Digital Transformation in the New World | Ep. 01

Welcome to the Beyond Business Podcast. My name's Charles Mackay and I'll be your host of this podcast series where we interview go getters from technology and service companies, all here to make the business world a better place. Today we had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Darren Smith from South Africa. He's the Chief Strategy Officer at Hubble Digital and is a valued partner of single. Today we go through topics of digital transformation in the new world, not the world where it didn't work, how divisions are being held back and what those divisions are that are challenging. And in the current environment, how important getting your systems, processes and people all on the same page is which departments have potentially been your biggest hamstring and how technology is such an enabler, but can also be a massive disabler to how is your business being a custodian to itself? So, you know, similar to being a custodian to the land. Are you there to improve the land or are you taking from the land? Same with your business. Are you improving it from a sales perspective or a marketing perspective? Or are you just there to reap the profits? And that is my little man Archie in the background and he also makes an appearance throughout this show. So I hope you enjoy it and I can't wait to get into it with you. Welcome Darren Smith, all the way from Cape Town, South Africa. So pleasure to have you on the Beyond Business podcast. So really looking forward to digging into a little bit of who Darren is and where you've come from and what you're working on today. So welcome Darren.

Yeah, thanks so much. Awesome to be here.

Awesome. So, before we get into this, Darren, tell us a little bit about your background. Like, obviously you're in South Africa. Where did you grow up? And, you know, rewind a few years to give us a bit of an understanding.

Yeah, so I've always been here in Cape Town primarily. I think being stuck here because of my sport, need to carry on surfing. So that's why I haven't left Cape Town. But I do have a global business. So, yeah, like working with people around the world and get to travel a huge amount of. In terms of kind of background I finished in school. Going back as far as that, I really had no. I didn't see much value in going to study something. I wanted to get my hands dirty and actually learn as quickly as possible. So I couldn't identify what I wanted to do. And a lot of friends were at that stage, kind of late 90s, doing computer science. And so I signed up with a whole bunch of friends to do a one year computer science degree and then became a developer, which I absolutely hated. It was too mundane and too much in front of the computer and ended up being in the right place at the right time, where I was busy building websites for a large telecoms company and they were going through some difficulty and they immediately retrenched their entire marketing team as companies do, because that's the. Sorry, that's the team that is perceived to be wasting money and most probably were wasting money.

What era was this in what year?

This was early 2000s, very early 2000s. So the CEO came to me and said, well, you build websites, that's marketing now you're the marketing manager. And suddenly I got ripped out of writing lines and lines of code to actually something a lot more that I enjoyed kind of 12 months later, once again in the, in a meeting room with the CEO and he said, our competitor has grown like this. We haven't grown. What's the problem? So I said, well, you know, we actually won an award that year for the first live stream TV ad we had. I taken people to the rugby, like everybody was, you know, really loving what I was doing. And he said to me, you know what, we'll pay for you to study marketing. So I went to go and do night classes and weekends and so on. Study marketing. Within the first month of that, I knew exactly what I had been doing wrong. I really was just doing what the typical marketer does. They do fun things, they do creative things, but without a very good positioning, without a very good value proposition, with a varied positioning. And it also struck me, since coming out of that environment, the amount of promotions I've seen where a personal assistant or a events manager and so on has suddenly been promoted and elevated to the role of a CMO or marketing director. And they made, they continually make the exact same mistakes that I made back then, but they're not realizing it. I didn't realize that I thought I was doing great work. I had won awards and so on, but it wasn't helping with the actual growth of the company. So then I ended up working for almost eight years in that role. Had a team of about the T people.

Wow. What did the team end up sort of looking like in the structure and what were they doing?

Yeah, so it was like a team that was structured back then on their line of speciality. So there were events managers, there were PR managers, they were above the line advertising managers, there was digital and everything was in a silo. And my job was to try and come up with programs and campaigns and then try and make sure that the digital person was doing their digital part of that. And it kind of aligned to what the above the line person was doing and what the events person was doing and so on. So like I was supposed to be the glue between all those different, different teams and then they also. Those teams had had regional focuses.

Yeah.

