Episode 33- Improving ROI & Metrics with Jarod Spiewak

In this episode of "Small Business, Big Moves,". Thomas Bennett is joined by guest Jarod Spiewak to explore creative strategies and innovative approaches that have propelled small businesses to new heights. Discover the steps to increase ROI and metrics.

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Small Business Big Moves is a podcast where innovation meets entrepreneurship. Join Tom Bennett as he explores all things  business growth! From business funding and business tax credits to conversations with leaders who have grown successful and innovative businesses! 

Transcript

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Welcome to Small Business, Big Moves, the podcast where innovation meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Tom Bennett, and we'll explore all things business growth from business funding and business tax credits to conversations with leaders who have grown successful and innovative businesses. Welcome to the show. Today's guests will be Jared Spiewak. Jared, I'll let you introduce yourself. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. As you mentioned, my name's Jared Spiak. I'm the founder of Comet Fuel. Comet Fuel is a revenue marketing agency that focuses on Google ads. Specifically what we focus on is attribution. So helping people close the gap between marketing and sales data so that they know what the actual ROI of their ad campaigns are, not just how many phone calls or form fills that they generated. Good stuff. Yeah. And I wanted you to give us a little background on kind of where, where you started and what got you to where you are today. I know it's a pretty interesting story, so I figured some people might get some value outta that as well. Yeah. So to kinda give you the quick version, I'm happy to dive deeper on any of the points. I got started pretty young. I. Started college at 15, graduated high school at 16. So I was like, okay, well, college is expensive. How do I make money? So that kind of got me into not really being able to make money, but figuring out that there was this world of digital marketing, I was writing for about a penny, sometimes less per word. And a lot of it was SEO content. So at that time. You know, everyone was doing SEO. It was just keyword stuffing, but that got me into the idea of like, Oh, here's this marketing thing that kind of sounds interesting to me. So that kind of kind of steered me towards getting my degree in marketing, went to school for marketing. I was kind of unsure at that time from there. I did a little bit over a year in corporate real estate marketing. And I started freelancing at the same time to try and basically build up a portfolio because my career in the corporate world just wasn't looking very fruitful. So that led to me getting a full time job offer from a marketing agency, making double what I was making per hour at the corporate job and work from home and doing something that I was actually interested in. So that was an easy yes. Two weeks later, I was then working for an agency. Two years later, I had continued freelancing on the side. And was at a point where I had a pretty healthy client base and I had a chat with my manager at the time because I had gone from full time down to part time only working about 10 hours a week for that agency and she was just like, why are you still here? I was like, you know what? That's a good point. So at the end of 2017, early 2018. I decided to start my own agency and then a couple months later basically lost it all. And then about 10 months later, kind of grew it all back. And then that puts us at the end of 2018, 2021, we rebranded to Comet Fuel and we kind of switched our focus from SEO at the time over to Google ads. And that's where we've been ever since. Awesome. Good stuff. And I think you just touched on it a little bit, but I know you said you kind of branched off on your own and made that jump. And then it sounds like it it went downhill from there and then you were able to bring it back and build a successful business out of it. What what were you, I know, what were you able to change or alter to really turn that around from looking at it as a failure to make it into a growing and successful business you got now? I think a lot of it was really just recognizing that this wasn't just for fun anymore. And a lot of ways the, I never really thought I would be the type of person who would own my own thing. Like everybody most people have that ambition at least at some point in their life. But I was like, I don't think I'm really cut out for it. And that's why I was so hesitant for actually completely breaking off onto my own. And what was happening at the time I had to a certain extent, kind of gotten addicted to sales to an extent, As someone who's not very good at sales, what was happening at the time is I was getting on calls with people like 10, 15 minute calls and then closing a deal. And that was very exciting for me at the time. And because I was getting really good at that, I just kept doing it over and over and over again. The client base was growing, but there was no real underlying systems processes kind of, kind of goals that I was trying to hit as much as just like, Whoa, I struggled for a long time being able to get clients. Now, all of a sudden I'm getting a lot of clients, like, let's just keep this going. And so what happened was the quality of work dramatically decreased. There were clients that I had that I forgot that I had, there were clients that I had that I was doing work for that. I forgot to bill. There were clients that I just wasn't