Episode Description:

This episode features a special guest John Wall, a co-host of the very long-running and successful marketing podcast “Marketing Over Coffee”. John has interviewed the biggest names in marketing over the years and has become an incredible resource from which to learn! John currently is. partner at TruthInsights.io We dive into data and analytics – and discuss how we can gain clarity, insights, and actionable information from all the data sources we have on our sites. Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, site reports, etc – how do you make sense of all of it?

Connect with John Wall

Website: https://www.trustinsights.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjwall/

Check out John’s podcast “Marketing Over Coffee”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-over-coffee-marketing-podcast/id251299460

Action you can take right now:

The goal of this podcast is to provide marketing and service insights, but also to provide actionable items that can occur right away without much thought. This episode explores how you can take action with the data you’ve collected in your business.

  1. I think the main action to take is to determine if the data you have, regardless of where it is coming from is statistically significant. Calculating the actual numerical statistical relevance will take a review in a statistics class – but without getting to crazy think about the number of data points, i.e. how many users of the site, vs. the conversion rate. Chances are if your dealing with thousands of users you’ll find the data can be used to accurately predict trends and unlock insights – but this is a very unscientific method and should be used as a starting off point!
  2. COMMON THEME ALERT – again in this episode the idea is discussed that testing will require more than one or two variables. The most successful marketers are constantly testing and refining copy for maximum impact at a minimum cost. Take a look at your last email campaign or digital ad campaign – how. many variations did you test? Chances are it was two or three (if any). Take another whack at it, but try dozens of variations, different copy, different images, different calls to action, etc.

After-Show Thoughts:

What a great and casual conversation on digging deep into the data we collect through tools such as Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, e-commerce carts, e-mail management programs, CRM systems, etc!

There are so many places we as businesses knowingly or unknowingly are collecting data, but we don’t often have a handle on HOW to take action on it. John discusses the challenges of having multiple applications that don’t always talk to one another, or even multiple departments within an organization that aren’t sharing data with each other.

I think the most powerful point John made, was discussing how shared goals and cooperative goals between sales, service, and marketing often lead to the best outcomes, regardless of the structure of the departments or the responsibilities of each department. This makes so much sense, given goals are what drive performance, and if the goals are not aligned within an organization you’ll foster an environment where fiefdoms are built within each division.

Episode 27 Transcript:

00:00:00 Justin 

So your website is up and running. You’ve installed your Google Analytics tracking code. You listen to last week’s episode and you install your Microsoft Clarity code. 

00:00:09 Justin 

You’ve got all sorts of systems and Facebook giving you data. 

00:00:12 Justin 

Your website giving you data. 

00:00:14 Justin 

But how do you make sense of all of it? 

00:00:16 Justin 

You have all these numbers in all this data, but where do you even start to try to find? 

00:00:21 Justin 

Insights into it that more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast. 

00:00:30 Justin 

Second, Justin Varuzzo, here from the marketing and service.com podcast, the podcast designed to help you grow your business by creating incredible customer relationships. On today’s episode I have a very. 

00:00:50 Justin 

Special guest John Wall. 

00:00:53 Justin 

The host of marketing over Coffee, a podcast that’s been running for over 15 years. 

00:00:59 Justin 

John has interviewed some of the top minds in. 

00:01:02 Justin 

Marketing and is now putting all of his skills to use at a new company called Trust Insights. 

00:01:09 Justin 

A company that was built to try to help clients uncover the insights within all of the data that they’ve collected. 

00:01:17 Justin 

If you enjoyed this episode and you find value in it, it would mean the world to me. 

00:01:21 Justin 

If you took a moment to like. 

00:01:22 Justin 

Or subscribe to the podcast. 

00:01:24 Justin 

And if you really want to do me a huge fail. 

00:01:26 Justin 

Never take a moment and leave a five star review. 

00:01:29 Justin 

It means the world to me and it helps keep this podcast going. 

00:01:32 Justin 

Don’t forget you can also join us on the marketing and service.com Facebook page. We are always looking to hear your insights as to the podcast. 

00:01:41 Justin 

What do you want to learn about? 

00:01:42 Justin 

Who do you want to hear from? 

00:01:43 Justin 

Let me know over on Facebook, or you can always shoot me. 

00:01:46 Justin 

Email justin@marketingandservice.com that’s jestyn at marketingandservice.com and without any further ado, I want to jump right into the interview with John. 

00:01:57 Justin 

And John, welcome to the show. 

00:01:59 Justin 

Thanks so much for being here today. 

00:02:01 Justin 

I really appreciate it. 

00:02:02 John Wall 

Oh, thank you Justin. 

00:02:03 John Wall 

Yeah thanks for having me on. 

00:02:04 John Wall 

It’s great, I’m always up for talking marketing and I think your angle on service is something that’s the wave of the future. 

00:02:09 John Wall 

It’s it’s coming big and is the. 

00:02:11 Justin 

Way to go I I hope so, because I feel like nobody listens to me. 

00:02:15 Justin 

Nobody cares. 

00:02:16 John Wall 

That’s The Pioneers. 

00:02:18 John Wall 

There’s right there, that’s the way you are the evangelist, yeah? 

00:02:21 Justin 

So at least I can just scream at my microphone and hope that somehow that gets translated to someone somewhere and. 

00:02:28 Justin 

So you tell me a little bit about the company that you are at now and a little bit about what you do. 

00:02:33 John Wall 

Yeah, sure, so I’ve been in marketing and tech my whole career I I think last count on seven different startups I’ve marched through for over God. 

00:02:43 John Wall 

It’s about 15 years now. 

00:02:45 John Wall 

I’ve been doing the marketing over coffee podcast with Christopher Penn. 

00:02:48 John Wall 

And almost three years ago now I had finished up one of the startups I was working on, and Chris had actually broken free from the PR firm he was at Shift Communications. 

00:02:58 John Wall 

He and one of his lieutenants, Katie Robert, decided to spin off and create their own firm, and so they created trust insights. 

00:03:05 John Wall 

And after you know less than a year of them running that it was. 

00:03:08 John Wall 

Obvious that the podcast was an engine for driving business to them, and so I kind of rolled in with them and the podcast now has become one of the marketing programs for trust insights. 

00:03:18 Justin 

OK, cool. 

00:03:18 John Wall 

And we’ve always focused on analytics. 

00:03:22 John Wall 

You know, Chris, his big thing when he was in PR. 

00:03:24 John Wall 

He was. 

00:03:24 John Wall 

Fighting analytics on what was working for their clients and what they found was that the clients were like yeah, OK. 

00:03:31 John Wall 

This PR stuff is good, but we would really like to see these analytics for all our marketing programs across the board and so that was where he decided. 

00:03:38 John Wall 

Finally, Katie actually convinced him to. 

00:03:41 John Wall 

She actually started the company as the CEO and dragged him along. 

00:03:44 John Wall 

And drag me into it, but our big mission is to. 

00:03:49 John Wall 

Fine companies and we say that we light up their dark data. 

00:03:52 John Wall 

We go in. 

00:03:52 John Wall 

They help them with their analytics. 

