A Decade Of Marketing: Key Takeaways To Boost Your Success
Tim Fitzpatrick
MSP & B2B Professional Service Firm Marketing Consultant/Advisor | Fractional CMO | Build and manage your marketing engine to get where you want to go faster. | Remove Your Revenue Roadblocks
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience.
Join Tim Fitzpatrick, Kindsey Haynes, and Tom Kirkham for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!
Watch This Episode
Listen To The Podcast
Subscribe To The Podcast
Whenever you are ready, here are 4 ways we can help you reach your revenue goals faster...
Read The Transcript Here
Podcast Transcription
A Decade Of Marketing: Key Takeaways To Boost Your Success
Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate growth. And marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited. I got two people with me today. I have Tom Kirkham and Kindsey Haynes from Kirkham Iron Tech. Guys, Welcome. Thanks for being here.
Tom Kirkham
Thank you for having us.
Kindsey Haynes
Thank you.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. I'm excited to do this. It's not often that I get to have two additional people on the podcast with me. So I think this is going to be fun. You guys certainly have slightly different perspectives. You're coming from two different places. So we're going to cover a lot of great stuff. Before we do that, I want to ask you guys some rapid fire questions to kick things off. Are you ready to jump in with both feet?
Kindsey Haynes
Let's do it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Awesome. So first, Tom, I'll ask you this very quickly. What do you do? How long have you been doing it?
Tom Kirkham
I am the CEO and founder of Kirkham Iron Tech, and we're a managed security service provider, but more commonly known as just a managed services provider. We provide outsource IT services to other businesses. That's it in a nutshell. Been doing it for, will be 25 years old in January.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Twenty five years. Time flies, right?
Tom Kirkham
Yes. Yes. And it gets faster and faster.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes.
Tom Kirkham
That's something that Kindsey hasn't really gotten to the point yet. But I want to always try to remind her and her youth to enjoy it. But at any rate, as far as marketing goes, I got serious in marketing about 10 years ago, and it was all through self-education. I went to College Economics major, and of course, I never did that. But I really got serious with marketing then. And then I'll toss it over to Kenzie. She joined the company five years ago now?
Kindsey Haynes
Yeah, five years in January.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Wow. Five years. So tell us more about what you're doing with the company.
Kindsey Haynes
Yeah. So I'm head of all things marketing, and I work one on one directly with our sales team. So we collaborate on a lot, pretty much everything, I guess you could say, when it comes to our branding, messaging and all that. And yeah, I went to College for Marketing, got my bachelor's, graduated midst of COVID, May of 2020. And I had started with Kirkham IronTech that January. So just right in all the craziness, and I've been with them ever since.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. I love it. So Tom, in 25 years, what's the most important lesson you've learned?
Tom Kirkham
Never stop learning. Never stop learning. My other big go-to is culture eats strategy for breakfast. And you may be familiar with the saying, but every time I think about it, it always means something a little bit different to me, and it gets more depth to it. But what it really means in application is that we all understand what our culture is. If anybody's got a question or don't know what to do, they fall back on culture, and they'd say, What would be expected of this company? Consequently, for lack of direction, or you just hadn't put processes in place, or whatever those gaps are, culture has a tendency to gloss over those, smooth out the potholes, and makes everything run real smooth in a lot of other regards, too.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. One of my mentors early on said, The day I stop learning is the day I die. And that always stuck with me. And ever since, it's just always been just a constant learner, right? And I think there's so many people, we get out of school and they just stop learning. And man, I totally agree with you there. We're never done learning. So what about you, Kinsey? I mean, in the five years or so, you've been in marketing. You jumped right into marketing right out of school. What? Anything in particular that's sticking out for you as a big learning lesson?
