"How Can My Business Make More Money?" Merchant Answers That Question!

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Jimmy Neutron of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we'll be discussing lead generating for 2024. We also went to a conference, Lead Generation World. Uh, so yeah, we're gonna be talking about all things leads, bro. Trying to get the money for 2024. Cash rules everything around me. Cream dollar dollar bill, y'all. Anyway, what's the word, man? How's it going? Long time no see. I feel like we haven't shot in a podcast in 17 years.

No, like a week ago.

Well, you know, it's been a while. It's been a while.

Well, we did a 2024 kickoff, so—

oh yes, yes we did, yes we did.

And, uh, the We had a 3-day weekend, MLK holiday, first bank holiday where there's like one guy that always calls, "I didn't get my money today." That guy didn't call this time.

Good, he got the memo.

He figured it out that the banks are closed. Good for him. I really appreciated that because he's— there's usually that one client that always calls Every— he calls on—

and then Christmas Day, he gets—

no, but he got mad on one holiday. He was like, that's a holiday? I was like, bro, I said, what can I— nothing I can do for you. There's like— they increased the amount of federal holidays.

A new holiday that I've seen. Yeah, there's another holiday that I seem like— this is, uh, George Washington's birthday.

Well, they used to have President's Day, and then—

okay, yeah, that's what it was.

But now they call it George Washington Day. I didn't know that. They're changing the name of it. It used to have President's Day, and then because before they had Washington's birthday and Abraham Lincoln's birthday, then they combined that to President's Day.

Okay, so are they going back to the— I have no idea, because from what I, I Googled, right, I'm like, okay, when is the next time I have a free day, or just a free day, right? Because I want to— there's something I need to take care of. And I mean, I don't want to take— you know what I mean? I need— I just want to take care of it. And that's the next holiday, but it said George Washington Day.

That's weird.

But it could still, you know, I mean, it's Google, so you never know. It could have just— I could have been reading really fast.

I'll tell you one thing, they don't wait for like anything to happen. Like, New Year's passed, they already got the Valentine's stuff out. It's not even February.

You aren't lying, dude.

They already put it out, like it's, it's out there. I think I can't stand the Super Bowl too, and the Super Bowl is not till February either. I don't know why they had a Super Bowl cake out at Publix the other day. I'm like, what are you doing buying a Super Bowl?

Because they were calling it a Super Wild Card.

That's what—

see that?

No, I didn't see that.

Yeah, they're calling all these games the Super Wild Card, the Super Playoff, Super Wild Card Playoff.

Well, that was this week. Next week's just regular playoffs, right?

So why is it a Super Wild Card?

Because Kansas City was the Super Bowl champion and, oh, they were in the game. Yeah. Speaking of the NFL, a lot of people were upset that the NFL put the Dolphins-Chiefs game on Peacock and you had to pay $6. I avoided that for two reasons. One, my Xfinity came with Peacock. Oh nice, so that didn't have to buy that. And if you were in the local viewing area, well yeah, you got the game on a regular channel.

Rabbit ears. No, they still have rabbit ears, like antenna. Yeah, you know, my dad has actually— he's— well, it doesn't look like rabbit, it's like a square that he put on his window.

Yeah, you can do that. People put, you know, my daughter has antenna outside. They have an antenna outside their house that they use for local television. Yeah, she has that. Yeah, well, she has to have her channel, you know, right? Yeah, be able to watch her channel on TV.

So yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on, man. Anyway, the— with the playoffs, I mean, go Packers!

Yeah, Packers did great.

Jordan Love smoked them.

Jordan Love did a—

I was reading too, that's the first time— that's the first game this season they had all of their starters. Well, you know, preferred players, they say. So that's why they scored 48 points. I mean, obviously they've been a little hurt. I didn't know that. I didn't really, you know.

Well, the Dolphins had like everybody from the Dolphins. Dolphins were playing guys 35 years old. I don't even know where they found them. There was one guy there, they were like, how old are you? He is 35. I'm like, whoa, I don't even know, like, I didn't even know, like, 7 or 8 of the people were playing. Never heard of them before.

