Shamir Duverseau: The Real Reason Your Ads Aren't Converting

Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fullcast and Silicon Slopes. I am so excited to introduce today Shamir Duvursoz, co-founder, managing director, and chief strategist at Smart Panda Labs. Shamir, how are you?

I'm good. Thank you for having me, Amy Cook.

Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. So are you hailing from Orlando today or where are you located?

I am. I'm in sunny Orlando, Florida today.

Yep. Great. And, and is it sunny and is it nice?

It is actually sunny today. It's, it's actually a pretty great day.

Yeah. Oh, well, thank you. What a great day for a podcast as well.

That's right.

That's right. So Shamir, tell me a little bit about your background. You have so much experience. You worked with Marriott Vacation Club and some of the others. So what brought you to SmartPanda Labs?

Yeah, so started in marketing back in 2000, I think it was, and started working with Southwest Airlines, working with their vacation packages division. So that kind of got me into product marketing, got me into the travel industry. And it was a time when technology was really starting to really take off and kind of, you know, get some legs. You know, it was probably right after the dot-com bubble kind of burst, but people were seeing like the value and the importance of internet. So as I continued my career there and then subsequently in NBCUniversal, Disney, and then Marriott, my role really started to veer towards marketing, the interactive, then now digital marketing space. So as I started to do that, one of the real pain points I kind of saw consistently across organizations was the ability for marketing and the tech side to really kind of align and understand each other, to speak the same language, so to speak. And as the internet became more and more important, as digital became more and more important, that challenge really started to really come, become more and more shallow and kind of come to the forefront in these organizations. And it really became a major bottleneck for a number of the large companies I was working with. So since I seem to have some good right brain, left brain thing going on that kind of allowed me to kind of speak both languages and do a lot of translation work. I kind of found that as my niche and kind of came to realize that, well, if that's something I can do here for these organizations that I'm working with, perhaps that's something I can do for other organizations and kind of help them out in that regard as well. So that was the seed that was planted that eventually grew into Smart Panda Labs.

That's very cool. And just for our listeners, edification, what is the elevator pitch for SmartPanda Labs?

Uh, so SmartPanda Labs is a technical marketing agency. We focus on enterprise companies, helping them with their post-click experience. So we help them strategize, plan, build, and optimize those experiences. So everything happens after someone clicks on the ad where they're really making that decision and helping people turn those decisions into actual actions.

I love that because, you know, it's, if we're dividing it into like the funnel, right? You've got your lead acquisition, right? And you, you got, you're clicking in there, you're trying to decide whether to fill out a form and sign up for more information. And I love that that is your, that's your focus right there because, you know, once the meeting is scheduled, there's like a lot I deal at Fullcast with everything beyond that once it's scheduled. Meeting and go all the way through, that our technology is suited for that. But I ran a marketing agency for 15 years and I'm very, very sympathetic and inspired by what you do. And so I think that it is, it's really exciting to see how you are combining the art with the science of marketing. Obviously with AI, that is something that has really come to the forefront. I have a lot of friends who have asked me, hey, do you think marketers are going to have a job in the next couple of years? Hey, do you think that marketing is important? Hey, do you think that sales is important? There's so much of people questioning basic, like, sales and marketing processes now along the go-to-market. What's your philosophy on that? What do you think?

I think marketers will definitely have a job. I think what marketing is and what a good marketer is has changed. That definition, I've seen that change, and I'm sure you have too, in the last 5, 10, 15 years especially, I think that's evolved. And as long as marketers are evolving with it and understanding their need to have a better understanding of metrics, a better understanding of how the business operates, a better understanding of some of the technical aspects, I think they'll be fine because you need the human judgment call on what to do and what direction to take. I remember working at Southwest in conjunction with the airline's kind of direct business, right? And we're selling these vacation packages. And the airline was selling a sale. It was like a, a friends fly free sale. Um, and initially they weren't offering that for vacation packages. It was only for direct. And what we were worried about is that, well, if we don't kind of take the hit and actually kind of invest and say, well, we're gonna self-fund this sale and do friends fly free, that people will think, well, I don't need to take a vacation package. I'll just, you know, kind of piecemeal it myself and book my own hotel and book my own air. So, so as not to lose market share to the direct airline business, we kind of took the hit. And that's not a decision that AI can make, right? That's a marketer kind of looking at the business and saying, okay, what do I need to do here? What's more important to me? Is it profit margin or is it share of the market? And that's a judgment call you have to make based on, you know, a number of different variables, some of them subjective. So I think as long as marketers are understanding those different business levers and what needs to happen, I think they're always going to have a job. It's just that that job is going to change.

I see. So what would you say, like, if you're looking to hire a marketer today, what qualities would you look for comparative to 10 years ago?

