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good afternoon my name is Alan McCoy I am director of startup support at the University of Maryland's um Ventures and I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you who joined us today for the next installment in startup fundamental support shop series both live webinar audience and those watching a recorded version of when I started UMD YouTube channel this Workshop series is offered by Young ventures in collaboration with mtech at the Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland to everyone attending the live session please feel free to submit questions using the Q a function at the bottom of your screen and also our speaker will be asking some basic questions and you can put answers to those in the chat this session is recorded and will be posted on our startup PMD YouTube channel so you may submit your questions anonymously if you would like to do so at the end of the session you will be able to raise your hand and we will unmute your microphone and you'll be able to ask your question live if you wish to do so or you can just keep typing them up so today's session will cover a very important topic marketing you may have the best product out there powered by Cutting Edge technology but if you can't communicate its existence or value to your potential customers your startup is unlikely to be successful so today I'm pleased to introduce to this our speaker Tom Christensen Tom is an entrepreneur himself he founded a company called marketing as needed of which he is a founder and chief marketing officer thank you Tom for joining us and sharing your expertise with us today the microphone is yours I'll um stop talking turn off my camera and my mic but I'm here in the background so um ping me if you need me I'm here so thank you so much again Tom Mike is yours no thank you I I firstly want to thank uh Alan McCoy for having me here um and we collaborated in selecting the topic there are so many things that I'm enthusiastic about when it comes to both entrepreneur entrepreneurship and education and so this opportunity to speak to all of you is exactly how I love spending my time so really appreciated and of the many topics I love discussing there are so many aspects and elements of marketing the one that we will be talking about today is full spectrum marketing which for the sake of ease you can think about it as customer life cycle marketing on steroids um Ally has told me that the maturity of the products or IP or the business structures you're working with are at various states of maturity and so I've thought about that in terms of preparing the content and in order to be inclusive we are covering this topic from both a very aspirational point of view how do you want this to look in your organization two five years down the road and a very tactical point of view so how can you Institute these things today into your organization or into your thinking about your organization the tactics we're going to be talking about they get increasingly important as your company grows and matures but they also become more difficult to introduce as the company you know sort of culture takes shape so no matter where you are in your offering no matter where you are and thinking about your business in terms of Readiness I think these the concepts that I'm going to be showing you are going to be very practical today in terms of today's agenda I always have a mission I always have a goal so my goals for you are firstly to understand full spectrum marketing what is it that we are even talking about here today and what I would love for you to walk out from is to personally select one or two actions from this list of five that you can Implement today and how we're going to get there is we're going to be talking about a few different things we're going to be defining it what is full spectrum marketing we're going to be talking about those five actions that you can take to improve marketing at every stage and we're going to cap it off with where you should invest your next dollar or more realistically your next minute and finally we'll have an open q a at the end um as Ella said please put your questions into chat she will be moderating those I believe if there is anything that's unclear on a slide or any terminology jargon that I'm using please ask for clarification I want everybody to be fully aware of what we're discussing at every given point that said if there's anything sort of outside of the scope of this topic if you have another question about marketing whether it's just not um part of this content I would love to discuss that but that's uh we can discuss that during the Q a portion a cell um a little bit more about me and explain what I'm doing in this camera before you as Ella said my name is Tom Christensen I'm the chief marketing officer founder owner of marketing as needed we provide fractional marketing Services mostly to early stage B2B companies that are trying to figure out exactly how they should be building out their marketing teams scaling marketing as they're trying to accelerate their revenue operations I am a three-time startup veteran and of those three twice I've been the first marketing hire and built out the marketing teams for series a tech companies the products and services that I've worked on have been super interesting Technologies ranging from augmented reality AI in the financial technology vertical and Healthcare I.T vertical also working on web marketplaces so it really expands the gamut um not only have I worked on this that's also my educational background like I said I'm very passionate about the intersection between entrepreneurship and education as proven um here I I just got back from my 20th reunion in in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia uh from the Wharton undergraduate program where I studied marketing and Entrepreneurship and then went off to my first career which was a professional actor in Los Angeles