00:03:54 John Wall 

We can provide machine learning and artificial intelligence analysis to give them better actionable insights. 

00:03:59 John Wall 

So they kind of know what to do and where to go next next with their marketing. 

00:04:02 Justin 

Yeah, I think it’s a it’s. 

00:04:04 Justin 

I think it’s really common that we we all build websites and we throw on our Google Analytics and we put on Microsoft Clarity and we we stack all these things together and and then you know two years later we look at it and we say alright we had this many people come to the website. 

00:04:18 Justin 

This was our. 

00:04:19 Justin 

Version rate, where are all these secret insights? 

00:04:22 Justin 

They’re going to blow my mind and change how I do business. 

00:04:24 John Wall 

Yeah, there’s a bunch of different layers where things get lost in there. 

00:04:28 John Wall 

You know. 

00:04:28 John Wall 

I mean, one obviously is with small businesses just statistical relevance. 

00:04:32 John Wall 

You know it’s like OK, so you do 2 email campaigns and you’re looking at your web analytics or like OK this one bought 35 visitors and this one bought 27. 

00:04:39 John Wall 

Well, does that really tell me anything? 

00:04:41 John Wall 

Not really one big thing for us that we always work with our clients and is taken to heart as the way we market is that you’re always testing hypothesis. 

00:04:51 John Wall 

You know it’s not enough to just look at the numbers and be like alright, but you know what do we want to do? 

00:04:54 John Wall 

Where do we want to go? 

00:04:56 John Wall 

But to actually come out and say like? 

00:04:57 John Wall 

OK, we’re doing a lot of search engine marketing so you know this month in Google ads, we’re going to try these three different types of campaigns and we’re going to measure, you know, after week one see what the results are. 

00:05:09 John Wall 

Adjust and continue with a four week. 

00:05:12 John Wall 

You know campaign and try and maximize the return on that so that you can. 

00:05:16 John Wall 

Really, you know instead of just. 

00:05:18 John Wall 

Kind of sprinkling budget all over the place. 

00:05:19 John Wall 

You focus and put out a hypothesis, test it, and then move on. 

00:05:23 Justin 

Yeah, I think it’s it’s. 

00:05:24 Justin 

I think another thing I see a lot is that you know we we invest time or you invest money into some type of you know, let’s say you run Facebook ads for Facebook campaign. 

00:05:35 Justin 

Paying for promotional for some item and then you know after three weeks say oh this this didn’t work. 

00:05:40 Justin 

This sucks. 

00:05:41 Justin 

Facebook sucks. 

00:05:41 Justin 

Facebook marketing doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work and I’ve heard people say this over and over. 

00:05:46 Justin 

They try something one way one time and then they just give up on it. 

00:05:50 Justin 

And they’re like, Nope, that’s not for me. 

00:05:52 Justin 

It doesn’t work. 

00:05:52 Justin 

Let me move on to something else, and there’s so many options. 

00:05:56 Justin 

Out there that you know they’ll jump from, like say, Facebook, and then they’ll do a YouTube ad and same thing. 

00:06:00 Justin 

And you know, give it a. 

00:06:01 Justin 

Few weeks maybe. You know a few $100 few $1000 and then realize I know that’s not that’s not working. 

00:06:06 Justin 

You too bad sucks too. 

00:06:08 Justin 

Facebook doesn’t work. 

00:06:09 Justin 

YouTube doesn’t work. 

00:06:10 Justin 

Let me move on to something else and they this cycle keeps going and going and they never stick with it. 

00:06:14 Justin 

So how when you’re working with customers, how do you encourage them to stick with it and to to try these? 

00:06:21 Justin 

Variations and to really test and measure and look for those. 

00:06:26 Justin 

Those sweet spots that will be profitable and worthwhile and have a good. 

00:06:29 John Wall 

ROI Yeah, that’s a great question because that’s really at the heart of this, is that? 

00:06:33 John Wall 

A lot of people do that kind of grasshopper ING you know, from campaign to campaign to campaign and the big thing with that is we always see this is that marketers are usually married to their copy when they’re doing those ads. 

00:06:47 John Wall 

They’re usually running one to three versions of an app, and they’re like, yeah, it’s not working. 

00:06:51 John Wall 

Let me send that same set of copy to different lists and they try different. 

00:06:54 John Wall 

Audience is still in the same copy, and really, anybody that we’ve seen that’s successful with us will put out 50 or 100 or 500 versions of the ad. I mean, you just need to. 

00:07:05 John Wall 

Constantly be tweaking the language and we see this all the time and you know if there’s 50 variants out there like you might find 2 that for some reason do way better than everything else, and so it’s like if you were only doing three or four versions, you could make 10 cycles through that and still never hit upon the gold, and it’s not going to work. 

00:07:22 John Wall 

See, then you know, like? 

00:07:24 John Wall 

Cycle back. 

00:07:26 John Wall 

You know six or seven years everybody was trying to do viral YouTube videos. Well, the clients we found that cranked out 50 videos, they tended to hit on one, you know, 50 or 100 videos. 

00:07:36 John Wall 

You’re going to hit on one and be viral if you make one to five videos, forget it, you just have no chance of that doing it. 

00:07:42 John Wall 

So it’s the. 

00:07:44 John Wall 

And ultimately that comes down to. 

00:07:46 John Wall 

Really, listening to your customers and prospects, right? 

00:07:48 John Wall 

You’re trying different language and different hooks and pitching your value different ways. 

00:07:54 John Wall 

And for some reason certain ones resonate. 

00:07:56 John Wall 

And we’ll cut through, whereas the majority of them kind of languish. 

00:08:00 John Wall 

And don’t do anything so really experimenting hard to get that message right. 

00:08:04 John Wall 

And then the thing with that is that does work across all channels, right? 

00:08:07 John Wall 

I mean you put up that ugly work once to find the three or four that work, and then when you go to the next, you know so they work on Facebook. 

00:08:13 John Wall 

Now you take those three champions over to LinkedIn or to the Twitter. 

00:08:16 John Wall 

Or whatever and you have much better odds now. 

00:08:19 John Wall 

And that’s one thing too that we. 

00:08:22 John Wall 

Is that there’s always economies of scale and learning curve. 

00:08:25 John Wall 

You know if you only try your Facebook ads for a month, you just somebody who’s done Facebook ads for a year is so far ahead of you in their ability to get things done and make things work and so we do counsel. 

00:08:39 John Wall 

A lot of people to go outside. 

00:08:41 John Wall 

And you know. 

00:08:41 John Wall 

If you’re doing ad platforms that you’ve never done anything with before, it’s really worth it to find some kind of agency that’s doing those ads and has done them because The thing is, they’ve learned from a whole range of clients you know you would have to do Facebook ads for two years to get to where they’re going to be from day one when they come in and talk to you so. 

00:09:01 John Wall 

Yeah, and unfortunately there’s no guarantees you know. 

00:09:01 Justin 

So that’s definitely good advice and and talk about those ad variations. 

00:09:05 Justin 

Do you? 

00:09:05 Justin 

Do you find the the successful campaigns have have tried a A? 

