Episode 123: So, You Want to Amp Your Marketing? Here’s How.

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew. If you look at the best distributors that are out there, they're the ones that are attracting the lion's share of the very best sales talent, and the ones that aren't differentiated, that haven't made those investments, are really struggling to attract anyone. And I think that's a real disadvantage in this marketplace right now in the promotional products industry, given the competitive landscape.

Absolutely.

It's ironic that we are an industry that sells marketing resources to a large percentage of buyers who are marketers, or at the very least, buyers who use our creative resources for purpose-driven marketing. And yet a small percentage of us have dedicated marketing professionals and a codified, deeply tactical marketing strategy for our own businesses. In today's episode, Mark Graham and I are answering the question from a distributor about how to go about hiring for marketing and launching a marketing strategy. From who to look for, whether to outsource, and where to best invest your marketing spend. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Common Skew. This week we released the SkewCon schedule and there are so many inspiring and helpful topics. I want to tell you just about two of them. Brandon McKay and I are hosting a conversation with three distributor friends, Kevin Felgate, Kate Ivory, and Brenda Spears, titled Working Better Together: Reimagining Supplier and Distributor Collaboration. We're asking and answering the hard questions on on how to deal with problems, how to prevent problems, and how to collaborate more creatively in the future. And Brian Papé with Mear will be sharing insights into how he positioned Mear and a premium product line in a commoditized category that led to outrageous growth. That's just to give you a glimpse of some of the topics we'll touch on. SKUCon sells out quickly. I encourage you to scoop up those tickets now while there's still time. You can register at skucon.com. This episode is brought to you by CommonSKU, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Begin your free trial now at commonskew.com. Now here's my conversation with Mark.

We have a customer who said, and we get this question a lot, I need help developing a marketing strategy. What do you recommend?

So I, I was really struck by this email that I, that I received from, from this particular person, and it got me thinking about our industry's strong history in sales, but our industry's very weak history in marketing.

Shockingly.

Yeah, it's shocking because we're, you know, you could say the promotional products business is in a sales business of selling marketing to other people. Yet our own industry has been historically pretty bad at marketing itself and the people within it. And of course, that's a general comment, but, you know, I think a lot of people would agree with that. So it's not unusual to receive questions at industry shows given, you know, Bobby, you and I have done a lot of speaking over the years about how, and why marketing is important. And it's almost as though I feel like we've almost had to like sell the idea of why marketing is important.

Which, by the way, Mark, is crazy because we sell marketing resources largely to marketers and everything in our world revolves around marketing. I don't know where we had this detour, but— or if we ever even got on the path.

Well, I mean, I think like not to spend too much time in the history of the industry, but, you know, generally speaking, the industry got its start as distributor sales reps that were representing factories. And they would go around, like this is decades ago, would go around the country with a catalog booking orders. And it was very much a how many calls are you making today kind of culture. And that exists to this day. And, you know, to certainly a large extent, that's a very successful way of building a successful distributorship. But I think why marketing is so important is that it's another way of driving sales. Of course, that's the definition of marketing. It's like, how do you raise awareness so that you can bring more customers into the door? But I think the really successful distributors that have figured out why marketing is important, it's because they've been able to use it as a way to drive incredible sales. And that's why it should be getting people's attention, not because marketing is this like fluffy branding, positioning, kind of copywriting fluffy stuff that I think some people look at it as, but it gets the salesperson's attention when they know it's a way of driving revenue. And that's why it's so—

it's also important because we're all working with companies bigger than us typically, and we need to earn the respect not only through our ideas and our service but through our marketing messages. The most profitable distributor entrepreneurs obsess over their marketing strategy for this reason. They know clients will trust them with more of their overall advertising budget if they can demonstrate marketing prowess. Also, we're competing for mindshare, not, not just with buyers, but with prospects. And so we're competing for attention in a buyer's mind. So all of that, you're right, fits into the sales funnel, not the, not the marketing versus sales conversation.