responding to fast enough that you know, that I just kind of forgot to send messages to. It was just complete and utter chaos. And so what happened was I realized that, okay, what I was doing was not super fun. It wasn't really what I wanted to do to be a little bit technical at the time. I kind of focused on just outbound sorry, not outbound offsite SEO. So link building that sort of stuff. But that wasn't really what I enjoyed on the SEO process. So I was like, man, like, I don't really, I like that. I'm being able to get the sales. I don't really like the direction that I'm heading though. So here's a bunch of clients that just. I don't enjoy working with or don't pay me a whole lot. I'm going to just fire them. And at the same time, because of all the problems that I had created for the other remaining clients, a lot of them then very quickly after also fired me. So I went from making a pretty good amount of money to signing a three year lease on an office to then almost losing pretty much all of it and making less than I would have made if I was just still working at that corporate job. So from there, it was just like, I had to figure something out. There wasn't really much of an option other than figuring something out at that point. And I appreciate you sharing that. And then I wanted to jump right into it, right? I know a lot of people set up different different KPIs, and a lot of people really focus specifically on ROI, things like that. But I wanted you to touch on how solely focusing on ROI is a Okay. Key performance indicator can actually harm the business's growth. Yeah. So this is a really interesting one and something that I find that a lot of small to midsize businesses don't generally think about and a lot of the mid to large side businesses that we work with usually understand this pretty well. And what that is, is that ROI is a relative metric. I spend a dollar. I make 8 back, I got an 8x ROI or 700%. The challenge here is that any number that you ever see, which is a percentage or an average, you have to take a closer look at. Those are the most misleading numbers you'll ever see. Percentages can be misleading because what you don't understand is the volume behind them. So it's great. Everyone's like, Hey, look at this really high ROI. I got this or ROAS or whatever sort of relative metric they're using. Look at this 13x return, look at this 10x return, look at this 4x return, whatever that number is. And you might see a lot of really high returns, and that might be really impressive. Hey, I was able to spend a dollar and make$15 out of it. But often those really high returns don't scale. Now, it's not always true, but a lot of times they don't scale. So it's one thing to say, Hey, I'm spending a thousand dollars and I'm making$10,000 as a return. And then what I find a lot of businesses do is they struggle to then maintain that where like, man, I'm trying to spend three grand a month. It's not happening. And their competitors are like, Hey, I'm spending$50,000. Making 200, 000. So a 4x return, the actual ROI is lower. We went from a 10x ROI to a 4x ROI, but we went from having an extra 9, 000 in our pocket to having an extra 150, 000 in our pocket. So what I generally recommend is like. ROI ROAS, all these metrics are good, but we also need to keep in mind is our goal to stretch our dollar as much as possible, or is our goal to have the most volume of dollars in the bank at the end of the day and trying to find the equilibrium between high scale as well as high return. And so to summarize that if you have your return ambitions too high, you're going to be limiting just how high you can scale. And so you know, It's not saying to avoid a higher ROI or ignore ROI completely. It's just, don't forget about volume in the process. Would I rather have lower volume, but higher ROI or more cash, but a lower percentage, basically. Right. No, that's great. Because I know a lot of people, like we talked about, obviously focus specifically on the ROI, but like you said, there may be, maybe other areas. Help them in an even more beneficial way. So that's spot on. And how, how can a company or a business entrepreneur, whoever that might be, how can they set achievable marketing goals? Yeah. So the first thing that you need to do is have some sort of baseline data. If you don't have a baseline, then no goal that you, you don't know if your goal is realistic, essentially, everybody can wake up and say, yes, I want to make, you know, 10 million this year, and that's great. But if you made. Half a million dollars last year, you get to make some substantial improvements to hit that goal. So at first, when you don't have baseline data, I don't recommend setting that hard of a goal because you're just guessing at every point in time. You know, if you're running an ad, you can forecast, you can use estimates, you can use online calculators, et cetera, to guess what your cost per click is going to be, to guess what your conversion rate is going to be, to guess what percentage of leads that you're getting are going to be qualified. So on and so forth, but until you actually. Put those ads live. You don't know where you're going to be. You could forecast a 2 cost per click, but then you actually turn the ads live and it's a 5 cost per click. You could forecast an 8 cost per click. You turn the ads live and it's a 4 cost per click. So. Which I can recommend is once you establish that baseline, then the framework that I like to use, which a lot of people like to use are smart goals. And so from there, you're basically just saying, okay, great. What is a specific measurable, attainable relevant