Kindsey Haynes
One thing I always say is, and I can picture our friends here, Steve and K Miller, they always say, Stay uncopyable and be uncopyable. And Tom had me read Steve's book while I was an intern, when I first started with him. And I think that just was the roots to everything for me. That's what I read right off the bat. The college classes, you learn a lot, but a lot of it's textbook material that who knows how old. So it wasn't super modern day or anything like that. And being able to read their book with nothing else except those college classes, it gave me a good insight on a good way to go about how I'm going to do marketing. And it's something I've followed ever since. So you just be uncopyable, do something no one else is going to do and something that nobody else is doing. And I think you can apply that to a lot of things in life, not just the company.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You sure can. Yeah. Oftentimes, the unpopular road is actually the way to go, right? So totally okay to be different. Tom, what about in 25 years, you've seen ups, you've seen downs. Do you have any mantra or something motivational you say to yourself, share with your team to push through those times where you have challenges or roadblocks?
Tom Kirkham
Oh, gosh. I practice a lot of transparency. I guess there's a limit to how transparent you can be, and maybe I do it unconsciously. But It's like Ryan holiday says, The obstacle is the way. I treat obstacles and setbacks. We lose a big client, or I failed at a marketing endeavor and blew 10 or 20K or something like that. You treat those as learning lessons. Every time we lose a client, even a significant revenue or even a smaller one, it always hurts, especially if they've been with us for 10 years or more. Some of them have been with us 20 and haven't left. But if you don't view those things as an opportunity and actively find out what went wrong, I go to people in the company if it's a significant size client. I'll ask everybody, just casually. And then we'll try to get in touch with the client and, Hey, what did we do wrong? What can we do better? And if you treat those as a learning experience, you just chalk it up along with your college education expenses and add it to the expense column on learning. Just always, another cliché that I love saying is, relentlessly pursue perfection. Now, we're never going to be perfect, but if you pursue it, you should definitely achieve excellence. But you got to do that relentless part on perfection to really realize it, and then demonstrating that for everybody. Walking the talk, be candid with people. We support our people. They may work for us for a few years and decide they want to do something else, maybe get a corporate job. We're a relatively small company, and that's cool. What can we do to help? And so we rarely to have anybody leave that's upset with the company or feel like they've been treated wrong. Yeah.
A Decade of Marketing
Tim Fitzpatrick
Let's talk about marketing. Why not, right? Tom, you had mentioned about 10 years ago, you jumped in into marketing. And I'm curious to learn more about that journey, how it's evolved. And I think Kinsey can jump in here with her experience. But I'm curious, if you remember, what was it 10 years ago that made you jump into this realm? And what has that process been like for you?
Tom Kirkham
Well, the first thing I did is I said, Okay, I'm going to get serious about marketing. How can I learn really great marketing as fast as possible, spend the money, and really dive into it? So I joined up with Robin Robin's group. She's a guru in the IT industry, but everybody knows who she is in marketing. I learned a lot from her. Then she dropped the names of a lot of other people that I started getting into their groups, like Dan Kennedy, Dave Dee, Chris Voss. He's more of a negotiation guy. But of course, I met Steve and K. Miller, introduced Kenzie to them. I was a member of the genius network for a while, and I think there was a couple of others. I did that quickly. I think by the time Kenzie came on board, I'd already been through four or five of these gurus. Then we started developing our own style, taking all those inputs. We were seeing results early on. The stuff Robin does is you'll get results right off the She proves what she's doing very quickly. She understands... She does a great job. She understands that for a lot of the people that she, a lot of her clients, they have zero marketing experience. If you don't know anything about marketing, and I'd seen this with other companies I'd worked for, they would try something for two or three months and not see any results, and then they quit. That doesn't work. You got to make all the efforts that you're going to try something new and then give it a fair shot. That's the way I did it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I want to pull out a few things here, Tom, because I think there's some really good learning lessons for people in how you approach this. One is paying to get the knowledge. All the information we need is out there. But to me, it's a matter of how fast do you want to get there. And by paying for somebody else's knowledge, you are going to get there much, much faster. So it's like whether it's Robin Robbins or Stephen K. Miller or the stuff that we're doing. Man, it's not revolutionary stuff. It's all out there. But if you pay to play, you are going to get there much, much faster. But the other thing you also touched on, which I think is really important, is you gathered all this info and then you found out what was going to work for you and you molded the clay and developed your own style, right? And that's really important because you can't just take stuff off the shelf and plug and play. I'm sorry, it doesn't work. You got to take what you're learning and adapt it to your business and make it your own. The fundamentals of that are still going to be there and present, but you're making it your own. Those are two things that are really sticking out to me about how you approached it that I think are absolutely fantastic. Now what I'm curious about is, Kindsey, you jump on board. Tom has already done some of these things. What has that process been like for you the last five years?
