Marketing & Sales Lessons from an ex-Road Warrior: Andrew Deutsch

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. We're clearly living in a new and exciting marketing landscape. B2B and SaaS companies are adopting new tools and approaches to do business in more markets. Fangled Tech's Andrew Deutsch spends a lot of time working with B2B companies looking for marketing and sales strategies and growth. Andrew, welcome to Marketing Spark.

Andrew Deutsch: Hey. Thanks so much, Mark, for having me on. I appreciate it.

Mark Evans: I'm curious about your views on selling in the post-COVID world. When salespeople can't travel and see prospects face-to-face, how does sales change, and what are the approaches or the best practices that salespeople need to take and organizations need to take to be successful?

Andrew Deutsch: The one phrase that always sets me off is when I hear people say, in this time, people don't want to be sold. And I it drives me nuts because the reality of what sales is hasn't changed a bit. The only difference is we're not physically in the room. You know, at the end of the day, if you and the person who's involved in that sales conversation isn't enjoying the process, it's kind of like romance. You're not doing it right. Right. The difference is that you have to use different tools so that you can remain present, engaged. Zoom, the very technology that we're using, has allowed us to really make eye contact even though we're not really looking in each other's eyes. We're looking at virtual eyes to be able to continue to ask the questions to really dive in, do our research, and understand what are the challenges, the problems, the pains that our customers have so that we then can propose solutions for them that solve those problems. That's what being sold is, is someone solving your problems. I think most people like that.

Mark Evans: Now at one point in time, you were traveling more than 300,000 miles a year. Yeah. Meeting prospects and customers. When you look at this new reality with Zoom and the ability to connect, do you think that things like video conferencing are going to make sales more efficient, that we don't have to travel as much? We don't have to have as much face-to-face time? I mean, certainly in some cases, you're going to have to do it. Going to have to see your customer in person. But does this mean that we can be a lot more productive and a lot more efficient?

Andrew Deutsch: Absolutely. I mean, when I was traveling, video conferencing existed. I've been video conferencing for 20-something years since the early days of it when it was grainy and sometimes you'd talk to a frozen face and all that type of thing. But many clients were resistant to it. Now through necessity, we've all become somewhat comfortable. So what happens, you know, in terms of travel, if I was doing the same job today I was doing then, the initial meet-and-greets to go see, touch, feel, to verify that I'm dealing with the right partner in that country would probably still be happening, but the number of repeat visits to go back and also the ability with conferencing to be able to handle issues more efficiently in multiple continents at the same time instead of this month, I'm focusing on Asia, and next month, I'm in Africa. There's a certain level of efficiency that way that allows you even though with email, you can communicate with all those places. You legitimately could be on all six continents in the same day if you can count the time.

Mark Evans: You know, one of the things that I find in my own business is it used to be that when a prospect appeared, you would meet with them right away because you wanted to show that you were serious. If you wanted to get a phone call, it meant that you weren't taking them as seriously as you should. These days when an inbound lead comes in, you respond by email and the first response is, well, you can't do it otherwise right now, but the first response is, do you want to jump on a Zoom call? And what I see post-COVID is that kind of behavior continuing because we want to be as efficient with our time as possible. We want to avoid the travel time. And everybody appreciates that there's a lot of time and effort that goes into sales. So do you think that prospecting in that regard has changed forever?

Andrew Deutsch: Absolutely. And prospecting just with the expansion of the internet. And when I was traveling initially globally, there was no internet. There weren't even fax machines in most of the places I went. You'd sit in the lobby of the hotel and wait for a kid on a motorcycle to come back from the telex office. So the technology has changed all of that. If you were in global trade even as late as the late eighties, you spent most of your time in books going through looking at listings for companies like the Thomas Register and things like that. Now it's all at your fingertips. So as tech continues to grow, the whole prospecting world changes. But, you know, if I was in the office in, say, Cleveland, Ohio and a guy called me or sent me an email or a fax or whatever from Botswana, he's not expecting me to hop on a plane and meet with. Yeah. A guy in, say, Texas or someone in Canada, maybe there would be a potential for travel within the next week or so to get to know them. So, you know, when you start talking about sales on a global scale, my territory, as we used to joke about, was all of the countries that weren't American except Canada and places they talk funny. So I had Puerto Rico and. Right. Places like that also. So, you know, when your territory is the globe minus the U.S., Canada, and, you know, a couple other minor places, it's a whole different aspect of how you prospect, how you prioritize your time, how you choose where you're going to go next. There are countries that you could do business, but the cost of doing business there based on the size of the country is higher than what you could profit if you did an excellent job there. So. Right. All of that falls into play in the whole prospecting area.