and time based goal that I can hit, and that's looking at our baseline and saying, okay, well, If in the past three months we made. Half a million dollars to now say in the next three months, we want to make 2 million. Well, we know that we're going to have to make substantial improvements. We can work backwards from that math to kind of figure it out. But we can also look at our past growth and go, okay, well, it took us a year to go from a quarter million to half a million do we have that says that it is attainable to go from half a million to 2 million. In the next three months. So kind of using the historical data to figure out how realistic is that goal is really important and not just coming up with a goal and saying, Hey, that sounds like a nice number and not having really a plan or an idea of if that's even going to be possible or what resources are going to be required to do that. Yeah, no, it's so true. And you said it perfectly because a lot of people look at that day, like you said they might do. 500, 000 this year and say, okay, we're ready to scale up to 2 million, but it's not just kind of writing that goal down and. Thinking you can get there just because you're growing. There's obviously a, you need to have a strategy and a plan that goes into that. So I agree a hundred percent on that. And then kind of piggybacking off that. I know there's a lot going on today with AI and a lot of improvements and everything going on with technology. How can a business adapt strategies to really continue the success that they're having with a digital landscape? Yeah, so I think the important thing is to not get to not jump kind of head first into whatever the current hype cycle is that being kind of a at the moment, not to say that it's useless. What I can say is that when I hear that our science competitors heavily invested in AI, I get very excited because that generally means it's going to be easier for us to win. So first is understanding the technology. A lot of people just, when it comes to even like chat GPT don't understand what it does. They think, Hey, just because I put something in and it tells me something back that it gave me an actual response. Even if you gave it an input. That means it can't physically give you an output back. It's not a fact machine. It's not a research machine. It's it takes its corpus, which is its data set. And it looks at what other people have already said on the web. And it basically spits back the most average or the most generic version of that. That's what it's built to do. And so what some people can get to kind of focused on is using these tools inappropriately, giving it ad copy and saying, Hey, what, which version of this ad is going to work better? I've seen people do that. It doesn't know it's going to just give you a bunch of generic feedback back. And if you get too heavily involved in that, you're just going to be going down the wrong path. So if you're going to use these tools, take some time to actually learn it. There are great use cases. It is good for, you know, brainstorming in some cases, but I would say, you know, most importantly, the fundamentals. I think that the vast majority of businesses are still messing up the fundamentals. A big mistake I see constantly is choosing a channel and then figuring out your marketing strategy from there and trying to learn that channel and be like, okay, great. This is what we're doing. We chose Google ads and now we're going to figure out how to get that to work. And that, that should be like step seven. What you should have done beforehand is figured out who are you, who do you want to target? How are you going to get their attention? And then what channel is going to make it easier Is going to be essentially the path of least resistance for you to do that. For example, let's say you're a kitchen remodeling company. Well, a challenge is that if you want to advertise, go look at every kitchen remodeler out there. They look exactly the same from the eyes of a consumer. You as a kitchen remodeler might be able to see the difference in the before and after pictures and go, Oh, like they use this kind of hardware. That's a cheaper version because they're trying to save a couple bucks. And it's going to break down in five years. Right. But I, as the consumer have no idea. And so most of most of, you know, most industries you look at the top three to five sites or, you know, you do a Google search and you see what kind of comes up, the consumer can't tell any difference. And so what they choose by is based off of something arbitrary. Who's the least expensive? Who picks up the phone the fastest? Who has the most number of reviews? Who has the highest review score? Yet we all know that all that means absolutely nothing to the actual quality of the work. So. What can be better is being a little bit more specific on who it is that we want to target for the sake of brevity. I'll just say, okay, great. We're a kitchen remodeling company and we want to target real estate investors. Okay, great. Why do we want it now? How can we get their intention? Well, we know that someone who's a real estate investor is not watching HGTV, at least not if they want to be a good one and say, okay, great. That's what I'm looking for. What they're trying to figure out is if they're doing like buy and hold. So turning into rental properties, they're trying to figure out. How can I basically min max what I'm doing? How can I get the maximum amount of value from the renovations that I'm doing to improve, you know, the looks to be more modern, to make sure that it's up to code, so on and so forth, but I'm not going to