And yeah, I mean the end point for me there was a request for me to move and as I said, like I'm not going to move where there are no waves and they wanted me to move to Johannesburg. So that wasn't a thing. And then at that point realizing, you know, out of all the service providers I was working with and being one of the largest brands that I was working for, we were working with the most expensive, most well known, most awarded, most decorated agencies and consultancies, but every single one of them were still trying to win awards. They were really not concerned about the outcome of the work that they were doing in terms of real business, tangible results. And so that's what kind of led to starting the agency. Because I just thought there's an opportunity.

Yeah. So between that job that you had and then the agency, what didn't you do something in between there before the agency officially started?

Yes, yes I did actually. So I worked for a mobile ad company for six, seven months around there. It was eye opening in two senses. So the company was headquartered out of India and had its kind of business address out of San Francisco. And what struck me immediately was I had been a glorified project manager up until that point. I was incapable of actually doing marketing myself. Everything I did, I briefed an agency and working for an American style company, they asked me to do things and I had no agencies, I had to do it myself. And that was eye opening. The second thing is selling mobile ads. We were creating such amount, such a buzz around it and jumping onto that kind of that horse that everybody was talking about. You know, mobile is the next big thing you have to be in mobile. We were creating so much PR around it reports, that type of thing. But in reality, the only person that I've ever seen click on a mobile ad is my daughter when she's accidentally trying to, you know, play a game or something on my phone.

Or skip the ad on YouTube.

Exactly. I mean like I've never clicked on one. Well, I did back then because we had to fake clicks because nobody was clicking on it. And we had a table full of, full of mobile devices and we click on them and you know, it is Crazy, because the media buyers that I had worked with up until that point, I thought they really had my business interest at heart when I was a brand. But what I discovered in this process is as soon as we weren't making targets, which was often because who buys mobile ads, I would put out a product promotion to the media agencies and say, if you book with us within the next three days, we'll give you an extra 10% commission. And suddenly we would hit target. So what I realized in that process is that agencies are actually even less interested in getting results for your business. They are chasing commission. So one of the things that we have done from day one as an agency is we have not taken the 15% or 20% commission on media spend from day one because it promotes bad behavior. I mean, to be honest, if your targeting is that good. Exactly. But all the. And if you go and do the Google AdWords certification, everything it tells you is trying to get you to spend more. And, but that, I mean, Google wants you to spend more. That's how they make their money. So like whenever anybody in my team, they need to have the Google AdWords certification because it's kind of a needed thing being in digital. But I always tell them like, okay, you learn the tool, learn where to click and how to do things, but take it with a pinch of salt. Take it where it comes from. It's coming from a media company that wants more and more spend. So don't go and do everything that they say it's not good for our clients.

