So much has changed in the world of marketing, especially during the digital age, but some basic principles remain the same. Perhaps one principle that isn’t going away any sooner is that marketing is all about caring. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” More than a century after he said them, these powerful words remain relevant. Andrew Deutsch should know. Having been in the marketing game before fax machines were a thing, Andrew knows that effectively communicating and building rapport with potential clients starts with being relevant and providing value to them. All the marketing technology in the world will never get you the same results if you forget this. The keyword is care, and it can be applied even in an era of virtual interactions, as Alon Zaibert has so eloquently shown in a previous episode. Join in as Andrew discusses this topic and more with his long-time friend and your host, Ben Baker.
Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. – Theodore Roosevelt
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Marketing Is About Caring: The Power Of A Full Customer Experience With Andrew Deutsch
My good friend, Andrew Deutsch is going to be joining me from Fangled Tech. Andrew has been in the marketing game longer than a lot of my guests have been alive. He has learned, relearned, has more experience, has been down more holes, and found his way out of them than the majority of people out there. We always have great conversations. We always laugh, trade barbs, and sit there going, “Do you remember this?” I love having the conversation with him. Andrew, welcome to the show.
You’re introducing me as I’m the old guy.
You’re going to be. You and I are dinosaurs. We both have the gray hair. We’ve got to embrace it. We’re not 30 anymore but look at the experience that we’ve had. Look at the things that we’ve learned along the way.
I’ve got to thank you for having me on. I’m honored to be asked. This is going to be fun.
I always enjoy our conversation. I said, “It was absolutely time to get it on the mic and be able to sit down and share your wisdom because I always loved the stories you tell. Let’s start off with a little brief history. I know you’re like me. Going on forever on the history of who you are, what you do, why you do it gets monotonous at times, but let’s start off. We at least need to let people know where did you come from, where are you now, and how did you get there? We have at least a basis of understanding about the conversation we’re going to have.
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and went to Southern Ohio for undergrad. I ended up in Florida, where I went to grad school. I studied initially International Trade and then added a Master’s that was more based in Psychology where I worked as a therapist for a period of time while I was building my consulting practice for global trade. Work took me further South. I ended up in Brazil where I lived for about ten years and built my business there. It was about a market that had opened. Prior to that, it was closed. Everything that was sold in Brazil was made there. None of the businesses there understood global trade. I went from being a young guy in the US who was one of many to an expert by changing ZIP codes and changing languages. I built a business where I helped North American companies grow their businesses in South America.
I came to the States in 2003, continuing that business until the market crashed. My biggest client at that time was in the plastic strapping industry. We had taken them from almost zero to about $1.2 million in South America. They invited me to come on board. I became an employee for the first time in fifteen years. We grew that business. At that time, I ended up hitting the road and I was in an average of 45 countries a year. I’d fly 300,000 air miles. I never knew what time it was. We grew a business from about $3.2 million to $11.4 million. I went from 12, 13 countries to 75 countries we were actively selling in until I decided that all that travel was killing me. I was weighing about 360 to 365.
I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs. I was exhausted and needed to make a change. I dropped 160 pounds and changed my career and now, I work mostly in the domestic market, but always in the creative marketing and sales space. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Fangled Tech is about taking all of those years of global trade experience, marketing sales, and all of the accomplishments that we did, and helping our clients grow their businesses and convert every touch they have as a company into what we say is a voracious advocate for their brand.
Everybody reads and says, “300,000 miles and 45 countries a year. That must have been exciting.” Trust me, from someone who’s done it, it’s not. It’s romantic for the first month to maybe three months.
Do you know when you realize it’s too much? It’s when you wake up in the morning, you look around the hotel room, and you have no idea not what city but what country you’re in. You pick up the book that’s got all the hotel perks in it to realize where you are.
We need to learn not only how to get people’s attention but also how to keep it. Share on XI used to call the concierge.
