because we also work in a b2b space. And we've found in a number of cases that this was the case. So I'm curious about the feedback from you. Don't you think that this transition, I mean, you know, the whole COVID thing, and then the stress that came with it for many, many businesses, mainly, we usually work a lot with medium sized businesses as a company, I know that you work also with bigger corporates. Would you feel that, for many, this period of time was a time when they had to look back at their sales and marketing and aligning the two and starting to work around that strategy that many of them maybe never really had? And actually question their website and other elements of the business.

 

Sean Campbell  20:52  

Yeah, 100%. I think a lot of these guys, they realised, well, I can't fly to a client site, I can't visit a client the same way, trade shares are dead, at least in the way they used to be. I mean, yes, trade shows and conferences when virtual, but basically, networking died. I know these people that run the conferences and be like, hey, networking still exists virtually, I'm like, it's not the same. I mean, it's not even remotely the same, right. And not to say walking the trade show floor was the most scintillating experience that anyone ever experienced. Right? That can be mind numbing in its own way. But you at least had these opportunities to connect. And I think a lot of business owners woke up and went, Wow. Our marketing needs to do something for us. And, and it's funny, even in our lane, we watched it happen. I won't say which folks, but like, there was this interesting thing where like, in our lane, particularly like in b2b market research, there's a lot of other research firms that had fairly poor web presence and websites, and SEO strategies and pay per click strategies and everything else. And it was fascinating, last probably q4 of last year, but especially q1 of this year, all of a sudden, we started to notice these other research firms popping up next to us in the ad listings, and their SEO strategies are changing, and you go to their website, and then all been refresh. So even in our lane, we noticed that while we'd been a little ahead of everybody, we've been doing a lot of digital work for a long time now. Clearly, these folks woke up and realise, oh, I've got to go spend some time on this. So I think there's definitely an awareness of that. I think there's some execution issues, though, that people still have with it. But I think, for sure, I don't know how, as, even as other sectors, like as a restaurant, I mean, how a restaurant could think their website isn't useful to them after the last year, it just boggles the mind. Right? So I think there's a lot of enhanced emphasis on the web presence, but I'm not so sure everybody's doing it the right way yet.

 

Andrei Tiu  23:03  

Yeah, I think that probably, from a maturity point of view, or actually, you know, just the core understanding of how marketing plays a role in this, probably everybody should just admit the fact that the website is usually the last conversion point. Many, if we talk about b2b businesses. How about content marketing? Because, again, building on what you mentioned, in terms of blogs, and having blogs / copywriting strategies that are not really funded in any way or not particularly following the direction? How do you guys go about helping the clients that you work with? What sort of process that you follow at the moment? If you want, we can bounce ideas, and I can share some of the things that we do.

 