spend the extra money for a granite countertop sorry, I'm not going to spend the extra money for a marble countertop just because it's marble. When a granite countertop is going to have. You know, it's going to look fine. It's going to do the same function. So because I know that the needs of that market is different, when I advertise to that person or when I market to that person, I can be a lot more specific about my language. I can be a lot more specific about their needs. And all of a sudden, If a real estate investor comes to my site or my landing page or my creative, what have you, they're going to feel much more at home than the generic kitchen remodeling company, get a free estimate. And so from there, it makes our lives a million times easier. If you assuming that you can get your targeting, right? And from there you go, okay, great. I know who I'm trying to advertise to. What I want to put in front of them might just be that, Hey, this is a specialty. We understand this niche, or it could be you know, don't book a free consultation so that we can show you, you know, how much, how you can spend a hundred grand on a new kitchen, book a consultation where we're going to go through what the market average is around your area, determine how this renovation can meet the standard needs. So everybody else has a granite countertop. We're going to go with a granite countertop. If everyone else is. Getting you know, brand new cabinets because it's in that kind of area. We're going to give you brand new cabinets, what have you. That's what that investor needs. That's a unique positioning in that offer. That's going to stand out a lot more now from here. Now I'm going to figure out what channel gives me the easiest way of targeting that person, which I can get that message in front of them. Maybe that's Google. Maybe that's LinkedIn. Maybe that's Facebook. And only after I figured that out, do I start thinking about what channels. Otherwise, I'm trying to choose that channel that is already a restrictive box. And then I'm trying to figure out a strategy that's working within that box. There's so, there's so much value there. I mean, I, I think we all see it all the time is a business kind of get started and they say, you know what, I'm going to go go all in on building my LinkedIn network. I'm going to go all in on YouTube video, or like you said, maybe it's Google ads, but you mentioned it right there. The you got to first figure out who that ideal target client is. And. Put together a solid offer or else you're just kind of throwing, throwing stuff at a wall and hope it hopes it sticks. So it was definitely steps before just picking a channel and. Yeah, absolutely. And when you put yourself in that more generic position, what happens is you, like people looking at you and other, your other competitors, they're going to be completely, they're going to be equally indifferent when they're looking at all of them. And so again, it comes back to those arbitrary numbers. And so it's like, man, like, why are we paying so much per lead? It's because you haven't given your leads a reason to actually care about you. You're, you know, you're basically putting yourself out there saying like, I D I, I deserve for you to, you know, convert on me, even though I look like everybody else, I sound like everybody else, but I promise I'm better. I know everyone else also says that they're better than me, but don't worry. You just got to trust me. And that's just not very compelling. No, it definitely isn't. And I know we just touched on that, just kind of blindly hoping for the best. What are, what are some other mistakes that you've seen businesses make when they're trying to, whether they're trying to get started or trying to grow or improve their marketing ROI? Yeah, so we, we only work with lead gen companies and that's for a very specific reason why is this, there's this big promise with digital marketing of like, Hey, compared to traditional, you can actually track it, you can measure it, you get to kind of remove all this guesswork. And when I sit down with the business owner or a CMO or what have you, and I say, well, how much money did you spend on your ads last month? Everybody can answer that question. You know, they know how to go into the platform, select last month, you know, look at the cost column, pretty straightforward, but then when I ask, okay, well, how many, how much money did you make from your ads last month? All of a sudden, nobody has that answer because, you know, we hear things all the time. I just want my phone to ring. Well, great. You want your phone to ring? No, you want customers to be paying you. And so if you're only paying attention to the phone ringing, you're not making a differentiation between someone who wants to give you 300. Someone wants to give you 3, 000. Someone who wants to give you 30, 000, somebody who's very likely to turn to a customer, someone who's not likely to turn to a customer, someone who's just a telemarketer that just found your ad and is going to call you. And so for a lot of businesses, what they're doing is they're measuring. They're success based off of phone calls, form fills, or just leads, but they're not looking to or attributing which of these leads were actually qualified and why, which of these leads were unqualified and why which of these leads turn into sales, how much money did it make for them? And how can I attribute that back to not just the channel of, of Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO, what have you, but the specific marketing campaign ad group keyword, so on and so forth so that I understand what's working. Cause otherwise it's very easy to get in a scenario where keyword a has generated a hundred leads and 20 sales keyword B generated. 