00:09:11 Justin 

You know, I think a lot of times I think where I’m going with this is that you’ll see someone say, like oh, do you like red cups? 

00:09:17 Justin 

And then the variation will be like, do you like cups that are red? 

00:09:21 Justin 

Do you like shiny red cups? So you got like basically you kind of get stuck on a tagline that you make 100 variations of that. 

00:09:28 Justin 

Same literally the same thing, and you’re not really expanding out and testing different things, you’re just taking the same thing and like recycling it under different ways. 

00:09:39 John Wall 

Yeah, no, they’re playing keyword bingo, right? 

00:09:41 John Wall 

Yeah, that’s like a Google thing. 

00:09:43 John Wall 

If you’re doing organic, yeah yeah, you would do. 

00:09:45 John Wall 

You’d be like cup cylinder solo, red, blue, solo and all. 

00:09:49 John Wall 

But yeah, no, it it totally needs to go back to that customer value thing. 

00:09:52 John Wall 

It’s like are you throwing a party in need cups or you know, for your summer punch get this. 

00:09:58 John Wall 

Or playing beer pong. 

00:10:00 Justin 

Right, yeah, like completely different things that you know how. 

00:10:04 Justin 

How do you when you’re working with clients again? 

00:10:07 Justin 

I say this from the perspective of you. 

00:10:09 Justin 

You know, working with clients that are generally business owners or in sales and marketing, and I know having worked with my own clients, the frustrations that business owners have and the limitations that they have both in time and in resources. 

00:10:24 Justin 

How do you initially present that? 

00:10:26 Justin 

When you say listen, we’re going to do this, but we’re going to. 

00:10:28 Justin 

We have to try a wide variety of things they say I had this great thing. 

00:10:31 Justin 

Do you? 

00:10:31 Justin 

Do you love red cup? 

00:10:33 Justin 

And now it’s up to you to say, Oh yeah, it’s a start, but we’re going to. 

00:10:36 Justin 

We’re going to kind of bend this here and there and we’re going to spread it out a little bit. 

00:10:40 Justin 

Maybe hit a little why? 

00:10:41 Justin 

Maybe find an audience we didn’t even know, right? 

00:10:43 Justin 

Like yeah, there’s. 

00:10:43 Justin 

Mention right solo cups and beer pong, right like you know for for someone a solo cup is a great party utility. 

00:10:43 Justin 

Yeah, yeah, there’s. 

00:10:49 Justin 

They may have not known in in a in some world that there was this whole other market of college kids playing beer pong with their branded cup, right? 

00:10:57 John Wall 

Yeah, absolutely, and it’s there’s a couple different ways to go with that. 

00:11:00 John Wall 

I mean, one, thankfully, is our whole. 

00:11:02 John Wall 

Model of testing is like OK, so you get to be. 

00:11:05 John Wall 

We always do champion challenger so yeah, you know you’re a shiny red cup ad. 

00:11:08 John Wall 

That’s the champion we’re going to go with that, and then we will throw in like, hey is challenger. 

00:11:12 John Wall 

We’re going to throw in beer pong and we’re going to throw in a couple other things. 

00:11:14 John Wall 

You know Toby Keith concert, so you can do it that way. 

00:11:17 John Wall 

The other one is we put machine learning to use for this kind of stuff. 

00:11:20 John Wall 

You know, we’ll go and look at the five. 

00:11:22 John Wall 

Best sites that score for solo cups and then run content analysis on their sites. 

00:11:28 John Wall 

And see what topics continue to show up and this is. 

00:11:32 John Wall 

I mean you could do this as a human, at least to get a grip of things. 

00:11:35 John Wall 

But you really can’t beat. You know having a machine learning model, churn through 60,000 pages and come back to you with the, you know the 20 most common terms or questions. 

00:11:44 John Wall 

And then that’s where you can start with that stuff, so that’s where you can kind of put that. 

00:11:48 John Wall 

Technology to bear to give you a little bit of extra insight that. 

00:11:51 John Wall 

Can maybe cut through the clutter right in I. 

00:11:53 Justin 

I imagine it’s a tremendous time. 

00:11:54 John Wall 

Saver, yeah, you know it’s not a lot of the stuff is not even humanly possible. You know, it’s like nobody’s going to sit. 

00:12:00 John Wall 

Through 30,000 call center calls you know it’s just you you want to. We get those transcribed and run them through machine learning and we we get to the meat quick. 

00:12:10 Justin 

Yeah, that that’s very cool. 

00:12:12 Justin 

Let’s dig into that first thing because you know obviously one. 

00:12:14 Justin 

One thing I I’m I’m really big on this podcast about bringing marketing and service together. 

00:12:20 Justin 

Hence marketing and service, right? 

00:12:22 Justin 

Because I feel that sales teams, marketing teams and service teams are often at odds with one another and they don’t usually work together and you have the sales team that’ll say anything to close the deal. 

00:12:35 Justin 

You’ve got a marketing team that’s, you know, making these beautiful brochures and. 

00:12:39 Justin 

Videos that make the product look like it can do all sorts of things that it can’t really do. 

00:12:43 Justin 

And then you have a service team getting beat to hell by angry customers. 

00:12:46 Justin 

And really, nobody is winning in this equation, right? 

00:12:49 Justin 

The customer is upset, the company is going to get a bad rap and and and none of this is really good for anybody. 

00:12:55 Justin 

So how do you bring those things together? 

00:12:58 John Wall 

Yeah, that’s a. 

00:12:58 John Wall 

It’s a huge challenge, and I mean I hate to say a lot of it is kind of law of the jungle stuff, right? 

00:13:04 John Wall 

I mean marketing has really eaten a lot of sales lunch over the past 10 years. 

00:13:09 John Wall 

I mean, sales used to be in charge of the customer entirely and now marketing is stepped up and they’re doing the initial contact. 

00:13:15 John Wall 

And of course, part of this is the nature of the web, right? 

00:13:17 John Wall 

The prospects now have probably researched you and your five other competitors and know what your pricing is before they even talk to anybody at your shop. 

00:13:25 John Wall 

But you know, sales has kind of displaced and been moved out of the picture and we see more and more now of the same thing happening with service too, in that you know social media is really more the customer service department area, right? 

00:13:37 John Wall 

I mean, that’s a better way to reach a. 

00:13:38 John Wall 

Customer, it’s a asynchronous. 

00:13:41 John Wall 

You know they don’t have to actually be on the phone. 

00:13:43 John Wall 

They could handle 4:00 or 5:00 AM at the same time. 

00:13:45 John Wall 

So really, a lot of them are tech stuff. 

00:13:48 John Wall 

I totally see marching in on the service side and so yeah, as far as the plate tectonics of it, it’s just kind of the stronger, faster, more evolved stuff will. 

00:13:58 John Wall 

Grab more ground and more part of the customer journey, and so I don’t think marketing is right to be doing that. 

00:14:03 John Wall 

As far as orgs, yeah, that gets to be really challenging and ultimately that is senior managers responsibility to make sure that it’s not Fife dumps and people are throwing things up over the wall, and in fact I had some research we had gone into about four or five years ago. 