Sean Campbell  23:51  

Yeah, I mean, from a developing content for clients standpoint,  I think the biggest thing is that there's two things, I guess. Are you writing to Google or you're writing to a persona, that's the decision you have to write out in the beginning, because if you're writing to Google, you can write your average listicle post, you can write, top, whatever kind of posts. If you're writing to a persona, though, you might have to sacrifice a little bit of that kind of writing specifically to Google, right? Google isn't a human being. So it's not going to have the same kind of response to an object a piece of content as a person will, so if I'd say the biggest mistake I see our clients try to drive toward when we talk to them about content, are they seem to skip over the persona, which is ironic, because what's the first thing a writer learns about writing? Beyond all the basics, like have a thesis and you know, don't use passive voice all the time and the grammatical constructs you're supposed to say clear of. Write to someone. And what I would say happens in most b2b marketing, and most of our clients marketing before we show up, is they're writing to everyone. They can't for the life of them pick an audience for a piece. If they're writing to the IT director, they're like, but it also has to dress the CFO, and it also has to dress this person. And, and the same thing happens with company sizes. You see, it's very hard sometimes for these kind of committees that create content in large companies to say, Okay, this piece is just going to be targeted at a developer lead, who works inside an enterprise company very quickly, that will be like, Well, what about startups? And what about mid markets? And can we add that and that". Waters it all down, because inherently, people are a little selfish when they read content. They want it to be about them. They're inherently selfish, it's not a bad thing. But they want the content to be about them. And the more it's about them, the more they'll read it. And when you water it down and try to hit every Google keyword, and you try to hit all the different bases and address all your internal audiences and all your stakeholders who want all the content to address all these needs. You have to say: is our goal to address everything? Or is our goal to be effective? And our goal is to be effective, we have to hit a certain persona, and it's really strange. We will have workshops with clients and I will have to get borderline pokey with them. And be like, no, pick a persona. And then they'll all talk for five minutes. And they'll give me seven personas. And I'll say no, pick a persona. And another thing we ask clients, that's super important, that I think everybody should ask their own marketing 100%, is what am I not serving? Meaning, Am I specifically telling myself as I author content, this is the audience this piece is not supposed to address. And it's a little different than numerating them. Because when you say NO to an audience, you should probably make that explicit in the piece. And I think that's really, really hard for marketers to do they always feel like, well, if I leave an audience, and I say no to them, I might lose sales from them. And I would say the opposite is true is that as long as you have the right mix of content, people love the authenticity of you basically saying this isn't for you. Because in their real life, how often do is anybody say that? Right? How often is anybody selling you anything? Say this isn't for you? Right? And so I think if the world did a little more of that content would be trusted more in general, which would be huge, right? And at the same time, I think people would sell more. So like a really good example there from a concrete standpoint is: we were dealing with this client, fairly large ecommerce site of technology products. And I was talking to their Chief Strategy guy, and there's like a bunch of other people on this conference call. And we're talking about this major revamp to their website and all the landing pages, and we got in this place where I said, Okay, so for this thing, who are you going to serve?  And the guy kind of gave me this really long answer. And I said, Okay, let me just try this on for size. Let me play client with you. And I started out and I said. So who do you guys serve? And they're like, enterprise mid market this way, started this way. I said, No, who are you really good at working with? And he's like, Well, I mean, we serve all those? I said, No, I mean, I really want to know, who are you who are working. And at one point, he cut me off, and he says, Are you being difficult? Just for the sake of it? I said, No. I said, this is the way people will read your content, they're looking for you to say, no, they're looking for you to eventually put an edge to what you offer. And the final thing, and this is that if you don't do this, if you don't do this, the only thing that's going to happen is one of the few possible negative outcomes, which are A, the person looks at your competitors website. And your competitor might define what you don't do. Like they've got a you know, kind of comparison chart, or they go hunting the web through third party review sites or through influencer sites trying to figure it out what is it you don't do? And so I think, if I had if I had a nickel to spend and what I would do to fix content marketing, I would have more pieces that say, this isn't for you. And then all along the way. It's saying who it's for. I think that's the hardest thing we struggle with, with clients. And I think it would just make the world a better place on us. If people did more that.

 

Andrei Tiu  29:51  

And now we're looking I think it's a nice moment for us to divert a bit into the customer journey in the b2b space because I know that you guys from working with the Cascade, you guys help a lot businesses in understanding their buyer journey research and then the buyer personas and building up this sort of framework and understanding what their audiences need from them really how to address that best. So, I was wondering if you have good or insightful recent case study that we could discuss about when looking at the way that the customer journey was influenced lately in the b2b space? You know, because ultimately, it's the person that does the purchase. So how are they looking for that specific service that they are after, differently now than they were in the past. And now, we touched a bit on this, when we were discussing about conferences and live events that are not really happening the way that they used to be. Would you have maybe a concrete example that we can discuss on in terms of business that found through research that actually their customer journey changed quite a bit, and that they had to adjust so that they can deliver, but also that they can get the result that they needed from their marketing and sales activities? 

 