But what a great point you just made there, Bobby. It is, it is, it is completely true that a lot of us as distributors are selling to people who are bigger than us and maybe more sophisticated from a marketing standpoint. And we as an industry often talk about this inferiority complex and why a bigger customer will treat a distributor as just someone who has got product that can give them a good price. I mean, that I'm oversimplifying it, but as soon as a distributor is able to invest in marketing and do it at a high caliber level, then all of a sudden the, the, the way the end client views that distributor changes. It's almost like they view them as now a colleague, someone who's on an equal footing as opposed to just some sales distributor with a catalog, and all they're doing is just placing an order with a distributor. And marketing has a massive, massive role in leveling the playing field.

Not just leveling the playing field, but literally driving margins up, because the higher the perception of your expertise and the more you can demonstrate that through your own service— I mean, there's so many reasons why there should be far more energy spent on it than there is, but it literally drives margins upwards.

Yep.

It's also, it's also a focused discipline, just like sales, just like accounting. It needs the work of a professional and you can't do this ad hoc. I think there's a, there's a journey in the, the life of an entrepreneur in this business where they go from solopreneur and they begin to grow out their team. And there's a, there's a really difficult hurdle to get over and that is when I can afford it, I'll hire.

Yeah.

Or work on our marketing, or we do it kind of just ad hoc until we get to a point. I may be getting ahead of myself, but it's just, it's a focused discipline like sales and accounting, and as such needs that kind of attention, right?

Or even worse, the solopreneur will look at it as purely an expense and say, this is too expensive for me to hire. And if I go back to that email that came in from, from this particular customer, that, that was threaded throughout the email was this legitimate concern. I'm certainly not downplaying it, but a legitimate concern as a 1 or 2 person distributor, how can they afford to build out a marketing strategy? How can they afford to invest in a marketing budget? And how can they afford to bring someone in if that person is going to be managing this budget and creating the strategy? And I would find it so interesting because, well, I think that's a legitimate concern. You have to be focused on ROI. But if done right, that investment, let's say we just use a number of $50,000 a year. Let's say that investment, it's interesting to see how we can draw a line between that $50,000 investment and a considerable return. And we're going to talk about that in this discussion. But to view it as just a pure expense, I feel is the wrong way of looking at it.

Yeah. Speaking on that topic, typically, Like I said, we don't tend to invest in marketing until we've hit some sort of level or plateau. But really, we should be thinking about it more when sales and growth are stalled or stagnating, or ahead of it, really, if we can. But in terms of what— one real quick budgetary question, because we get this a lot as a sub-question on this topic, that there are so many conflicting pieces of advice on how much of a successful business should spend on marketing. Some experts advise upwards of 10% of gross profit, and some, like the Small Business Administration, recommend 2 to 3% of projected revenues, or 3 to 5% if you're a startup or if you're in like high growth mode. But the problem with general statistics is that these numbers encompass a wide variety of industries, like from the Small Business Administration, and may not be a true reflection of what's required in our business. And in our business, we sell marketing resources. Everything in our world revolves around marketing, everything. So you could argue that there should be a higher attention paid to it. We would typically spend anywhere from 3 to 6% of the gross profit depending on the year and depending on what new initiatives we are trying to launch. So for example, if it was post-recession and we knew we needed to really amp sales or really focus on sales, or if we were going through a rebranding, you might see us spend closer to the 6% of gross profit. And, you know, it just depends on what we were, we were doing. So for every million dollars in gross sales at 35% margin, we would allocate $10,000 to $20,000 in marketing. Or probably an easier way to look at it may be to use Catherine's calculation of 1 to 2% of your total anticipated gross sales revenue. But just as a sidebar for those that are sort of wondering about spend and allocation and budget and things like that. But to your point, we're talking about not an expense but an investment because this is going to be an evergreen investment. Right.