Yeah, no, I totally understand. So from that. And then you and your business partner at the time, Graham, went and started mpul, is that right? So did you start the agency first or did you build some tech or tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, so first of all. So what we realized is our experience. My experience at the telco company was in the business to business division and there were long sales cycles, anything from three months to two years to get a company to switch to use your infrastructure. And so my agencies at the time would give me reports that said we got this many clicks on your ad or your brand equity increased by Y. And I knew that because what I used to do is every single Contact Us form that came through our website, I got cc'd on it and I would look at the inquiries and 99.9% of them were not our target market. They would not be able to afford the services that we offer. Many of them were actual job seekers and so on. So like what I wanted to work out is true return on investment over a long sales cycle. So I wanted to find a piece of software that integrated into CRM systems that let you track marketing entirely. And I think it's a typical South African thing. I went out and thought, let's build a piece of software as opposed to let's do see what's there already. And so the first business and was also called mpool and the idea impulse stands for marketing pool, was to pull all your marketing from all different angles and all different sources together and give you that unified view. And there was a view for a CMO where you essentially have a marketing calendar. And you can see I've got a press release here in this city today. I've got an event here, I'm running TV ads there and you can get that view and then you can drill down and see what contacts have been associated to that campaign and then link into a CRM and you can see how much did that person spend. So created this piece of software. This was like kind of 2011, 2012 around there and nobody bought it. We had a lot of meetings and every marketer loved the idea until we told them that you would have to actually enter information into the software. And bearing in mind that I had realized shortly before that that many marketers are glorified project managers and their agencies do everything for them. They don't want to do work. So we had a breakthrough with a large financial services company where we just tried a different angle. Instead of saying that we've got a piece of software, we said, you know, we're going to run you a campaign and we're going to do all the creative and all the execution and then we're going to give you an amazing report at the end. And they agreed in the meeting to that and only charged them 10,000 rand, which didn't even cover my flights there and back twice where I had to go out to see them and the hotel and that type of thing. But, you know, it was. It was our first customer and yeah, it actually worked. We created an amazing piece of content. It was a long sales cycle. It took several weeks to nurture the lead. There was one, only one out of the. I think they had about 500 leads. One eventually became qualified, but that company spent millions in the end. And essentially what we were doing is we were bundling our software in with services. And so we started to get some traction there. But then all the money we were making, we kept on coming up with new ideas and new features for the software. So we still weren't taking a salary because we were paying developers to constantly add new features to our software. And I ended up in a good coffee meeting with one of the first employees at Eloqua and explaining what we were doing. And he said why are you trying to create software when Eloqua does this already? Exact Target does something similar. HubSpot does something similar. Why don't you just use that software? You can clearly listening to you, you understand this concept more than the average person. And I know that having worked at Eloqua for the last few years that people don't understand Marxists don't know how to do this. They don't understand it. So there's an opportunity for you to sell services. That's what really kicked off the services where we stopped developing our software we did back then. If you look at the Martech infographic, I think there were 300 or 350 pieces of martech on the Martech infographic. A large percentage of those were around media tools like the one that I'd worked at before. So I immediately ruled out those because I was not interested in media at all. Having seen what kind of fast that industry is. I didn't look at the Google Analytics and all those type of analytics tools I went in. I didn't look at the social media tools because all they do is post social media updates and I didn't see much value in that. And so I went into the marketing automation space. The more end to end marketing tools that a full audit of. It must have been about eight of them at the time. And HubSpot came out as the top one for two reasons. One was the price. So when you compare that to Eloqua Exact Target, which is now Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I think there was Silverpop at the time, I can't remember all the others. Marketa I think was already there. They were all really, really expensive and we've been running without salaries, without income for months. We didn't have money so we went for the cheapest one which was HubSpot at the time. Subsequently there's a whole bunch of really, really cheap systems like Shop Spring and Zoho and Free Fresh Marketing and that type of thing. We've tried them, I will not touch them again. They're just unreliable and really they don't scale. So we went with HubSpot and yeah, I mean nowadays we do work with some of the other technologies, anything HubSpot and above. But back then, so it was the price and then the other thing was depth of functionality. So Still, a lot of the people that count themselves as competitors to HubSpot are just an email platform or just SEO platform or just a landing page platform. I think the closest competitor to HubSpot is Salesforce, but the Salesforce suite, because in order to get the equivalent functionality that you get in HubSpot, you, you need pod dot or marketing cloud, you need ad cloud or ad Studio, I can't remember what it's called. You need social cloud, you need sales cloud, you need service cloud, and you need the analytics tool. So that's six pieces of software all with a decent price tag. And one of the things that I've seen Salesforce doing a huge amount in the market, they price match HubSpot on one of their tools. So they'll say, oh yeah, okay, are you selecting par dot over HubSpot? Okay, HubSpot's gonna charge you $1,000 for this. We will match that and we'll charge $1,000. And then the client signs up because they think, oh, Salesforce. And then three months down the line they realize, oh, but I also need a, you know, to be able to track social media and I need to run remarketing ads. And suddenly there's two other pieces of software also at $1,000 a month. And then they go, oh, well, you know, actually now that I'm running three pieces of software, I need analytics tool to see the data because each one only gives reports on its activity. And then you need the analytics add on. And so like I'm still, as you can Hear, a massive HubSpot fan.

Fan.

Yeah, because it is end to end, it's integrated, there's no hidden costs. And actually, you know, one of the biggest objections I get around HubSpot, especially selling to more enterprise companies, is they charge you a price per contact.

Yeah.

But it is tiered pricing. So as you, I mean, we've got clients that have, you know, 2 million contacts on HubSpot. When you the thought of paying $10 per thousand completely freaks people out. But when you actually compare it to the cost of five or six pieces of software that don't have contact tiers, like at Salesforce versus this, it is still way cheaper. So it's a perception that often needs to be broken down.

So that like that journey, it's amazing how it's all flowed in. It flows beautifully and how your lessons and learnings have flowed through. So starting out like when you, the problem you're trying to solve was to pretty much stitch all of these departments and silos together and bring it all into one. What are you starting to see now? Like that was the initial problem, but what is the problem? What are the problems now that you're seeing as it's evolved? You know, it's nearly 10 years since you started and working with so many brands and agencies around the world. What are the problems that you're starting to see now and where you're trying to focus your time?