Sean Campbell  31:13  

Sure, sure. I mean, I would say one of the more perennial things we see is, kind of gets back a little bit to the persona thing, but like they will inevitably target too high for their content. This is, I think, it's a little bit of an ego thing. See this across a lot of buyers journey research we do, right, or a lot of kind of messaging research, the client will say, well, we need to produce a bunch of content that targets the C level, or the vice president level, or like, whatever. And what's interesting is, at the same time, they're telling us that they know that in b2b, there's multiple people involved in the deal, right, depending on what number you look at, some people say there are five people in every b2b purchase, or six people or seven or eight or nine or whatever. Currently, it seems like the number that people have settled on is somewhere around seven to eight, right? So what's interesting, though, is that people will tend to write content to basically the most important person with the biggest title. A lot of times when really, I think if they're thinking about the front part of the buyers journey, the discovery part where that person is like looking for vendors and looking for solutions. It's actually someone probably quite Junior. And if you look at most companies content, it's not targeted at Junior people, right? So if you're a SaaS company, and you offer some kind of productivity solution, or let's make it even a little nerdy, or like, it's like financial auditing and compliance, right, we have somebody who works in that space. Sarbanes Oxley, compliance software and stuff like that. And so they might write a lot of content to the, to the CFO, or the Director of Finance, but ask yourself this question. Is the CFO really going to Google using Google as his therapist and searching for new vendors all day long? No. I mean, everybody uses Google as a therapist, but he's probably not looking for vendors. And so like, everybody that, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but we all turn to Google with odd questions, right, at different points of the day, right? I mean, whether they're business questions or whatever. And a number of years ago, I started just saying, we just use Google as our therapist, right? But you know, the CFO isn't shoving those queries into Google. It's probably like a mainline accounting manager, maybe even a bookkeeper, right? They're the one who's experiencing the day to day pain, at some level, that your solution solving, and even if they're not the ones experiencing the pain, the CFO doesn't have time, at 500 bucks an hour or whatever, they're paid, to go search Google, they're gonna delegate that. So there's this weird air gap where, sales and marketing sit in a room and they say, who's the most important person in the deal? And what they do is they do this weird mapping, where they say, well, the most important person is the person that ultimately signed the check and ultimately signed off on bla bla bla bla bla. But that's not the person who did the discovery. And your content should be written to make that person that's doing the discovery go "yes, I trust you. Giving you to my boss will be a safe decision. You've told me what you do and you don't do, I won't look like an idiot for referring you or bringing you in. And you also even showed me how you can help me, little lonely Junior me, way down in the finance team, you showed out you can help me." And here's the test if people went to almost any website, but they should start with their own, and they asked themselves two questions. Is our content written to the person that we believe is actually shoving the query into Google to find us? My guess is the answer's no. And also they should ask is anywhere in our website are we saying what we don't do? Or who we don't serve? market segment persona, whatever, the answer, that will almost certainly be no. And that junior person really needs to see both, because what's that junior person dealing with predominantly, when they make a recommendation on a vendor? Personal risk. That's what they're dealing with. Their job isn't to ultimately decide on all of what you offer. So it's also interesting, the content you would produce for that person is a little different. Do they need a big huge competitive matrix? Maybe not. Maybe what they need is they need basically an understanding that you will be a good partner, that you will work with them effectively. Yes, you have some comparison points with your competitors that are worthy. And I rarely see anyone, particularly in the services lane, kind of right that way. That makes it clear that we will be kind of safe for you to recommend. We've done this research on this before, there's an outfit I, protect client conferences, I won't say but this was an agile training firm. And they wanted to move up market in their selling, they wanted to sell more to, like VPS of product development, and senior leadership, but they were doing training classes with Junior people. And they didn't really feel like they were getting senior people to come to the training classes. And they were convinced that they had to do this kind of full board direct approach, put a lot of content that the senior people want. And when we interviewed a lot of these Junior people as part of research, they said, honestly, what I really want is the confidence that you won't kind of make it difficult for me what I recommend you. You'll keep me in the loop, you won't run around me right? You won't just forget that I brought you in, you know, you will enhance my career just as much as you enhance my bosses and my grand bosses career. Now, and it's not to say companies don't do this. Sometimes there's somebody who does this really well. There's a software company called Tableau who did this really, really well. They went after kind of - I don't know if you've heard much about Tableau as a product but I'll give a brief flyby if listeners haven't heard it - but everybody knows about Excel and an Excel you can make charts and graphs and visualisations but everybody knows that the charts and graphs and visualisations in Excel are average. Basically, they're not sexy looking right? So Tableau comes along and says, we're going to make really sexy, awesome looking visualisations off your data. But we're not going to go target the guy that runs the Blinky light servers inside the data centre, we're not going to go target him or her and we're not going to go target your boss, we're going to actually go target the person building those charts and graphs. And they want to be seen as a valuable member of the company by building these sexy data visualisations and they want an easy way to do it. And they're struggling to do it in the Leatherman tool of the business world known as Excel, right, that does everything the Swiss Army knife. And so they went after them. And they built communities around this concept. And their marketing was targeted at making these people heroes. And they ended up getting bought by Salesforce for like a tonne of money. And they're really valuable. And there are other companies like this, like I said, but it's it's much more common to wrap this up this little kind of section of like, for these companies to target toward the person they felt was kind of the economic buyer, or the person that was the last most significant title they met in the sales process, versus that person doing discovery. So I would go back and tell this, there's check two things on your site. One, is your content written to the person shoving the queries into Google to find you? If it's not, fixed that. And secondarily, give that person some faith in you that you know what you shouldn't do, by putting something around that on the site and the markets you don't serve and the people you don't serve. I think you'll get a lot more sales in the end. And honestly, you'll probably have more fun writing that content than trying to turn the mind if some random CFO any day, at least that's my opinion.

 

Andrei Tiu  39:16  

Yeah. And also save a tonne of time, in the sales process, because you don't want to spend time on, people that you don't really observe. Yeah, very good insights, totally on board with everything that you did. We've been also as a company, like firsthand through this journey when we first launched and we had to pick our market. And then one thing though, as a startup, I think it's one of the hardest things that you that you can do in the beginning because you know, revenue.

