Mar 28, 2019
Gaining Favorable Attention with Adam Robinson
Adam Robinson and Joe Lynch discuss what gaining favorable attention with prospective customers.
[00:20] Opening / Introduction
[00:36] Tell us a little about your background.
- I went to the University of Texas and wanted to be a Latin teacher, but then found out how much that paid and decided to get into business and marketing.
- My first job after graduation was Director of Sales and Marketing with a startup.
- That company sold and I went on to work in the newspaper industry, selling their online ads.
- Today, I’m the Marketing Manager with Cerasis.
[04:27] When and why did you join Cerasis?
- A headhunter that represented Cerasis approached me with an offer.
- I wasn’t really looking for a new job, but it was a blank slate and seemed like I could do things my own way.
- From an SEO standpoint, I saw a lot of potential.
[06:40] In the old days, we were trained to sell on the phone and to say something intriguing in the first twenty seconds. People like you have moved this from a phone call to the digital world.
- You need to make sure you look at the long-term and what a customer is trying to do.
- There are many opportunities for someone in logistics to have problems, therefore, you can create content that speaks to answering those problems.
[09:55] Name some of your favorite ways to gain favorable attention from a prospect.
- Our initial goal at Cerasis was to put a blog post out that was search engine optimized and answers problems we could solve once per day.
- We then thought about the full problems of a supply chain and started developing more blog posts.
- You need to start doing this stuff from day one, but it’s not the only thing you should do.
- We started with a lot of advertising to build our brand awareness, but at the exact same time, we started putting out content.
[15:31] Tell us a little bit about your web presence and how the search engines view you.
- I get media kits from publications trying to sell us advertising and we often have substantially more traffic than them.
- I pride myself at Cerasis in our advertising budget being really minimal.
- You don’t need to have millions of dollars to break through.
[19:12] Tell us about how many leads you’re able to get your sales guys.
- As a salesperson myself, I know there’s a lot of leads that waste my time. Because of this, we have many pre-qualifying questions in our lead form.
- It’s important for me to hand out leads that are of the utmost quality.
- This consisted of about two-thousand leads in 2018.
[24:47] You guys seem to have really aligned your marketing, sales, and operations teams to work together.
- It’s not necessarily easy, but if you have a vision and a strategy, it happens.
- I built our content by first interviewing every single employee in the company – not just management.
- “Everybody loves to buy, but nobody likes to be sold to.”
- We’re out there on the front lines hearing the actual conversations from our customers which we can pass on to our development team.
- We’re able to present solutions that we didn’t just come up with in a lab, but that are actually solving real world shipper issues.
[30:42] With this alignment, you’ve integrated marketing into its rightful place. It’s super important, but a lot of people don’t do it.
- We haven’t been scared to put ourselves out there. Everybody’s going to have an opinion.
- We all get better by doing, as long as there’s a vision.
- It’s never going to be perfect, and that’s what makes it fun.
[34:44] We’ve talked a lot about the sales process, so now let’s talk about the buying process. How does that look?
- No matter what, the buying process is definitely going to start online.
- After a potential customer sees our content and likes us, they will be much more receptive when we call them compared to a cold call from another company.
- If you’re thinking about investing and you’re not online, you’re probably missing out on the ability to make your sales team as effective as possible.
[38:21] What’s been going on at Cerasis?
- One of the biggest things we’ve seen is manufacturers going right to consumers, so we’re working on a great solution for this.
- We want to bring an Amazon-like experience.