I agree with those numbers that you share from your past at Robin. I mean, Robin's a big distributor, right? You do multimillion dollars worth of sales. You always had a marketing person that was in the seat. And when you're talking about these $10,000 to $20,000 investments, that was added to a budget. It wasn't added necessarily to headcount. If we dial this back a little bit and you think about that distributor who's just starting out or they've just got a couple of people, they're all salespeople, maybe one person's an admin, right? And they're they're really grappling with this idea of like, how do I bring in a marketing person? Because like, you, I suppose, had already gone through that at Robin, and now you were just adding additional budget. But if we, if we look back, what are some of the— or maybe I should ask you this, Bobby, before you had a marketing person at Robin, how did you make the justification for that role?

So you're right, we always had an investment that we watched. It was— I was on the P&L. We always had this, this line item attributed to marketing and marketing resources. And it grew and grew. I think where we decided to invest in a bigger way and actual— in an actual person dedicated to it was when we realized that we could no longer put together a marketing strategy and tactics ad hoc like we were. Because one of the challenges is because we work around marketing resources, we think that because we come up with a great campaign once a year, we think we're marketers when marketing is such a bigger discipline, right? It's strategy, it's branding, it's social, it's prospecting, biz dev, it's, it's, it's account-based marketing. It's all kinds of things, and it's a much larger discipline. It just required a whole lot more attention, and it was a little embarrassing. We made the investment far too late. We should have made it much more earlier. But a couple of things happened. One was recognizing that all of the clients we serve were huge corporations, that, that, that was the language they spoke, and therefore we should be doing that as well. Number two, we weren't growing inside accounts with existing reps, as it were. They needed marketing alongside them in alignment with growing their existing sales. And then number 3, we just didn't have the bandwidth as an organization anymore to ad hoc marketing. It just wouldn't work.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's a great point. And if I reflect on the early days at Right Sleeve, there was never a marketing person. That marketing person was me spending some of my time, and I had an interest in it. So I was focused on becoming better at marketing and kind of understanding how marketing would impact the growth of the company. But there even got a point— it got to a point where my approach to marketing as Right Sleeve grew was ad hoc. And we then made the decision to bring in a marketing manager who could do nothing but that. Yeah, build the strategy and report on the numbers and the ROI and all that stuff that I wasn't doing as an owner because I was running around hiring people. I was managing the business. I had my own book of business. And so naturally as things become more— became more complicated and I was less focused on marketing, the company started to really— it started to suffer until we invested in that role. And we've never looked back since then.

So you evolved into this in your distributorship then. And just as we were talking about, you couldn't—

you didn't—

like me, you didn't have the bandwidth anymore to focus on that. And the funny thing, I think, probably about both you and I, we both loved that kind of work. And so we probably held on to it a little longer than we should have. My guess— my— I did, and my guess is that you did too.

Yep.

And when you evolved into it and finally liberated someone to do that, it opened them up to focus on what kinds of things— like, let's talk about a little bit about who this person is, you know, what skills and talent did they possess? What were you looking for when you finally realized you need to do this?

In my case, I think I recognized that I had enough background in being able to create the the brand, the positioning, the design of the company, how we interacted on social and how people saw the brand. That was all foundational work that I did from those early days. And because I was, because I was really interested in that work, what I was looking for when I needed, when I knew that I needed a full-time marketing person was someone who could be a little bit more analytical. Someone who could do a better job of connecting the work we were doing around content or social or events or all the positioning that we were doing and connecting that better to leads. So that way, when we were— when I put my owner's hat on and I said, all right, we're going to spend X dollars on bringing this person in who is not a salesperson, they're a marketing person. So they're not picking up the phone asking customers whether they want promotional products. They were creating that demand and they needed to track that so that way they would earn the respect of the sales team. And if they didn't, if the sales team didn't really know why this marketing person was there—

Was there a struggle to first integrate this and then make sure— because, you know, one of the classic arguments or one of the classic challenges is how sales and marketing sort of live and operate in two different silos. Was there a struggle in those days?

