Lori Turner-Wilson On Her Book "The B2B Marketing Revolution" | Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. And today we have Lori Turner Wilson with us, and she wrote a book, The B2B Marketing Revolution, and this is a must-read for business leaders. You know, everybody that's in business, you know, you're either B2C, business to consumer, or you're selling B2B, business to business. And business to business is a lot different in a marketing perspective and sales perspective than it is to sell to consumers. And that's what we're here to talk about today. So, Lori, you want to introduce yourself to the B2B Vault listeners?

Absolutely. Thanks, Allen. I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for the invitation. You know, today I'd like to talk about, um, challenging the way B2B companies think about marketing. So often business leaders think about marketing as this mysterious, unpredictable expense, and it really doesn't have to be. We're going to talk about how you can demand guaranteed outcomes from your agency partner, why they're fearful, rightfully so, but there's some reasons why they're fearful to actually guarantee their outcomes and how you can build a marketing strategy that's repeatable, predictable, scalable, which is every small and midsize business owner's dream.

So, you know, it's interesting. I just had a meeting right before this meeting with some guys from an agency, an SEO agency, and they basically blew up their entire business model and changed the business model. And now it's called the Ultimate Content something. Ultimate Content, they call it. And their ultimate content is, is producing one blog post a day to put onto your website and then being able to measure like how that content works. And I know a lot of people, it's hard for them to produce content. I've written hundreds of blogs. Okay. Hundreds. Okay.

But you have not.

And it's not easy. And you're right. You wrote a book and I know that's not easy because I attempted to write a book, but now this year I am going to write a book. Yeah. That encompasses a bunch of art. I wrote articles for a magazine, but I think it's important, you know, that what do you think, like, when you're talking about, like, using, you know, people use an agency to do SEO, or they're using an agency to run their Facebook ads and their Google ads. And sometimes it's hard to run ads when you're comp— like, for me, our competitors are Stripe, Square, Braintree, PayPal, billion, multi-billion dollar public companies. Companies, we— they're buying up all the PPC, you know, pay-per-click. So everybody knows what that is. Not everybody knows all the acronyms, right? And they're buying up all the ads on Facebook, buying up the traffic and jacking the prices up, right? So how, how do you— how, how do smaller businesses accomplish getting around that? Do you have suggestions for that?

Well, so the, the There's a lot of reasons, a lot of ways to do that, but the primary secret sauce behind how you create predictability is actually what I learned back in my enterprise marketing days. So I don't know if you know this, but I cut my teeth leading marketing teams in the Fortune 1000 world for Hilton Hotels, for TCBY Enterprises, for some really large big brands. And I didn't realize at the time that I was creating this framework that I would eventually roll out in my own agency. I was I was testing it against thousands of variables on a national scale. But at the end of the day, the biggest reason that I was able to create those predictable outcomes then in the enterprise world and now as an agency owner is because I have market research as my linchpin. And back in those days, Allen, market research was really expensive, right? The Fortune 500 companies could only afford it. It's how they basically kept smaller companies from ever taking much of their market share. But all these advancements that we have now in data analysis tools and AI have allowed market research costs to come down so significantly, it's really accessible for small and mid-sized companies. And it gives you— it can give you all the answers that you need to get true predictability and to have even guaranteed outcomes at the end of the day. And so few mid-market and small business leaders really realize how affordable and necessary it is to create that scalable marketing plan.

Yeah, it's very— it's, it's not easy. You know, I always say people don't fail. Don't, don't plan to fail, but they fail to plan. And, you know, you really have to have a plan when you're going to do marketing. And sometimes, and, you know, technology is moving so fast, right? Like, I've been in credit card processing since 2001. So in 2001, right? So in 2001, if you were going to go sign somebody up for a merchant account, we would have literally this 3-page booklet, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Filling it out. White, yellow, green, pink. Link, right? It's crazy. And today it's like, hey, give me your info, your name, business name, that's it, your email address, boom, I send you a link, you're filling the rest of it out, link, you know, boom boom boom, and there's no paperwork. Yeah, you know, so, you know, tech. And also like every credit card machine like, like these, you don't even need a— what, you can have it wired if you have bad Wi-Fi, but otherwise you can just plug this in, hook it up to your Wi-Fi, walk around your business and take credit cards from people. You don't need them. So technology, and especially AI, is moving at a rate like that's insane, insanely fast.