00:14:10 Speaker 2 

Right? 

00:14:18 John Wall 

About what works and doesn’t work, made it very clear that there was no single structure that worked best. 

00:14:26 John Wall 

You know, it’s kind of like if sales has their goals and marketing has related goals and if marketing ultimately answers to sales or if marketing is its own department on a different branch of the tree. 

00:14:36 John Wall 

Like none of that stuff that mattered. 

00:14:37 John Wall 

All that really mattered. 

00:14:38 John Wall 

Was that at some point in the org chart there was a meeting place where sales, marketing and service were all in agreement on the goals and were communicating. 

00:14:48 John Wall 

And so if you have that, that’s what makes the successful organizations. 

00:14:52 John Wall 

Everybody else that silos up. 

00:14:53 John Wall 

They end up. 

00:14:54 John Wall 

Unfortunately, they get into that churn of the three bad quarters. 

00:14:57 John Wall 

You know, one of the senior execs gets balanced and it just kind of continues to churn until they finally get people. 

00:15:03 John Wall 

If they’re lucky, they get people who can play together and they get over. 

00:15:06 Justin 

That sure I you know, I want to back up. 

00:15:08 Justin 

For one second, you mentioned something really cool that I don’t want to gloss over the idea that you can use AI technology to scrub through and scrape. 

00:15:18 Justin 

Service calls, transcripts of customer service calls to gain insights as to what’s happening on the service end. 

00:15:26 Justin 

That potentially, you know, the the the executives or the marketing department can then take and make changes, improvements. 

00:15:34 Justin 

New offering. 

00:15:35 Justin 

I mean that is really cool, that’s like. 

00:15:37 Justin 

Really, starting to bring that whole circle together. 

00:15:40 John Wall 

Yeah yeah, so one of our clients. We’ve done this. They had call center. They gave us 30,000 calls from a month. 

00:15:47 John Wall 

We went through those and chewed them all up and it was great because we came back with OK. 

00:15:52 John Wall 

These are the top 10 reasons that people are calling in. 

00:15:54 John Wall 

These are the topics that we keep seeing coming up over and over again. And so the marketing department was able to put those on the FAQ. So and when they get to the page where they need to call the service center, you know there’s always these, you know well. Are you actually asking about XYZ? 

00:16:07 John Wall 

And by having those questions over there, you can shunt 70 or 80% of the questions off the call center you know, and it’s amazing with their callsign. 

00:16:16 John Wall 

After they had some stat, it was like if they could shave a minute off the average call time. It would save them 80 or $100,000, right? 

00:16:23 John Wall 

So you know the ROI was totally there and it gives them SOS go left too because now they’ve got these questions in there that they know are the most popular questions and so suddenly the Google organic traffic. 

00:16:24 Justin 

Huge returns. 

00:16:36 John Wall 

Comes from that too, because that’s. 

00:16:38 John Wall 

You know you’ve kind of landed on that. 

00:16:39 John Wall 

What the customer language really is. 

00:16:41 Justin 

Yeah, that that is a. 

00:16:43 Justin 

That’s something that I think is is really, really important that in a small business it’s very easy to get the feedback from the customer, right? 

00:16:52 Justin 

If if you’re if you’re a solopreneur, or if you’re a small business, you’ve got maybe 10 employees. 

00:16:57 Justin 

Even even a larger small business, say 50 employees, and you do have a little bit of a service. 

00:17:01 Justin 

Department you’ve got the sales department it. 

00:17:03 Justin 

I think it’s a lot easier and you can be more nimble and responsive when you get. 

00:17:08 Justin 

You know you you can talk to the one or two people that answer the phone and say hey well what question you get asked the most? 

00:17:14 Justin 

And it’s like Oh well, everyone calls they’re always asking this this, and this is so great and now you can put in your literature, put it on your website, put it on the FAQ, right? 

00:17:21 Justin 

And make it really easy to find. 

00:17:23 Justin 

And obviously as companies scale and they grow and they get bigger and bigger and bigger, those types of things become much more challenging to get that feedback. 

00:17:32 Justin 

You know, if you’re in Amazon. 

00:17:34 Justin 

Call center Rep in in. 

00:17:36 Justin 

Yeah, right. 

00:17:37 Justin 

How are you going to pass up to Jeff that you’ve got this issue? 

00:17:41 Justin 

That’s very, very common and recurring theme with a certain product that Amazon sells, right? 

00:17:45 Justin 

It’s just never going to happen, so the idea that you’ve got the technology to kind of go in there and do that work for them is is really that I’m impressed. 

00:17:55 Justin 

I mean, that’s mind blowing. 

00:17:56 Justin 

To me, I never thought about that. 

00:17:57 Justin 

I really didn’t. 

00:17:58 Justin 

I never thought about that. 

00:17:59 John Wall 

It’s very cool. 

00:18:00 John Wall 

That’s interesting because it’s more of a data churning thing. 

00:18:02 John Wall 

But another interesting thing we see with that is to be able to use the same thing for incoming prospects and leads. 

00:18:07 John Wall 

You can look at your incoming prospects and leads and have machine learning work. 

00:18:10 John Wall 

Once that too, so you know you’ve run this program and you like a free newsletter thing, and so over the course of a year you get, you know 8000 leads or something like that. 

00:18:19 John Wall 

But to be able to pick out the 50 that are most like your existing customers now you can do individual conversations with those 50. 

00:18:27 John Wall 

You don’t have to like come up with custom contact for all. 

00:18:30 John Wall 

You know 40,000 of them or whatever you can send the form message to the ones that don’t really fit the profile, just generally thank them. 

00:18:37 John Wall 

But the ones that should be on the target, you can now actually be more of a human sales and marketing person to them because you kind of know what their background is and you probably know the questions that they’re going to ask and how. 

00:18:48 John Wall 

And it can. 

00:18:49 John Wall 

Yeah, all that kind of anything that gets you to focus. 

00:18:52 John Wall 

That’s the big thing. 

00:18:52 John Wall 

It’s not so much of marketing. 

00:18:54 John Wall 

And last generation was about, you know, mass messaging and spamming. 

00:18:59 John Wall 

And just like doing spraying more with less and what we’re trying to shift more to now is that you said more human, more effective and more insight so that you’re. 

00:19:08 John Wall 

Actually, more human and relevant to the. 

00:19:09 Justin 

Right people? 

00:19:10 Justin 

So you know, Speaking of insights, you know we talked a little bit about Facebook ads and and and we’ve we’ve, you know, talked a little bit about customers. 

00:19:18 Justin 

To jump into data, you know company data. 

00:19:22 Justin 

I know that there are so many organizations that run all sorts of analytics and they collect all sorts of data, but then they don’t know what to do with it. 

00:19:33 Justin 

And and I think you know, I, I’m not an expert at this, but I I think you see it. 

00:19:38 Justin 

On both the small business scale, you’ve got a business been around for five years. Let’s say they you know do a million $2,000,000 a year in sales. 

00:19:44 Justin 

Now they’ve got five years of customer data analytics. 

00:19:48 Justin 

They just don’t know what to actually make actionable they’re looking at. 