Kindsey Haynes
It's been a big learning experience, that's for sure. It's been a good one. I had mentioned going to college, and they give you these textbooks, and you're reading all the stuff that was written years and years ago. But with marketing, everything's changing really fast. So we have, in the last five years, had to adapt with marketing and everything that's been changing along with that. So, yeah, we've got Dave D and Robin Robin and all these people. But we've also had to branch out a little bit and see what else is out there because AI, the big word right now, AI, that's changed the game for not only marketers, but salespeople and people that work in operations and tech and every industry. What do they always say? It's like, if you're not catching up and playing the game, you're going to fall behind. You need to be working with AI and using these tools so you can keep up with your competitors. And so that's just it's been always keeping up with what's happening. There's always new stuff coming out. I can't tell you how many vendors We have worked with different marketing vendors doing different things, whether it's like calling or email outreach or meeting status. I feel like we've done it all at this point, but there's just so much that you can do and try.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Do you feel like... I agree with you that marketing is constantly evolving. It's changing quickly. Where I live in the marketing space is with those, I believe, are the fundamentals that don't change, right? Because in any discipline, the fundamentals are immutable. Like, They're the same today as they were 50 years ago, and they're not going to change 50 years from now. As a marketing major, because I was not a marketing major, I was a math major, I'm curious. Do you feel like studying marketing in school gave you some of those fundamentals? Did they try to get more tactical and have a difficult time doing it? I'm just curious.
Kindsey Haynes
They had the fundamentals there. And yes, they tried to be tactical with it, but I don't know that it was the best way they could have gone about it. And my school was amazing. My classes were amazing. I'm not saying anything bad there. But I mean, just for example, in my social media class, we were just looking at old case studies from AMEX and Yelp. It was old. And it was a social media class in 2019. I'm talking about LinkedIn or Facebook or anything that my class would have seen as relevant for that social media class. Yeah, but the fundamentals. We still, for example, we're doing the long form direct mail that Robin Robbins does. We've done that in the past, and it's worked, and we stopped for a little bit. We're picking it back. But now we're using these AI tools to help us make it better and improve what we have. It's only helping us with the fundamentals.
Tim Fitzpatrick
What would you say has been the biggest marketing learning lesson you've had?
Kindsey Haynes
That's a good question. Tom, you might say the same thing on this one. I don't know. When I When we first started, we were focusing on the water utility industry. It took us some time, but we eventually learned that they just weren't ready to buy. That market wasn't a good market for us. That was one thing in university that I didn't, I guess, catch or they didn't teach was that you've got to pick that market and roll with it. If it's not the right one, it's not going to work. The water utility industry, they're just and they're not ready to buy into what we're selling. It just wasn't the right time for that market. We had to shift our focus. We realized that if we spend all that time that we're focusing on the water utilities on law firms, what results can we get? That's exactly what we did. It was a big lesson because at first I was rolling with it like, Yeah, let's see. Why wouldn't water utilities want to buy our stuff? We're awesome. We know what we're doing. We need protection. Our water utilities are vulnerable, but they aren't ready to buy.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I want to pull a few things out because this is super important. One, I love that you chose a vertical to focus on. So many people are afraid to do that, but none of the stuff we do in marketing is set in stone. Nothing It says you have to go down this path and just keep going down this path forever. And sometimes, no matter how much research you do ahead of time, oftentimes, we don't know until we actually go out to the market, and the market determines what we're going to end up doing, right? And what changes we need to make. And I think you probably would have had a really hard time knowing what you know now, ahead of time. Like, I don't think you could have done all the research you wanted to. You weren't going to discover that they weren't ready to buy until you actually took it to the market.
Kindsey Haynes
Exactly.