I’ve walked up to the desk, speaking the wrong language. I do know more airports, restaurants and factory locations than most, but there’s not much tourism and excitement that goes on when you’re stuck over the weekend in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia talking about plastic strapping.
You’re not there as a tourist. You go in, you fly in, you do what you need to do. You’re back on a plane and you’re heading somewhere else. It’s a completely different lifestyle.
When I was out 2, 3 weeks at a time, certainly I would plan the trip so the weekend was somewhere interesting. I got to see some amazing stuff. When you weigh it all out, that was a privilege. That doesn’t outweigh the amount of wear and tear on the old body and the mind being away from family. We talked about the Zoom thing. All of a sudden, everybody’s video conferencing. I’ve been doing it for more than twenty years.
If I had been smart, I would’ve bought a stock in Zoom. It’s funny. I’ve been using Zoom longer than I care to imagine. I always thought it was a great thing. All of a sudden, it went public and I missed the IPO or didn’t think about it. It’s amazing how it’s gone from this hockey stick curve. It has changed how the majority of people connect with each other.
It spread quickly like a virus. In the early days, when I would be sitting in a hotel in Colombia before fax machines, waiting for the motorcycle kid to come from the telex office with a short message on yellow paper for me to respond to a client because the phone calls were expensive. You watch the evolution of that going through. I remember when the fax machine first became available in the international market, nothing could ever be better. Now you look at how we’re able to communicate so easily with global calling plans, email, internet and Zoom. It was the only way I could keep in touch with my family when I was on the road.
That’s an interesting conversation. The evolution of communication, marketing, and how do we communicate effectively with each other in order to build trust. That’s what it’s all about. It’s being able to connect to many people, send an email, a text, a telex or whatever they send, and they assume it’s understood. They understood it’s going to be engaged with, they understood that people get it in the reference that you want it to be in, but it’s not true. Communication is not a two-way street.
We’re learning that a lot of the things in the business world that we’re always a staple of, who we are and what we did with the digital age and from marketing have changed. For example, the trade show. Before we had the websites and the ease of communicating, what was the trade show? It was the moment where we got to see everybody so that we didn’t have to travel so much and introduce something new. Now with YouTube, websites, webinars and all these things, we can be constantly launching new things as they’re ready to launch and not sit on them until that annual trade show happen. With COVID, people are recognizing even more because all the trade shows were canceled. Now the reason people go to trade shows is that face-to-face networking and/or the ability to have a steak dinner on the company nickel.
Also, get away from the family for a couple of days.
Unless there’s something that you do need to see, feel and touch, the trade show is almost a thing of the past. Most trade shows in the industries that I’ve been in, for example, the packaging industry, in the last years before this happened, you’d go to the trade show. For example, if you’re in the packaging world, you go to a packaging show. Who’s there? Your competitors. It becomes a question, “Let’s look around and see what the other guys are doing. Let’s posture and lie about our numbers to make them think we’re bigger than we are and play the games of ego.” No business was happening at those shows. What we had discovered was if you’re selling packaging materials, you go, “Who uses the packaging?” “The chemical guy.” “Let’s go to a chemical show.” That was the evolution. Now, we can’t go to the trade show. Let’s show how the packaging works in video form and webinar and otherwise. Any moment that we want to deal directly with somebody, we show them the video, have them at a conference like this. We can advance the process so far forward that the trade show has almost become nothing more than a social gathering.
I’ll get back to that. The social gathering is important because we have become disconnected from each other as people. I’m not talking COVID. I’m talking for years now. We’ve gotten to a point where we don’t have two-way conversations. It’s one-way dialogues and then we wait for a response. Whether it’s five minutes, five hours, five days or sometimes never, you wonder, “Did the person get my message? Did they understand my message? Did they relate to my message? What are they going to do with my message? How do we go back and forth?” Video conferencing helps because it allows us to at least look people in the eye and be able to take a look at somebody’s language, but you’re still two dimensional. You are still a two-dimensional figure on the other side of the screen. It’s being able to reach out and have those quiet conversations.