this picture of me that hopefully you can all see is a computer rendered version of me from the video game NBA 2K15 uh I do not play basketball I cannot play basketball um but my character was a very aggressive agent who was trying to take advantage of a street basketball player who's trying to go pro so for any of you video game fans out there there's a minute possibility that you've seen this image before and then after that career I went back and I got a second Business Degree also at the intersection of marketing and Entrepreneurship this time from UCLA so I'm very excited about the subject now I am very much a dad I live in Columbia Maryland um on the weekends I do some improv comedy up in Baltimore and try to squeeze in a couple of yoga sessions so just a little bit about me firstly we're going to Define what a buyer touch point is you're going to hear the word touch point an inordinate number of times during this session and I want to make sure that everybody understands exactly what we're trying to refer to so let's set the table a buyer touch point is simply an interaction it is any interaction a buyer has with your business your product your service or your team that means there are a lot of them there are a couple of different types that we can discuss direct touch points this is probably what you're thinking about and a lot of the marketing you're considering sort of one-to-one between a company and a buyer it could be a phone call it could be an email Direct Mail something that you have a lot of control over there it's very trackable traceable and you have a lot of control over optimizing it and improving it additionally I want you to be thinking about in the back of your heads indirect interactions indirect touch points sort of one-to-many sort of the untrackable um things right so you know broadcast ads that where you don't get direct measurement or um word of mouth or people coming across your product on a celebrity that they see um sort of like this you can think about it as sort of sort of environmental exposure to what you are doing in your business for the ease of this um conversation and just to try to Anchor it some renal activities that you can do you can think about it in terms of email an email that you are sending to your your customer let's move on and discuss the definition of what we're here to discuss what is full spectrum marketing full spectrum marketing is this philosophy of seeing every single one of those buyer touch points as a lever to maximize your profit okay so buy our touch points if that's our definition is that that's our very broad definition of those they clearly occur before buyers are even aware that you're having an offering they might see your branding they might uh see an email come through and they just don't even recognize it they also continue after the relationship ends so they are dissatisfied with your product they go off and do something else they no longer have a need for it but those relationships persist and and they they have an impact the goal of thinking about things in terms of this framework is full spectrum marketing is to get everyone at your organization to commit to commit to the idea that every single buyer touch point is a lever I'm going to give you an example one of my favorite one of my favorite examples I don't really know um uh I would love to see hands and faces because for me this is very relevant I've got a I've got a child um I'm assuming some of you have been to Disneyland I'm also assuming some of you have been to Legoland and I'm assuming some of you have been to both there is this belief out there that I found true which is you never see a piece of trash on the ground at Disneyland um that is not true for Legoland you most definitely see trash on the ground at Legoland and it's a it's a result of active and ongoing business decisions and they are observed by their customers right I'm not saying one is better than the other but um there is an impact both on the finances of Disneyland and Legoland and on the customer perception right it is not inexpensive to keep Disneyland clean and operating right they coach all of their staff to consider themselves as cast members there's intense training that costs a lot of money there are reviews that cost a lot of money right the club like everything about Disneyland from the operation slide side is more expensive it results in a different product and that product is seen differently by the end consumer so trash on the ground at Legoland no trash on the ground at Disneyland does that impact how people feel about them does that impact how buyers are more likely to recommend one experienced versus the other this is um just to frame the idea that touch points happen they happen a lot they happen a lot of different ways and they are relevant with that said we are going forward for the rest of the hour with this idea in mind every interaction will either improve or diminish your brand there are no neutral interactions right when they've seen your product when they've interacted with you in some way it is either good or in the minds of the buyers or it is bad in the minds of the buyers so if this is true if logically all touch points matter then we are going to focus on the following we want to identify touch points we want to improve touch points and we want to introduce touch points we want to identify Monitor and measure the touch points our buyers have with us it's easy to stop tracking the small ones right these really minute ones because it takes effort and then time costs that the the monetary cost adds up but it pays dividends we want to improve those that add value and we have the opportunity to eliminate those that detract value and since most of you are at startups it's the whole the whole purpose of this right there is a chance that our customers have had no touch points with us that they have no interaction or no exposure to our brand or company or service and so it's very critical to