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Brenda
Welcome to another episode of Little Talks, your weekly dose of marketing news and insights from Littlefield Agency.
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Sam
Welcome back to another edition of Little Talks with Littlefield Agency. I am Sam Littlefield, and this is the root. Do you know where on camera.
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Roop
I got in trouble for not looking at.
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Sam
The same camera that you're supposed to look at every week for the last three years.
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Roop
If you're watching us …
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Sam
So you like looking at yourself, is what you're saying?
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Roop
I can't see these glasses. Only for close up. I actually can't see this.
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Sam
So you can see the script. Well. Welcome back. It's, gosh almighty. It's the last second to last day of July. Where did the word summer go? Whole year flying by. They tell you that happens when you get older. It's really true. Claude, you just wait.
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Roop
Yeah, it’s …
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Sam
That's insane. That is insane. Hey. Sitting next to Claudia, they can't see her. we have Jules hover. Julia. You call her.
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Roop
Julia, and her name is Julia. But that's not how it was pronounced.
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Sam
Even Stephen struggling with Julia. Anyway, Julia Hulver with us. It is Joy, Hulver's daughter, and she is way ahead of the game. When I was 17 years old. God knows what I was doing. And she decided to shadow her mom for a week, which is awesome. Good for you. It's amazing. So Julia is in the studio. Welcome to the studio, Julia.
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Sam
Tatum's last day in the studio. Sad. That's okay. She'll be back. Let me back around and be a friendly face. we got RibCrib in the house later this afternoon for fun meetings to shout out to Sean and Stephen from RibCrib. And then this Thursday is a big day. I'm gonna let you announce this one.
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Sam
Going on with Ditch Witch on Thursday.
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Roop
This ..?
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Sam
Thursday.
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Roop
We have our friends from Ditch Witch in the studio recording the first few episodes of their new podcast, Beyond The Moon, super awesome.
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Sam
Nice. Claud. Frickin’ nailed it. Great work.
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Roop
Fun fact for people listening to this podcast, those episodes will not be the first one released though.
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Sam
And that's why we're versatile. Yeah, I love that.
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Roop
We've got a different plan for them that I think is gonna be pretty cool.
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Sam
Sean's going to be amazing. I can't wait to see him in action. He's a natural, so it'll work out really, really well. so, yeah, big week here as we, coast into August, back to school, starting up a lot of moving pieces. But God is good. I just love this time here.
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Roop
Our inbound plans are coming together.
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Sam
Inbound plans are coming together, and, it's just I always say it's this time of year when people kind of start. Summer is great and it's wonderful, but it's like, I'm ready to take charge. Let's go. People. Right. Let's frickin go.
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Roop
Yeah, yeah, there you go. I was about to do the whole thing.
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Sam
Nah, we don't need to now. We'll stay on time today because you have a, You have a big meeting here in about 20 minutes. So we got to be on topic.
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Sam
I am, I'm very excited for this topic. Today. We have topic number one. Claud, we're calling this. I'm doing this exercise, and it's, I talked to a lot of prospective customers every week, and, I wrote down a list of questions that I frequently get asked.
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Sam
And there's one that gets asked in the B2B manufacturing world, almost every call. So this topic is called closing the ROI attribution loop. And what we mean by that is I have a, we I talked to someone last week. I was like, okay, this is a 45th time I've heard this this year, and we need to address it on the podcast.
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Sam
And it's, hey, you know, marketing. They're out there and we're trying to soften the beaches and create, you know, good qualified leads. We deliver those leads to the sales team or the dealerships, the district, the distributors. And then you never know if marketing actually did their job and closed that sale, because sometimes your salesmen are very, very busy selling.
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Sam
We totally understand that your dealerships have a lot of moving pieces. And, what happens when Steve wrote about a $500,000 piece of equipment? But we we know that he came to a marketing campaign, but we never know if he actually bought said equipment. So we're gonna address that topic today, which I think is really good. I think it's really timely.
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Sam
as you're listening there, do we have the answer?
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Roop
Kind of a little bit. And by the way, that's that closing that attribution loop is not just so marketing can …
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Sam
No no no no no no Lou.
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Roop
It helps guys, like you mentioned Chris, with our analytics. It helps us work better with your budget. So when he's targeting an audience, when we know someone who definitely came through and bought how much they bought with how much money they spent with you, then you will find lookalike audiences and other people like that.