100%. I don't think we got it fully right with the first person we hired. That particular person did, did a great job in the end. But in the beginning, this is not the person who's doing the job right now, but the person before, I think, really struggled to connect the dots between what the sales team was doing and what marketing was doing. And in those first several months, I think really struggled to earn the respect of the sales team. So some people that are listening to this, this is probably their worst nightmare. Like, hang on, I spend $50,000 or $60,000 bringing on a marketing person and they don't earn the respect of the sales team. Like, Learn from me in that there's ways not to do it. And the ways that where we struggled is that the sales team felt that the way the marketing person was going about things was too academic and was not rooted in the reality of how salespeople operated. So salesperson will love marketing if they, A, make leads come in, B, if they make it easier for that salesperson to sell. And we weren't not totally in alignment there. Things changed after we tweaked things a bit and we got the marketing person out on sales calls. We had them really involved in our events, got them really involved in the lunch and learns and the product knowledge sessions that the suppliers were coming in on. We really wanted to make sure that marketing person was integrated into the marketing team as opposed to being this person on an island that was thinking about brand positioning and tweaking Mailchimp results because It was like they were on their own island and not— they were not in lockstep with the rest of the business. So that was a huge, huge learning and probably cost us 6 months, 6 to 9 months of productivity and effectiveness in that role.

You know, and I want to actually throw in my— I think our challenge was very similar in the sense that we had too much focus on image and branding and on new business development and not enough focus on marketing as an activity that penetrated existing accounts or that was growing existing accounts alongside the sales team. So, and we also didn't augment all of our sales channels with our marketing support or our marketing efforts. We seem to get really lopsided in a few areas, which is fine if you really need, you know, new business to spend that kind of focus. But by not integrating that into directly growing accounts was one of our, one of our biggest mistakes. So too much focus on new business development and branding and image. So, Mark, we've talked about how and when. We've talked about who this person is. We talked about some of the challenges that we ran into. What does marketing actually do? I know that sounds kind of ridiculous for me to ask, but I want to clarify it here about what it is that marketing actually does.

So very simply, marketing drives sales. At the end of the day, that's what it has to be in our business. Now, I don't want to give the shortest answer that I've ever given in a podcast because usually I go on forever. But That's really what it's all about. Now, to get a little bit more detailed, not too detailed, don't worry, brace yourself, listeners. This is the point that Bobby, you know, goes out and makes himself a coffee and then comes back 20 minutes later. So I think that the key sort of day-to-day role in driving sales or like how this person drives sales, it's looking at the different channels that are available to invest in to drive those sales. So a channel is a thing like a trade show, or it could be email marketing, or it could be social media, it could be events, it could be paid advertisements in a, in a, in a publication, it could be digital advertising, so on and so forth. And I think that great marketers are the ones that are able to evaluate a number of different channels, test those channels, and then go all in on the channels that are working. So that's, that's my somewhat academic answer in terms of how a marketer can be very successful. When I told you about those 6 to 9 months of sort of the false start that we had with our initial marketer that we brought on a couple of years ago, as soon as we started to shift things towards this channel mentality and a little bit more analytical and understanding what was working, That's when we really started to see the magic because now salespeople could go connect marketing's efforts to driving additional leads and additional sales growth.

I want to add to that the fastest growth, the quickest sales growth that you can achieve with the marketing position, marketing strategy, whatever it is you're doing. You know, we all know that the fastest way to grow is to grow existing business and, you know, it's so much faster, but treating individual accounts as a market in their own right is the fastest way to grow, and aligning marketing within that. So that can be— and I deliberately didn't use the very boring, uh, marketing word for this, account-based marketing. Um, but in our industry, it's kind of fascinating, Mark. Not only do we not have the marketing conversation enough, not only do we not talk about it, have, have more classes around it and devotion to marketing as a discipline in our industry, we also don't talk about account-based marketing at all, which is staggering to me because so many people live under the 80/20 rule where 80% of the revenue is typically 20% of their clients or some kind of variation of that. But we typically get a lot of our revenue from a very small pile of clients in our industry. And it's astonishing to me that we don't invest more marketing resources to literally grow existing accounts. You know, that can be campaigns to buyers and other departments that can be helping the sales team by researching existing clients, knowing what their business is, knowing their business better than anyone else. So you can sell merchandise that solves legitimate problems. Treating every major client— doesn't have to be every client, but every year, top 10, your top 5— like a market in their own right, and then aligning marketing's activities toward that. Another example might be introducing new products, introducing seasonal products, building some really imaginative campaign around self-promo items that will inspire the customer, creating quarterly meetings with them that are about results and numbers, but inspiring them with merchandise, all those kinds of things that we don't do enough per account. Right.