80 leads and 60 sales. But if you're only paying attention to leads, you're going to spend more and more money on that first keyword. And then over time, you're like, man, our conversions keep increasing more and more each month. Our marketing people or our agency or what have you keeps reporting on all these metrics. Everything's green. It's going up into the right, but I'm looking at my P and L and it's not looking as impressive, or it may even be down where everything in my marketing is saying that things are up. And so there manages to be this massive disconnect to the extent of. We were working with this business and they were spending about half a million dollars a month or so on their advertising. We go into that account and within the first couple of weeks of working with them, we cut their cost per lead in half, which everybody was super excited about. Like that's a massive win for that much volume in advertising. However, That led to no increase in customers. In fact, it may have even led to a slight decrease. So for all these businesses that only pay attention to phone calls, form fills, leads generated, et cetera, that would seem like a massive win. That would even maybe compel people to spend a lot more money on that strategy for something that actually had no. measurable benefit, potentially even a negative benefit. And so by even be, be, by being able to kind of track beyond that initial lead gen and being able to track who is good, who is bad, who turned into a sale, how much revenue did I make, et cetera. We start to be able to answer a lot more complicated questions, a lot more deeper questions. And we start to gain a lot better understanding of what the actual truth is of our marketing performance and make better, more informed decisions. Absolutely. No, that's huge. And then I wanted to jump into this a little bit too. I know I'm familiar with it. I know I don't know if it's becoming more popular, just just I've started seeing it more recently, but walk us through the launch concept and how that can really help a business scale without the The constant grind and putting in the work to figuring out marketing or advertising. Yeah. So this kind of has two components to it. One is to Basically kind of move quickly is to make decisions quickly, get ahead of stuff quickly. I, there are a lot of things that we will pitch to clients and there are definitely times where you should take a moment and, you know, take a step back and kind of reevaluate things and take some time on it. There are other times where like, man, in order, the amount of time it took to get one decision, we could have tested 10 new things. And so when we're in a position where it's like, man. Are we're getting all these leads. They seem good, but they're not turning into sales. What I do in my own business and what I recommend others do is, okay, great. We'll do everything in your power to get them to turn into a sale. So you can figure out if the problem is something with your sales process or the problem is something with the quality of the leads. So what I might do in that case is I might say, okay, I'm going to. Not because I want to make less money, but because I want to see if the issue is price resistance. I want to, I want to test timelines. I want to see if we can speed up the timeline even though it's going to cost us more money. I want to see if they're, if the problem is that they're resistant to the timeline. I'm just going to throw a bunch of ideas out there. I'm going to see what sticks, even if that thing that sticks is not something that I could sustain long term, it helps me get it, get closer to what that problem is that I can then figure out. I'm trying to sell something for 5, Nobody's biting. I put it in front of them for 3, 000. All of a sudden they are paying for it. Okay, great. Even if I'm breaking even at 3, 000, that's okay, because I'm getting closer to what was wrong, which was that there's some sort of gap with people either not being able to afford more than three grand, or they're not valuing what I'm doing at more than three grand. So now what I need to figure out is how I can increase the perceived value that these people have so that now I can test and say, okay, great, here are a couple of different ways I can do that. Let's put that in front of people. Now let's try. Sell it again for 5, 000 with this increase in value. Are people now saying yes, and I'm just going to iterate through that as quickly as possible and not necessarily spend you know, the next Three months trying to figure out of all these things. I want to test exactly what exactly You know to the dot what would each process look like? What would each step what would each thought look like what would each where would each dollar be going? Because then we get you know, two three months down the line and we're like great. We've tried one new thing It didn't work and do you how much time are you going to actually give this to try another new thing? And that's going to be another three months Versus in that same period of time, we could have tested 10 new things and then just continue to iterate it on it for a little bit of time. Say, Hey, we're getting closer to the truth. Now let's figure out a solution that actually work and be sustainable for us. So that's one thing. The next component of it is tracking at a deeper level, which makes making decisions a lot easier and faster. So for an example, where a lot of businesses end up is they go, wow, are we're not getting