Yeah, I really do think it's, and I hate kind of saying this, right? But I think a marketer today needs to have a broader understanding of all the different areas of marketing than perhaps before. I think someone before could probably be a lot more niche and say, well, I'm a brand marketer, or maybe I'm more of a performance marketer or growth or any of the. You know, myriad of other titles that we kind of give to the different areas of marketing. But now I think you need to have a good solid understanding all those areas in a particular how all those things kind of interact with each other. And then you might have depth in one particular area where you're really strong with maybe advertising or you're really strong on maybe, you know, marketing operations or whatever that happens to be. But I think it's critical to have understand how all those pieces and parts play together. So I think one of the key things I would look for is that, that experience and understanding how have you worked with these teams, how do you collaborate and communicate with these teams, how are you understanding their pains and what they're, what they're looking for, the metrics and things that are important to them. And the better a marketer is able to kind of balance that and see how those pieces to the puzzle all kind of fit together, that's going to be really be what it kind of appeals to me in terms of being a, a poke marketer moving forward.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right on that because there are so many tools, especially with AI now that can help a person go, you know, into more depth. For example, I was just on doing a deck, an investor deck for our company, and my design assistant was Google Gemini, and they produced all kinds of images for me that I would've had to have bought licenses for or done a custom photo shoot for. And that's just not necessary anymore. So I fully agree with you that Understanding the overall customer journey and how all of those pieces fit together is very, very important. I also have found myself hiring for people who are good communicators, who are relationship-driven people, and who have an understanding of a campaign, maybe more so than just deep into creative. Do you have a philosophy on that?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, Understanding one part of the equation, for example, the creative part is obviously super important, but understanding how your creative impacts the other components of the funnel of the overall experience is also critical as well. How does your creative impact the brand and the brand perception in that person's mind? How does your creative impact how much trust you're generating as a brand so people can move through that process and say, yeah, I do want to fill out that form and kind of continue them that process, right? And those things resonate all the way down the funnel. So as people begin talking to a salesperson and so forth, that creative created a perception of the kind of organization and business they're dealing with. And that perception could be positive or it can be negative. So it could be the salesperson kind of having to dig itself out of a hole, right? Or it could be something that goes very smoothly, very easily because they've really gotten like, okay, these guys are polished. They're very professional. I feel good about this, right? You're getting past some of those psychological barriers. So yeah, I definitely think it's important to understand how what you do kind of impacts the entire experience that that customer or potential customer is having and not just kind of your kind of narrow little siloed world.

I really love that. And I'm sure that that comes up a lot with your work with other clients as you have to understand the lead generation process to understand the lead conversion process, right? Can, can you explain a little bit more about, you know, where you really focus and why what you're doing is impacting go-to-market today?

Yeah. So as you kind of mentioned earlier, where we focus is really kind of after that person clicks the ad and they're trying to gather enough information to get past their uncertainty, their doubts, their fears, and say, okay, I feel comfortable moving forward in this process. And as you mentioned, we kind of need to understand what happens even in your world, right after we fill out the form in order to kind of surface that information and bring it forward. So proper expectations are being set, questions are being answered. So people don't feel like it's smoky mirrors after they fill out the form and all of a sudden it's like, well, that's not, that's not the impression I got. I didn't think this was going to be about. And now salespeople are upset because it's like, well, this is a low quality lead. You gave me someone who was a waste of time, right? So how do we bring that proper information forward to help people feel educated, feel informed, feel comfortable so that when they fill out the form, they're able to then say, okay, great, this is ready for the salesperson. This person is the kind of person that we want to be talking to. And a lot of that is, as I'm sure you know, it's, it's about the metrics, right? It's about understanding how people are effectively moving through the process so that you can tie those metrics back to what happens before that form gets filled out, after that person comes in the ad, and how that space can help to be able to improve the performance of those metrics and move them in the right direction so that you're, you're measuring not just lead conversion, but also lead quality, uh, and kind of how that quality of that lead is leading to sales and lifetime value.

Oh, I like that. That makes a lot of sense. We've just been doing some exercises around our ideal customer profile and requalifying and rescoring leads based on those metrics. So we're in the same world right now, and I appreciate that, those comments a lot. So, you know, clearly you are at the top of your game. You know, you're, you're running this incredible organization focused on the, what's new and the, the biggest and the best in marketing. So how do you stay there? What do you do that is keeping you at the top of your game professionally or personally, mental health-wise? Like, what are you doing to, to help you stay resilient?

Yeah, I mean, there's some, just some basic things I do. I mean, a lot of reading, right? Trying to keep, trying to kind of keep pace with what's kind of happening or what's going on. Of late, I've really been reading a lot of, a lot more about psychology, behavioral psychology, right? How people behave and why they do the things they do. And probably the most important thing that I try to kind of stay on top of and keep a pulse on as we work with our different clients is the research that we're doing, getting direct feedback from the actual prospects and customers and understanding how they're thinking and how they're feeling, right? It kind of gets you out of your own head. It gets you out of the subjectivity and it gets you in the mindset of like, you know, I have years of experience, but it can be very dangerous to bring that experience to the table and make assumptions about how something should be or why people are doing certain things they're doing as opposed to saying, Yeah, this might be what I think or what has typically happened or maybe what I'm used to happening in this particular industry or instance, but that's not what people are saying. You know, that's not the pain that they're, that they're having. That's not the feedback they're giving. And I need to be driven by that feedback. I need to be driven by that pain and not just kind of by my own experience. So probably the most important thing I do is just keeping an eye on that research, you know, seeing what people are saying, getting a sense of that feedback. Consumers are constantly changing. They're constantly in flux. So kind of keeping up with that in itself is a full-time job, right? So being able to do that and keep up with that flux and just understand what that feedback is that people are doing, that level of intelligence I think is the most critical thing I can do to keep pace and keep moving forward.

Oh, I love that. In the words of Ted Lasso, be curious, not judgmental.

That's right.

Well, thank you so much, Shamiri. Really appreciate your time. How do we get a hold of you? And have you help us with our lead quality and conversion.

Yeah. So feel free, please, to visit us at smartpandalabs.com. That's the website for the agency. Or just please feel free to connect with me, reach out to me on LinkedIn or Instagram. You can find me at Shamir Duverson. I guarantee you, you will not find another Shamir Duverson on either platform. I am the one and only one. Thank you, mom and dad. So feel free to reach out with me to be there.

Wonderful. Well, Shamir, thank you again. It was wonderful to connect with you and I really appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for having me on, Amy Cook. I really enjoyed it. Business. Yes, that's business.

Business. Yes, that's business.