be aware of when and how to introduce new touch points right we want to introduce new touch points that will attract right bring bring the right customers to us amplify and that is amplify the message that we're putting out there right because it's very expensive to do it independently and when I also want to amplify the size of our deals right we want to increase the size of our opportunities and we want to accelerate things we want to make as short as possible the time from when someone doesn't know at all about our offering to the time they are a paying customer this is where we stop for a quick moment and say we are talking about one aspect of marketing foreign that's predicated on the assumption that you on this call you watching this webinar know to a pretty high degree your customer how well do you know your buyer if you do not know your buyer there is activity that has to occur before these things right and your strategy needs to be aimed in the right direction before you put any resources time or money behind it so I will give you one example from a semi semi-hypothetical example from the healthcare it universe right imagine a software a software that a staff staff uses at any organization where they serve Healthcare patients right and we have two very different ideal customer profiles icps one is this sort of Private Practice and one is this hospital or integrated delivery Network you know chain of hospitals and pharmacies and things like that on one side we you know we'll label one as a small to medium business and they typically have two to 20 Physicians they have one office location and from the needs of the staff users they just need an easy interface right what they've been doing is clunky and hard and their staff turnover and they want to leave the business objective is to fill appointments an appointment scene is appointment um build and that's Revenue in the pockets of the business the buyer in this case is both the practice manager right they work at that office and they actually use the product right so they're one and the same and they have no technical support right critical to understanding how that person is going to be persuaded to learn more about this product and make the purchase decision right take for example again same software the Enterprise ideal customer profile they have over 500 Physicians they have multiple offices their needs are they need to be able to configure it themselves this is an automated tool that they can't do it themselves they're relying on customer service it's the reason they're out in the market right now they are dissatisfied with Alternatives that don't provide self-configuration the business need is they are in the metropolitan area and they have a very competitive hospital that offers a very similar um level of customer service and they need to beat them right it is a live or die situation they're fighting for a fraction of that market their buyer is in this elusive digital transformation role right nobody even knows what it means or uh or what they do on a daily basis but they're responsible for transforming their organization through any means necessary into a digital first organization and they have technical support they have large I.T supports and legal teams but they act in as much as they are opportunities to sell the product they are also hurdles right so again talking about touch points looking at this the touch points you select and optimize for are going to look incredibly different based off of who you're trying to reach who you're who your buyer is so if you have not already done this before we get into every action actions one through five talk to your buyer understand your buyer both the people and the organization you want to understand how they think you want to understand how they go about their business right so what business needs do they have right what are they trying to accomplish from the personal perspective what emotional needs do they have are they trying to win their boss's approval right are they just trying to get home um how do they manage these needs now what are the substitutes how do they buy one person needs one person's approval and they've got total budget Authority or is it a a committee decision of 15 individuals on a strict uh budget and they have to approach it like through a RFP or something a request request for proposal it has to go through this formal process how will they prioritize purchases right now has the CEO said I want everything to be powered by AI in the next 18 months pretty good if you're about if your Solutions powered by AI or do they have some other mechanism for prioritizing their purchases when do they buy right as your total window for this um like almost like the tax season and if it's like April 16th you're too bad you're out of luck and this one this one's one of my absolute favorites is um what vocabulary does the actual buyer use when discussing all of the activity above once you have that data you are ready to go back to this Mission at hand this fall Specter mission of looking at the touch points bettering the touch points and bringing on new touch points the first activity you want once you get to a place where you feel like you know you can reach your customer you've had customer conversations you need to choose your champion you need one True Believer to own this belief this thought process internally this is going to be a lot of work it is thought work it is communication coordination analysis that generates a clear picture of what your buyer needs and what your buyer responds to and this person is going to proliferate it with everybody else that you work with and so this person needs to have kind of a pretty interesting profile and if you were in an organization of one I think you know who the champion is it's it's you you need to act as the voice of the buyer right what does the buyer think about this how do we make sure that we don't lose sight of why why they're going to give us money