I've been thinking while we've been going through this conversation about how to position a marketing investment in the eyes of, of maybe a nervous and somewhat reluctant owner who hasn't, hasn't done this. And what you said just kind of cued this up for me. So if you think about some things that distributors naturally do right now without really batting much of an eyelid because they do it in the service of sales growth. Okay, I'll give you two examples. So one is producing spec samples for a client meeting. So let's say those spec samples cost you $250. Okay, I'm just making that number up. A lot of sales-oriented distributors will look at that investment as a way to help them generate sales. So they go, $250, great. If that helps me land a $5,000 account, I'm going to spend that money all day long. Okay. Another example, very basic, is I'm going to go invite my client out to lunch and I'm going to spend $200 on a lunch because that time with them is going to generate some kind of sales return. And most people would translate, you know, a $200 lunch with additional opportunities down the line. Okay. So those are just two small examples. And I think if you look at that and you look at that same kind of thinking in terms of investing in a marketing person, so yes, it's going to be more than just $200. But I just give this example here. Let's say you're bringing on a junior marketing person and I'm going to use a number of $3,000 for someone that comes in in a more junior marketing capacity. All that is required to pay for that is an additional $150,000 in business at a 40% gross margin. And I think when you put it that way, and I think this is why I'm trying to go back to that lunch and spec sample example.

Yeah.

If you're a solopreneur and let's say you're doing $600,000, $700,000, $800,000 in business at maybe on the low end, a lot of people would say, well, to get another $150,000, if I'm already doing that amount of business, is not really rocket science. I mean, yeah, I'm going to need to put some work into it., but they've already reached that initial plateau or that initial foundation of sales. I think putting it in that context makes this argument make it feel less intimidating. And I don't know what you think about that in terms of justifying that expense when you put it in that framework.

Absolutely. Not only that, Marc, but you're not going to invest enough time and energy into growing those existing accounts if you don't have a dedicated person to it. We all know that spec samples, for example, the fastest way to land new business. But you know how many seasoned and successful salespeople struggle with getting those done for clients and getting those in some sort of cohesive fashion on a regular basis? The number one reason why a client fires a distributor in this business is not service. It's lack of ideas and lack of attention. And so when you're in this particular white-hot economy where you're doing everything you can to respond to deadlines and orders, I mean, especially now, they're doing everything they can to stay on top of things. The salesperson themselves, they're doing very— they're investing very little energy in proactive selling. So your marketing is this additional muscle, sort of sales on steroids that you get suddenly that can help you forward, sell forward. And when you think of it that way, it's not a marketing investment, it's a sales investment, right? Yeah.

Much like the decision to bring on someone in admin. If you don't have someone doing that role and you as a salesperson, sales-oriented owner is out there pounding the pavement and you're also doing presentations and you're vouching bills and you're dealing with bank reconciliation and all that stuff, following up with suppliers, so on and so forth, there's a pretty decent argument to be made that if you're going to bring on an admin assistant, then all you need to be able to bring in in sales to justify that expense is another $125,000. I mean, think of all the time that saves you. That should be a no-brainer if you've already got some kind of sales momentum. So marketing is no different.