They were all hurt.

Yeah, they have so many guys out hurt, it's crazy. The whole defensive line, like, it's completely— was completely gutted out.

Go Bucs, by the way. Again, we're looking good.

Yeah, Tampa Bay was looking good.

No, I'm not talking about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Talking about the Bucks. Go Bucks!

Yeah, Miami Heat was a big Miami Heat weekend. They retired Dwyane Wade.

Yes, they did.

And they're retiring Udonis Haslem, I think, this week.

He's huge down here.

Yeah, well, he's from— he's from Miami, and then he went—

oh, that's right, he is.

He went to University of Florida Gators. Go Gators! And then he came to the Heat.

That's cool.

And he never played on another team ever.

That's why I stopped liking Dwyane Wade, because he went to school in Marquette and he didn't stay and play for the Bucks. So, meh. But at least he got some championships, man. I can't be that much of a hater. So yeah, man, let's hop into it. Um, Lead Generation World.

Let's just talk quick news, quick news stories. So one news story was Mr. Wonderful was on a bunch of big business shows over the weekend, and he is not down with these Bitcoin ETFs.

I was going to ask you though, didn't he just get in trouble?

I don't think so. I'll have to look at that. Yeah, I know that he's building an oil refinery because he says they haven't built an oil refinery in the United States in a few decades, and he's going to build the brand new oil refinery. I think that's a great idea. And the other thing was he said—

what's that guy's name?

Uh, Kevin O'Leary. So he, he also said that the fees on those Bitcoin EFT funds is way out of control. It's— and he said there's no way he would pay those fees. He said he owns some coin and he's holding on to it. And then the other thing, it was a big story this morning, that— I mean, we're only 2 weeks, not even 2 weeks, we're 2 weeks actually into the year, and something like 1,000 tech companies, or less than 1,000 tech companies, have laid off over 250,000 workers. And there's literally like layoffs going down.

It's pretty gloomy for the, for the tech world right now. I think like we talked, we touched on this a couple of podcasts Well, a lot of it is for, you know, Google was a big piece of it. Meta.

Yeah, Apple, Meta, Amazon.

Really getting their ass kicked right now by Microsoft. You see that?

Yeah, well, Apple's got all kinds— there's Apple and Google have all kinds of problems going on with the App Store.

And well, yeah, they lost, right?

But I'm just saying there's like a lot of stuff going on with that, with the App Store.

Yeah, I think a lot of the, you know, artificial intelligence— I had a little something I wanted to— they were saying that over this, just, you know, within the past 6 months, the, the talk of AI, right, has like quadrupled in the marketing world. And it's just really—

everything is AI. Like, you know, we're getting hit up now. Now, I mean, we went to the lead generation world, right?

Obviously you're gonna get—

so we're gonna get hit up from like every kind of lead generation solicited emails for sure, right? So I mean, so, but also, you know, there's a lot of talk about what was old, you know, maybe you should be using now. And we've talked, we're talking to some people about postcard marketing, and it was interesting, you know. So should we—

it was really funny that a lot of people were agreeing with me. Yeah, that's what I was— I, because, so I don't know what, like 6 months ago I started, I brought up Yeah, we talked, we talked about mailers a few times because my background is like Gorilla Promo. Before, like when I was hustling back, you know, back in Milwaukee, we, we fliered the city. Like people know right now if you were in Milwaukee and we're like, hey yo, we need to get in touch with Gorilla Promo, we got a show coming up, like they know who that is. Like people know who that is. So like You know, that traditional marketing, you know what I mean, that's never went anywhere.

No, no, I think like we're gonna see—

Yeah, but what I was trying to say is it was really interesting for me that like a lot of the people were not only agreeing but actually already implemented these types of programs into their marketing. So yeah, that was—

No, I think it's interesting like, you know, so we're gonna price action, we mail postcards out to some new business. New businesses and try that. And, you know, because that's where there's always, you know, a good— more of an opportunity, right? Then another second guy we talked to about mail said, oh, we should be offering mail to our customers in that they should send postcards to people who are moving into the area every month, right? And they had a program for that. So that was kind of interesting. I think for like retail stores, I think it's very hard. You know, it's like I talk to people about like the business we're in and we talk to them and I go, it's very hard to, to go and say, oh, I want to spend $10,000 on Facebook when Square can spend $10,000 in a day.