for this in the first place why they have willingness to pay at all they need to be emotionally intelligent right it takes a lot of skill to talk to people who have different functions across the organization people who may be part-time or contractors or have a very different skill set or a neurodiverse right they have to be capable of engaging a broad set of people they have to be process oriented right everything that we're talking about here is going to be something that you want on an ongoing basis and so you're going to want to improve it document it put it into your lifeblood of your organization you will be doing this again so someone needs to capture and create an optimize process if this person is not you right if your organization is starting to grow then you must also they must also have visible support of the leadership right because they are tasked with going into everyone's work streams and saying we would like to add something uh that that um that mandate has to come from the top and so they must have visible leadership of visible support their first main task once you've found this person or once you've adopted this mentality is for you to map the customer Journey okay and what do I mean by that you are going to itemize every buyer touch point that you were aware of or you can track down that has led a customer from zero awareness into your organization and when I say every I mean every email every phone call every cupcake delivery you sent with to them the ad clicks they have form fills demos the contract revisions right coffee dates Etc something occurred between them and you you are going to create it right um when we're talking about these models they sound very linear right I am not in the market I am now in the market I found your product now I'm a customer the reality is never that clear and so itemizing those buyer touch points will give you very accurate uh jumping off point to do a lot of the remaining work if you have multiple buyers and multiple segments this is going to be a repeated process the good news in that case is you probably have you know a very rapidly expanding business it clearly adds a level of complexity to doing this work but it also raises the importance of doing it well I'm about to show you a couple of models but the critical thing here is that the models I'm about to show you are generic models they are not your models right what your organization what your business needs is a model that's created that accurately and distinctly represents your buyer's Journey on the left is a pretty typical customer life cycle guide people starting sort of awareness mode they don't really know who you are they're starting to warm up to you and say okay I know your product a little bit for this one I think I use a drone example later let's talk about drones so yeah okay they have a drone that does um you know some sort of industrial work okay cool now um I saw you at a conference and I heard you say something impelling so now I'm genuinely considering your product right and run into you and had a you know sat down at lunch with one of your representatives and I had that touch point now I'm actively considering you okay I took it back to the team and we are ready to buy right like we've seen the we've seen the benefit there's a value here to us we're going to purchase this thing and that's a whole phase right a bunch of you know communication back and forth and now I've started giving you money I'm in this retention phase right where you don't want me to stop paying you money so you're going to do things right you're going to communicate and engage with me in a way um to make sure that I continue the relationship and then I get to a place where I'm so happy I'm going to start advocating for you I think there's a critical flaw in this I think advocacy comes immediately after purchase right I even was speaking with a friend uh in um Financial uh advisory um yesterday and uh the time to get advocacy from a customer is immediately after the purchase and there's a distinct reason for that they came to you with a problem some sort of need purchasing your product resolves that problem right so they are coming from bad and going to good at this point in time they're likely very well informed about your product like likely it takes up a big share of their mind space now is the time to say oh you seem very excited about this how can we get your capture your case study get a testimonial what can we do to get um to work with you to you know interact with your network so that um your friends want to adopt this product too because you are very you have a very Salient story about what this fixed for you so I just pointing that out and you don't don't put off advocacy people become less likely to Advocate over time generally speaking on this right hand side if you take the left-hand pie chart and sort of spread it out um it's very similar right there are buckets of activity based on what the customer buyer might be thinking and here they've mapped a bunch of different channels right social media or influencer outrage or very specific um ad types again this is going to look different for your organization don't look at one of these and try to map your marketing Outreach to one of these it will not be efficient it will not be cash efficient right you're going to spend money in the wrong places but you can see how this one on the right side shows a little more of the loopbacks and the interaction between where a customer is it's not this linear um uh model for customer Behavior we need to capture all that data right that's what this Champion is doing or this Champion's delegate is doing start simple open a spreadsheet collect the following data points what was the message oh it was a email that said hey you might you know I saw your title you might be in this market uh this is what we do what was the channel That was the email channel right who sent it well and marketing sent it using some sort of automated tool um and there was a marketing analyst low level of marketing analyst who shipped it and that person reports to the head of marketing and uh they sent it to um the CEO of a company about this size they got it a very specific person got it was there an outcome no they didn't do anything with that and then who is accountable for improving that outcome okay so maybe it's the head of marketing head of marketing's job is to make sure people take more actions when that is sent you're getting a spreadsheet you're collecting all of this data and now now you can go back to one of those simple models and distill it into okay these this is sort of how our buyer goes through the purchase process this is the activity we've taken I see some gaps in here I see some oh that didn't go right or this one this was very effective let's do more of that but it's about capturing that data early and being very methodical about it I think this might be my favorite slide I want you to picture the almighty Fruit Roll-Up now I wish I could see everyone's faces because uh um you either know Fruit Roll-Ups or you don't right like as a child of the 80s like uh it was Mana from Heaven I was Fruit Roll-Ups were it's just gelatin and sugar that you play with with your dirty hands and then you eat it's absolutely disgusting but it's essentially a sheet of of uh gummy right and it looks very solid when you unroll it and it adheres to the plastic strip it looks like a solid mat right of food but when you do what you're supposed to do which is take it off and you start playing with it and you start stretching it out what looked solid all of the holes become very uh distinct right you start seeing where the gaps are and what looked like a solid thing is now you can see all how permeable it is right how flawed it is in this analogy and so that's what you want to do with your customer data right you want to stretch it out okay if you had a Contracting conversation was it three emails or was it four emails okay why was it four emails and not two what did the customer have to ask for information that you did not provide um was there a benefit to that delay uh would it have shortened the cycle or improved the likelihood of sealing that deal if you had led with that information or put that you know been more proactive in that what you say when you say it where you say it you can see all of that and the simple Act of gathering that data will fix so much and help optimize so much right because just capturing it everybody for the most part has very high uh you know good intentions for your business and if they see oh that could have been better they just fix it next time right but if they are not observing if they're not tracking these touch points um it's very hard to optimize those touch points action number two okay now that we know how a buyer buys from us uh and what about our Fields um we want to convert everybody at this organization to be an advocate our goal is to bring make everyone in the company take personal responsibility for this buyer satisfaction right in the small organization an organization of one or 50 right most people will have a direct conversation with a client as you get bigger than that the touch points become more obscure right but you still have people who never get on the phone with a customer their work does impact customer satisfaction so you want them to run that through their filter how do you get them to adopt this mentality you can do it through over trainings right overt actions like trainings those are very effective but they're very costly you need to prep for them everybody needs to stop their day take the training in terms of time costs they're very uh expensive what I want you to focus on here in the tactic that I want you to adopt today the subtle actions the nudges I want you to do sneaky little things that will help build this customer centrism into your culture as it grows and if you start with an company of one it'll be that much easier I want you to think if you haven't read it this book Atomic habits uh it's really just about making good habits you know building good habits and breaking down bad ones and spoiler alert it's about adding friction to bad habits and making easier good habits that's it that's all there is to it in the context of language right I want you to think about this one idea convert versus Buy there's this um model of the customer life cycle that always puts people in the conversion section oh we they we're converting them when's the last time you as a buyer ever converted right when's the last time you've used that phrase when's the last time you converted a pair of Nikes was the last time you've converted a honeymoon trip no you didn't you bought it you purchased it right like why are we using language that is irrelevant or even maybe like antagonistic to the buyer go in in your emails in your documents replace technical jargon and business speak with the language you have observed your buyers use right this is from that research period so now that we've converted everybody is excited about it we want to make it easy for them and we do this by adding forcing functions for everyone across the organization if every person Bears responsibility for buyer satisfaction make it easy for them to comply and make it hard for them to defect I'll give you a super easy one even if you're a small organization you probably have a salesperson or a consultant closing deals for you reaching out talking directly to buyers trying to move money you want everything we know about that buyer to live in one place in an organization one it's a document or a spreadsheet in a large organization is the is the customer relationship manager it's a sales force a HubSpot right some sort of tool doesn't matter but it lives in one place the reason you want it to live in one place is that you can analyze it track it look for opportunity the next touch point plan the next touch point but you need good data so you need to