I speak at conferences around the world and the magic happens not when I’m on stage, but the quiet conversations have happen before and afterwards. If people grabbing a cup of coffee or talking, “That speaker was great. I learned this. What did you think about this?” That’s where the magic of the trade show needs to be. You’re right. Product, we’re going to see 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, on demand, whatever you want, because you’re right. We can create good videos that talk about how the product helps you be better at your particular task and solve your problem.
Let’s build on that. Think about the last time that you gave an in-person presentation. You went to a conference room. There’s a bunch of people in the room. You put up your slides or you did your thing. You showed a video, you had the discussion. That was a powerful thing. More powerful than that was as the meeting broke up, Bob who was in the meeting, who was the guy who makes decisions comes over and says, “Ben, that was fantastic.” You get into that side conversation that builds the rapport and the confidence. It’s interesting because the generation right now who are leaving college, becoming members of sales teams, becoming members of business development teams, learning their basic marketing, what they’re missing that we had was all of those times that we had to personally network. We’re walking into a room of people we didn’t know and going around from cluster by cluster of folks, introducing ourselves without, “Here’s my brochure. Here’s my card. Let’s do business.” It’s, “Let’s get to know each other. What do you guys do? Tell me a little bit more. Maybe sometime we’ll have to get together later and talk about this.” They don’t have any of that skillset because they’re doing it here.
The other thing that’s going on with this, which to some it’s wonderful, but to me it’s odd. It’s all those little minutes in the office where you can go, “Bill, what do you know about this?” You then move on. They’ve all been broken down into 15, 30 and 45-minute increments on here. You can’t say to someone, “Can you hop on a call for ten seconds? We’ve all got it all blacked out on our calendars.” By that, the way the technology is set up, it’s got to be a text. There isn’t that personal bit where you cannot just hear the information, but hear the tone, the level of commitment, and all those other things that we can read into conversations.
That’s one thing that I teach people is if you’re going to have a good size meeting, 10, 12, 15 people, that breakout session button in Zoom, and I’m sure it’s available in other technology as well, it’s magic. Say, “I want to talk about this. I want you guys to break up into 2 or 3-people groups and be able to workshop this around, think about it and then come back, and let’s talk about it as a big group.” That’s powerful.
There’s another piece to it too that I’m wondering about. I don’t have any data to back this up. This is a supposition that I’d like to look into further. We’ve been in conferences and network meetings. While that meeting is going on, we’ve been enabled with something that we didn’t use to have, the ability to have side conversations in the chat. It’s extremely distracting for most people but they don’t realize it. It’s like texting while they’re driving and everybody’s like, “No, I’m fine when I do that,” as they look up, they’re touching the guard rail with the bumper of their car.
People who are reading this, think about how many times have they been on a Zoom meeting with 30 people and there’s a speaker talking about things that are critical. At the same time, the chat window is going with five different people buzzing them saying, “Isn’t this dumb? This guy doesn’t get it.” You’re being critical and otherwise in the private chat or direct chat. You realize, “I’ve got to go back and listen to this meeting because I didn’t hear any of the programs.” I was noticing it in meetings in the last ten years where people were doing that with their phones. Meeting people were texting each other and now it’s even easier because people can’t even see you doing it. Are we connecting and sharing information and what we need to know to be a team working together or are we encouraging side conversations and distractions?
Those side conversations can be valuable if they are done in a productive way, but for the most part, they’re not. Here it is. I’m sitting here with two 24-inch monitors. If I’m watching a webinar, I guarantee you, my email is open, there might be a website open. Somebody might say something, I’ll say, “I’ve got to check the YouTube on that.” All of a sudden, you’re right, you’ve lost half the webinar. It’s time you either paid whether it’s money or where you spent time or whatever. The people on the other side have invested time and money and effort to be part of this thing, but they don’t have your attention. We need to learn not only how to get people’s attention, but how to keep people’s attention. It’s as much about the other people in the room as it is the presenter.