Tim Fitzpatrick
But once you did, you were like, Okay, well, we need to shift. So you shifted, and that's okay. That's part of marketing. The way I always think about it is test, measure, learn. You're testing something, you're measuring whether it's working, you learn from it, and then you wash, rinse, repeat. It's this endless cycle. So Tom, what about you? Would you say the same thing, or do you have a different one?
Tom Kirkham
Well, no, that's absolutely right. That's one of those 10, 20,000 more than that in that particular. It was really weird going into that market because it's been different than a couple of other markets that we done. We thought it was Blue Ocean. We had no competition. Tremendous interest. Everyone was telling us that they needed our services, but no one was buying them because they're broke. Yeah, water utilities just have very tight budgets for the most part. That was one of those expensive learning lessons. But I want to circle back around to the classic stuff about marketing?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah.
Tom Kirkham
In addition to all the gurus I was fortunate to work with, I was also reading a lot. You want to talk old school, Kenzie will tell you, you're going to read this book by Gary Halbert and learn how to copyright, and you're going to know what the difference between a serif and a sand serif font, and where you use them and where you don't. I don't know if you ever got around to read an Ogilvie on advertising, but that's another famous copywriter. I'm Old School, what was that series that was loosely based on his advert?
Tom Kirkham
Mad Men.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Mad Men, yeah.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah, but he was a genius copywriter. As a kid, or my entire life, I've always been into cars. So these car advertisements would catch my eyes. And I remember when those original Volkswagen ads were in print, and they'd have the Volkswagen, and underneath it, it would just say ugly. And you just had to read the copy. It's genius. Everything he did. So we take the old and the new and mix it up. And like Kenzie said, uncopyable was not to plug Stephen K, but they're great. But that uncopyable, make it your own and make yourself unique. Taking all of that building blocks, and then what's our message? What is our culture? It applies to so many different things, being unique and establish yourself to stand out. If you're doing the same thing everyone else is doing, that may make you successful, but that's not going to make me happy enough.
Tim Fitzpatrick
If you understand the fundamentals, you can apply them to any of the shifts from a tactical perspective in the market. Well, I might be dating myself here, but my space, right? Yeah, it was it for a while, and then it shifted. But the fundamentals of marketing can be applied to any of the marketing channels, any of the tactics. And as they shift, you're just shifting from one tactic to another, but the fundamentals that you're applying to it are all going to stay the same.
AI Tools for Marketing
Tim Fitzpatrick
Kindsey, I want to go back to something that you touched on with AI in marketing. It's a huge buzz word at this point. I think a lot of people are struggling with how to actually use it. I think people believe they can get more out of it or it can do more for them than they actually think. I'm curious, what are you guys doing to utilize it at this point?
Kindsey Haynes
A lot. For starters, just content creation. It's helping us generate ideas for content creation. I mean, if you're not sure where to start on a blog post, you can have it give you good titles for blog posts that would be relevant to SEO for your website and start there. Even with the graphics, there's graphics that you can have built for you now. Notebook Album is a cool one that I came across a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't figured out how to use it business-wise yet, but you input the documents and it's able to analyze it and create a podcast off of your data that you feed it. It's pretty cool. We've got that. We use ChatGPT, we use Jasper for a while, but ChatGPT is definitely the one these days. Apollo.io is something that I highly recommend checking out if you haven't. I don't know what they consider themselves, but they're like an AI email platform where you can pull intent data from your prospects. They're showing intent, and then you can reach out to them. With Apollo, I'm not sure what other ones do this, but it can create AI openers for you. It reads their LinkedIn profile and creates a customized first sentence for your email saying, Hey, I saw you went to the University of Arkansas, go Razorbacks. Let's try to buy your IT and cybersecurity. It's able to do all that for you automatically. Apollo, it's pretty mind-blowing being able just to have it do all that for you. We recently evaluated an AI sales dialer. We haven't done anything with it, but I had someone give me a sales call, and it caught my eye because I saw he had an Arkansas phone number with no Arkansas accent. I asked him, What are you using to call me right now? It was something called Concert. It is an AI sales dialer that's able to call four phone numbers at a time, and then it stops other calls when someone answers, so you're not manually having to dial for dollars. It's doing all the calling for you. You just need to be able to pick up the phone when someone answers. And it's got...