add a forcing function to make it full of good data because I trust me like no organization has fantastic data around this to do so you need to block incomplete records right like in sales in Salesforce it's very easy to do this oh you didn't fill in this note sorry you can't continue you can't pass go and you can't collect your 200 right you can also tie compensation to the process are people adhering and improving the um the sort of customers centrism a one that's harder to uh pin down is refer things further away from sales for example think about you fight your Finance right or accounts receivable what you can do for everybody is when you talk at town halls or you know Friday check-ins or any time that you're talking uh stand-ups your your retrospectives ask for an explanation of how something impacted the customer think about Finance accounts payable or accounts receivable they went from like Drop Shipping people to PDFs to now automating monthly invoices and from the customer perspective we can say customers are now seeing this sort of Professional upgrade we went from like super Scrappy startup sending them you know back a Von lope and now they can see that we are evolving into a more secure company right we're upgrading our operations that means we will be around to continue to serve them okay and prompting people for that explanation of how does this impact the customer we'll just keep people keep it top of mind for everybody action number four you are going to be operating your business by measuring a lot of things right and you will have data around what employees are doing and you will have employees around their outcomes and you will have them data around customer customer outcomes focus on measuring customer actions whatever data that you're Gathering as you build up this business did the customer do something that's the kpi that's the metric that's the observable you want to put first let's talk about an example for um I gotta move move my menu bar an example of a sales email you're sending out after a demo with a case study to prove the point that your product works and um you are a drone company the positive outcomes you could have could be the customer knows something which is good they feel something which is better where they do something which is best so in this case I sent an email to the buyer the buyer is now thinking okay well Alpha team has a drone that's capable of going into dangerous conditions and reducing staff time in field okay I know that that's good that's better than me not knowing that I want them to feel like Alpha Team could keep my staff safe and cut my costs right there is a personal connection to that that's good right it may that it's going to stick in my head best I mean better outcome yet is oh I reply to the Alpha Team asking to learn more I saw the demo I'm honest I want to re see the ROI right so I want to go through the business case with somebody right you want your customers to do something you want your team internally to be asking did they do something right so for every touch point did we have a desired action and did the buyer take it action number five should look pretty similar pretty familiar you gotta talk to your buyers right if you on this call have a product no matter the state you should have time this week on the calendar of someone who might have the capability of buying your product you will talk to them about it you will hear honest opinions about it and when you're talking about these individual touch points you want to know how they would react to it so in regards to your targeting right how do they feel about this solution right when you have this touch point when you send them a document does that resonate with them do they feel like that product fits in their world uh if not I mean it might not be the right buyer right you might not have product Market fit if it is the right buyer did they respond to the message did you phrase it in a way that is persuasive to them do they see their their peers do they see their opportunity does it reflect their goals and their needs um again going back to the language are you using the vocabulary the buyer uses to talk about their own pain right would they say it in this way and then it's time to think about efficient channels right you don't want to be like spending in ads before you've figured out those first two things so now that we have confirmed with our buyers that they are our buyers now that we have uh checked the messaging and said okay this is this is the best messaging that we can come up with now we can take that message put some dollars behind it and push it out to a new group of people to see if they will react in a positive way as well so you can find out which touch points are cost effective right there are plenty of channels right there is you know um you know Direct Mail you have social media you have search engine and marketing you have conferences right you have just going up and knocking on someone's door but which are the ones that are going to uh be cost effective because you have to remain cost effective to remain in business so go talk to your buyers here's a little joke from The Simpsons somewhere in the 90s beware of over indexing on a single buyer's point of view though uh this is from an episode at Lisa's grousing with her grandfather saying I'm too young no one takes me seriously I'm too old no one takes me seriously Homer walks in and says I'm a white male between the ages of 18 and 45. everybody listens to me no matter how stupid my ideas are and the product that they've built on that is nuts and gum together at last so as critical as it is to gather by your data do a sanity check make sure you're not over indexing on someone who has a very particular need or that their company doesn't behave the way other companies behave in terms of purchasing buyer data is still going to be your most critical North Star in terms of identifying where your future Revenue comes from but you