I mean, yeah, there's no comparison.

And I could spend, you know, that would be painful for me to spend that in a month, you know. And what would I get for it? And that's, that's where the, you know, that's where the craziness comes in with advertising, is that the advertising has gotten to the point where the big companies can afford to do it and the small companies are getting shut out, right? And the small companies gonna have to— you got to get creative. And that's what we're thinking about right now, is how to, how to creatively do what we can do. And you know, then the other big thing being discussed at this conference was telemarketing constantly. And you know, is telemarketing good? Is it bad? What are the rules? There's all these new rules. There's like one more year left possibly of the wild, wild west, but there are still people getting sued because there's these TPA, whatever that is, lawyers that are out suing telemarketing.

Yeah, it's kind of shady. You guys suck.

And that's kind of, that's kind of horrible because, you know, here small businesses are trying to do—

I mean, all we're trying to do is make a buck, man. Yeah, I mean, we're not— I'm not like maliciously looking up businesses' emails and phone numbers to be like, I'm gonna I'm not gonna pester this person and like make his life hell for the next 3 days, you know what I mean? Like, I literally am just looking for a new client.

So I get it though, man.

I don't like when people call me nonstop, you know?

No, I think that, you know, the like the offshore telemarketing— one thing, you know, I look at is like, I'll get— I'll see on my phone now it'll say telemarketing, or the calls won't even go go through because I think, you know, I have T-Mobile and I think T-Mobile is definitely like started cracking down on these like fake phone numbers. And you know, you can report—

you have a way for you to report them. Since I switched my phone to AT&T, it's been the total opposite.

Really?

My phone goes nuts now.

Yeah, well, I don't know what T-Mobile installed on there.

Yeah, I forgot about that. I shouldn't have switched. Sorry, T-Mobile.

But that's kind of slowed down for me.

Yeah, my phone sucks. I, I don't like the service. I can't— I really can't even use my phone in the office, really.

Really? No.

Yeah, even when I'm— it's worse when I'm connected to the internet.

But remember when I used to get all those calls for the medication? Yeah, I used to get like 10 phone calls a day. Now I get 2 or 3. They sneak through. But you can, you could hit the button and report you know, hit the report button and they go into the poo-poo list over there, right? And also the, you know, now that's forcing like the people who have these dialers and everything to actually give the telemarketing companies real phone numbers, not using these like ghost phone numbers that they were using before, these SIP lines they call them. Like unused telephone numbers from like that, these like unused phone numbers that are not— don't go, you can't call them back.

Really?

Yeah. So it's kind of crazy, but you know, lead generation is hard and you know, you have to figure out like, you know, or you know, is funnels— like should you be building a sales funnel? Yeah, build a sales phone home?

Yes. Okay. You should always have a sales phone if you're selling something. You need a phone. I mean, you got— you got to filter.

It's hard to get it, you know. I think that's one of the things also that was discussed a lot was how to generate more inbound leads, like where you're having people inbound to your landing page or calling your phone number up versus the opposite of doing outbound telemarketing.

Yeah, inbound is, I mean, that's my goal, right? Like, I come to work to get inbound leads. I'm trying to figure out how to get more inbound leads constantly with the website. You know, it's difficult, it's tough, it's really hard. It's not a simple thing. I wish it was. I wish it was more easier, but it's not. And it's getting more difficult, actually. But, you know, you got to keep learning, figuring out new ways.

That's part of the game. And then the other thing that I've been, you know, listening to a few webinars about was like all these, all this information about content and content marketing and how many pages should you have on your website. How many new blogs are being posted every day? And when you think about it, you know, people are posting millions and millions of blogs every day. They gave some number out on a couple of webinars I listened to. It was like 47 million pages added to the internet like every day. I mean, that's insane. Like, who's reading all that? Okay. And then, you know, I guess some for everybody, that's what it's saying. Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, and then I had a guy trying to convince me this morning, oh yeah, let me make you like, uh, $5 pages on your website. I'm like, I don't know how the guy's gonna write $5 blogs, but whatever, $5 blogs. So you can get like, and you know, for $5 grand you can add 1,000 pages to your website.