It's always surprising to me, you know, if you ran a manufacturing company and you wanted to buy a piece of equipment that cost $100,000, would you do your due diligence? Would you do research?

Yeah, you would go, you know, I learned— that's one thing. When I was— before I was in this business, I was a chef. And when I was in culinary school and before, you know, and they were like, well, when you become an executive chef, you might have to buy an oven, right?

Yeah.

And we're like all sitting around like laughing. Yeah. So what? You just go buy and, you know, you think to yourself like, it's an oven, right? No. So, you know, you have to learn like, oh, you're going to call 3 companies and you're going to get 3 competitive bids on an oven. They might not all sell the same brand of oven, but they all do basically the same thing. But you want to make sure what are you buying, what's the warranty, is it in stock, how long is it going to take for you to get it, so on and so forth.

Well, so it, it, the same holds true in marketing. And so the average, you know, small business lower end of middle market, they're going to spend, you know, $100,000 a year or so in marketing. And if you're doing that and you're not investing in market research, it's shocking how much is wasted. So we've been in business— Red Rover is my agency. I formed it about 20 years ago, just almost 20 years, and we've worked with about 300 clients during that time. And so there's some data that I track on all those clients that'll be interesting, I think, to your listeners here. So of those 300 clients, when they came to us, most of them came with an inherited marketing plan, right? A plan either their internal team developed or another agency. And we do an initial assessment and audit of that to determine what dollars are well invested and what's wasted. At the end of the day, average across all 300, 60% of their marketing investment was wasted due to lack of sufficient market research. We do the market research, we can see with clarity where their dollars need to be spent. So it's always so surprising to me when we invest so much as business owners, hard-earned money that we could be spending in operations or to hire additional talent, when if we invested it in researching our marketing strategy would give us a significantly higher ROI. And that's one of the one of the primary messages in my book and part of this framework, this playbook that I outline in the book.

Yeah, market research is super important, and a lot, a lot of people don't know where to get it. Where do I get this market research? How do I do it? Do I have to do it myself? Is it affordable to hire somebody? Right? And that's, that's where things come into. And, you know, I think as business owners, people get you know, people get scared. But I see a lot of businesses like SEO, it's changing. Marketing companies are changing. And then we have all this outside, um, threat from like Upwork and Fiverr and these people that are work for nothing from another country. And, you know, I don't do that in my business. I invest in the people in my office, and we do as much as we can in-house unless we find some way to do it outside of in-house. And, you know, you, you know, but I think pricing of marketing is coming down, especially with, with AI and tools available to do things that maybe cost $10,000 before to get a market research study, maybe now is only a few hundred dollars.

Well, I think cost is part of the reason why business owners are hesitant to, to really get behind market research. But there's another reason, and it's that As CEOs or company leaders, we think no one could more know more about our customer than we do. And I get that, you know, you spend night and day, blood, sweat and tears in this business. How could anyone know more than you do? But at the end of the day, you are beautifully biased as a business owner, and that's the kiss of death in market research. You see what you want to see with your customers and you don't, you don't see at all the full picture. And the objectivity that market research brings to the table allows you to see those customer insights that identify openings in the market that allow you to really optimize a strategy. So this framework is all about how do you execute a qualitative and quantitative research effort that will ultimately allow you to have predictability in your marketing strategy? And then how do you develop the resulting strategy and relentlessly optimize it to get a really strong ROI?