Mark Evans: So you and I met on LinkedIn and over the past year, would argue that LinkedIn has evolved probably into places that Microsoft never imagined when it purchased LinkedIn for $26 billion a few years ago. How have you seen LinkedIn impact your business just in terms of your ability to connect at scale, have conversations, drive leads down the funnel, maybe relate a little bit of your own experiences with LinkedIn?

Andrew Deutsch: Yeah. There's been some real pluses and a couple of minuses. But the pluses are that folks who are seeking me out that knew who I was, that didn't know how to reach me, have found me again. And I've been able to prospect and create contacts in different types of networks. There are companies that I had always wanted to be able to penetrate before, and the people in those companies were never really on LinkedIn. They had a profile, and that was that. And now people are more attentive to it. So when you send a connection request to somebody and in that request, share the reason of why you want to talk to them, it speeds up that whole process of that first getting that first meeting. On the negative, I you know, you've got to be able to sort through all the people with cryptocurrency scams and fake profiles of supposed princesses overseas looking for a husband and all that other scam stuff that you all have to avoid. Although I am going to get that money out of that one bank that has $12 million in it from an uncle of mine I've never heard of.

Mark Evans: You and everybody else, I believe. Yeah. That's no.

Andrew Deutsch: Just me.

Mark Evans: Not just you. Well, that's the thing about LinkedIn is that it really does take a lot of time and I'm sure they have to be thinking of better tools to manage connections both inbound and outbound. Given the fact that sales and marketing people won't be traveling this year, don't expect conferences to come back until early 2022. Do you see the B2B marketing landscape unfolding this year in terms of the channels that marketers and salespeople are going to leverage?

Andrew Deutsch: You know, I was predicting the death of the trade show long before COVID ever hit. The trade show used to exist before we had all of this technology when people would plan their entire marketing year for that moment of launching what's new. So if the trade show for your industry, say, was in November and it was March, you would be, you know, on a limited basis kind of rolling it out to your customers if you were visiting and talking about it, but the big launch was November. Now with virtual trade shows and the ability to use your website, to use LinkedIn, to use YouTube for videos or Vimeo, however you do it, you now have the ability to bring everybody together anytime that you want at the convenience. All COVID did was just push the sword in a little bit deeper into the depth of the trade show. There'll still be needs for it. There'll still be conferences and opportunities to do that. But for the most part, I can more efficiently bring a product to market using digital technology than I ever could at a trade show. So, you know, it's you've got to roll with the punches and understand that things are changing anyhow.

Mark Evans: What does raise the question of the trade show's future and whether conferences are still viable and relevant. Another marketer that I was talking to said that when he talked to clients and asked them to assess the success of trade shows, Well, 20% of the trade shows that they attended generated 80% of their new leads, which suggests that 80% of the trade shows they attended were a waste of time. Mhm. Do you think a lot of companies are going to look at trade shows in a new light and say, we could probably go to only one-third of the trade shows that we used to go to and save ourselves a lot of time and a lot of money and not impact our business in a big way. Is that a plausible reality?

Andrew Deutsch: I think it is. You know, I was involved in a project. We had created a new type of barrel for aging spirits and wine in a project that I was working on several years ago. And we would go to all of the craft brewer shows, the craft spirit shows, and those types of things. Those shows were already turned to a different model. People didn't come to those shows to look at all the new equipment. They came for conferences, educational panels, learning situations. And in between those, they come out and look at the new stuff. That was sort of the transformation of the trade show where it used to be there would be, you know, small, you know, get-togethers and talking and opportunities, but for the most part, it was to see the exhibitors. So the transformation was happening now with platforms that are out there. There's Remo, there's Walkabout, there's a bunch of different ones now where you can actually attend virtually to conferences and have exhibitors who set up virtual showrooms so that you can see the materials, the products, and get a far bigger view of all of the offerings rather than a company that was well, do we want a 10-by-10 booth or a 20-by... you can really get people involved to see what's new in that format and not blow, you know, $30,000 to $60,000 to get your team to a trade show.