00:19:52 Justin 

Yeah alright, what’s the conversion rate? 

00:19:53 Justin 

How many visitors to my website? 

00:19:55 Justin 

And that’s like you know that’s the extent of it on big data side, it looks like you’ve got the opposite. 

00:20:01 Justin 

You’re all the same problem you, but now much much bigger. 

00:20:04 Justin 

There’s so much data. 

00:20:05 Justin 

How do you even begin to filter through this and find anything when you’ve just had so much information available to you? 

00:20:14 Justin 

What are some things that businesses can look for like? 

00:20:17 Justin 

What are some insights other than? 

00:20:19 Justin 

Conversion rate and how many people went to the website. 

00:20:23 Justin 

What’s like a good example of something that can be extracted from a decent data pool of a small business? 

00:20:29 John Wall 

Yeah, what like a great place to start too is Google has already got with their site analytics. 

00:20:37 John Wall 

You can go in and find out what’s working and broken. 

00:20:40 John Wall 

You know you’ll get feedback as far as which pages are fast enough, which you know how many site errors you have and things like that. 

00:20:47 John Wall 

So just going through and making sure everything that’s clean. 

00:20:49 John Wall 

Is working is a huge advantage. 

00:20:51 John Wall 

You know you should be able to beat out most of your competition ’cause a lot of people don’t even have sites that are working. 

00:20:56 John Wall 

Another problem with the small business sites is that. 

00:20:59 John Wall 

You don’t have enough data. You know you have data, but it’s not statistically relevant. So let’s say you run two marketing programs and one of them gets you 35 conversions and the other gets you 27. 

00:21:11 John Wall 

You you just go test that again now you see because if it it could easily flip the next time around. It’s not like if you have 500 conversions with one. 

00:21:20 John Wall 

And you know, 48 with the other, that kind of stuff is easily obvious, but until you get above. 

00:21:25 John Wall 

I mean, you really depending on the product and price point. You may have to be up over $20 million before you get those kinds of conversions and see what’s kind of working right. 

00:21:34 John Wall 

For the smaller business, the bigger thing is to have goals in Google Analytics you know have checkpoints as far as like sign up for the company newsletter, and then if it’s in e-commerce thing, the actual shopping basket, you know clicks a conversion, so at least you can see what’s converting and even in a small business that’ll give you some clues. 

00:21:51 John Wall 

You’ll see if social is driving traffic or email. 

00:21:54 John Wall 

Or your own website. 

00:21:55 John Wall 

And that can at least tell you where to go and where to kind of spread your budget around to get the best results. 

00:22:00 John Wall 

And for big companies it’s a whole different set of problems. 

00:22:04 John Wall 

You know, so much of it is silo ING and tribal problems. 

00:22:08 John Wall 

You know people not wanting to share data or or it’s just infrastructure silos where you know HubSpot doesn’t talk to. 

00:22:15 John Wall 

MailChimp, which doesn’t talk to Microsoft Clarity or whatever. 

00:22:20 John Wall 

You know you’ve got all these systems strung together and so it’s a matter of going in and saying, like, OK, what do we really need to find out? 

00:22:25 John Wall 

Then you know what’s the minimum number of systems we can string together to get to that finish line, and then being really the the the key is to have the business drivers mapped out first to. 

00:22:36 John Wall 

You know it’s like OK, what are we going to measure and why? 

00:22:38 John Wall 

And then go build it. 

00:22:40 John Wall 

So many people like just want to build the cool dashboard with all the stats and then hope that they stumble upon. 

00:22:43 Speaker 2 

Right? 

00:22:45 John Wall 

Some insight, yeah that that just never works. You know nobody wants to see those dashboards and what comes with that is very clear is you know, the CEO’s dashboard is very different from the VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, which is very different from the sales Rep you know. 

00:22:59 John Wall 

Scoreboard, like everybody, has their own dashboards and their own stats that they care about and you’ve got to get to that. 

00:23:05 John Wall 

Where you know they’re logging in every Monday or Friday or whatever, because these are the stats they want to see to see what’s on the scoreboard, not just a dashboard of kind of like. 

00:23:14 John Wall 

OK, what’s going on? 

00:23:15 John Wall 

You know what’s the weather map? 

00:23:17 Justin 

Yeah, so so how do you then in that instance, how does that business owner or CEO where do they draw the insights from? 

00:23:26 Justin 

Like at what point can you sit someone down and say hey look it, we see that? 

00:23:32 Justin 

This is happening and you’re probably not aware of it, and if you shift focus here, or if you shift a campaign here, or if you push more money over in this area, you’re probably going to be much more. 

00:23:44 Justin 

Likely to have success. 

00:23:46 John Wall 

Yeah, it’s you know that’s the biggest challenge of the whole thing is finding out like where to go and what to do. 

00:23:52 John Wall 

Because most of the time you’re just not having as much success as you’d like. 

00:23:56 John Wall 

You know most companies. 

00:23:58 John Wall 

Yeah, you start off as a new business if you’re testing 3 channels. 

00:24:01 John Wall 

If you’ve got one of them that is predictably delivering some business like you’re doing, fantastic. 

00:24:06 John Wall 

You know, I mean, that’s you’re you’re winning. 

00:24:08 John Wall 

In a big way, and so your mission just becomes alright. 

00:24:12 John Wall 

Keep testing 3 and find one that does win and then as the organization scales up, you know and we identify there’s like basically 20 different than you know paths you can take and you’re starting with three as they start to mature. 

00:24:26 John Wall 

You just keep adding them as you add staff you know like. 

00:24:29 John Wall 

No one marketer can handle more than three at all, but what will happen is you’ll get so good that someone will specialize completely. 

00:24:35 John Wall 

You know somebody will be doing just Facebook ads as their whole job right? 

00:24:38 John Wall 

So then at that point at the senior at the VP of Marketing Dashboard is going to be OK. 

00:24:43 John Wall 

Let me look at those 20 channels. 

00:24:44 John Wall 

And what’s the splits you know where those breaking down as far as which are the highest and most? 

00:24:49 John Wall 

But even then, you’re kind of given this interesting quandary of. 

00:24:53 John Wall 

OK, so this one is doing the best and let’s say this one is near the bottom, the one that’s doing the best that when you’re going to test for elasticity, right? 

00:25:00 John Wall 

You’re going to say OK if we spend twice as much, does it generate twice as much and it may or may not, and so you and the normal curve is that at some point there’s diminishing returns. 

00:25:11 John Wall 

You know, you kind of up, for example, with Google organic. 

00:25:14 John Wall 

You’re going to have your basket of terms, and once you exhaust those, there’s kind of nowhere else to go. 

00:25:19 John Wall 

And same with Google ads to a lot of sense. 

00:25:20 John Wall 

Would just be like look we throw all of our money on these five terms and we budget 200 bucks but we only spend 50 but we take every buck we can get. 

00:25:30 John Wall 

So it’s yeah, it’s that constant shuffling and then you know the C level just wants to see profit and cost by department. 

00:25:37 John Wall 

You know they don’t care about the details really. 