The presenter needs to understand whether it’s face-to-face marketing, whether it’s Zoom marketing, whether it’s marketing to the masses, whatever it is. It’s how do we communicate in such a way that we’re relevant to the audience that we’re trying to communicate with. They understand it and they value it. What are your thoughts on that and where do you think we could go to be able to get back to a place where people are paying attention and people are valuing each other in terms of the information that’s being passed forward?
If you don’t care about the other person, why should they care about you? Share on XOur mutual friend, Alon Zaibert, who’s brilliant, has an interesting statement about his training, but what he’s doing is he’s teaching people how to hug each other when they’re not in the room. I don’t know that necessarily in the business world where we’re always wanting to hug. At the same time, making things more personal without being invasive is part of the relationship-building between people. I don’t need to know your deep inner secrets, but knowing and getting people to talk about themselves is a great way to endear yourself to them if you want to know about them.
If you care. The keyword is care.
I’ll give you a good example. Most men assume the other guy is a sports guy. I get on a call with somebody and they almost always go, “From Cleveland. How about them Browns?” I’ve never seen a game. It’s not something I’m interested in. If you wanted to have that conversation, they should start with, “Are you a sports fan or do you like other things? You’re into sports. You live in Cleveland. Do you watch the Browns?”
I’m a Montreal Canadiens fan. “Why?” You have that conversation about why Montreal Canadiens if you live in Cleveland.
We’re teaching the skills of engaging folks rather than placating folks. You start your conversation with, “How’s it going?” You don’t care how it’s going. How do you teach people to engage and get people talking about themselves? You’re interested in knowing not so much because next time I’ve got to remember he’s got a wife who had a birthday. You’ve got a wife who’s an artist. I’d be interested in knowing if that was the case. Where does she show her work? You have a son who’s in a band. Why? I’d love to hear what the music is like. Those things that built that personal rapport, we don’t teach very well how to do that anymore because even the next generation, they hardly even talk to each other on the phone.
Their relationships are based on what they can type with their thumbs or what they’re yelling at each other over a video game while they’re blowing up the world or whatever it is. There’s a disconnect in terms of the social structure that existed before all this tech. I’m absolutely certain that if we master how to bring that back, we’re going to be able to relate better and have such a better seat at the table with our clients. Also, in how we build our marketing strategies to understand who is that customer, what are their problems and challenges and how do we solve them rather than, “I’ve got a product and I think you need it.”
You mentioned that we’re tech because our tech stacks in the marketing world, the sales world, and everywhere else in the world are becoming more and more complex. They truly are. Everybody sits there and go, “You have to have this piece of technology. You have to have this piece of technology and you need to have this automation sequence.” The big problem with automation sequences, whether they’re chatbots, whether they’re email servers, whether it’s social media content, whatever it is, it’s the people that design them. The people that design them are not thinking about human beings on the opposite end of the process. They’re not thinking about how do we relate to people in a caring and relevant and emotional way. I’m not talking about reaching out and giving everybody a hug.
I’m talking about caring about the person on the other side. If you don’t care about the other person on the other side, why should they care about you? Why should they even care about what you do or why you do it if you don’t care about them, if you’re not making this relevant to them, if you’re not trying to sit there and say, “How do we make a connection between me and them or my company and their company?” Whatever it is, how do we expect them to want to do business with us and treat us anything more than a commodity?
Let’s take a step back. All of these tech things that we’re talking about are tools and none of them will work if you don’t go back to the strategic part of who is the customer, what are their needs, what are they interested in? All of the things that make up who that being is. The other mistake people make is if you’ve only got one type of customer, it’s because you don’t know your customers. You’re going to implement something as complex as a CRM. The first time I ever used a CRM, it was implemented by the IT guy. He never sold anything in his life. He never marketed anything his life. He created an electronic babysitter that caused us to have to do a ton of work. If I was an IT guy, I would have loved it. If I was a sales guy, I just got another job. I now have two jobs. I’ve got my sales job and I’ve got my CRM job.