Yeah, so what we've seen is there's increasing mistrust in marketing still. Even though marketing can be measured, especially if you're using a tool like this. A huge amount of companies have adopted some form of content marketing and as a result, a content marketing formula is to be very. Do not push your brand, give true advice, give honest advice, but stitch your brand and your messaging into the story anyway. So what can you believe in what you read anymore? Because you know that it's been written either by a journalist that has been taken to an event and has been kind of brainwashed a little bit or by a copywriter that's been hired by a firm or an agency. So they may tell you that here are the 10 best cities to go and visit and nine of them really are, but the 10th one is Sydney and they've been hired by the Sydney Tourism Authority. You know, like you can't trust it. And I still think it needs to be done. It's very important. It's very important for search. More and more people are remote working now. They do online research. More and more people have global teams. Is no longer with everybody having experienced remote working. You know, people have realized, well, you know what, I don't need somebody in my city that I can see. Suddenly the talent pools increased. But now that means that it's not so easy for somebody to pick up the phone or even use a chat, live chat and be like, hey, how does this product work? Or does it do this or that? Content and content marketing has become even more important, but it's like it is not entirely trustworthy. So what I'm seeing is the brands that are winning, are winning on building amazing end to end customer experiences that are so amazing that people tell their colleagues, people tell their friends, their family, they move jobs and go back to that company. And so marketers have to spend less of their time creating ads and content and that type of thing and really being the catalyst for massive change in an organization. You can't say on an ad that you guaranteed delivery within 24 hours and then somebody orders and they get it 72 hours later because your, your Strategist at the ad agency said that there's an insight that people like instant delivery. So you just put that on your box and just hoped in the background like a better strategy would be to not say anything and somehow work out how to do a delivery in 12 hours and, and absolutely blow the customer away and then they will tell their friends and so on. So it comes like, so where we've kind of pivoted the agency to, and I actually call it more of a consultancy now is to identify end to end customer journeys. So from acquisition of customers to onboarding of customers to retention of customers to servicing those customers. Like as a marketer, how can we make sure that there's no friction, that we remove red tape? I'm like, I'm even shocked, you know, HubSpot preach this stuff as well. And I asked them for something the other day and they said oh no, we can't do that because the internal process doesn't allow us to do that. I was like, well how can you be customer first, customer centric organization if you say you can't do that because of internal process. So so much of the marketers work is moving from being, you know, just these guys that create ads and value propositions to actually having to change managers. Yeah, exactly. They, I suppose they go beyond business to actually make significant change. And then word of mouth. So what happens? Faster and faster you see brands, a new thing launches, especially in digital. TikTok launches. The brands that succeed are the brands that get there first because within weeks the audience, the customers of TikTok, the users of TikTok have worked out how to zone out or tune out from ads. Some developer has developed a little app to block the ads, that type of thing. So your window of opportunity is so small because consumers do not want to be marketed to like that. And so the only marketing that will ever stand the test of time is word of mouth marketing. And the only way you're going to get somebody to talk about you isn't by going to an agency that does viral campaigns like many would think. It's about absolutely delighting those customers so that they organically talk about you.

And especially the environment we're in now, you know, that's more prevalent than ever. What are you finding with the, you know, going from this transition where you're literally end to end customer, where's most of the friction you're seeing within organizations? Is it that marketing and no longer fluffy. But they, you know, that maybe the CEO doesn't want to have to destroy all of those other divisions to make that change. Like where are you seeing those friction points?