Yeah, I think we just simply need to change the nomenclature, the word, the words we use around this, because I think marketing's got a negative connotation. And if you just think that this is like hiring a salesperson, not only is it like hiring a salesperson, it's like hiring a sales leader or thinker for every single one of your major accounts and your major salespeople. So if you think of it as a sales investment, not a marketing investment, I know it's a nuance, but I think it's a powerful nuance because it liberates you And the thing is, like, you and I know this, like, we struggled a lot with our marketing investment, so to speak, right? There are people in our organization that struggle with it. You and I are sort of driven to it. So we didn't struggle with it as much. We knew it had to be an investment. There are people that question that investment all the time. And when you change the language in your own organization that this is a sales investment, not a marketing investment, it's a think forward, go forward investment versus an expense.

Yeah, I'm going to add one more thing here because I know that we're selling the idea of marketing hard. And not only is it a great investment in sales, and I think that we've talked a lot about that already, it's a great investment in the equity value in your business. So if you're, if you're a distributor owner, and so you're getting a bit of a double whammy going on here. Number one, it's driving sales if you're doing it correctly. And number two, and I think way more important importantly, is it now positions your company as way more valuable than a distributor that simply has a client list, and the only reason that a client is working with them is because they have good service and good pricing. I mean, think about buying a business under those circumstances. I mean, there's lots of businesses that got bought under those circumstances, but I can tell you the valuations are pretty pretty meager. Whereas if you're a distributor that has created brand equity in your company and you've differentiated your business and marketing is now driving sales in a really exciting way, a buyer is going to look at your distributor company and say, this business is worth more than this other business where there's no marketing, no differentiation. It's just a couple of guys that are hitting the phone and, and clients are working with them because they have good pricing and good service. There are two very different types of distributors that are getting bought these days. I'm not suggesting that you invest in marketing so you can sell your company tomorrow, but I think there's a lot of distributor principals that at some point are thinking about that kind of thing. And, and marketing is, I think, one of the best ways to drive increased value in your business and something that lots of people should think about.

Yeah, it's so, um, such a great point because The more equity you build in terms of marketing, the more when salespeople come to you or let's say you're recruiting, folks are going to look a lot higher. You're going to make their job a lot easier to get to their sales goals and to get to their sales growth. And they feel like they get that support that they don't get in other organizations. So it's huge for that.

So, Bobby, I think what you just said there about salespeople, the very best salespeople in terms of why they go and choose to make a home at a distributorship, the very best of them are, are not going solely because of a compensation agreement. Certainly that's a component, but it is not the only, and it's certainly not the principal thing for the very best salespeople in the industry. What they're doing, and we hear about this a fair amount sort of after the fact, is we'll have salespeople that'll say, I only want to go work I want to work at a distributorship that has invested in a technology platform like Commscue or others because I know that's going to make my job easier. And I only want to work at a distributorship that has got a differentiated brand because it'll make my job easier as a salesperson. And if you look at the best distributors that are out there, we all know their names. They're the ones that are attracting the lion's share of the very best sales talent and the ones that aren't differentiated, that haven't made those investments. Are really struggling to attract anyone. And I think that's a real disadvantage in this marketplace right now in the promotional products industry, given the competitive landscape. Absolutely.

That really what we're talking about when we were talking about building equity is building the resources inside your organization, being an independent, thriving, growing operation. And when a top salesperson sees this, they see a tech infrastructure that supports them. They see a marketing infrastructure that supports them. They see an admin infrastructure that supports them. And they think there's no way I can't grow with this company.

If you're a great salesperson inside or outside the industry that's looking to join a company, you're going to be looking at companies that have made the investments in technology, marketing, admin operations, because you know that'll make your job that much easier.

A lot of folks may be asking themselves, what about outsourcing this activity instead of hiring someone and the burden of payroll and all the things I got to deal with with that? You could argue that, well, having a dedicated marketing person, you have a limited viewpoint, you have a a limited style. They may be really great at video marketing, but they're not good writers, whatever it might be. You could argue that an in-house marketer might have limitations. If you chose to outsource, one of my— initially I thought, why wouldn't I outsource? And then I now, looking back, realize that the number one reason I wouldn't outsource is because this is a sales position with a marketing title, and I need them involved in account-based growing. And a marketing firm is going to do all of generalized lead gen, generalized branding, messaging, all those things that they're good at, those disciplines at, but then they're not going to get in and do actual account penetration.