Hey, Sean. Whatever. He'll deal with it. Something happened to the camera, man. Now I got a different camera on. No, one of the things that, one of the things that we noticed in our business is that the, the customer base, right, customer base, when we look at it, we go, okay, 40 to 45 and above, they want one thing and they do business in a different way than the people who are on the younger side of the 40 45 and below. Yeah. And a lot of times if I'm talking to a younger business owner, they're, they're like, what are you talking about? You, you're— they're like looking at me like I'm their dad or their grandpa, right? Not that old, but, you know, they're like, oh, what do you know that we don't know, you know, about merchant services? And like, oh, we were on Stripe and Stripe cut us off. Right. And now what are we going to do? And then, you know, you start explaining to them, well, you don't understand about compliance and you don't understand about this and you don't understand about that. And I was reading a study that was showing how the two age groups, right, how they decide on buying. Now, the older age group decides on— they might go to the internet. They are going to ask friends or family or other business owners about services that they use. And then younger people do all their research online. Yeah, they, they literally— that's where they do all their research. And I think as a business owner, you have to sort of try to figure out how can we, how can we take care of these people and these people? How can we deliver these two different experiences, especially in the B2B world, right? Because let's say you're a clothing manufacturer, how are you gonna You might have older people that own clothing stores and you're selling to them. Then you have young people and they own a clothing store. And how are you going to sell to them? Those— the younger crowd probably wants to go on your website and order everything and they don't want to talk to anybody over the phone.

So market research to address that market research can help you identify who those customer profiles are. First of all, the demographics and psychographics of those different segments of customers that buy from you. But then there's something really important that is so often neglected in the marketing strategy. And it's, it's all about attribution modeling. And I don't know, have you ever heard that expression before? It's such marketing jargon, you might not have.

No, I've never heard that before.

So let's talk about just for a second, high-level attribution modeling and what it means to a business owner. So you talked about all these steps in the, in the touchpoint process, the customer journey that a, that a young customer, for example, online might go through before they ever pick up the phone and talk to you, right? There's usually 8 touchpoints before they'll ever interact with your team. And those look— can look pretty similar from customer to customer within that demographic. What you don't know though is which of those touchpoints is actually driving them most to make a purchase. And most people assume it's the last touchpoints, the last thing they did before they picked up the phone and called you, which might have been a visit to your website. And that's where we should therefore put all of our marketing investment. But if you really do the analysis, you might find that it's not the, the last touchpoint, it's the first that really has the most influence over their decision to buy. And if you put most of your money into that touchpoint, then, which could be pay-per-click advertising, you might see much stronger conversions. There's this really cool— there's platforms that will allow you to assign attribution to the touchpoints that matter most to your customers and are driving them to make a purchase. So without proper research and without knowing which touchpoints really matter to your customers, you're— that's where all that marketing waste goes.

Yeah. What, you know, like one thing is it's like a lot of businesses, especially the B2B, traditionally you would go to a trade show, have your booth there. But one of the things I noticed is, is ever since COVID I think industry trade shows still do well. Like if we go to the credit card processing trade show, there's a lot of people at this trade show. But when we go to a nightclub show or a restaurant show, Yeah, we're just a general business show. There's not a lot of business owners there. There's a lot of lookie-loos and a lot— not a lot. Business owners are not going to these events as like they were 5, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, where, you know, if you were a manufacturer of a product, you were at this show. Selling your cups or whatever it is that you're selling. Right. And now you lose that. And where did that—

where—

how are you going to get to the people who don't go to the show anymore?

Yeah. And, you know, you can waste $20,000 easy on a show, right, with your sponsorship and your travel. And that money goes fast if you're not spending it in the right way. So, you know, we— that just too much money is being wasted, darts against a dartboard. You know, what does my gut instinct tell me I should spend my marketing on when there is there's a science behind it where you can actually get that predictability, which is really great. And, um, I don't know if I've mentioned this to you, but my father was an entrepreneur. My late father was an entrepreneur. And so I saw how much money he wasted on marketing strategies that weren't paying off, and I saw the weight of company performance that he brought home. You feel it. I feel it as a company owner, right? You've got to make payroll. You've got to hit your numbers no matter. And marketing can give you the predictability and the peace of mind that lets you sleep at night and not carry so burden. And that's, that's why I do what I do. And when I'm helping our clients and helping your listeners, it's like I'm helping my father and others like him.