Don't need to pay somebody for that.

No, no, I'm just saying, it's just, it's, it's crazy.

Yeah, I mean, I understand. Like, you know, I used to try to figure out new ways to try to make money too, you know what I mean? But it's a— what he's saying is a valid point. Like, you know, you create more content for your website, the likelihood of Google indexing that page is, you know, it, it's, it's a game, dude. It's a game you play. It's a wicked game.

And then is Google looking at that going going, hey, is that AI generated?

They definitely are.

Are we gonna not— are we gonna— are we gonna index that page or not index that page? And then what kind of quality is that going to be? Then other people are saying, oh dude, only put out quality content and then post that content, you know, everywhere. That's—

I don't know what you said, both. I mean, so as someone who's been doing this as long as I have There's two, you know, tried and true ways of getting content indexed on Google. One is you create pages for your local community, you know, Fort Lauderdale payment processing, etc., etc. You create content around that that's going to be useful for people in Fort Lauderdale once they find that page, and it's good, you know, but like content localized optimized content or whatever you want to, you know, I mean, however you want to say it, it's beneficial for sure. I mean, again, it's like depending on what your business model is, or, you know, if you don't serve people or anything like that, you know, then locally, you know, maybe it's not the biggest, you know, big deal for you. But, you know, for us, I think it's kind of a— we should be doing that.

Well, that's why we're making a list and checking it twice.

You didn't— you know, I don't want to get in an "I told you so," but, you know, Allen wants the whole world to use nationwide payment systems, not just people in Fort Lauderdale. So I get it. And me being me, I'm, you know, saying I was trying to get you to to rank locally, but you, you know, he bypassed that. So, but now he's coming to the, coming, coming to the forefront.

And, you know, well, you know, I think, I think that if you're in a, I think if you're in a smaller state than Florida, maybe like say you're in Iowa and then you're doing local marketing in Iowa, you probably have a better chance there than you do in Florida of being successful because you're going to have less competition.

That's your opinion.

Okay, that's my opinion.

Yeah, it's wrong, but it's okay.

It's wrong.

Okay, I mean, it's wrong and right. I mean, if you go to anywhere, there's going to be— if there's more competition, it's going to be harder for you to rank, right?

Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying. When you're in a major metropolitan area, but we're not trying to—

anyway, this could go down a whole rabbit hole, bro. We could be talking about SEO for 45 minutes.

Okay, that's true.

Um, but yeah, uh, I think that it's a missed opportunity on our part, and that we definitely should be, uh, low optimized locally, at least Fort Lauderdale. Payment processing would be a start for me.

Okay.

And, you know, but yeah, Leads are— Lead Generation World, the conference, all in all, it was decent. I had a good time, I guess. You know, there was a lot of people there.

Yeah, there was a lot of people.

It was a lot of call centers, a lot of— well, there was a couple attorneys. Shout out to the attorneys attorney. I can't remember, you guys, sorry. Um, I can't remember the firm name. Oh, they gave me that cool shirt.

Oh, I don't remember. Oh yeah, I remember that. A cool shirt. Yeah, whatever. It had like a lion on it or something.

Yeah, it was like a— it almost looked like a band t-shirt.

Yeah, well, if you're doing— if you're gonna run a big phone room, you better have a lawyer because you're gonna get— you might get sued, or at least You got a year.

The attorney said you got a year. Yes, she said, she said that to us.

So yes, she said you got a year.

You got a year before it really hits the fan. Um, so all you guys out there making cold calls, 300 and— well, 200 and, uh, 365 minus 14, whatever.

So 351 days left.

350 days.

350 days left. Yeah. No, I think that people need to rethink some of the, some of the marketing. We talked about like newspaper, how can we do newspaper, or how can we get into some newsletters, or what are people reading. Like, tell us, like, we should do a poll, like, okay, you're a business owner, what, what are you reading? Like, where are you getting— where are you— where are you reading?