Tim Fitzpatrick
So it's a human that's there, but the AI is doing all the dialing. And so you're basically just sitting there waiting for somebody to come on the phone.
Kindsey Haynes
Exactly.
Tim Fitzpatrick
And then I'm assuming when they come on the phone, then the information is popping up on the screen and you go.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Kindsey Haynes
Yeah, you can have it all right there, their profile.
Tim Fitzpatrick
yeah. You know what's interesting? I think what you're talking about with Apollo on the sales side is going to be really interesting Because that's where on the sales side, I think crafting messages that are custom, where it's pulling data from their profile. But I think also AI understanding and analyzing what their disk profile is or whatever personality profile they're using to determine how they need to communicate with that person, that I think is going be huge. The other thing that you touched on, you talked about ChatGPT and getting ideas, right? I have found that, well, one, there's so many freaking tools. I am hitching my wagons to ChatGPT. I don't want to learn 10 different systems. I want to maximize as much as I can from one system. And with ChatGPT, yes, you can use it to create content, but everybody else can, too. So if you're not tweaking the content and making it your own, going back to Tom's point from earlier, if you're just using it to crank out content and you're not doing anything else with it, I think that's a mistake, which you guys are not doing, but a lot of people are. But I think using it as a thought partner to bounce ideas off of is incredibly powerful, and a lot of people are not doing that. So it's like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. What are the positives? What are the negatives? What am I not seeing? Because AI gives you an unobjective... It's not colored. It has no feelings. It just gives you the data. It's not subjective. So I think that's super, super powerful. Anything else that you're using it for at this point?
Kindsey Haynes
I'm trying to think. No, I don't think so. I just know that... I mean, I've got ChatGPT pulled out every day, and it's something I'm constantly, constantly throwing things into it, having it, help me improve it. You were mentioning earlier with ChatGPT, all the different apps inside of it. Something that we figured out that me and my sales guy, we do a lot back and forth with each other, and you're able to save templates inside of ChatGPT or prompts, I guess it's called. That's something that he's been able to on a sales side, use to save him time because he now has a prospect prompt. Instead of that, he just has to give the company name, and then it automatically knows to give him the employee size, the industry, where they're located, how many locations, who's going to be the best person to talk to, what contact information can you find. And so he's using that, those templates, those prompts in different ways to not only save him time, but also be like his little sales assistant in a way.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're playing with custom GPTs and loading. I may have a Copyright Assistant, right? And I pop in in the GPT, I can pop in our ideal client profiles, our current messaging playbook. If I wanted to speak like me, I can load a document of emails I've written, speeches I've given, podcast episodes like this, so it knows how I communicate, and it can all take that data so that it's outputting stuff that sounds like me. With how our methodology, there's so many different things you can load into custom GPTs that I think give you a really, really strong output. The other thing that I'm also finding it super helpful for is from a data analysis standpoint. So there are times where we've done ideal client interviews for clients, and we'll take the transcripts and load those transcripts into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze the data for this and to spit it out with these eight categories, and bam. It is so much faster than us actually reading through that data. Now we still need to interpret what that means, but it analyzing the data is incredibly fast and incredibly effective. So we're only scratching the surface.
Kindsey Haynes
I know. It's kinda scary.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it is. But I think it's awesome that you guys are going down that path because the sooner you do it, the more you're going to learn as you continue to go down it.
The Importance of a Compelling Marketing Messaging
Tim Fitzpatrick
Tom, I want to go back to a couple of things that you shared in the pre-interview. You shared a few thoughts in the pre-interview. One was that messaging from marketing standpoint needs to be competitive and compelling. And the second was that marketing takes time. Can you expand upon that a little bit? I'm asking this question selfishly, so just...
Tom Kirkham
Well, I can't remember. Steve Miller, once again, he's got this, he calls it 4-Ms, and some of it I'm going to, I'm going to mess up some of it, but it's basically media market message. What's the fourth one, Kenzie, do you know?