I'm seeing a huge friction in technology. It is so difficult. In order to really delight a customer, you need a single customer view. If a customer engages with you on whatever, whether they live, chat, whether they phone, you need to know who they are, what they bought, what problems they've had before, what's their lifetime value to you, that type of thing. And you need to be able to respond to their requests quickly, quickly. But if you have to, you have to open five or six or seven different systems, some of which are not cloud based, that aren't integrated, sometimes have different customer reference numbers. It just is a complete blocker to amazing customer experience. So, you know, many, many analyst organizations like Gartner and Forrester and that type of thing have predicted for years that marketers will spend more on technology than the IT organization. And this is kind of what's kind of happening. Marketers are becoming more and more involved in technology because often the IT guys, and I was an IT guy, but they are, you know, stuck in their ways. They decide, oh what? You know, we are a Microsoft house. And they won't consider anything else. They haven't moved on to say we're going to use best of breed technology. They just completely switched off for that. They're like, we're going to use Microsoft now. Microsoft Outlook might be great, Excel might be amazing, but SharePoint is terrible. Microsoft Dynamics is the worst piece of software I've ever seen in my life. Have you ever tried to use that thing? It's like a desktop application most of the time. There's a cloud version, but wow, it is ugly, it is slow, it is complicated, the interface is horrible. It adds no value to the salesperson that's trying to use it as an example. But the IT guy is going, no, no, we must be a Microsoft house. So there's huge friction that then develops between marketing and between it. And that's like in the end, the person that's impacted is the end customer. And when the end customer is impacted they then go, well, screw that. Instead of working with this old school organization like an accountant is amazing example of this. I'm going to switch to Xero because Xero is completely cloud based. I can buy from my credit card and it's easy to use. It integrates with a whole bunch of things with the Microsoft products. They don't have RESTful APIs, most of them. You have to be a. NET developer if you want to integrate with them. That is Dinosaur kind of thinking. But it exists in many of the organizations around the world today. And you know, I think that's where you're going to start seeing, you know, these organizations that you think are large.

Yeah, yeah, they're not agile enough. They're not ripping it out and going, you know what? And the young guys are going to come in and go, you know what? We can do it faster, cheaper, more efficiently and better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I've been reading recently Infinity Games by Simon Sinek and he has a, he writes there about, I can't remember the exact time, but the average age or age expectancy of an organization has dropped by decades. And the other thing that I've taken out from that book is many of these old school organizations are absolutely obsessed with, with these fictitious kind of time periods that they have invented. Like a quarter or a month or a year, like, how did we do? What was our revenue, what was our growth, what was our profit? And they chase that. And as a result, they're not thinking about the future enough. Like, how many CEOs paraphrasing what Simon Sinek says here, but how many CEOs measure themselves on the innovations that they have launched in their time as CEO that has ensured that the company is going to be there for the next decade? Most of them go, well, in the seven years that I was here, we grew EBITDA by this, like, okay, great, why did you pick seven years? What happens next year when you leave? And because you did not ever think about how customers are changing and the new set of competitors you didn't even knew you had that the following year you basically crash and die.

Totally. I think it's a similar thing to like with land and being the custodian of land, you never actually own it. You're realistically there on it for a period of time. So if you are running a business, you're a custodian of it. You're not, you're not there to keep it forever. And if you come in and just drive profits for three years and hit all these records and then two years later you've left, reality is that should be seen as a failure.

Yeah, exactly.

It's amazing listening you talk and how things have pivoted and changed and evolved. And I agree that the departments that you've worked in have been the change makers and innovators for sure, from when you guys started to where you're at today. Like, what's that vision look like to now? What has actually played out? How different has it been and what's that journey been like?