sales. And so the marketing team says that's because the sale team sucks and they don't know how to sell. And the sales team says that's because the marketing team sucks. They don't know how to drive us qualified leads. And you end up in this kind of just constant blaming of each party. And so what you might do is you might go, okay, great. Well, let's track our qualified leads. Okay, great. We got just as many qualified leads as Mount last month. So it turns out it's actually sales problem and not marketing this problem, but that's not necessarily true because we can take that a step further because just saying, Oh, like sales weren't selling as well. That's not actionable. Nobody can fix that. That's just, you know, you know, people getting blamed for stuff. So if we can take that a step further and say, well, what is a qualified lead? What determines how qualified a lead is, is somebody more or less qualified than somebody else? And if so. Can we quantify that? And so that can be done a bunch of different ways. What some of our clients have done is they've created like different levels. So like, this is a level one lead, two, three, four, what have you. And so you might look at that and go, well, level one leads actually close at 5%. Level four leads actually close at 45%. So we could get the same number of qualified leads, but depending on the quality of each of those qualified leads, we might have a very different expected close rate. So we were expecting a 30 percent close rate, but, or we get a 30 percent close rate overall, but when we factor in the quality of those qualified leads, we would have expected a 22 percent close rate. So even though we got a 20 percent close rate that month, it looks really bad compared to the 30 percent average, but it doesn't look that different from the expected 22 percent when we got 20%. So all of a sudden we can then shift our strategy to not say, Oh, we just need to figure out how to close more of these deals. Cause that's not very actionable. We can look at that and go, okay, well, are there things that the sales team can do to maybe make it more likely that we can close those level one, two, three leads? And is there more things that the marketing team can do to make sure that we generate more of those level three and four leads? So all of a sudden that becomes a lot more actionable and we know why, you know, what qualifies somebody in those different buckets, we can go, Oh, the people who are. Level three and four leads. Let's just take the. The kitchen remodeling example again, we might look at that and go, Oh, well, based off of the the median income and the zip code that they're in. Okay, great. Well, maybe we're updating a marketing strategy to not just say, Oh, we service this entire County. So let's just run our ads in this entire County. Maybe we're looking through the County records to go what zip codes. Are the most media have the highest median income, and now we're going to spend as much as our marketing budget as possible for areas that have at least this amount. And that's going to help us get more of those level three and four leads on the sales team side of things. We're looking at and going, Oh, how can we help those level one and two leads? Maybe that might be, how can we start offering financing? Maybe we can start offering payment plans. Maybe we can. Start you know, for leads that don't have the means to do fuller remodels, maybe we can offer like, Hey, instead of replacing your cabinets, we'll paint the existing ones and stop trying to like upsell to people that, you know, simply can't afford it. And that upsell actually pushes them away. So we can get a lot more specific. All of a sudden we go from, you know, just basically throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks to saying. Here are very actionable things that we can do to make everything that we're doing more efficient, more profitable without spending the next six months, just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping for the best. That's huge. I love it. And then I want you to talk to us to a little bit about the your clicks to cash strategy and how that's been pretty beneficial and exactly what that looks like. Yeah. So effectively what we're doing there is trying to close the gap between marketing and sales data so that when we're running tests, when we're reporting on what we're doing, it's not just looking at leads generated, but actually being able to understand which of those leads were qualified to Google ads, which of those leads were qualified to specific ad campaigns so that we're making decisions at further points down the sales process. And we're not just guessing and hoping that because something is generating more leads, that's generating more sales. And that's helped us you know, more ways that I can count, like the example that I gave earlier with a half a million dollar a month advertiser, there was another example where we found that all of a sudden a client of ours was getting just a ton of spam submissions and because they get like Thousands upon thousands of leads a month. Nobody's looking at each individual lead. It's just, you know, an automated like process. And so once that actually was noticed by somebody internally, we then were able to mark, okay, which ones were spam. Let's import that as spam, go through the ad account and see if there are specific keywords, areas of the account that had more spam. And we were noticing that some keywords we were like, some might be 4 percent of our submissions from this keyword was spam. And then all of a sudden we're like, Whoa, this keyword, 85 percent of the leads we