Kindsey Haynes
Media market message. There's another one.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah, he's got another one, but I added a fifth one to it, because I keep talking about culture. I think that before you do the four that he has, you really need to understand yourself and your company, and what your capabilities are, how you're geared to operate, what your skill sets are, what's your intention, what's your mission, your values, your ethics. Because that's what makes you uncopyable, right? That's where I think you really, really need to start. And I don't think I answered your question.
Tim Fitzpatrick
No, you did. You're just highlighting the importance of messaging, which so many companies struggle with because it's just hard for us to think objectively about our business because we're just so in it. I also think that oftentimes we feel like we need to get cute and clever with our messaging, but we really just need to keep it simple. It needs to be different because if it's not different, then we just look the same, and then all we can compete on is price, which is a horrible place to be. But Dan Kennedy talks about something very similar to what you were mentioning. He talks about market message media match, right? And so you need to know the market. You need to know how you're going to get in front of that market. And you need to know what you're going to say to them. And those all need to be in alignment.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah. And the other one was moment, which goes to your point. Okay, cool. It goes to Kenzie's point. And another market failure that we thought was Blue Ocean is They're not ready to buy. Or maybe your company is not ready to go into that market. You learn something about it. But yeah, absolutely. The media message and the market, those are super critical.
Marketing Takes Time
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. What about marketing takes time? Do you feel like you've... Was that instilled in you early on, or do you feel like you gave up on things before you gave it time?
Tom Kirkham
I had watched others that I worked for give up on it way too quick. Yeah. I'd also watched, I think my first real job, I was on it's 19 years old. I watched a guy take newspaper ads out every single week. He never stopped, and he did it the whole time. That was a valuable lesson. Then I'd see other people that I worked for just try something new and novel for two months or three months and never give it a chance. I thought, Well, I don't know if that was enough time. We were just starting to get some leads coming in or whatever it was, some sales. I knew that when I started the company. What we... What I did, when I was still working out of my house... Well, it goes full circle, don't it, Kindsey? I'm working out of my house right now. Never thought about that. But I started looking at, since I'm selling to businesses, what is the best bang for the buck on media? And I'm thinking, Oh, most business owners are going to tend to be conservative. They're going to listen to talk radio. So I bought spots on talk radio. They invited me in for a guest spot. I became a weekly appearance. Then eventually, I got a show for three, four, maybe, yeah, about four years, give or take, where I had a call-in show for a computers. That established mind share in this area, which even today, it doesn't happen very often anymore. I quit that show well over 10 years ago. But The older guys will come in and say, Oh, yeah, I listen to your show all the time. I hadn't done that in 12 years or whatever it is, but it still established that mind share. So locally in this MSA, we're known as the go-to people, but we're a national company, and so that presents a different set of challenges. You got to be careful with your marketing dollars. Look for that most bang for the buck.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I run into people all the time that have given up on stuff way too early. I think part of the challenge that... Now, on the flip side, I also then talk to people all the time who are 12 months in with an agency and nothing's happened. I tend to believe that the issue with both of those is just not having metrics or waypoints that you're tracking along the way. Because with those, that's going to give you an idea of, are you gaining traction? Are things headed in the right direction or are they not? And if they're not, what do we need to do? Because part of that also is marketing as a whole, not setting good expectations either. Hey, we're going to get you on the top page of Google in 30 days, or we're going to generate you 50 leads in the first month. Those are unrealistic expectations. And so I think coming in, sometimes people have unrealistic expectations. And when that doesn't happen, then they do want to give up. So I think there's a number of things going on there. But in general, it takes time, and you got to give it the time it needs to work. That doesn't mean that you're not making adjustments along the way, but you're giving it the time it needs.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah, I think what I did, and I don't do this, well, we still do this, but I would say, they tell me, Okay, something costs $1,000 a month, whatever it is, this marketing initiative. I'd say, Okay, well, I want to give it a fair shot. They say I'll get a lead the first month. I said, But I'm realistic. I'll commit $6,000. That'll give it six months, and then I'll evaluate. Then, if I don't get anything in that first two or three months, like they said, I make a decision then. Now, I've already committed the $6,000. It wasn't like I only committed 3,000, right?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Right.