Yeah, it is very, very different to what we thought was going to happen. As I said at the beginning, we thought we were going to be a software company. We are. Now we don't. We resell software, essentially, but we are a services company. When we started, there was 300 pieces of marketing software available. Today, there's 8,000. So many of the ways that I thought the agency would make money are now being replaced by a piece of software that does it better, that uses artificial intelligence and algorithms and all that type of thing to get better targeting, better insights, better everything, and at a fraction of the price. So as an example, I know some agencies that used to charge in terms of rand, terms like 120,000 rand for a landing page. Now you can buy HubSpot for $800 a month and you drag and drop and create a landing page. So, you know, a lot of software has eaten the revenue that I was expecting to get. And so, yeah, it is a difficult place to be in as a consultancy, as an agency. So we've pivoted a huge amount from doing a lot of the work to the consulting part, the thinking and giving advice and input. Because even if you take websites as an example, there are hundreds of thousands of website templates available out there today. And how different can a website possibly look from each other? There's always going to be a navigation, there's always going to be a hero, there's always going to be a footer, there's always going to be, yes, you get some amazing creatives and I still think that there's an absolute place for that. But for many companies, it's not necessary to have this really, really fancy website. But they go the cheap route of selecting website template, but then they don't invest the time and effort in working out what should be on that page, why should it be there? How are we going to convert? Is customer acquisition their number one thing or is service and existing customers the number one thing? Or are they equal? And is your website, if it is equal, yeah, built for that. So people don't. They go, they get a copywriter to write copy, they drag and drop some modules and they go, here's my website. But it doesn't perform because they did not follow that strategy piece. So the agencies pivoted or the consultancy pivoted a huge amount to do a lot more thinking and consulting work. And then, yes, if you need us to execute, we'll execute. But otherwise you can do it yourself or you can find a super Cheap freelancer. So we now compete in a huge amount against freelancers, which I never anticipated when we started. And freelancers are interesting competitor because where I'm trying to build a long term sustainable business that yes, makes a profit, you're allowed to make a profit. And I'm trying to hire people that are the best. And as a result, you know, I need to hire managers to do things that the talent doesn't like doing and so on. We need premises, although we reconsidering that at the moment, and so on. So there's a whole bunch of additional expenses. Pretty much you take somebody's salary and we need to make two and a half times more than what their salary is. But a freelancer only needs to make the money they want to make for that month, their salary. And they're working from home, they have no additional expenses. So often that is lower than what they would expect if they were working for an employer. And so they take, if they put 100 billable hours in the month, which means they only have to work five hours a day and they want to make $5,000 for the month, they divide that, that gets the hourly rate and it is a fraction of what a consultancy or an agency charges. And that's. Although there's using freelancers and so on, there is a risk because they may disappear, they may get a really nice contract and pay you less attention, they may get sick, whatever. If our rate is three times that, some customers say, oh well, you know, even if they get it wrong three times or have to redo three times, it's still cheaper than working.

I think there's another part of it too which the freelancer doesn't get, which is that collaboration piece. So when you go into real problem solving as a business and you've got a really complex thing, to put all of that on one person is really hard. So that's where the power of collaboration and getting multiple people in a room or multiple people around the world to solve that problem really shows the value to just having a freelancer do it.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a huge, huge fan of T shaped people that know lot of stuff, but only a little bit of each thing. I believe they make the most amazing salespeople because they can identify opportunity. And I think they make the most amazing project managers and high level kind of consultants. But they need to work with specialists and know when to pull in specialists that can go deep. And their job is to keep that person on that, on the vision, on the, on the. It's so easy for somebody that goes deep to suddenly go down a rabbit hole and lose, lose track. So it's the T shaped person that needs to manage that.

And reality is you can't be a T shape without coming through, specializing in something, going very deep in it and then maybe jump into something else. You've got to have experience across everything to become T shaped. So I think that, you know what, you know, when the T shap sort of stuff came out a couple of years ago, people just jumped into it without knowing what they were doing in other divisions. And I think that probably found out a lot of people in that space going from a traditional marketing agency to going oh, now we're going to do this. But you've never done any of that so you need to go and learn a lot about it before you can just become a tee. And I absolutely agree with your point. It's sort of like if you looked at an apprenticeship. I think today in business it would be working through a whole business, through every division. It wouldn't be going and just learning a trade and doing one thing. And I can probably reflect that in my career a bit that I've worked in so many different divisions and departments because then you've got an understanding how the business works. Yeah.

And that T shape I'm like, it is incredibly important as a coordinating role because what I see with a lot of agencies still, and it completely blows me away that they still operate like this is they have different departments and the salesperson goes and closes something and then they that work gets divided up. So the paid media department gets the paid media portion and the social media department gets that and the inbound marketing department gets that and they all end up doing this amazing work in their little areas. But it sometimes conflicts with each other. The paid media person often ends up buying only bottom of funnel keywords and displaying bottom of funnel ads. Where the inbound department might be looking at how can we address the goals and challenges in top of final customer acquisition journeys. And then they don't spend any paid media and they wonder why it's not performing because they're relying completely on SEO and organic ranking, which is a long term strategy which you shouldn't expect to get any results for less than 18 months and then they decide oh well this thing isn't working for us and they switch it off. But that's so many. I see so many agencies that have these siloed departments and have absolute experts that can go deep in there. But and they. And post sale there's not a T shaped person involved that goes, hey, hold on. This is the whole campaign and program we're running. We need paid here and we need it like this and we need social like this and don't do it like this. And what's the point of buying that keyword where we spending money when we are ready, number one for that keyword, I'd rather redirect spend somewhere else.