The problem with that is the sales guys then sit there saying, “This is way too much at work. They want me to say this? Fine. I’ll say this. They want me to input this? Fine, I’ll input this.” Whatever it is that the least path in this existence. Garbage in, garbage out.
When you’re developing and when we do sale Salesforce or Dynamic, which by the way, I’m agnostic as to which CRM because they all have their benefits, we first look at what are the challenges and what are the needs are, and then we pick a CRM rather than adapting. When we do that, we’re going to adapt tech for a customer, we start with the guys who are going to use it. We look at what are their needs and challenges and how do we make this something that they’re going to love and want to use. You then take the next step back. The information that they gather, the marketing team needs, the operations team. How do we use that information without making the salespeople into members of that department too? You build out from the core. You don’t let the IT guys in the room until the integration part because they don’t understand.
You don’t let the engineers in while the sales team is building what the sales component is going to be because they think differently and they have different needs and wants. By taking all of that, starting from the core and working your way out, you get a CRM so that a salesman walks out of a sales meeting and talks into his phone and do all of his notes in three minutes. The data that he provides combined with all the data from sales, proposals and all of that stuff, combine that on its own, that’s where the automation happens where people don’t need to be. When the marketing team looks at that, they can see the results of the campaigns and all that. It builds out from there. It starts with that personal touch of understanding those people, not assuming who they are.
It’s understanding the needs of both of your internal clients and your external clients. The big thing that keeps coming back in my mind is training where whether it’s marketing, whether it’s sales, whether it’s whatever, it’s training people. First of all, why they should use this tech? Second of all, how to use this tech? Third, how this tech is going to allow them to help their customers better?
It’s a what’s in it for me analysis. Back before all this tech existed, we could have these conversations upfront about who the customer is, what their needs are, and all this stuff that we have to have now but tend not to. In the early days, when we would visit a client, those were the initial conversations. Most of the business that we do now ends up because some other person who doesn’t understand the personal touch has burned that customer. For example, here’s a pitch that I’ve heard repeated to me from other people who have marketing agencies. “We’re so glad that we’re here now. We looked at your website. We think there’s an SEO problem. We need to drive more people to your website. As a matter of fact, we can rebuild that website and make it look beautiful for you. We know how to get 300,000 visitors to your website a month with no problem. By the way, your employees have lousy LinkedIn pages. We’ll show them how to get 10,000, 20,000 followers additional every month. We’re going to get you a trade show. We’re going to do some advertising.”
They go through all of this tactical stuff they’re going to do. Nobody ever goes, “You don’t even know what our goals are. You don’t know our customer. You don’t know any of that stuff,” but because the play sounds so good, “I heard these numbers. Hundreds of thousands of followers and visitors.” They get excited and they go after all this tactical stuff when they should have gone back and looked at their market placement, the branding down to the core. Until you build that strategic understanding, what are the goals of the company? Where do you want to be in the future? What do you represent? Who are you? All the things that make up that brand, all this tactical stuff is like going hunting for mosquitoes with a shotgun.
We rely too much on tech. We truly do. Decisions are made through data analysis without having any context without talking to the customer. We assume our customers are this because of the data. Data can be interpreted in 1,000 different ways. How good is the person that is interpreting the data understand the actual customers that you have your business and everything that goes along with it? When we’re building technology stacks, we have the chatbots. Here’s a beautiful thing. We say, “We, as a company, need a chatbot because we need to be able to have that deal, that one-to-one engagement with our customer.” We build this chatbot and the chatbot is good for simple questions that need to be answered at 3:00 in the morning.
At 3:00 in the morning, you need a phone number. There are simple little yes or no, things that can be programmed into a chatbot. Those are wonderful. The problem is once you get beyond those questions and a real human being needs to be involved. As companies, we’re not sitting there going, “We need a chatbot that’s already gathered all this information, already dealing with a customer that says, ‘Would you like to talk to a real human being?’” All that information already gets transferred over to a customer experience person. They already have your name. They already have your account number. They have everything up on the stage, what you’ve already talked to. They say, “Hi, Bob. I see you’ve been talking to our chatbot about this. You seem to have questions that it can’t answer you. How can I help you?” Instead of, “Hi, who am I speaking to? Can I get your phone number? Can I get your account number? Wait until I bring this thing up.” There’s nothing that turns a customer off more than that. Trying to use technology with technology can’t work for you.