always want to be checking to make sure that the information you have is representative of the market you're going into and not just the conversations you were able to manufacture so driving this home where do we want to spend our next time I'm giving you the actions I hope you found some that appeal to you or that you can see the value in in terms of what should I be doing now think about this in terms of buyer awareness invest your time in dollars in the buyers that are in market for what you've got or what you're developing so in this model right we go from completely unaware to simply just aware right the further you are away from a buyer in Market the more expensive it is going to be to induce them through any touch point to take an action so if they're unaware they don't even have no they have a problem so you have to educate them on that problem aware they know they have a problem they don't even know there's a solution out there solution aware they know they have a problem and that the solution exists They Don't Know About Your solution right that's a good that's a good place to start right as a startup nobody knows about your solution and then product aware they know they have a problem they know your solution exists but they aren't convinced that's probably what the next phase right is say okay well do I want to be the first purchaser of your product and then this is the phase you want to be driving people to right they know they have a problem they are aware of your solution and they are just ready to buy right like the timing's right the budget's right all of those things that's a very Advanced and that's a very processed um optimization place for marketing um but all of this can be improved and all of this can be affected by by marketing the most expensive as I'll reiterate is taking people from unaware to aware that it exists at all right it also happens to be where there are no competitors so you have to really think about um is the cost of educating uh going to be likely to be recouped in the fact that we're the first to Market in whatever this um whatever this is I've used it my time I'm going to go quickly through this bonus round as you mature your marketing you will be very excited about doing a lot of marketing possibly stick to one message in one channel as long as you can don't you will feel the fomo just breathe through it you're not losing out marketing poorly is way more expensive than not marketing so the idea is to create efficiencies before complexity if if sending personalized emails one to one is working do that and create the efficiencies there make it inexpensive from an operational perspective to do and continue on learn to love the spreadsheet tools are nice software is nice I get about 100 emails a day from people trying to sell me marketing software they do help manage complexity they also create complexity go Lo-Fi do this on a spreadsheet it's shareable it's a universal language everybody everybody can everybody can look at a spreadsheet right you don't need to share um login credentials for our spreadsheet so stick with the basics there I want to thank you for your time we're going to move into q a right now but um in true marketing faction fashion I want to show you um what I would recommend you do which is I want you to have a call to action you want your buyers you want your audience to do something that's right so I would love for you to email me here's my personal email Tom at marketing as needed.com please reach out on LinkedIn as I said I'm a local I like to go to uh startup events and learn myself and get involved in the community in and around the DC to Baltimore Corridor so hopefully we run into each other connect with me there and if you want to discuss your product or your business idea um on a more specific level the only way to do that is if we have a conversation so uh feel free to reach out you can set time with me or just learn more at marketingnewsnita.com and I'm just very grateful for having the opportunity to talk to you all today and um now I think uh is a great time for Q a thank you so much Tom this has been a very interesting and very informative session thank you very much um so uh please submit your questions uh via the Q a function or you can also this time raise your hand and I can unmute your um your mic and you can ask a question that way so I have a first question can you use this technique in attracting investors um yes the question is can you use this technique in attracting investors all of the activities I've mentioned hopefully um if you if you take a step back they are text techniques for two things one is increase your persuasion and improve your operations so yes if you if you're a goal if your audience let's just call investors by you're the buyers investors if you are trying to reach them if you are trying to persuade them if you want them to take an action uh if there are multiple investors at a single organization all of these things apply all of these things are applicable to creating efficiencies around persuading people to take an action so I personally can see that there and if there is a um investor profile that you are trying to get to invest in you right you can very clearly see how identifying that customer profile talking to people or sorry investor profile talking to those investors getting their language understanding how they think about portfolio companies understanding how they think about exits and scale and the risk profile that they're looking to take on that deep knowledge informs everything that you're doing Downstream I'm gonna stop share here um and I'm going to continue here um can I see another uh Anonymous attendee um very mysterious can you offer advice about planning a focus group oh you're welcome Lisa uh you're a focus group to learn more about potential customers how they view your product yes um I I could give you a lot of advice about both planning that focus group um both in terms of thinking through your