Yeah.

Am I wrong about that? I'm leaning toward the in-house.

Yeah. So I think as it relates to do you outsource this role or do you bring it in-house, I think that there are certain things you just can't outsource. And one of them is strategy. Strategy. You cannot outsource marketing strategy, right? And but the things you can outsource are the tactical things that you may not have in-house talent for. So I'll give you just one simple example. So a lot of people come to me and say and ask questions about websites. So what I like to say is create your strategy as to how you want your company to be seen in the marketplace. You should do all that stuff in-house. But when it comes to like building a website, your marketing person may not have the chops to do that. But good thing is that you could go to, say, Squarespace or WordPress and go to their developer community and hire someone and pay them a couple thousand dollars to go and build a website on the Squarespace platform that adheres to the strategy that you have given them. Yeah. So the key in outsourcing anything is having a really tight spec and saying, here's what we want. We don't have the technical ability to do this in-house, but we're happy to pay for for it, then you get that back. So it's almost like a transactional experience. But anything that is not transactional, that is more creative and it's more strategic in terms of how your company goes to market, that 100% needs to be done either by the owner or an investment that they've made in bringing someone in-house. I feel super strong about that.

Yeah, I agree 100%. I agree 100%. You really just can't outsource that. We work too much in too many intimate details with each of our clients and And I go back to just this account-based marketing approach that if you're going to have folks that are going to be involved in growing sales, they need to be really close to the accounts. They need to be close to the sales team. And you're never going to be able to create that relationship with an outsourced partner.

Never.

There might be some activity. Some people outsource social or they might outsource aspects of it, like you said. But for the most part, I still think that's a mistake too. Okay. Why?

Because I don't think it's coming from an authentic place. I think outsourcing social media, unless you've got a real unicorn of a person. I think you're going to get stock posts, wooden comments. I just don't think that you're going to have the social media presence that the very best people in our industry have. And if you look at who they are, you just go through who they are, chances are they're doing it themselves because it comes across as so much more authentic and so much more on brand and it mirrors the strategy. That is, I think, really important. I think you see so much social media, I think, these days that just doesn't come across in that authentic way. And I think it's very obvious when it's being outsourced to an agency because they're delivering X number of posts per week. And I'm not a fan of that whatsoever. I've not seen that work. I don't think I've ever seen it really work very well.

Yeah. Uh, okay, Mark, put you on the spot here. Number one tip you would give— what do you want to leave folks with the impression about with this marketing position, this marketing idea? What would be your either one, or here's one, two, three, boom, go?

If you're building a distributor company, and I think if this also applies to a supplier, uh, as well, I suppose, you've got to look at the business as more than just sales. Yeah. And I think that the trap that a lot of smaller distributor owners fall into is they see themselves as sales agents for supplier factories without building an infrastructure that includes operational excellency, technological excellency, and marketing excellency as a discipline. And the thing is, is those require upfront investments which are intimidating and they carry risk. But I think the, the very best companies in our industry are ones that have made those standalone investments and are focused focused on ROI, they're focused on making sure those different parts of the business, and in this case we're talking about marketing, are driving ROI. And if they aren't, because it's not all going to be perfect, I don't want people to accuse me if they go and hire a marketing person, doesn't work out. Like, it's happened to us too, right? Believe me, I've been through marketing people before. It's on the owner to make sure they're tracking that ROI and they're making sure they understand what success looks like. And the same goes for technology you invest in, the same goes for operations you invest in, and we all know it also goes for salespeople that you invest in. They're not all going to work out, but the best companies have got these individual foundational elements of which marketing is a key part of it. And don't scrimp on it. Yeah, recognize the value they drive in your company going forward.