Where are you consuming it?

Yeah, where are you consuming information and for how long? Are you consuming it on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn? Or you get— do you go to an app like New York Times or Wall Street Journal or local newspaper app? Or do you get the newspaper, the That's a lot of questions, right? I know, I'm just saying, like, where do you consume your thing? Like, I owned a restaurant, okay?

We know.

So when I owned my restaurant, the big thing was to get into that dining section on Friday of any local newspaper. On Friday, the dining section of this back then was the Sun Sentinel. You hit the North Broward, South Palm Beach County, uh, dining section., and they had a 4-page insert that went in the middle of it, right? So you wanted to get an ad on that, and I usually would wait till Thursday, and I had to add ready, and you had to buy it. And they don't sell one ad, there's always one ad left. You could usually get it for half price. So I used to get the remnant ad.

Nice.

And, uh, you know, I used to get it as often as I could because it was Yeah, I mean, the newspaper ads are still—

I don't, you know, people are reading the newspaper. Newspaper didn't get stopped, right? That's for sure. And they have websites, so I think that's another viable avenue for us to take. I mean, again, this is going back to traditional marketing, man. Like, I really think the old-school tried-and-true ways are coming back on the forefront. You know, print advertising didn't leave anywhere. Magazines and newspapers are all coming back. People still listen to the radio. It might not be radio, but it's streaming, so that's an opportunity to put a place to add on. They're streaming the content on YouTube, another place for you to place an ad. I mean, so these are all traditional ways of getting the spotlight on your business. So I think that we were— well, not we, but business owners have been so distracted by the internet and they've kind of been led astray. Like, "Oh, don't use that. That's old school. Don't do that no more. No one's reading that." The business owner got told that so many times, it's like, "Oh yeah, why would I even spend any money on a newspaper? No one's reading the newspaper." But that's not true. Plus, the entry level for that has gotten a lot easier and more easily digested by the business owner because they can actually afford it. 40.

I mean, if I had to figure it out, I would think probably mail would probably be—

for us, yeah, mailing new businesses in the area. I think that's a great opportunity.

Yeah, I think that's a— I think that's a really good opportunity. I think it's— I think it's, you know, I think it— I think newspaper is kind of— just depends.

It depends. Yeah, I think it really depends. I'm not saying like, you know, your local newspaper, you know, the one that's in your neighborhood, community thing, right? You know, that I think is still viable. Not for every business, right? I mean, you got to think of it like, is my ideal customer picking this paper up, right? You know what I'm saying? So there's a, there's, you know, there's a rhyme for reason for everything.

So no, definitely, there's definitely, there's something out there for everybody. I think that you have to really start to uncover some rocks. Like, like we said, when that one guy was saying like Hey, if you have businesses in a local area, you know, they can get— do, do a mailing through like that company of people who just moved into the area. Well, that's probably— I don't— we didn't get the pricing from them, but I bet you that it's probably fairly—

I bet you it's pretty affordable as to what it was a couple years ago. Absolutely.

Yeah, I don't think—

I mean, I remember, I, I mean, we could speculate pricing all day, but yeah, I mean, I definitely remember it being very, very expensive to do mailers 5, 10 years ago.

Yeah, I mean, I still get like Valpak in the mail. Yeah, but it all seems— that seems to be— that's one thing like we saw at the convention, a lot of things were geared towards like those home service businesses, and that's what you always see in there.

A lot of business to consumer.

Yeah, a lot of business to consumer.

Yeah, there wasn't B2B, many B2B booths up there. I mean, some of the software, the SaaS companies, I guess they're, you know, you could be implemented for a B2B type situation. But for the most part, everybody that we were talking to was all business to consumer. Um, even one of the persons, they even emailed us back that there's nothing that they can do for us because we're B2B, right? Yeah, which is Yeah, I don't know. I don't— I don't know, maybe they should have a B2B lead generation world. I don't know, that was kind of strange to me.