goals of that focus group thinking through how to moderate that focus group you know what to do after that it's very going to be um you know there are broad Strokes that you can apply to essentially any focus group right um know what your goals are going in what your goals are coming out know who your buyer is if you don't know who your buyer is maybe that's the focus that's the point of the focus group um if I knew I think I knew a little bit about uh the pro uh product or service it might inform the advice a little more granularly or targeted but um yeah if you have a secondary question as a follow-up to that focus groups are incredibly effective in terms of Bio research you have um you have a spectrum right you can do very uh inexpensive uh research that results in very poor quality information uh you could do very expensive research that reads reaches a broad audience but you could probably only get them for a couple questions you could do one-to-one Outreach speaking of a specific buyer they all have a a place if you've decided on focus groups because you know you've had deep conversations with one person and high conversations with um many people the InFocus group might be a good fit um so uh for whomever uh posted that question I welcome you to have you know reaching out to me and I'm really happy to take it a step further no question but I wanted I just want to reinforce your comment about enforcing people to enter data right there's a whole Market out there for addressing this problem right so whoever's got that solution you know I'll co-invest but um in our sales persona's employment contract I put a sentence that entering CRM data was a job requirement and refusal to do so was grounds for dismissal it set expectations from day one I think because we're talking about sales Anonymous is at least this sales person has an understanding that they have a duty to to interact with the customer broadly speaking about this presentation there are many functions in their training or their academic background they do not see themselves as having a duty to be stewards of the company or to be stewards of these touchwoods who improve them to identify to know them about them so um I find that salespersons although they um they are more frequently uh should be spending their time you know going out and hunting because that's their skill set and that's their contribution to the company uh for the other functions as well right you want to set a company culture where this is this is just how we talk about it right you're an engineering you're in quality control right like that clearly has an impact on on customers right you are um you are an admin and you oversee the facilities of our main headquarters and you our job is to you you're just visible right how you show up to work that you show up to work that you're not on your phone or clipping your net like everything is seen by a customer or at least um you should set that expectation do you think a person can effectively Market a product without being a product specialist I.E a generalist Business Development professional working for a biotech research firm I so the question um effective or like the the phrase effective a lot of times I substitute efficient and when I say efficient I mean cash efficient can a person do something well without it being overly costly to the organization training costs money hiring specialist costs money doing things poorly and having to redo things costs money a person who is um goal oriented who knows what the outcome is they're trying to achieve and has a very logical approach to the process by which they get there can be effective in a number of roles I've had I told you I was an actor for 10 years right like I have had so many um jobs over the past 20 years in so many different capacities there's probably not something that I haven't done right but um it's all been a creative right and it's especially helpful in a startup environment where people wear different hats right you just don't have the bodies to get all the functions done people can't just be like oh I do this and I only do this and I only look at this part of the organization I think generalists are uh incredibly value especially at the you know seed to Angel the series a phase where we're still figure trying to figure out how this organization needs to work to deliver this value to customers so long-winded answer to be you say yes well I know that we um are pretty much coming up on time I'll reiterate the call to action which is um if you enjoy talking about marketing if there is a burning question you have about marketing that is was very much out of scope of this because it was a very targeted conversation um I welcome having those conversations with you I enjoy being part of this community and I wish you the absolute best of luck as you develop your IP and consider different ways of taking your product to Market thank you so much for a fantastic presentation uh very insightful presentation and most importantly very practical call to action um hopefully that hopefully the audience took that away as well um and please feel free to email me um and let me know if there are any particular other marketing topics that we could invite Tom to present again sometime in the fall let me know and I'll communicate at the top and we can see what we can do for maybe sometime September October November timeline but again thank you so much Tom this is fantastic uh we will be uploading this Workshop to uh startup UMD YouTube channel where you can watch it again or to those who missed the live session unfortunately you won't be able to ask questions but you'll be able to hear and see what other questions were asked and answered again thank you so much Tom fantastic and look forward to possible another collaboration in the future oh that would be so much fun thank you Ella thank you and have a great day thank you to all participants as well thank you for great questions have a good day yourself