Mark Evans: One of the interesting things as an attendee of trade shows is I'd go to many of the panels And it would be and I would say to myself, you know, I could easily be on stage, not because, you know, I'm a star or anything, but I had the same depth of knowledge as most of the people on stage. And so that held less value for me. The exhibits held no value for me because I already had all the information I wanted. It was that in-person conversation, building that relationship. So how do you keep the power of conversation while you eliminate the booths and the panels and all that kind of stuff?

Andrew Deutsch: Yeah. I'm a big believer that 90% of the business that happens at a trade show is either at the buffet or in the bathroom. And, you know, people are laughing for sure when they hear that, but it's true. Some of the best contacts I've ever made at a trade show were bumping into someone that, you know, I sat down at a table and look up, and I see a badge of a company that I've been wanting to talk to for a year and never got in. But with these new virtual systems, for example, I don't know if you're familiar with the platform Remo. No. I'm not. You walk when you go, I say you walk in, it's you turn on your meeting, and there's a whole series of tables. And there's six seats in each table, and you get to choose which one you want to virtually sit at and talk with folks. And then when the program begins, you go up on the stage. So you can switch tables and you can look at the list and see where people are you'd want to meet and truly network digitally and exchange information. And you also can put in there, like, your LinkedIn address so people can find you. And I've made and several conferences I've been to since the launch of this platform and since COVID, I've made great contacts similar to what I would have done at a show. The only difference is I didn't, you know, have to give them a paper business card. I didn't have to shake hands. Realized that, you know, I had dripped mayonnaise on my shirt while I was going to embarrass myself.

Mark Evans: Shifting gears just a little bit and still focused on technology. One of the things when I was doing research for this podcast that you have talked about in the past is the overreliance on MarTech. A lot of marketers have fallen and have been fascinated with tools that are all around automation and operational efficiencies. Do you think that the pendulum has swung too far to MarTech and away from the fundamentals? It sounds like you're in that camp.

Andrew Deutsch: Here's the deal. You don't build a house until you have a set of plans. The agencies out there who don't do their client a good service start with the tools and hope that somewhere along the way, it'll lead to a strategy that they haven't built. And the reality is the way you build a strategy today and the core of marketing hasn't changed in 20, 30 years. How do you know your customer, know what their needs, desires, pains are that you can solve, and how do you differentiate in that market space against all other competition so that you're the one that can fix that problem and they recognize it and how do you solve it. That's what you want to build that strategy first. Then you decide, do they actually need a website? Do they need a social media campaign? Do they want to spend money on pay-per-click? I'm doing an experiment right now with a new program, which is a tech that allows you to be present in a meeting. Before this, you saw me goofing around with what I can do in Zoom. So imagine being able to, for example, shrink yourself down, pull the PowerPoint up behind you. There's so many things that you can do to be present in the room. I can call a press conference and catch your attention while we're having a meeting. All of that can do is great, but first, I have to have a reason for it. So we're doing an experiment on affiliate marketing with the training for this type of technology. The software is free, but we're selling the training. So we want to see if affiliate marketing really works. All of the course is going to be sold through affiliates, and it's a true experiment. We think it's going to be very successful. We first tried to figure out who are the people that could benefit from this training, how will it make their lives better, And then how do we get to them in a way where we're not spending a fortune on SEO, pay-per-click, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, all those types of things? So we got to the core. We built a strategy. And now with the launch of the program, we think that we can grow faster than we ever would have and not spend a penny on all of that MarTech stuff that the gurus bring to you every day.

Mark Evans: Well, that's what I found interesting in the last year is the return to fundamentals. So a lot, I'm seeing a lot more interest in positioning, marketing strategies, buyer personas, the buyer's journey, tactical plans. A lot of marketers have realized that the fundamentals matter. Yes. Technology can hide a lot of things. Conferences for that matter can hide a lot of marketing inadequacies. But unless you know your customer, unless you know you have a great story, you're not going to resonate. The market's too competitive these days.