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Roop
We can.
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Sam
Do better. And it's a wonderful point. Makes him way more excited too. That's a great one. But also, I mean, to you B2B marketers out there, we understand there are a lot of sales teams that are saying, hey, what's marketing doing for me today? I mean, that that's very much I hear that all the time. We see that across the board with some of our clients.
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Sam
Absolutely. And it's a very fair and valid one. And if we all figured it out, man, it's going to be and we kind of have figured it out. So that's what we're here to talk about today. as we we got this question. I mean, I've had this question a million times over the last few years is what have we done in the last year?
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Sam
And I don't want to get into specifics, but how are we understanding that Jules came in through a marketing campaign and whether it was two weeks later, whether it was six months later, eventually purchased product of our customers, and then we can link that back up to the original initiation of her showing interest in our product group. Take it away.
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Roop
Right, right out of the gate. The first thing you're going to need more, more times than not, you're gonna need a CRM system or some sort of mechanism for tracking, your customers and their activities and their sales activities. There's tons of we love HubSpot. You know, that we're at Salesforce and at times we need something that tracks back.
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Sam
Okay, check.
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Roop
Automations that happen within that. But when when you where the automations fall short is when a human has to be involved and has to in some way, a sales person or a dealership has to report back that sale completed. So we've seen a few different ways to, close that loop, using the CRM. And we thought we got through some of those today.
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Roop
Perfect. So again, there's no way to do this 100%. Humans are still involved. They're going to fail. It's time to time if you can incentivize is make it easier for them as well. So if you don't have an automated way or this just happening, say that cash register, which was for B2B clients don't know.
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Sam
There's financing involved, you know. Yeah, at 100%.
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Roop
A restaurant chain though, like, say, rib crab. We do know that like that's there's systems in place that will report back. But if you're not one of those folks these are some better. These are some ways you can do that. Things we've seen work include warranty registrations which seems pretty easy right? Yep. That's an incentive. Most of these are kind of also incentive for even the dealer or the customer to close that link for you.
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Roop
So if you're having an issue or a dealer or a salesperson just is to frankly get it too busy to report that back, they got the sale. Boom, they're on to the next. you can also incentivize that customer to report back. Totally. Registrations are a great way to do that. So when they thought that warranty registration, you want to do it online on a form that ties back into your CRM, and then you can close that loop when a piece of equipment goes out and ships to that individual.
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Roop
So that dealership or that salesperson, you know, you know, you send it out there, you know, it's coming back in contract or things like that.
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Sam
And we and we get and again, not going into super detail here, but let's say we get that warranty registration and then how does that does that kickback through HubSpot. And you get an alert and says, hey, route bought equipment.
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Roop
I mean, we realize that sometimes this is kind of a slow transition, but we've seen several actually, clients over the years. They're still doing a paper registration, post postcards that says.
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Sam
Oh my gosh.
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Roop
Yeah. Can you register this postcard? Put the mail on because that's no good. And it's 2024 heading into 2025. Yep. But they don't want you dead. But they do have a postcard but a QR code to a website form. I don't feel that format that will feed right back into your CRM, and you can close the loop that way.
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Roop
And most of these are going to kind of work that way. And another way beyond warranty registrations is customer satisfaction surveys. So and you can incentivize them. You have a client. They know who they are. That incentivizes with a gift card. Nice lovely. You send it out to you. You know, you know the customer at this appointment and on the, the instruction bag in the manual comes with a QR code that kind of explains, hey, this QR code would be worth $20 to you.
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Sam
Awesome. But take $20 any day. Absolutely.
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Roop
I showed you head to website with the form, has a bunch of questions on it. You get some, you get some legit like satisfaction questions out of it. You get some content ideas out of it. But like the main thing you're getting out of it is, they got either kind of like a warranty serial number and where they bought it, and that ties back.
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Roop
And we know that stuff now. We know it's it's done. So customer satisfaction surveys reaching directly at your customers. If you've got you really need to rely on the dealers.
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Sam
Absolutely.
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Roop
To do this. And they are not interested in paperwork. I'm not even sure I sympathize. you you can send an email, an automated email a few days or a week after you ship that equipment or that product off to them to do a delivery. The customer with just a simple yes no question on did the sale happen?