got from it were spam. And this is our fifth most popular keyword. Okay. That's an easy fix. Turn it from on to off. And sometimes it's as simple as that. We've had other cases where just kind of trying to track back. We were like we had a client figure out that what was the percentage? It was. It was something massive, like 75%. I can't remember the top of my head, but a very large percentage of their leads were never being assigned to a salesperson simply because they had like a Zapier integration that just got disconnected and nobody knew because the people who managed that changed hands over time. So we had this situation where the marketing team was like, Hey, we're doing good. We're generating all these leads. And the sales team was like, Oh, you know, it's not that profitable of what we're doing because what nobody noticed was that there was this gap of leads going into this automated system, that automated system failing. And then a lot fewer leads actually making it to the backend essentially. And just by trying to kind of close that gap and be like, Hey, like, why are we seeing this amount of deals off of this large amount of leads? And. Wait a second, where, where are all these other deals? If we got, you know, 4, 000 leads, but only, you know, a thousand got assigned to salespeople, where are those other 3000? And so just trying to really close that gap and understand exactly what's happening, not just when somebody clicks the ad, but what happens when they fill out that form and follow that person throughout the entire sales process. We can figure out where issues are. We can, in some instances, listen to phone calls and go, wow, Actually, I just re, I just changed my understanding of the, what the client sells because we got the onboarding information from the CMO, but I just listened to a sales call and that salesperson just explained that what we were advertising just doesn't make sense because we misinterpreted what this is. What this keyword meant that the CMO signed off for, because the CMO didn't understand that particular nuance of the sales process, but just simply listening to the sales team talk, I learned a bunch about that product. And it gave me a bunch of new ideas that I can put in front of somebody. And it gave me a bunch of new ideas that I can run for keywords for ad copy, et cetera. For sure. That's good stuff. Yeah, that's crazy. With the Zapier integration, I've, I've never heard of that, but like you said, a lot of people that are just running the business or you get sales here, marketing there, and no one's really paying attention to that. And then if a company is running Google ads and it's working for them or doing the job, how can they how can they scale that or\ take it to the next level? Yeah. So generally what I recommend is at first, what you're trying to do is get to the point of breakeven. That's everybody's first objective. I wouldn't worry that much about profitability at first, because what we want to do is we want to get out of the red, every dollar that we spend below breakeven means that we're eating through the amount of cash that we're willing to use to basically test this channel and get it to work. And so the first objective is to get it to break even from there. I want to set some sort of a revenue base goal, whether that's ROAS or ROI, depending on what you prefer, you, you know, kind of up to you different people care about different things. And I'm going to try and hit that. So if I want a 3x ROI, I'm going to optimize my account to get it to that 3x ROI. When I am at a level of return that I am happy about, what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my strategy from trying to test a lot of things to testing very slowly. And from a statistical standpoint, basically this means you're just going to test with a lot higher confidence intervals. Whereas when you're trying to get things to work, you're going to test lower confidence, confidence intervals, just so you can test faster. So, okay, great. We want that three X ROI. We have that three X ROI now, assuming that the business can sustain the growth, we're just going to increase the amount that we're spending each week, each month, however often you review your budgets. And as long as we hit that three X ROI, we're just going to keep that input going. As long as our business can sustain this. Now we're going to end up in one to two scenarios either. The marketing going to be able to grow faster than the business. This is especially true for professional service based businesses, lawyers, CPAs, et cetera. We can't just grab anybody off the street and say, Hey, you work for me now. So those businesses usually grow to a certain extent and then get kind of get stuck for, you know, six to 12 months. When you get to that point What you're going to do is you're going to start massively refining what you're doing again. So you're going to start to turn off keywords. You're going to start to really just focus in on what is the most profitable for you because you don't need to worry about having all this extra excess to be able to scale when you, or you're going to be growing. And all of a sudden your ROI is going to dip below your target. Now, this is kind of where you have to make a decision. Do you want to update your ROI goals? Going back to what we talked about earlier, ROI versus volume. You know, you might say, Hey, I'm happy going from a, you know, 6x ROI to a 4x ROI. If it means that I can, you know, increase my scale by 3x, right? She might be making a decision like that. If so, then you're going to keep increasing or if like, no, I really need, you know, that three