00:25:39 John Wall 

They go to the VP for the details and the front run wrap either the marketing OPS person or the sales guy. 

00:25:46 John Wall 

They need to see the daily thing of like OK who are the customers coming up for renewal or who is looking to buy this? 

00:25:51 John Wall 

Week and who did we lose and how many came through the front door so that they can go back and. 

00:25:56 John Wall 

Complain that you’re not driving enough traffic for us. 

00:25:58 John Wall 

That kind of stuff. 

00:25:59 John Wall 

So it’s yeah the focus is different at every level, and it’s a different batch of reports, so it’s a lot of work to map that out. 

00:26:06 Justin 

Yeah, and even things like that. 

00:26:07 Justin 

I mean, do you find that you you work with businesses that don’t even have those fundamental things like a heads up of like hey, this person is renewing as opposed to Someone Like You know, tabbing through different accounts, saying, oh, look at this one. 

00:26:17 Justin 

This one looks like it’s coming up soon. 

00:26:19 Justin 

Do you find that is is a pretty often frequent occurrence in small businesses? 

00:26:24 John Wall 

Oh yeah, absolutely you know. 

00:26:26 John Wall 

Shortage of resources is just the biggest problem you know for a smaller business. 

00:26:30 John Wall 

Like that, but there is no sure path to gold. 

00:26:34 John Wall 

Then if you can get that renewal cycle or upsells. 

00:26:36 John Wall 

And yeah, we just continue to pound that into people because you’ve got to understand that as it’s in nearly every business, it’s just cheaper to try and do more business with your existing customers than it is to find new customers, right? 

00:26:49 John Wall 

You know. 

00:26:50 John Wall 

Except for inbound stuff where they actually come to you looking for business. 

00:26:54 John Wall 

Those may start to rival renewals, but after that it’s yeah, keep your current customers happy ’cause there’s just no better return on your marketing or sales dollars than getting you know providing more service to happy customers. 

00:27:07 John Wall 

There’s nothing better than locking them in harder. 

00:27:09 Justin 

Yeah, and that you know that’s obviously a theme here in every episode is building those long-term trust full long term relationships that will be beneficial for both your customers and for the business. 

00:27:21 Justin 

Let’s jump the last thing I want to touch on a little bit is I. 

00:27:25 Justin 

I know you work with predictive analytics crystal ball. 

00:27:29 Justin 

Their BS. 

00:27:31 John Wall 

That’s a great question. 

00:27:32 John Wall 

Yeah, it’s it’s not as easy as it used to be. 

00:27:34 John Wall 

You know, so much of the predictive stuff that we have worked with in the past and have done is usually based on a 5 year horizon. 

00:27:41 John Wall 

You know, if you can get a five year horizon for something, then you can usually reliably look forward a year or two and have a good idea of what’s going to happen. 

00:27:47 John Wall 

So there is some crystal ball stuff, unfortunately, you know. 

00:27:50 John Wall 

As we’re talking right now where you’re 2 into a pandemic and so many things have just been completely destroyed that the data we. 

00:27:59 John Wall 

Used to have is of. 

00:28:00 John Wall 

No use compared to where we’re going now, like a good example, I always tell people is. 

00:28:04 John Wall 

There used to be in beta B, it was just a given. 

00:28:07 John Wall 

You could in most places shut your website off on Saturday and Sunday. 

00:28:11 John Wall 

You know you would see like 500 to 10,000 users Monday through Friday and Saturday and Sunday. You’d get like 400 or whatever you know it’s just completely doesn’t work. 

00:28:17 Justin 

Well, nobody wants to work on Saturday. 

00:28:20 Justin 

I’m drinking beer and watching the game. 

00:28:22 John Wall 

Yeah, you know business shuts down. 

00:28:24 John Wall 

That’s just how it does. 

00:28:25 John Wall 

And unfortunately, even weekends are still pretty dead. 

00:28:28 John Wall 

But what we kind of see is that the traffic pattern is like when people are on vacation. 

00:28:33 John Wall 

You know, people show up at weird hours on weird days and it’s a lot flatter. 

00:28:38 John Wall 

It doesn’t peak in cycle like it used to. 

00:28:40 John Wall 

Well, depending on the usually depending on the business you that have like Monday Tuesdays are huge and the rest of the week or flat or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or flat and Thursday, Friday or huge, you know pretty much comes down to stuff people need. 

00:28:51 John Wall 

They grab on Monday and Tuesday and projects that are fun or that they’re looking to do new cool stuff they do on Thursday and Friday, and so there was all kinds of stuff with that that we could predict. 

00:29:01 John Wall 

And and get people involved with. 

00:29:03 John Wall 

And so a lot of that has gone. 

00:29:04 John Wall 

Yeah, it’s not as affected. 

00:29:06 John Wall 

I mean, we still run it, but we just a lot of times we don’t come up with the confidence interval. 

00:29:09 John Wall 

You know, we can’t just say we can’t say that yeah, we’re 90% certain that this is going to happen, but there are still areas where it works. 

00:29:14 John Wall 

We do we have a report. 

00:29:16 John Wall 

We called the Cheese report where we had been doing a bunch of stuff with food companies and of course nobody wants to share their data right? 

00:29:22 John Wall 

They don’t want the rest of the world. 

00:29:23 John Wall 

See, but their crystal ball. 

00:29:25 John Wall 

So we created the generic cheese report and it’s just amazing. 

00:29:28 John Wall 

The insights that we get out of this thing like you know, I I had never knew about halloumi which is a cheese that’s grillable and so if you’re in the cheese industry. 

00:29:38 John Wall 

May June starting into July. 

00:29:40 John Wall 

Halloumi is you know if you were selling cheese you’d wanna be doing blog posts and videos on halloumi in April, May June to prep for that summer surge as everybody looks for the grillable cheeses and it’s like you know if you’re the Monterrey Jack person well then you’re shooting around the Super Bowl because that’s when that’s going to get. 

00:29:48 Justin 

Right? 

00:29:58 John Wall 

Hot and cheddar is big. 

00:29:59 John Wall 

Around Thanksgiving you got to be ready with your recipes there, and so you can’t. 

00:30:03 John Wall 

There’s some reliable cycles that you can predict against and use to help put together your content calendar. 

00:30:08 John Wall 

That’s really for most of our customers. 

00:30:10 John Wall 

That’s what they end up doing. 

00:30:11 John Wall 

They say, hey, you know we sell these. 

00:30:13 John Wall 

Five different verticals of stuff you know. 

00:30:15 John Wall 

Women shoes and dresses and coats, and you know we can say OK, so these months you need to be pushing and promoting this kind of content. 

00:30:24 John Wall 

The other months you move on to this next thing so that you’re kind of always staying. 

00:30:27 John Wall 

You know two or three weeks ahead of when the Google crowd is going to show up looking for that kind of stuff. 

00:30:30 Justin 

Yeah, do you find? 

00:30:32 Justin 

You know, obviously most most people in most businesses. 

00:30:36 Justin 

Roughly know their seasons of what do you have you found success in looking at competitors and other industries? 