Um, yeah, the other thing that was, that was also interesting was like they said that like there was a few companies that made directories for home service businesses, right? And then they were saying like in the, in the webinar, in the seminar that we were listening to, the average person likes they're going to remodel their bathroom or their kitchen or do plumbing, air conditioning, that they get 2 to 3 quotes. So they take that same lead and regurgitate it, you know, to 3 companies, and then it's up to the company. Best price wins.

That's fair, you know.

And there's, you know, there is some— there are some, uh, lead gen— there are some websites for merchant services, but they're very expensive to advertise on. I bet they're— they want ridiculous amounts.

Oh, like the paymentsdive.com?

Not that, not Payments Dive, but there's like directories like Maverick Merchant.

Well, that's what I'm saying, like the same—

no, Payments Dive is a blog.

Yeah, but I bet you it's expensive to advertise on there.

Probably it's expensive to advertise on there. Yeah, that's the thing is how You know, you have to look at how much are you going to spend per lead. I mean, I've heard people tell me, oh, I'm spending $30, $50, $100.

The guys that we talked to, they came up to what, $75?

One guy was $75 a lead.

That's a lot of money.

Yeah, it's expensive. And that's just a lead. That doesn't mean they bought.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. So, you know, 30— like somebody offered us today, oh, $10,000. What was it? It was 300 leads a month for $10,000.

Came to $30,000 a month though. $10,000 a month, right? A month for 300 leads, right? Which would be $33 per lead, roughly.

Yeah.

And that doesn't even— that's just the lead, man. That's just the information. That's a name and a phone number and possibly an email address. This, right?

So then you got maybe 10% of those because it's cold calling you're gonna sell. So now out of 300, you sold 30 or 40 if you're— maybe 50 if you're good, right? So that's kind of expensive for 10 grand. You divide— take what's 50—

all this, all that— when it keeps trying to break this math to me, man, the math don't be mathing.

No, no, but I'm just saying what You got your calculator.

I know, I mean, I don't need a calculator. It's simple mathematics. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The math don't math most of the time when they're talking about these leads and per acquisition, and it's kind of getting a little played out.

Yeah, and I mean, someone was trying to tell me the other day Facebook ads for $8. I said, I don't know about that. I said, we've seen— we ran something.

I mean, it's possible. Again, like, people think that Like, it's just, I don't know, man. Yo, like, yeah, we can run an ad, but we're not going to be running an ad for payment processing. Like, that click-through cost per click on a payment processing, who knows what that is, $100?

Like, no, it's like $20 to $50.

Exactly. That's going to run through your marketing budget like fire in a dry field.

Exactly.

Like I don't— anyway, man, so I mean, yeah, we can run a whole shit ton of campaigns. I know what to do with that, right?

Right.

But is that gonna get our ideal customer 90% of the time? Absolutely not. And the people that file, trickled through, you know, I mean, we just have to try to figure out a better way of acquiring those, those leads. And yeah, more constant battle, man.

Yeah, we got to sit down, look at all the stuff that we looked at, at lead generation, 2024 Lead Generation World and see if we find it, find something. Oh yeah, shout out to these guys, CallTools. They had a really cool software for answering the phone with a CRM in it, so shout out to them. Looking at demo of that. And so you talk to those guys again? Yeah, she sent me a link so I can schedule a demo.

Oh nice.

So just got a few more fish to fry. Get to that. That's one thing on our list, to use that for part of our lead generation strategy.

All in all though, Lead Generation World was cool. Lunch on the first day was terrible. Lunch on the second day was, hmm, okay.

Well, at least they had salad without meat in it.

That was ridiculous. Yeah, I would— I wouldn't mind going back again though. I think they would, you know, do something a little bit more aimed towards B2B people.

Yeah, somebody sent me something today about some B2B thing in Chicago that's coming up.

That'd be cool.

That'd be cool. Might be interesting to figure out if we can go to that.

Yeah, my birthday is May 13th, man. Great birthday present for me, go to Chicago for this thing.

Okay, all right, well, let's look at— we'll look at that.

Yeah, man. Well, so we're running out of time.

All right, peace out, carpe diem, and like, subscribe, and share.

What he said.

Peace.