If your customer experience tells your customer that you think they should be working for you, that they have to do the work, that’s a bad customer experience. It’s revolting. It’s the same when you have an issue with a shipping thing. “According to our,” then they start using all the jargon internally. I have no idea what any of that means. I don’t work for your company. I’m the customer. If you’ve got customers who feel that way, it’s time to take a step back and figure it out. The tech can be amazing if the qualitative, as well as the quantitative data is gathered in a way that it truly engages what the needs of the customer are and knows its limitation.
Another example, you call a company because you have a question about a single item on your bill and you have to go through, “Your current balance is this, your last payment is this.” Five minutes have passed as you’re waiting. If you have a question about that, hit zero and you can talk to a person and then you get what you described. What’s your name? What’s your account number? You’re like, “I just went through all of that.” At what point in time did you say to the person, “Can you help me without me having to repeat everything that I said to a robot?” It’s exhausting.
What we need to realize is that every department is marketing into every department of sales because we all deal with the customer in one way, shape or form. Whether the thing gets shipped out wrong or they’re packaged improperly or there’s a defect in the product, and it gets to the customer anyway. How the accounting department deals with their accounting department, how the customer’s experience department deals with this, how a manager gets on the phone and deals with the problem once it’s elevated to that level. We’re all in the process of dealing with our customers. We need to have the training, the tech, and the experience to be able to differentiate ourselves and be that company that customers want to sit there and go, “They care about us. They want to take care of us. I’m going to recommend this person to everybody I know.” There are few companies like that.
The biggest thing that is missing in marketing today is the full customer experience. Share on XOur goal with every go-to market strategy and every engagement that we have starts with our core concept. We want to help your company, not your people. Your company, which includes your people, everything that you do so that every person your company touches will become a voracious advocate for your brand. Even if I’ve never spoken to an employee in your company, but I’ve seen your website, or I’ve seen your point of sale display, or I’ve seen your product, or I saw a commercial. All of that would lead me as the customer to go, “These guys are great. I’m going to tell the world.” Most marketing systems stop at the sale, “We got the guy’s money.”
No, we want the person to learn about us, study us, get excited about, buy and then love what they bought, and tell the world about it. That’s part of telling the world. If you have a brand that is strong that people wouldn’t even think of looking at a competitor because they’re happy with what’s there. Imagine some of these companies, I hate using the big guys because they’re cliché, but there’s a reason that people are in line around the Apple store for days and ahead to get the new product that they’ve never even seen, touched or tested with big money in their pocket to buy it. They’re voracious advocates. Go online, pick a brand like that and go onto one of their pages and say, “I think that product sucks.”
You are going to get trolled for days, weeks, months and years.
Think of the pop stars that the kids follow. You make a comment about one of them as being horrible. See how long it takes before you get letter bombed. I’m being sarcastic but those are voracious advocates. It works in the B2B space too. I was working with Avery Dennison in the Perfomance Tapes. It was a brilliant, well-advanced technology and absolutely on the same level and many cases, above and beyond the adhesive tech from 3M. You would go and talk to a buyer that’s been a 3M buyer of the competitive product for years. Do you know what the buyer would say? They were programmed to say it, “No buyers ever had been fired for buying from 3M.”
People say the same thing about IBM.
We can look at the competition but my job security, nobody’s going to tell me that I made a mistake for buying 3M if I take the risk with yours. It’s that training that is incredible, the impact when you consider everything that you do affect your brand.