 

Sean Campbell  39:45  

Right, right. 

 

Andrei Tiu  39:46  

And you have it there. But once you start being accustomed to it and knowing what you want and what you'd like to serve and what you don't, then I think the journey becomes a bit smoother and trusting that will work out it will usually work out. Super cool. So in terms of your plans for this year, and ways that you work with companies nowadays, ways in which you might be able to maybe help some of the guys tuning in today, who are you guys serving and who you are not?

 

Sean Campbell  40:18  

Yeah, well, let's start with who we're not, that's probably the best way to go it like we work with anybody who makes technology that isn't typically sold in the Best Buy. That's how I used to say it, or like an electronics retailer, or a commerce retailer. We deal with all the b2b technology products that are a little bit more invisible. You know, so like, clients include folks like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. We also work with a lot of startups that sell b2b technology, or b2b SaaS. And what we do for them is we'll basically do what I sometimes say are just two things. Although it's a little broader than that, of course. We ask the right questions to the right people. And that's the research side of the business. So we go find the right people, whether that's in a qualitative or quantitative venue, and ask them the right questions so you can move the business forward. So that can be like, buyer persona research, messaging research, brand research, competitive research, those things. And then, on the other side of the business, on the marketing side, we focus on making sure that you're saying the right things to the right people. We don't try to run your pay per click campaign for you, we don't try to do SEO, we don't try to do those things. We're very laser focused on messaging, and then packaging that up in whatever form makes the most sense. So whether that's something written or something video or something animated. And the reason I think both of them work really well together for us as a business, we're spending all this time it's now like your 16, basically, of just staying focused on the needs of b2b technology companies and researching them over and over and over again, and the problems they have and the journey issues and the persona issues and the messaging. And that's just filled us with a lot of really good, interesting best practices, and just even observations at a kind of meta level of how to get messaging right, for b2b audiences. And so, you know, most folks, that's what they'll hire us for is some kind of combination of those two skill sets, sometimes isolated, sometimes it'll just fires for research, or sometimes just marketing. But it's pretty common for somebody to say, we don't know this problem about our market, or we're losing to a competitor or our messaging isn't resonating. Can you help run some research on that? And then when that's done, can you help us fix that messaging and, you know, get our website better, right? It's a messaging framework, help us author some content, get some sales enablement materials out there. And, and it's a fun, it's a fun place to be because there's way too much bad messaging out there. So as much good messaging as we can create, I'm happy with. And, you know, and, and it's nice, it's nice to come back six months later and say, Wow, now you're getting leads, and you weren't getting leads before or now you feel comfortable about what you're saying to the market you didn't before. So that's basically who we are.

 

Andrei Tiu  43:16  

Great stuff. And if people want to find out more about you, or they want to follow you on one core platform, which one would be the platform that you'd like to direct them to? Is it your website? Is it LinkedIn, Facebook, something else?

 

Sean Campbell  43:31  

I just a website, honestly, just go to https://www.cascadeinsights.com/, that's the easiest. And as far as reaching out to me, I'm on various social networks and platforms. But to be honest, I don't always check the messaging from there, I've got plenty to do, the fastest way to get ahold of me is honestly just email me. So that's just sean@cascadeinsights.com.  And one thing I'll add, I'm always happy to talk to entrepreneurs and business owners of any stripe. My company serves certain people so you may work in a sector and my company can help you. Fine. But there's always a certain amount of like collegial conversation that can happen if you're having struggles as a business owner, and it's always helpful to have somebody to kind of talk to you. So if you're out there listening, and you're like, I don't do anything with b2b tech, but I like what he said, I'd love to be able to just chat with him about business. You can email me too. We won't work for you. But I'll talk to you. Happy to do that.

 

Andrei Tiu  44:32  

Cool, guys. So we'll have links to these in the description of this episode, depending on where you're viewing it, but we'll add them everywhere. And until next time, Shawn, it was really a pleasure in the very nice chat today. Looking forward to staying in touch. And for you guys listening, as you already know, if you have certain questions that you'd like myself or Sean to address, or you'd like us to organise something for the future, always reach out to me or to Sean. You have our address in the description as well. So that's hello@marketiu.com, make sure that you write your question and we'll do our best to answer it together or maybe in a future episode, depending on what struggle you're going through. And Sean, again, thank you for the offer to our listeners to get in touch. I think this would be really valuable for somebody that you know, need the hands to know that they can reach out to people like yourself, like us. For basically free hand of help. I think that's great.

 

Andrei Tiu  45:39  

Well, until next time, have an awesome one. Thank you, Sean again, and looking forward to catching up soon. 

 

Sean Campbell  45:44  

All right, thanks, man. Take it easy.