So like with marketing, you know, everybody like started going to like email marketing. Yeah, Facebook, you know, social media marketing. And then, you know, I've been reading a lot now people are saying like, mail is coming back. It is. Yeah, it's making a reprisal, you know, direct Direct mail. The only problem I see with direct mail is, is that one, the price of paper is through the roof. Okay. Because I've seen a ton of magazines go out of business because the cost of the paper for the magazine.

Yeah.

Is out of control and they can't afford it. And then, and then they go digital unless they just have a tiny little magazine like 10 pages. Yeah, you know, but a lot of them, like one of my friends owned a magazine for years and they bought at one point when prices were low, they bought like 30 or 40 rolls of the paper.

Yeah, yeah.

From China or somewhere. And then they were down to like their last 3 rolls. And when they started pricing out paper, they were like, yeah, this is not going to work. You know, we're not going to be able to afford to do the magazine anymore. They figured out how many more issues they had left and they went out of business.

Well, the beautiful thing, you know, your listeners being in the B2B space, generally there's a higher transaction value to a new customer, right, than in a B2C world. And that usually allows you to invest in high-impact, high-touch strategies like direct mail. Account-based marketing is one of my favorite strategies for B2B companies. It's this combination of sales and marketing touchpoints that are really high-touch and personalized that break through and make your prospect feel feel a sense of reciprocity, like they feel like they, they need to follow up with you because you've really done— make— made such an effort to connect with them personally. Direct mail can be a part of that. A high-impact direct mail piece that's three-dimensional, that's tactile, that gets into their hands, maybe it's even FedEx to them, can have a real impact depending upon the demographic of your market. But the research will give you that pinpoint precision. It'll tell you what channels what frequency, what day and what day of the week, what time of day to which particular customer profile. And that's the science of marketing is beautiful in that way.

Yeah, we've tried like some different things with like direct mail postcards. We tried doing like where you do the sort, not FedEx, but like the big envelope from the post office.

Yeah, yeah. Looks official. Yeah.

Official, big, you know, and things like that. But, you know, I've gotten marketing from companies where they've spent tons of money and they actually mail you like a box with a bunch of fancy stuff in it, like one of these cups, you know, and, you know, and a bunch of other stuff. And, you know, to try to get your business. And it's, you know, that's— I mean, it's just a big— it's just a big expenditure to go and do that. Yeah. You know, so it's, you know, I think people, you know, a lot of people struggle with like, okay, if I do this, is it going to work? You know, what's the— you know, that's the whole thing that I think business owners really worry about is how is— how is that— how is that going to actually work out? Another huge change, like in marketing, is people used to print up like postcards and print up like 8.5 by 11 data sheets on their products. And now, you know, people expect to find all of that on your website. Or for you to email them a email, email them the PDFs. You know, I think it's important that, you know, people have to think about like, you know, updating your, you know, updating your PDF so you can email that those things out to your customers, you know, and things like that. What would you know and what's your— here's another thought process like Here's a problem I always have with, like, salespeople that are in, like, a business and they might, like, be a 1099 for several companies. And I always tell people, like, you should have your own, like, personal brand, right? And have your own website, whether you have it under company name or it's AllenKopelman.com or whatever you want to call it. Right. And then that's your personal— that's your personal brand. And you have like at least a one-page website and you have a professional email address. Yeah, I think when somebody approaches me to sell me something and they have their email is, let's say, frameworkmarketing@gmail.com, am I going to trust that or am I trying not to?

Probably not.