00:30:43 Justin 

To kind of uncover some things that may not be so obvious like you know, if you’re a grocery store going to sell more turkeys at Thanksgiving, then then you probably are at during, you know, during the Super Bowl, right, you know? 

00:30:54 Justin 

Looking a little bit broader or using AI. 

00:30:57 Justin 

Is there a way to gather a little more information to find more of the subtle little hills and valleys that might be missed on the surface? 

00:31:05 John Wall 

Yeah, sure, I have a fantastic example for this kind of blew my mind. 

00:31:08 John Wall 

We were not expecting. 

00:31:09 John Wall 

This at all. 

00:31:10 John Wall 

We were we. 

00:31:11 John Wall 

It’s funny, we actually worked with a few churches. 

00:31:13 John Wall 

We had churches in the mix. 

00:31:14 John Wall 

They actually. 

00:31:15 John Wall 

Some of these churches have the marketing staff and really want to do some ******** analysis and we were looking at ad spend and we found a correlation with a churchgoing audience. 

00:31:26 John Wall 

If this was in the Midwest somewhere, if you were looking for people to join your church, there was a high correlation between dog owners. 

00:31:35 John Wall 

And the churchgoers. 

00:31:37 John Wall 

So if you were the kind of person that would buy a dog and go to a dog park and do dog related things? 

00:31:42 John Wall 

So you had some a digital fingerprint that had dog in it. By targeting those advertisers, they were able to get like a 4X lift. 

00:31:50 John Wall 

On the headset. 

00:31:52 Justin 

There it is. 

00:31:52 John Wall 

You know it’s. 

00:31:53 John Wall 

The dog people are the same kind of people that if they’re not doing anything on Sunday, they might really be up to come talk to people at church. 

00:32:00 John Wall 

They should. 

00:32:01 John Wall 

They like to get out and do stuff. 

00:32:02 John Wall 

And whatever and so yeah, you know you wouldn’t. 

00:32:05 John Wall 

Connect dog in church without having a machine pore through that. 

00:32:10 Justin 

Data, yeah, that is the stuff that I absolutely absolutely love. 

00:32:14 Justin 

I I cannot get enough of it. 

00:32:16 Justin 

I don’t know if you’ve ever read Charles I think was Charles Duhigg. 

00:32:20 Justin 

Did the power of habit. 

00:32:21 John Wall 

No, no fantasy. 

00:32:21 Justin 

It’s a fantastic book and and he digs. 

00:32:24 Justin 

Through you know some marketing campaigns. 

00:32:28 Justin 

To show how certain companies specifically, he talks a lot about target. 

00:32:33 Justin 

Having figured out that based on people buying behavior of groceries, they started to be able to predict when women were pregnant in some instances before the woman knew she was pregnant, like they literally made like. 

00:32:47 John Wall 

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s that’s a famous case that was even a privacy thing. 

00:32:47 Justin 

Alright, you know? 

00:32:50 John Wall 

They they took it. 

00:32:51 John Wall 

But yeah, it’s amazing. 

00:32:51 Justin 

Oh yeah, big big privacy issue. 

00:32:52 John Wall 

Some of that. 

00:32:52 John Wall 

Research ’cause Walmart has a shelf 1/2 diapers and beer. You’ll find there’s if they have a liquor license. There’s beer near the diapers because people run in and grab and go. 

00:32:53 Justin 

Yeah, Yep. 

00:33:02 John Wall 

And yeah, it’s uh, there’s a there’s a lot of stuff on the horizon with that, especially with target, because we’ve noticed that they’re now doing. 

00:33:09 John Wall 

Generic brands, but they’re going by vertical ’cause they have like their up and up brand. 

00:33:13 John Wall 

That’s kind of all over the store, right? 

00:33:15 John Wall 

But now they’re going in and they’re being like OK. 

00:33:17 John Wall 

Our brands of shampoos are going to be, I figure what the names of them are, but they have so much data that they know that they can look and be like, OK, we can pick up. 

00:33:25 John Wall 

Off this conglomerate, if we come up with a better shampoo line and then the insane thing is in the past it used to be generics were being sold to regional groceries, so there was no real data, but target can go in every day and be like. 

00:33:38 John Wall 

OK, here’s how head and shoulders sold. 

00:33:40 John Wall 

And here’s how we sold across the nation. 

00:33:43 John Wall 

So yeah, there, there’s a lot of stuff going on in that front. 

00:33:45 John Wall 

It’s pretty. 

00:33:46 Justin 

Crazy very very cool stuff. 

00:33:47 Justin 

So as we wrap this up I gotta ask, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever? 

00:33:52 Justin 

Right? 

00:33:54 John Wall 

You know, yeah, I had to think about this. 

00:33:55 John Wall 

You you at least coached me ahead of time that this was coming so I could prep one behind. 

00:33:59 Justin 

And really proud of. 

00:34:01 John Wall 

The well, you know the the thing with me it’s it’s always been the same it’s. 

00:34:05 John Wall 

I’ve misjudged the teams that I’ve gone to work with. 

00:34:07 John Wall 

You know, I’ve accepted a position and gone into some place and the worst ones within three months. 

00:34:13 John Wall 

You’re like, Oh my God, I’ve made a terrible mistake. 

00:34:15 John Wall 

This is not gonna turn out well to protect the innocently guilty. 

00:34:19 John Wall 

I can’t, you know, tell the the full stories of what goes on, but it’s pretty much always the same thing. 

00:34:24 John Wall 

Where you kind of. 

00:34:25 John Wall 

You know it’s like everything looks good on the surface and you dive in and it’s just you find everything from product problems, even product problems. 

00:34:32 John Wall 

You can usually get around. 

00:34:33 John Wall 

It’s the human problems that you can’t, right? 

00:34:35 John Wall 

You know managers that are backstabbing each other and you know all kinds of other. 

00:34:40 John Wall 

Yeah, ’cause I I’ve been to. 

00:34:41 John Wall 

I was in one place where we went in as a team of 10. 

00:34:44 John Wall 

That was, you know, specifically for a product line and within five months, 9 out of the ten were gone. 

00:34:49 John Wall 

They had flushed everybody and you know, at no point was anybody like, geez, it’s kind of strange that. 

00:34:54 John Wall 

We had, you know, 10 employees in a row who were unable to do this, but you know, let’s let that manager try with four. 

00:35:00 John Wall 

Or five more people so. 

00:35:00 Justin 

Right, right? 

00:35:02 John Wall 

Yeah, picking the wrong team. 

00:35:04 Justin 

Looks like you said with testing you you hire 100 people. 

00:35:04 John Wall 

It’s just the biggest mistake. 

00:35:06 Justin 

Chances are five and we’ll get along with. 

00:35:08 John Wall 

The manager right right exactly if you just turn to where there’s, there’s that saying if you wake up in the morning and the first five people you run into are jerks, there’s only one jerk. 

00:35:18 Speaker 2 

Right? 

00:35:20 Justin 

It’s not like that. 

00:35:21 Justin 

I like that. 

00:35:22 Justin 

And then of course my my next question is what is the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten? 

00:35:28 John Wall 

Yeah, you know there’s there’s two an easy joke. 