Andrew Deutsch: Yep. I tell this story all the time, but if somebody comes to you and says, Mark, I know your business. I could build you the greatest website in the world. I can drive 100,000 people to it. I can build you a social media campaign. You're going to be the most famous guy. You'll have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. If you don't respond by either running away or going, why do I need that? There's something wrong with you. Our core, the way everything that we do and people get sick of hearing me say it. Our job is to help our customer convert every touch into voracious advocate for their brand because brand advocates come from a solid strategy based on what that customer needs. And when customers get what they want, when somebody solves their problems, they shout from the hilltops. They become a horde of advocates that go out and promote your business, whether it's B2B, consumer, whatever. That's what it's all about. And the only way to do that is to focus on the strategy first.

Mark Evans: You raise an interesting point about nurturing brand advocates and evangelists. I think a lot of B2B companies fall down because marketers are focused on prospects. They're shiny. They're sexy. They're new. When we get them, we're rewarded and compensated. But after someone turns themselves from a prospect to a customer, as marketers, we ignore them. They're gone. And then we're on to the next prospect. And I think that's a fundamental mistake because if you don't nurture those people, they won't turn into advocates. And you lose a very powerful marketing vehicle.

Andrew Deutsch: How much is it worth to you to have every customer who ever bought, had contact or worked with you telling their friends what a brilliant company you are? There's a reason Apple has people lining up outside the door to buy stuff they've never touched. Never saw it work. They saw a promotional video, and yet they're willing to fork out that kind of money on day one because there's so many people who just advocate for their stuff.

Mark Evans: Like me, you offer a fractional CMO services, and I'm curious about your take on the rise of fractional. Why is everybody talking about it? Why is there so much interest and what does it say about the marketing and for that matter, the sales landscape?

Andrew Deutsch: Well, there's sort of two sides to it in the marketing world. Number one, if you spend your money to hire a guy that doesn't have a strategic background, a fresh out of college guy who knows lots of tactical tools, built websites, you're not going to get the same impact as bringing someone in who knows how to build a strategy. The challenge is the person knows how to build a strategy is really expensive and most companies don't need that guy five days a week. Right. That's really what it boils down to. So do you want to spend, you know, $70,000 on somebody who's going to have to go out and find all of these resources and figure it out? Or spend on a guy one day a week, one day a month depending on who you are. They could be part of your team involved and benefiting from the growth of your company who then empowers the other people to do all that other stuff. It ends up being significantly less cost for significantly higher impact, and any fractional chief marketing officer whose goal isn't to eventually grow the business so they can hire a full-time isn't doing their job. That's what fractional is to us.

Mark Evans: I'm just curious about whether the rise of fractional has happened because a lot of companies cut back on their marketing last year and really tried to be very efficient about their marketing spend or whether they've recognized that expensive senior marketing talent sometimes don't deliver ROI that they expect. I mean, can you pinpoint the reasons for the rise or the growing interest in fractional?

Andrew Deutsch: I'd like to say the reason that the fractional has increased in popularity is because, you know, because I've been talking about it. I'm kidding. Okay. No. But there's a lot of different motives for different reasons. There's no one answer. Many companies that we've taken on as fractionals, we've I would say 90% of them because they've been burned by agencies that saw them as just a source of income. Right. They just kept piling stuff on. They didn't have what I would consider to be a fiduciary responsibility. They're focused on what we can sell you that has the highest margins, not what can give you the biggest impact. So that's part of it. And then the other is that there's a lot of companies out there that really want that growth, but they know they can't afford a full-time talent nor do they need one because that person would come in, build the strategy, and then they'd have to get rid of them to replace it with somebody else. Right. So it's a great beginning of building strategy. It's also a great way to take any company to the next level without having to spend significantly more. It's, I joke, the way to get champagne lifestyle out of your budget.

Mark Evans: Love that. Love that. Andrew, where can people learn more about you and Fangled Tech?

Andrew Deutsch: Well, you can check us out on, check me out on LinkedIn. I'm sure you'll put it in the context. Our website is FangledTech.com and our podcast is the Fangledcast. You can catch us on YouTube. I think we send it out by fax too because we're old. Yeah. Occasionally, the podcast telex.

Mark Evans: Yeah. Exactly. Telegram, all that kind of stuff.

Andrew Deutsch: Yeah. Smoke signals.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Andrew, for your insight, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Andrew, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you'd like to suggest a guest or learn more how I help b to b companies as a fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to Mark@marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.