Right. But that's what I'm trying to say. Like, I think, like, in business, need to think about because I know like a lot of older business owners, they have Hotmail. They have Yahoo, they have Gmail accounts. And you got to get— you have to have a .com name. You have to have at least a one-page website, even if you're like a startup business. Yeah, you need to have like the basic tools to look professional. And you have to have a really good LinkedIn profile because I think people really go and do— they're going to go put you in Google. So what do you want them to find? Right.

We treat marketing like an afterthought. We treat it like a creative endeavor. It's artistic and there is an artistic component to it. But so often as business leaders, we don't, we don't require marketing to live to the same accountability and metrics like we do operations, for example, sales, for example, that are a little bit seemingly a little more measurable. Marketing is that measurable. And I was it was about a year ago and I was sitting down with my team and I was toying with the idea of putting this playbook together because I know the formula to get this done. And it's not complicated, but you— it isn't easy either. And trying to decide whether to put this out into the world and my team thought I was crazy. Why would we put our trade secrets out to the world? And I just decided that there comes a point in your life when The impact that you make on the world is more important than your individual impact. And I wanted, I wanted to help entrepreneurs because I was raised by an entrepreneur. I am an entrepreneur. I wanted to help them realize their dreams. It's the foundation of our country. It is. It's just part of my DNA. And I wanted to be able to help them finally see the science behind marketing, how it can allow their vision to come true, how it can create predictable growth so that you know how to scale operations to support it.

So if there's 3 to 5 things you would tell somebody that's either starting a business or has a business, what are 3 to 5 actionable things people should think about and actually like do so that they can grow their business?

Yeah, that's great. All right. Narrowing it down. Number 1, everybody in a marketing profession around you is likely going to tell you that outcomes can't be predicted and you can't believe it. You have to deserve that. You have to believe it. Believe that it can be done and that you deserve guaranteed marketing outcomes, number one. And that's the very first of the 12 battles and mindset that's in my framework, the 12 Battles framework, that gives the— that will give your listeners the playbook for doing that. So that's number one. Number two is you need the deep consumer insights that will give you the answers to what your strategy needs to be that you can predict within a reasonable, reasonable margin of error. You don't have to spend a lot on it. We're talking $30,000. What you spend in marketing year over year and how much you're probably wasting. Easily a very, very strong ROI for most clients, about a 10x ROI. Number 3, you need to build your strategy. You need to build your strategy first and then build your marketing team around it. And so many companies do it the reverse, right? You hire a marketing director and you say, go create my marketing strategy. But what happens, that marketing director creates the strategy that's most aligned with their experiences. Not the strategy most likely to scale your company. And it's not a knock against good people. It's just human nature. You want to have some objectivity, hire somebody external to do your research and build your strategy. And then if you want to build that internal team, build it around the strategy that you've put together with the specialists that you need in each of those roles most likely to successfully execute that plan. And don't hire generalists, for the love of God. The jack of all trades that say they can do everything. Marketing is not the place for that. Marketing is too complex. It's too dynamic. You need specialists in each of the digital marketing specialties that are necessary to execute your plan. And the last thing, this is my favorite one. Tie your teams, your marketing team's compensation to outcomes. And I'm not very popular among marketing agency owners, as you might imagine.

Probably not too popular.

I believe your internal or your external marketing team should have skin in the game.. And if they've got the right infrastructure and the courage and conviction to stand behind their projections, this is a pretty easy thing to do. But tie your internal or external marketing team's compensation to your marketing ROI, not leads. At the end of the day, it's the ROI that is being delivered on your marketing investment. And there's a formula in the, in the B2B Marketing Revolution that will show them exactly how to do that. It actually gives more upside to the marketing team, and they'll eventually see it that way. But at first it's met with fear because they're there's not a lot of understanding about how to create that predictability. And I was in a— I was delivering a boot camp. We do this boot camp thing, and it's a 3-day intensive, 18 hours, like an MBA in marketing in 3 days. And I had a marketing director that was in there, and, um, we— she knew we were going to talk about compensation, right? She saw the agenda, she saw that it was on there, and she told me from the beginning she was really nervous about thinking about tying her compensation to marketing ROI. And by the end of the 3 days, she said that she got it. She understands how there can be predictability, how she can have the confidence to do this. And she wasn't afraid to do it. She actually presented it to her president as an idea where she had more upside if she overperformed the plan, but she wasn't afraid to do it anymore. So it's possible you can educate your team to be able to have that courage and conviction. So anyway, those are my top 3 or 4.