is my minimum. I'm not going to go below that. And I missed that. Then I are just going to go back to testing generally with probably a lower confidence interval, depending on how much data you have to just start to iterate faster. So it's really just. When I'm happy with results and I'm trying to grow my business, I'm going to increase my ad spend more, be very protective over my ad account to not make too many changes that might, you know, lead to, you know, too big of a decrease for a short period of time. If I am happy with my results, but I can't currently scale because there's some sort of block with my business, then I'm going to focus on refining what I'm already doing. Also probably testing a little bit slower at this point. Cause I don't need as much skills. My focus now is to, you know, can I take that three XR? Why make it a five XR? Why at the same spend? Or if results just simply aren't good, then I'm going to start to try and iterate a lot faster to figure out how it can get to the point of things being good. And then basically just being one of those other two scenarios. Definitely. That's good stuff. And I know we threw a lot at them today. I know you could could give value to the listeners all day. Anything we might've left out or that you wanted to leave the listeners with before we hop off? I think a lot of the things I typically like to say have been kind of covered. A lot of that is you know, don't, don't start off with a channel, kind of figure out your strategy and then choose a channel after that. Um, my next piece of advice is generally make sure that you're tracking more than just phone calls, phone fills, that you're actually attributing to your marketing. And it's very easy to, you know, the amount of times I've gotten into an ad account. And people have told me, Oh, it's going, it's performing so well. We get so many leads off of it. And then we set up that track and we're like, Hey, over the past three months, you've gotten zero customers off of this where they typically would have expected like 15, 20 happens more often than I like. But, you know, unfortunately it does happen. Those are really the two biggest pieces of advice. Beyond that, just, just try stuff. I've, it's, I've run into so many scenarios where people are just so hesitant to just try things and they're like, what I'm doing now is not working, but I'm also afraid to try anything that's new. And that's when you should be trying as many new things as quickly as possible, because you're basically on the timer before you either run out of willpower or money to actually continue with whatever it is that you're trying to do. And so big simple tricks from there is just make, find out where that blockage is. Let's just say you're running ads. You're getting traffic. Nobody's turning into a lead, create ridiculously compelling offers, even if they don't work for you in the longterm, just to figure out like, okay, am I actually putting myself in front of real people or would people be interested if kind of, I was willing to give them the world, or are they still not interested? And a lot of people are afraid. Oh, what if I. Let's take a SAS company, for example, what if I take my hundred dollar a month product? And I said, you know, the next five people that sign up, get it for free for life. And, and they're like, Oh man, like everybody's going to want this deal. And what I'm afraid of is you still put that in front of people and nobody wants that deal. That's that's what's a lot more scary to me. So if I'm like, Hey, you know, would you be willing to give five, Lifetime accounts or five one year free accounts to people just five so that we can prove Are we even putting ourselves in front of people who are interested in what we have to offer? Because if not no amount of updating the headline changing the button color Is going to solve this problem and we're going to waste several months You're going to fire us. You're going to hire another agency. They're going to do the same stuff. You're going to waste a button. You're going to waste another, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, and you're just going to repeat that cycle until you happen to get lucky and you kind of accidentally put something in front of somebody that they're like, Oh, actually now I'm interested in this. And so just test stuff, figure out how to do it as low cost as possible, which might take a little bit of finagling to figure out like I said, like limit it to five or what have you. And figure out what is, you know, how can I get past that block? And then from there, just figure out how to make it more realistic. You know, I can't give away, you know, one, one year free accounts to everybody, but I know that I'm targeting people who are actually interested in what I have to sell because they're signing up. They're using the product. Those five are, maybe I'll just ask those five people like, Hey, I'll give you a second year free, but we can just have like an half an hour chat with me. Like, I just want to understand like what compels you to move forward. What do you like about the product? What do you not, that might give me way more information that I'm getting from just the. The quantitative data that I'm getting from the ad account or from segment or what have you. That's fine. That's great. And I appreciate it. And that's going to be a wrap on this episode of small business, big moves. If you got value out of this or know someone that would we ask is that you share this and review the podcast. You can find me on all social media at Thomas Bennett, and we look forward to seeing you all in the next episode.