Tom Kirkham
Then in order for me to kill it early, I have to have a valid reason other than the $3,000 that we've already lost, because that's a sunk cost.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah.
Tom Kirkham
I need to figure out what's going wrong. I have to have a valid reason to quit at that point. And if I don't have a valid reason to quit, I'll go the six months. So right or wrong, that's the way we do it now. But at least I've already budgeted for it. I think the budgeting part is where a lot of people get hung up.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, they're not. They're going into it thinking too short term, right? Whereas you're going into it thinking, I'm committing to this much, but I'm going to evaluate it throughout the process.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Right? And I think that's where a lot of the companies that I talk to that have gone down that path have straight is it's like, Yeah, I signed this agreement. It's a year long. I committed, but they weren't doing enough along the way to check how are things going? If they're not going well, what's going on? What do we need to tweak? Because marketing is not a set it and forget it activity.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah, and on that subject.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Optimizing.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah, on that subject, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Tim Fitzpatrick
No, it's okay.
Tom Kirkham
But on that subject, we also, and this is baked into our culture, when we make a commitment with a vendor, a marketing vendor, or partner or whatever, we make that commitment, and we're going to ask them to tell us the best practices, tell us what we need to do to make you guys successful, because we don't want to be the failure. We don't want the vendor to fail, or in the system, for that matter. But we want to make sure that we're fully committed, that we're not the problem, and we're going to do everything we can to make that vendor successful with us, because that's just a smart way to do things, same way we do with our clients. It's that two-way street. It's not just calling up and complaining about, Well, this is broken, and this doesn't work, and you guys are screwing up, and all that. It's about, No, I want to give you some positive feedback here, but this is what we're seeing. Tell me what's wrong about that. It's a dialog. It's a discussion to try to fix whatever the problem is if it needs fixing. It's just a different way to look at those relationships.
Marketing Metrics to Keep an Eye On
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Kindsey, I want to ask you one question before we start to wrap things up, because I think a lot of people struggle with this. And as a dedicated marketer for the company, I'm curious how you approach this. What metrics are you guys measuring? How do you go about that process of, We're doing this initiative, what are we going track? How do you think about that?
Kindsey Haynes
Yeah. So we mainly look at our main activities that we're doing. So for example, webinars. Tom does so many webinars. We do the email marketing. Within the email marketing, we're getting those leads from two different places, so I would separate those in my head. I mean, everything's about the lead source and that aspect. So when I'm looking to see where everything comes from, I need to see that we've gotten the majority of our meetings, not even necessarily closes, but meetings. Who are those coming from and where are they originating? And so even on our website forms, when Jason ourselves got with, he's meeting with someone, Hey, how did you hear about us? And so we're going to keep doing what's working, obviously, and try and improve it always. And that's something Tom and I are always saying. It's a constant, you're constantly improving. That's never going to stop. We're always going to be changing things. And then even just looking at what has closed and the deals that haven't closed and why they're not closing. I know that's something for next year, too. We're going to try and really focus on more of those KPIs and working around them so we can make sure we're doing the best we can to get our ROI.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love how you've answered that question. When I talk about metrics, I always talk about the top three as leads generated, lead source, which you hit on perfectly, right? And it's never going to be 100 % perfect, but You mentioned, Hey, are sales guy is asking, how did you hear about us? Gathering that data is better than what most people have. So even if it's imperfect, at least you have an idea of where leads you're generating are coming from, which tells us what's working and what's not. And then from there, how many new clients, which gives us our conversion rate. If we start with those three metrics, we can always get more advanced. But with those three, you have a lot of really good data that you can work from. And then from there, as you're starting to branch out into specific campaigns, I always go back to, Okay, what's the goal? What do we want to accommodate accomplish. And then based on that, that's going to help dictate what metrics we choose to track. Because there are a gazillion different metrics within marketing. A lot of them don't mean anything. Let's go back to what's our goal? That's going to dictate the metrics we're going to track for specific activities. But lead source is such a big one that most people don't track, they don't ask. And if you don't know that, you have no idea what the hell is working and what's not. So thank you for hitting on that one.