That's your top. So where can people find your book?

The B2B Marketing Revolution is the website where you can find more about it. It's also on Amazon. There's also a really cool tool, set of tools I want to tell your listeners about, all free at marketingtools4u.com. And it's got 50 or more templates, scripts, tools, platforms, resources, all the things you need to execute the playbook in my, in my book. It's all laid out there for free. For them to access so they can start to create a scalable marketing plan independently.

Wow, that's really cool.

Yeah.

And tell me, like, you— when we first— before we got on the podcast, so what happened? You were in the hurricane. Where were you living?

So Reddington Beach, Florida, down near Clearwater and on that little barrier island. And our house was built in the '50s. We're right on a channel. It hadn't ever flooded ever since the '50s. And Hurricane Helene came through and we got 4 feet of water in our house. So furniture floated from room to room. Almost everything was destroyed. We were out of town and we had pets in the house that the sitter, the pet sitter, couldn't get to in time before the floodwaters rose so fast. So we raced across the country. We were in our RV. We raced from Arkansas, which is where we were, all the way back to Florida. 2 days, kind of almost day and night, just slept on the side of the road a bit and got home. And fortunately, they all figured out how to swim. We didn't know if they could. They all made it upstairs. They were all alive and muddy and traumatized, but okay. And so now we're in the process of going through the rebuild. And I'll tell you what, it makes you realize what's really important at the end of the day. And it isn't all that stuff. It's, it's your family, it's your contribution to the world. And this book is my, my way of giving back and contributing to the world.

No, that's awesome. Because I also, I write for a magazine called The Green Sheet. And I put 2 articles a month in there and it's like supposed to be action. You know, I'm writing to people who are doing sales and merchant services and I'm giving them like my whatever, giving back to the community that I made so much money from over the last 25 years. So I did it last year and I'm doing it again this year.

Yeah, yeah.

It's, you know, it's enjoyable to do that. You want to give back. We receive so much. You know, and it's good to give back. It's always great to, you know, give back to the— because you give out and then you get it back, right?

Yeah, absolutely, all the time.

And what's the website with all the free tools again?

marketingtools4u.com.

Okay, that's cool. I'm gonna go check it out myself. Great. And thank you for being on the podcast today. It was super interesting. I think there's a lot of good information there. If you're a small, you know, if you're a big business, bigger business owner, obviously you can contact Lori and find out about her services or you can go to look at the tools, read the book and everybody have a great day. And thank you for being on the podcast. And I hope you and your family rebuild your house. I know it was very horrible. That's a horrible experience. Glad the pets are alive. Rocky's cheering down on the floor while he's snoring.

I bet he is.

He was having a bone, so he was all quiet. He willed himself out and you guys fed your dogs beforehand. So we had a bark-free podcast.

We did. It's a miracle.

So thank you everybody for listening to the podcast, B2B Vault. You can find us on Spotify, Apple, YouTube. Check us out on LinkedIn. And Facebook, everywhere you can find podcasts. That's where we are. Thank you to everybody. And you want more information about Nationwide Payment Systems? Go to our website. You want more information about Lori? We gave you the information. We'll post the links when we publish the podcast. And thank you for being a guest today.

Thanks, Allen. My pleasure. Take care.

You too. It was great to meet you.

Yeah, nice to meet you.

Glad you enjoyed it.