Yeah, totally. Or put it into some brand advertising. If your competitors are outbidding you, put it at the top. So at least then you know people that don't know anything about ads will click on your brand.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So going and looking back at I suppose the journey you've been on, especially getting into this Martech environment, what would be a tip for someone that's getting started in it or looking to enroll their business to go, we want to go through a transformation. What would be the one tip you would recommend?

I think it relates to analytics and I know that I said just now that you shouldn't have odd numbers that you, that you kind of tracking against or measuring yourself against, but you do need to be tracking yourself. Like you don't need to use that as a way to kind of pat yourself on the back. But if you're not measuring something like, then you don't know how it's performing. And one of the biggest objections I've had when talking to marketers around Martech is they are worried that everything's going to be tracked. Then the company is going to see that for the last few years everything that I've done was bad. I'm like, well rather find that out now and make a change than carry on doing these bad things. So like analytics is not only ads and clicks and social media likes and leads you need to look at, you need to identify many different ways of measuring. It might be number of widgets produced in a day or cash flow reserves or all the different things that you need to analyze in order to check the health of your business and be able to make informed decisions and you know, all strategy is essentially crystal ball staring. You know, you look into the crystal ball and you, based on your, on your history, your experience, you make well educated assumptions and guesses that if we do this or if we do that or if we change here, it will have a positive impact. But you know, you need to then test that and you need to be able to, once you've learned did that work, did that not work? Then pivot that and pivot that and pivot that. So you do need to Focus on. You do need to be measuring numbers. And as soon as you identify what are those numbers I need to measure, you will suddenly realize that the systems that are in place are incapable of giving you those numbers. Which then leads you down. I need to do a complete system refresh or integration projects. Once you've got the numbers, then you can start rolling out programs and campaigns and all that type of thing. So, yeah, start with analytics is my ultimate tip.

I couldn't agree more with you about that and the fact that you can see a lot of people will come in and the first thing they'll probably do is a brand refresh or update this or update that, and then they won't go to the core of the numbers. And whether it's a generational thing or not, I'm not sure. But, you know, as kids, I remember vividly sport and, you know, everyone knew what their result was and what their time was and you would write it down and next year you would see if you'd improved or next month you'd see if you'd improved. But whether people are fearful of that, I'm not sure. But, like, reality is, the only way to move forward is if you're tracking what you're doing and if you're not tracking it or you're not going to move forward. So, yeah, I couldn't agree more. So over the nearly 10 year, nearly 10 years now, what's been something that you've looked back at and gone, you know, wow, that was something that was amazing. Successful, that you're proud of as well, that you will remember through this journey.

Yeah, I think there's been many of those moments for me, like, one of the overarching things has been to get inspiration from the different pieces of software that we use and the different suppliers and different gurus out there. But we've absorbed that, we've acknowledged that. And then we have built our own frameworks, our own methodologies, and we've innovated ourselves. And so we just, yeah, we constantly innovate in. And what I see in particular in the HubSpot ecosystem is partners sign up with HubSpot and then they do the HubSpot Academy and then they take that as the only way. And, you know, a lot of that, those methodologies and so on are created by people that have never been in professional services before. They are a software sales company and many of their things are absolutely brilliant. So don't get me wrong, but so many partners are just sheep and they're just following what the software company is saying, and it's the exact same as Google. Google's trying to sell more media, HubSpot is trying to sell more licenses. You go take what they say with a pinch of salt. And if you really, really understand your customers, problems, challenges, the macro environment, the micro environment, if you really understand digital, if you really understand CRM and service, then you can develop your own products and services and methodologies and frameworks. And I think that's an element of pride for me in that we haven't just copied, but the thing that makes me most proud around that is that we didn't do this on purpose. I think it's just built into our DNA as the original founders.

But.

It'S actually become part of our employee value proposition in that we've got employees that may have moved on, gone to different agencies, gone to brands, and we've got other agencies and consultancies that try and poach our employees on a daily basis. But we've got such loyalty for from past employees and existing employees because we innovate and we question the status quo and we do things our own way and it stimulates them because otherwise they're just following a playbook. And so, yeah, the thing that makes me most proud is, is having built that kind of, that value proposition to the employees and being able to create such a loyal group of employees as a result of that. As I said, I don't think we can take absolute credit for that because I think it was something that was just in Graham and my DNA in the beginning. It wasn't something that we purposely set out to do, but it is something that's ended up happening that I think is awesome.