Conclusion
Tim Fitzpatrick
Tom, one last question. Knowing what you know now, anything you would do different?
Tom Kirkham
Is that something like, do you have any regrets? I mean, who wouldn't want to rewind the clock, right? But what would I do different? It's me. I don't think anything. If it's still me doing it, I only hope to learn going forward. I don't dwell in the past. The only to reflect on what the problems were. Then hopefully, I won't repeat that mistake. But I started it out of my house. I had a radio show. I was buying radio spots when I was still in the house, and then basically bootstrap the company for the entire time it's been in business. We're in the top 10% of MSPs in size. I think even with all the mistakes that we've all learned from, there's not much I would probably do different. If you're in that marketing thing, just start reading books by some of these gurus, Kennedy. If you don't know, copywriting, Halbert, Gary Halbert. Start with that one. Those copywriting, in electronic stuff, you don't have to worry quite as much about readability and legibility and the fonts and all of this. You do, but not to that final point that him and Oglesby did. But all of this stuff is in these books. You don't have to go out and spend tens thousands of dollars for a guru to teach you if you don't have it. They've written books, right? Just get on Amazon. You've certainly gotten plenty of names today to add to your library if you're not familiar with them. I think that was... Of course, I've always been like that, but that's what made us successful at marketing. I didn't answer your question, and I just don't know how to.
Tim Fitzpatrick
No, you did. It's okay. I mean, hey, the path is the path, right? Every mistake, every success you've had has brought you to this point. You're happy with where you're at, and that's okay, right? I asked that question because there is no right or wrong answer to it, and it is so broad. I'm always interested just to see where people end up going with it. So, Kinsey, Tom, it's been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it.
Tom Kirkham
Yeah, yeah. Same here. It was great.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Where can people learn more about you? They want to connect?
Tom Kirkham
Well, it's right at the bottom of the screen there, kirkhamirontech.com, and you can feel a lot of contact form for either Kindsey or me, or if you just want information about the company, or you're worried about your cyber security or IT management, it'll route to the right department. So don't worry about it. We're a small, tight team, and we'll get your message, whatever it may be. I have a couple of books on Amazon, if you don't mind me plugging them.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, please do.
Tom Kirkham
All right. There's two books on cyber security. The important thing you've got to remember about those books, one's for high networth individuals, and the other is just a general book on the cyber security, the Pandemic, Cyber Pandemic Survival Guide. They're both best sellers on Amazon, but what you need to know about them is they're not written for my peers. These are written for either high networth individuals or businesses that want to have a better idea and a better realization about cybersecurity and how important it is. And it gives you the basic steps. So it's one of those books you can learn about how to better secure yourself.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. And what are the titles on those?
Tom Kirkham
Hack the Rich.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Hack the Rich?
Tom Kirkham
Yeah. And that's really a personal cyber security deal. The other It's the CyberPandemic, the Cyber Security Pandemic Survival Guide.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.
Tom Kirkham
It's a bad title, but it walks through the steps that businesses need to put in place, do a security vulnerability assessment, and understand your policies and procedures. You need this technology put in. But they both have a fictional component. In fact, it's the same story through both books. So it keeps their attention. Cybersecurity and IT is a boring topic for most people. So the stories keep it flowing and makes it relevant.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. I love it. Did you have something to add to that, Kindsey?
Kindsey Haynes
Yeah, I was just going to say you can find Tom's books at tomkirkham.com.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, cool. So tomkirkham.com And then kirkhamirontech.com. We'll make sure those get in the show notes. Thank you guys again. It's been a pleasure. It's not often I get to connect with two people at the same time. So we could have jammed for a long time. So I appreciate you guys. We talked a lot about marketing your journey, your thoughts on it, and I really appreciate you sharing that. For those of you watching and listening, appreciate you. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com. The other tool we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. If you want to know which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can do that there in less than five minutes. So go take advantage of it. And till next time, take care.
Connect With Tom & Kindsey on LinkedIn
Links From The Episode