If you’ve got buyers that are conditioned that I need to buy 3M products or pick a product, it doesn’t matter whether it’s 3M or not. All of a sudden, your price goes from X to X plus 15% or 20% or 30% because the market will pay it. It’s the same thing with Apple and a lot of products where all of a sudden, you stop being a commodity and you start being the brand worth loving. When you’re that brand worth loving, it’s not about price anymore. You’re not fighting it out in the trenches over nickels and dimes.
In the steel drum industry, when we did the research for the company that I was involved with before it sold, all of the things that they thought were the reason that people do business with them were way down the list. When we went out and talked to their customers, “Why is it for 30 years you’ve been buying from these guys without fail and never strayed,” it wasn’t because of the quality of their drum. The quality was great. They made the best product in the market and they were known for it. The real reason that these buyers were doing business with them was they never would pick up the phone and call and a person didn’t answer the phone.
Number two was when the buyer would screw up or there was a run on a product and they needed a special drum right away, they were customer-friendly to be able to truly get them in the schedule right away and cover their need. The competitors couldn’t do that. That was the number two reason. The third one was, and this is the fun one. Sometimes we would get a defective drum and we would call them. Within moments, we would have someone interested in making it right. The competitor could take months to get a response on a defective product. The entire reason people do business with them at a premium, at a higher price was that the cost of doing business with the other was higher in the total cost of ownership and the cost of use. When things went wrong, they weren’t there. That became the branding.
That’s care and that’s trust. That is the biggest thing that is missing in marketing now. It’s that full customer experience. It’s that end-to-end. We know we’re going to be taken care of. We know that this company cares about us. They understand our business. They understand what’s important to us. They understand that this is mission-critical. This is not so much. When they need to jump to the pump, when they need to take care of us, there’s no shirking, there are no excuses. There’s no hiding behind email. There’s no phone tree or whatever. There’s somebody that I can pick up a phone with and say help. That person is going to sit there and say, “I don’t know, hang on a second. Let me check it out. Can I call you back in ten minutes?” They do.
When you call, the person who answers the phone speaks in the same dialect of the language that you speak that you can understand and communicate and not off a script.
All of that comes down to training, purpose and culture. These are the things that we work with companies with time and time again to be able to let companies understand. It’s the little things that matter. Nevermind how much money you spend in The Wall Street Journal or LinkedIn ads or Facebook ads, or all these types of ads that are out there and your social media marketing. People want to know you care. Those are the companies that are going to make it going forward.
To know that, to build all of this that we agree on, first, you have to go back and understand and know who your customers are, the personas of the people you’re dealing with. All the rest of it can build off of that. Otherwise, you’re building a house with no foundation.
Know who your customers aren’t. Who are the people I can’t help?
Also, the people you don’t want to help.
Andrew, this has been a phenomenal conversation. The value that you add to the companies you work with is amazing. I have one question for you and I ask this to everybody as I let them go out the door. Go get the pressure on. When you leave a meeting, when you get in your car and you drive away, what’s the one thing you want people to think about you and Fangled Tech when you’re not in the room?
If we want to grow, Fangled Tech is the guys who can make it happen. We enable companies to dig deep and change the way they do business in ways that turn every touch they make into an advocate for the brand.
Andrew, thank you for being an amazing guest. I loved having you. I love our conversations and we’ll have more.
I had a great time. Thanks for having me on.
Important Links:
- Andrew Deutsch – LinkedIn
- Fangled Tech
- Alon Zaibert
- Avery Dennison
About Andrew Deutch
Multilingual Marketing Leader with broad-based expertise galvanizing teams to develop innovative and effective strategies.
Spearheading innovative campaigns proven to drive demand and cultivate sales success in highly competitive companies and brands from conception to market success. Expertise in including and inspiring key stakeholders to collaborate and build value propositions and comprehensive marketing roadmaps designed to strengthen brand influence and grow sales.
An innovatively effective change leader who leverages true passion and an unwavering commitment to excellence. Consistently navigating the complex waters of business to secure positive results in all markets and economic conditions by welcoming and guiding the contributions of others.
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