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Roop
Did it complete this button for yes, this button for now, and we'll take it from there.
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Sam
And again, all automated. You're not doing any of this. You're just setting it up.
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Roop
Run it and let it go. we we've seen that done where someone gets an email, clicks it, and it comes back over. We know who we sent it to. We know why, why we're sending it. It's tied it to the product in the CRM, all that stuff up front. We're just simply asking to get the sale complete.
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Roop
I should mention that's not one where you get back to specific. How much demand that for sure to to have to deal with like some kind of, baseline numbers. Like on average we sell, you know, this piece of equipment is part of this number. And, you know, it could be up or down a little bit. And is better than zero.
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Sam
no, absolutely. Again, it's just it's more knowledge for you. It's it's, it better enhances your CRM. We understand too, that you have some really good dealers and you have dealers that are not so great in the sense of inputting information, etc.. we have some clients. There's call them clubs. Right. And so they're incentivizing dealers. There's a point system.
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Sam
So hey, did you input at least or did you get back to us on at least 85% of the leads that we sent you? And you get, you know, points that go through something it might be more co-op dollars from corporate. It could be, it could be a trip. Yeah. Discounts on equipment. It could be a, you know, hey, if you get a thousand points in a year, you go to Cabo, wherever it may be.
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Sam
but we we've seen that in a myriad of ways. And again, it's just a little thing. So just check this box, say yes or no. And, and that's always a good incentivization because it's for them personally.
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Roop
It is pretty valuable. I mean, we we've heard talk a lot about first party data, but this is the end of that first party, that closing, that loop, all the stuff you've done to learn about your that they actually bought something and completed the sale.
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Sam
And you bring up look alikes. That's a great point. Think about the cross-sell opportunities to hey, we know that Mister Roop. You know, bought, bought a skid steer. It's his year anniversary. Has he been to the dealership to get it fine tuned? does he know about our array of attachments for said skid steer?
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Roop
We're tracking him in your CRM. Maybe you've seen them looking at some content around specific ding.
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Sam
Ding ding.
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Roop
Snowing equipment. Now you can flag that all together. Sending a communication email. contact his dealer and say, hey, the guy we saw the guy looking at this stuff he bought this from a year ago. Maybe it's time to reach out to.
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Sam
That was like, that's like an orchestra. And that's that's that's beautiful. That's a symphony. And, well, and here's the cool thing. The setup, of course, right, is a ton in the sense of your world. And, and working with an agency partner or your team, once you get there, though, it does. It's I mean, that's a beautiful thing right there.
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Sam
And then you just, you're going to sleep at night and you're selling product, and we know how you're selling product.
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Roop
And one last point on this, know, data is a two way street, right? But you're asking.
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Sam
Good point.
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Roop
Of view, people. It's also good to share with them. Right. The results that you're seeing on your side, they want to see qualified clients that leads. They want to get them in a timely manner. be transparent with them about the data you collect and you're sending back to them. If it's a really, really good lead, let them know, hey, there's a very high probability close to this, but if it's a lower intent one, they still probably want it.
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Roop
But you know.
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Sam
Now of course that's a that's a great point. And then you're starting to create synergies within your sales team in your marketing team. And that's where it gets exciting. So we get this all the time. If you have further thoughts on this or want to talk, please reach out. We love talking through this. We've done a lot in the last year to really figure this out to, you talked to us a couple of years ago, and it's just more of an, a client, a great client of ours for a long time would always talk about closing the loop.
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Sam
And, man, we're here now, and it's pretty cool. through some of the technology tools and the ability to understand the ROI of your marketing dollars, which is why we're all in business. Right? So, so that's what we have for you today, next week's topic.
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Roop
is content marketing worth it for me to be bingo.
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Sam
Absolutely. And it's a great one, too. And very timely as we, launched it, switch into this new world of podcasting.
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Sam
Okay, my friend. Always a pleasure. I'll see you next week. Yeah.
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Roop
Good topic.
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Sam
Thank you. I try to, I try to come in close from time to time. We will see you then. Thank you so much for listening.
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Roop
Adios
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Brenda
And that's a wrap. We hope you've enjoyed our little chat and found ways to grow your own marketing strategies. Remember to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on social media at Littlefield Agency.