Yeah, I agree with you on that and that challenging the status quo. It's interesting actually because we've all had to do it and go through a lot of certifications and there's one at the minute that I disagree with a lot of it. It's built by someone that is a very, probably highly intelligent person, but very theoretical. It's just not practical at all. And, and we're going into a practical world now where you've got to be a doer, it's not so much, but you know, do and learn and execute or do learn, execute, you know, put it around in a circle, you know, if you think all day and don't execute, you're just never gonna move, especially today. And some of the stuff that's coming out is very theoretical. So. Yeah. And you know, being obviously working with you guys for so long, the innovation and Change you guys at the forefront of that. So I think it's awesome. So just starting to bring this to the ground. It's been awesome chatting with you, Darren. What's some things like we're in obviously really challenging times. There's a lot of crazy stuff going on. But what are a couple of things that you're really looking forward to and have a positive outlook for that's keeping you going in these times?

Yeah, I feel like everybody's saying this, but I think it does ring true in that we're in digital. We're in, you know, building amazing customer experiences which involves technology and building applications and building customer journeys and automation and so on. And I feel that not like although the concept of digital transformation has been around for years and years and years, I think a lot of people have given it lip service and have it work.

It didn't work though. It now actually works.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm seeing some of the tools and stuff that we put in place which weren't actually being used properly because it was easier to just go over to somebody's desk and be like, hey, like you can now do the next step in the process because I've done my step. But that person that you've just interrupted may have had their mind somewhere else completely. They forget that you've now told them or you send them an email and then by accident they mark it as read and they've got a rule that all read emails go to a certain folder or something and these things get. That's where you drop the ball and then the customer has a negative customer experience. So I feel that I'm excited because I think many companies are going to invest in digital. I prefer doing business online. I don't want to have to speak to somebody. I'd rather self serve. So that's my preference. I think others are going to get it. I think as a company I'm excited that that opportunity is going to come around. And yeah, I think the world for me is going to change. This is going to people remote working and so on. They're suddenly going to realize that hey, this is actually pretty good and it actually works. And all those fears that we had that people are going to sit at home and watch Netflix, actually they carried on working and they probably delivered more so we don't have to micromanage our employees. I'm sure it's failed for many companies. People are watching Netflix because of the culture they've created and that type of thing. But I think those are the type of companies that aren't going to survive. Those are the type of companies that still use the Microsoft suite of products because they believe that is the thing.

That they should be doing and it's just too slow.

Yeah, yeah. And so the other thing that really excites me is part of what I do with organizations is in their digital transformation journeys. I say, okay, how can we do this if there's no email? Right? Because email is the, you know, your process is only as strong as the weakest point and email is your weakest point. And and because if you have 3,000 emails because you've got a notification, an alert, you've been at ED or whatever, it is a point of failure, as is Slack and all the other instant messaging platforms and so on. Like what you need to be doing is building processes and systems and then building a routine that says, oh, every day at 9 o' clock I'm going to go in and I'm going to check my folder for new installation requests and then I'll check again in three hours and then I'm going to go and I'm going to check my this system. And so you actually build a rhythm and routine that is not reliant on alerts and email that like eat up. So besides traffic and everything that we save in ourselves by remote working, the other thing is if you have, even if you just view the email and mark it as read, it still has taken a few seconds to do that. And if you have 200 of those, because you have 200 alerts, that ends up being 15 minutes. And then you go and check the news sites and the sports sites and that type of thing. And next thing it's two hours gone and you haven't actually achieved anything. So I'm excited to get rid of email.

It's fascinating actually. I know my previous life having been in it, there's a guy who develops some software that he, the way he used to explain in his sales process was just look out on your floor of IT people and how many people are there standing behind someone with a shoulder tap and he's like, so that's that person to shoulder tap, then the person at the desk to shoulder tap Times that by 365 days of the year and how many staff you've got, it's like thousands and thousands of hours. Then that's it. Which is generally run quite efficiently and smart. You throw that into a normal business, it's going to be like 50x that.

Terrible analogy, but it sounds like how the coronavirus spreads right. That's why you do lockdown. Get everybody away from email and shoulder taps, and they'll become efficient.

That's probably not a bad headline for the podcast. Awesome. Well, thanks, Darren. It's been. It's been great to get to chat to you, and. Yeah, I really appreciate your time.

Cool. Yeah, it was awesome. Thanks so much.