00:35:30 John Wall 

One was when I was very early in my career. 

00:35:33 John Wall 

My dear friend Ben Dunn said managing people sucks and you know he’s right, like managing. 

00:35:39 John Wall 

People does suck, so that’s the short one. The longer one though, is Seth Godin’s Icarus deception. 

00:35:45 John Wall 

Is the book that kind of changed my life completely? 

00:35:48 John Wall 

If you’re not familiar with it, the idea is that all of our lives, especially through our educational system. 

00:35:54 John Wall 

We’re kind of taught that you need to be well rounded and you need to follow the track, and you need to obey and perform and you will. 

00:36:01 John Wall 

Everything will be OK and the Icarus deception kind of turns. 

00:36:05 John Wall 

That totally around and says no, it’s. 

00:36:07 John Wall 

Actually, the people that pick one thing and become the best in the world at that one thing. 

00:36:11 John Wall 

Those are the ones that surge ahead and that following the rules. 

00:36:15 John Wall 

Unfortunately, that was great. 

00:36:17 John Wall 

You know my dad did 40 years with General Electric. 

00:36:20 John Wall 

You know companies used to take care of people. 

00:36:22 John Wall 

Now that’s not the case at all. 

00:36:23 John Wall 

You know you miss two quarters and you get. 

00:36:25 John Wall 

Well, sometimes you don’t even miss two quarters. 

00:36:27 John Wall 

Sometimes the company needs to hit the year end goal. 

00:36:30 John Wall 

They will just lay people off to hit the numbers. 

00:36:32 John Wall 

So the C-Suite can get the cash. I mean, there’s no more allegiance there, so you do have to take. 

00:36:38 John Wall 

Initiative to you know, work for your own career, and ultimately it all comes to take on more risk. 

00:36:44 John Wall 

It’s not about how hard you work, it’s about how much you risk, and that’s where the payoff is. 

00:36:50 John Wall 

And so yeah, they’re kind of coaching me out of always trusting and following senior managers. 

00:36:56 John Wall 

To, you know, go in there and take responsibility for the work. 

00:36:59 John Wall 

Yourself and prove where you want to go and and take the chance and risk to do it, and that’s real. 

00:37:04 John Wall 

They made the biggest difference in my. 

00:37:06 Justin 

Career very cool, excellent and how can people get in touch with it? 

00:37:10 Justin 

For trust insights. 

00:37:11 John Wall 

Yeah, sure, it’s J wall at trust insights dot AI. 

00:37:14 John Wall 

Or you can just go to trust insights day at trust insights dot AI and see us over there. 

00:37:19 John Wall 

And I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter or all the normal social places you can hook up with. 

00:37:24 John Wall 

With me, any place over there. 

00:37:25 Justin 

Awesome very. 

00:37:26 Justin 

And of course I will put all of that in the show notes as well so you can find it easily. 

00:37:29 Justin 

If you’re listening and just click on. 

00:37:31 Justin 

And you have a very successful marketing podcast called Marketing Over Coffee that you kind of mentioned at the front of this that you’ve been doing for a very, very long time, right? 

00:37:41 Justin 

You said about 15 years. 

00:37:43 John Wall 

Yeah, yeah, we’ve started this. You know the first podcasts were pretty much 2005 and by two Chris and I had both done cast back then. 

00:37:51 John Wall 

But then in 2007 I kind of realized, hey, I’m not going to be Howard Stern. I need to like focus on marketing and tech. 

00:37:57 John Wall 

’cause that’s where I can’t. 

00:37:58 Justin 

Make a difference? 

00:37:59 Justin 

Yeah, what what got you into it that that long ago? 

00:38:01 Justin 

I mean, 15 years ago podcasting. 

00:38:03 Justin 

Was really really at its infancy stage. 

00:38:05 John Wall 

Oh yeah, yeah no. 

00:38:06 John Wall 

So this was. 

00:38:07 John Wall 

Like Adam in fact yeah, Adam Curry and Dave Weiner were the two guys Dave Weiner put together RSS he came up with the framework for what RSS should be. 

00:38:16 John Wall 

And Adam Curry was actually testing that he was. 

00:38:20 John Wall 

He did what he called the daily source code, a podcast where he would put together an audio file so these developers could build podcasting software and this was. 

00:38:27 John Wall 

You know, two years before it was in iTunes, so you had to like go download funky software to make it work. 

00:38:33 John Wall 

And yeah, I got involved really early at that point I was at a company called Marketing Sherpa, which was like the marketingprofs of its time. 

00:38:40 John Wall 

And so I was. 

00:38:40 John Wall 

Watching tech all the time. 

00:38:43 John Wall 

And then to, you know, with your musical background, you know I’d like, I’ve just been into audio gear forever. 

00:38:47 Speaker 2 

Yeah, yeah. 

00:38:47 John Wall 

I mean, I had you know a one time CD ROM burner and made my own mixes. 

00:38:51 John Wall 

You know, in the in the 90s and all that kind of stuff. 

00:38:54 John Wall 

So I yeah a chance to get my voice on air. 

00:38:57 John Wall 

I was all over it. 

00:38:58 Justin 

Very very very cool. 

00:38:59 Justin 

So if you’re looking for the marketing over coffee podcast, you take this podcast, you find it and then you scroll up about 14 pages to the top of the list and you will find the marketing over coffee, podcasts and of course I will put a link to that into the description and show notes as well so people can find you. 

00:39:17 Justin 

John, thank you so much for being on here today. 

00:39:20 Justin 

I I really appreciate you taking the time and and sharing your insights because it’s a. 

00:39:24 Justin 

It’s really cool stuff and I love that we’re we’re kind of on the same page of this, bringing marketing and service together, and the fact that your company can use AI to extract some of those insights and some of that information is just super. 

00:39:36 Justin 

Super cool and hopefully we will start to turn a corner where when you ask someone the best customer service experience they’ve ever had, they’re going to say, Oh my God, there’s so many I don’t even know where to start. 

00:39:47 John Wall 

That sounds good, yeah, thanks Justin. 

00:39:49 John Wall 

I appreciate it always up for talking, marketing and tech stuff. 

00:39:51 John Wall 

So I had a great time. 

00:39:52 Justin 

Awesome, thank you. 

00:39:55 Justin 

Wow, thank you John. 

00:39:56 Justin 

What a great guest John was on this podcast and I hope that this helped give some value to how you interpret your data and some of the things you might look at when you log into your Google Analytics dashboard or when you’re scrolling through Microsoft Clarity homepage and looking for some insights. 

00:40:13 Justin 

There are definitely some things you can. 

00:40:16 Justin 

About your customers and their experience through these platforms, but it might not always be as easy as it seems it should. 

00:40:24 Justin 

Thanks so much for listening today again, I’m Justin Varuzzo. You can find me at justin@marketingandservice.com. 

00:40:31 Justin 

You can hit me up on the marketing and service.com Facebook page and of course again, if you enjoyed the show. 

00:40:36 Justin 

Please like or subscribe. 

00:40:38 Justin 

It means so much to me and I look forward to seeing you next week. 

00:40:43 Justin 

Have a great day.