Yeah, I would add an addendum to this. My advice would be based on, again, based on our experience where we succeeded, where we is do this and map these activities first and foremost to existing account sales growth first. If you can map that to existing account sales growth first, for one thing, you as an investor in your own business, you're going to feel better about the investment quicker and faster. You're going to build the bandwidth you need to do bigger and greater things with your marketing. And then here's the other thing that I kind of want to warn folks about is that when you go to hire a marketing professional, You're not going to replace your marketing spend. So be sure and look at your entire investment. You know, if you're going to invest $50,000 in a marketing person and you were spending $20,000 before, guess what? You're going to spend $70,000. It's not— it's easy math, but it's a mistake that many folks do tend to make is they think that by hiring a person, what's going to happen when you hire the right person, you're actually going to spend more than you anticipated. So just be sure you, you look forward to think forward and sell forward and look at that position as an investment, as you said, in the brand and equity of the business and as sales growth and to map it to those activities and you're going to win.

Yeah. And I think my final comment on this is that it's not as risky as some people make it out to be. Right. I've actually got an opinion about how someone can go about hiring that first marketing person. So if now a distributor principal is on side with making this investment, Their next question is, where do I find this person? What do they do? In my experience, I think the best marketing person to bring in is someone who is just out of school. Fortunately, there's lots of people that are— there's lots of local colleges, universities that have got marketing programs, creative programs. So there's fortunately a lot of talent in the marketing space. Ironically, probably a lot easier to hire a marketing person than a salesperson in this industry.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Find someone who is just out of school, someone who's got that non-industry perspective and is able to come in and is able to work in conjunction with you as the owner to develop a marketing strategy that works. And then they then go and they explore those couple of channels that are going to really drive sales for for you. I think that's really exciting that, A, it doesn't have to cost as much as a salesperson, and B, I think it's easier to bring someone in. And what you're really hiring for is whether there's a cultural fit within your distributor business. And there's a lot of great talent, whether it's in a small market or whether you're in a big city, for entry-level marketing roles. And what I love about this is that if this works, if marketing as a discipline works, there's a great career path for this marketing person to either move into a senior marketing role where they may have someone who works underneath them, or this person may fall in love with the business and they decide to jump into sales. And by that point, someone with this marketing background working a couple of years in your business is going to be an extraordinary salesperson. And then you just repeat the cycle, move them into sales, find someone to go replace them again in a junior role, and you're set. So it's very— I don't think it's as intimidating as a lot of people make it out to be.

Yeah, I agree, I agree. And I just love your idea here that really we got to get our minds right. It's about sales. This is a sales position. And when you think in terms of that, like you just said, you could be training and grooming future salespeople stronger and better than you have with your latent sales training program because you're having them invest in the brand, the messaging, and in each account. So it could be a great training ground for this.

Well, and it's also really important, you think from a compensation perspective, that a marketing person And this is the big difference. If you're a distributor principal that is paying salespeople solely on commission and you've got a commission split, this is a little bit of a wake-up call for you that no marketing person is going to want to join your organization on a commission split, pure commission split. If they do, I would— I mean, they're either a unicorn or I would just run the other way. So it will require an investment in some kind of base salary that will comprise the majority of their compensation. But that said, it's important to include in their compensation some kind of bonus for sales goals. So they know from day one, listen, your job as the marketing person here is to help us drive sales. We're going to pay you X as your base salary, and then we're going to incent you with Y on the other side with the sales side. So that way they're really aligned with sales. They understand from day one that they're not just in some fluffy brand positioning job where they're just sending out emails. They're there and they're looking at the sales numbers and they're excited when a salesperson lands an order because they can trace that back to their efforts and they should be compensated on that.

Yeah. Mark, it's a great conversation. I'm glad we finally had this. We've been talking around marketing. We talk about marketing all the time, but we talk about it in little snippets of conversation. Had one linear conversation about this role of marketing, what it can do to boost your business. I actually think this is one of the most important conversations we can have. And, uh, be looking out for some follow-up material on this, folks, because this is a topic we are very passionate about, because if it's about sales growth, we're all about it. Thanks, man. Thanks, man.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.