Gaining Favorable Attention with Adam Robinson Adam Robinson and Joe Lynch discuss what gaining favorable attention with prospective customers. [00:20] Opening / Introduction [00:36] Tell us a little about your background. I went to the University of Texas and wanted to be a Latin teacher, but then found out how much that paid and decided to get into business and marketing. My first job after graduation was Director of Sales and Marketing with a startup. That company sold and I went on to work in the newspaper industry, selling their online ads. Today, I’m the Marketing Manager with Cerasis. [04:27] When and why did you join Cerasis? A headhunter that represented Cerasis approached me with an offer. I wasn’t really looking for a new job, but it was a blank slate and seemed like I could do things my own way. From an SEO standpoint, I saw a lot of potential. [06:40] In the old days, we were trained to sell on the phone and to say something intriguing in the first twenty seconds. People like you have moved this from a phone call to the digital world. You need to make sure you look at the long-term and what a customer is trying to do. There are many opportunities for someone in logistics to have problems, therefore, you can create content that speaks to answering those problems. [09:55] Name some of your favorite ways to gain favorable attention from a prospect. Our initial goal at Cerasis was to put a blog post out that was search engine optimized and answers problems we could solve once per day. We then thought about the full problems of a supply chain and started developing more blog posts. You need to start doing this stuff from day one, but it’s not the only thing you should do. We started with a lot of advertising to build our brand awareness, but at the exact same time, we started putting out content. [15:31] Tell us a little bit about your web presence and how the search engines view you. I get media kits from publications trying to sell us advertising and we often have substantially more traffic than them. I pride myself at Cerasis in our advertising budget being really minimal. You don’t need to have millions of dollars to break through. [19:12] Tell us about how many leads you’re able to get your sales guys. As a salesperson myself, I know there’s a lot of leads that waste my time. Because of this, we have many pre-qualifying questions in our lead form. It’s important for me to hand out leads that are of the utmost quality. This consisted of about two-thousand leads in 2018. [24:47] You guys seem to have really aligned your marketing, sales, and operations teams to work together. It’s not necessarily easy, but if you have a vision and a strategy, it happens. I built our content by first interviewing every single employee in the company – not just management. “Everybody loves to buy, but nobody likes to be sold to.” We’re out there on the front lines hearing the actual conversations from our customers which we can pass on to our development team. We’re able to present solutions that we didn’t just come up with in a lab, but that are actually solving real world shipper issues. [30:42] With this alignment, you’ve integrated marketing into its rightful place. It’s super important, but a lot of people don’t do it. We haven’t been scared to put ourselves out there. Everybody’s going to have an opinion. We all get better by doing, as long as there’s a vision. It’s never going to be perfect, and that’s what makes it fun. [34:44] We’ve talked a lot about the sales process, so now let’s talk about the buying process. How does that look? No matter what, the buying process is definitely going to start online. After a potential customer sees our content and likes us, they will be much more receptive when we call them compared to a cold call from another company. If you’re thinking about investing and you’re not online, you’re probably missing out on the ability to make your sales team as effective as possible. [38: