Today's Guest

Len Ward, Principal of Ward Consulting, discusses his history on Wall Street, working in an e-commerce start-up, the founding of two of his own businesses, and how he has applied his quantitative background to his marketing consulting. With over 26 years of experience in entrepreneurship, business finance, and digital marketing, Len specializes in helping small businesses understand marketing ROI, customer acquisition costs, and marketing investment allocations. Len shares some of the strategies he employs when working with small businesses to help them achieve their growth goals. 

Resources Shared

• Ward Consulting
• Thryv
  

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, and this week, we're bringing you a tremendous guest, Len Ward. Len is the founder of Ward Consulting. They specialize in marketing, ROI, customer acquisition costs, and marketing investment allocations who prioritizes innovation over optimization, empowering clients to make informed marketing investment decisions. Len's the author of the Weekly Notes where Len assesses the current marketing investment trends, gives his thoughts on how they'll affect his client's marketing budget, the cost of acquiring new customers.

What should you or our listener get out of this episode? Every small business looks for new customers and acquiring and retaining those customers is a key process that can frankly make you or break you. Len shows you how to do this. This show is brought to you by Thryv. Small business runs better on Thryv. So, Len, welcome to the show.

Len Ward:

Morning. Thanks for having me.

Gordon Henry:

Great to have you. So, maybe we just start with your background, how you got into helping small businesses through Ward Consulting.

Len Ward:

I mean, my background actually started way back. I started way back in investment banking, actually as retail stockbroker over to investment banking, first with Morgan Stanley, then over to Credit Suisse. But the more relevant aspect of my career for this is I actually was the owner of a full service agency for the better part of close to about 17 years. One of the problems we ran into that all agencies run into is the client ultimately always asking that question, "What is my return on what I'm investing here?"

So, after hearing that a lot and every agency hears it a lot, I figured I'd take a step back and really try to identify the numbers underneath the marketing and what was happening with the numbers in marketing. As I dug deeper and deeper, I really came to a conclusion that there was a need out there for business owners to really understand what a real investment in marketing is, not to guess at it. There's actually a formula you can use where you can try to estimate some return. So, a bit of an eclectic background from investing all the way over to my own agency to now consulting small and medium-sized business owners on an ROI for marketing.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, yeah, I did find your background interesting because applying Wall Street techniques to marketing techniques, you've always had, I guess, a quantitative approach to things. You found that your niche or your preferred area turned out to be in this marketing area, I guess, right?

Len Ward:

Yeah. You know what's funny? When I was a young guy on Wall Street, you look back and you're like, "Wow, you're really young and dumb." But I did learn some stuff and one of the things that I tried to apply here was, "What were mutual fund managers asking companies that they were about to invest in? What were the financial questions they were asking people because they wanted to know? These questions were really vital to the health of the company. I think when I was able to extract that from my memory and really lay it over on top of the marketing and developing the ROI, yeah, I think I eventually stumbled upon something, but yeah, it was a swing in a career there from A to Z. So, it's been very different.

Gordon Henry:

So as you look at small businesses, medium-sized businesses and the marketing challenges they face through your lens of return on investment, what are the typical problems that businesses face that they come to you with and say, "Hey, Len, help us out"?

Len Ward:

I think the biggest problem, well, obviously the question is we're not seeing a return on marketing, but I think the biggest problem that customers have is I don't think they understand the magnitude of the investment in marketing anymore. I feel like the biggest issue companies are facing is maybe they're building out a great company, maybe they have a great product, and then they're coming at the very end and saying, "Okay, well, here's what I have left for marketing." It doesn't work that way anymore. You literally have to go in and say, "Here's my product. Let me take a look at my sales pipeline."

Look, if you're brand new, just starting out, or maybe you're not getting the sales you want and identifying the holes in the pipeline and say, "Okay, well, to fix the holes and I know I have a good product and I know I have a good value proposition, what's it going to cost me to fix that?" I think that is typically where agencies normally lose a client. That's where a client sometimes spins off the rails and says, "I don't trust digital marketing." I think when I can get a business owner to really understand that and then understand that this is a very different type of marketing and how digital's not like the old marketing you remember, then the light bulb goes off in their head and they're like, "All right, well, how do we start? How do we get this done?"

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So, when a customer walks in toward consulting and says, "I'm not getting a return on investment. I don't know how much I should be spending, how to target, yada, yada," what's your process for helping people?

Len Ward:

The process is pretty straightforward. I come in, it always comes out with, "Well, what's your revenue goal? What is the revenue goal for the year right now?" Then I do a backtrack all the way through the revenue goal. We look at close rates. We take a look at the leads you've gotten, and then what we're trying to identify is where the hole is in the pipeline. I feel like that's where marketing agencies actually are failing their client. They're not laying out the pipeline and saying, "Walk me through the sales process from A to Z, and I want to know where we're failing. Is my close rates under what industry standard is? Am I not getting enough people to my website that's actually generating a lead?

Are the leads we get in are maybe not necessarily quality or are the leads to proposal to close, are we having a problem there?" So I really lay that out for the clients and then I lay down their current marketing strategy on top of what they're doing, and then it becomes pretty clear. They're like, "Oh, well, we're not addressing that hole. We're not addressing that hole." Then what I do is I try to start working with them to work on a strategy that they can now work with their agency on to eventually get to ultimately, the revenue goal and then the return on investment.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So, you used the word pipeline. I guess some people use the word funnel.

Len Ward:

Funnel, pipeline, same idea.

Gordon Henry:

It is beginning and end and it goes through stages. There's marketing and then there's sales. So, it starts with how do I generate an interested prospect, somebody looking for what I offer, and then taking them through the journey of I'm just browsing to ultimately buying something. Is there typically a bigger problem on the marketing side or a bigger problem on the sales side? Do you see one or the other that tends to have more holes, more gaps?

Len Ward:

Yeah, the problem is they silo it. So, what happens is typically, sales and marketing, we all know really never really got along, they blame each other and the business owner or the person calling the marketing sales and marketing shots, they keep it siloed and they'll say, "All right. Well, sales has generated this for me. Marketing has generated this for me." Then they'll make wholesale decisions on who should get laid off, who should not get laid off. In the digital world, you have to understand that unless it's an emergency service, unless you have a cracked tooth, you need something fixed, unfortunately, a DUI, there's an emergency, then you could say, "Okay, I'm going to click my ad and I'm going to make my purchase and I'm going to get my problem solved right away."

But if you're typically in a 90% of the other businesses out there, service based, attorneys, medical, or something along those lines where there's a bit of a thought process, you have to understand that that lead may come in and sales may have a touch or two. But the problem is that if marketing drops off, that pipeline is normally actually the biggest problem we normally find, which is right there. Marketing and digital marketing has to support the salesperson all the way through, whether that's geofencing, retargeting, email drip campaigns, maybe even a preemptive campaign. Hey, I'm about to case this area from leads and so forth. I'm going to go door to door. Can you drop a geofence? So it's working together and really trying to get to that final goal.

Again, the goal should always be like, "Our revenue goal this year is $15 million. Are we getting to 15 million? If not, what is the problems you get on the pipeline?" So I hope that answered your question.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, so help us understand now, I know you have a structure where you often look at the cost to acquire a customer and then the value or lifetime value or lifetime revenue that the customer provides. Can you, first, let's just define them because I know there's a lot of misunderstanding on this topic? What should a business be thinking about as the cost of acquiring a customer?

Len Ward:

Customer acquisition cost is probably the most unknown entity of any business when you walk into it. When I'm dealing with a business, the very first question I ask a business is, "What is your customer acquisition cost?" 95% have no idea what their customer acquisition cost is. The great ones do. Netflix, Uber, the rest, they know it cold. Google, they all know it cold. I tell people, "When I point out 10 companies about the customer acquisition cost, this is the reason why they are what they are." They've had a great value proposition, definitely a purple cow, Seth Godin's worked in there, but number three, they know how to manipulate that customer acquisition cost number. Customer acquisition cost is made up of two things. It's made up of your sales and your marketing.

The actual cost of it, again, is predicated on, we'll call it the funnel, the holes in your funnel, predicated on how you have to try to fill those holes. So, basically, it's a mix of the two and there's all investments going there, digital marketing, traditional marketing, your marketing manager, your commissions, your sales. Maybe you have a MarTech stack, a CRM, your website, your hosting company, anything and everything that is used to actually bring a customer in the front door and actually check out on a register. You'd be surprised how in depth that can get, and you'd be surprised how often a business owner will step back and be like, "I did not realize how much my customer acquisition cost was." So that's that.

The next thing is a lifetime value. You have to identify what the lifetime value of your customer is. How many times will they come to the register and actually purchase your product? Is it one time? Is it multiple times? Is it maybe one time and maybe in a couple years, you can service them down the road? You really have to identify that. When you take your customer acquisition cost and you take your lifetime value, you then establish a lifetime value ratio. So, for every dollar you put in the sales and marketing, this is my return, my lifetime value ratio return. I don't want to get too into the weeds here.

Typically, what Silicon Valley's always looked for was a three to one. So, for every dollar you put in, you would get $3 back on the lifetime value. There's other components. There's operating expenses and so forth, and a lot of other things. That's not what we're bringing into a question here. Basically, here's what I'm investing in sales and marketing. Here's what I got in return. Am I profitable? So hopefully that answers that.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, that's great. I just want to press down a little bit on one or two of the points you made. First of all, on the cost of acquisition, should it be fully loaded where you're included even let's say your CMO salary or even your CEO salary? How loaded down do you make that?

Len Ward:

Anybody who has a touch with the potential customer or existing client, all of those salaries should be included. Sometimes you have to prorate it. One of the things we get a lot is normally, they have the internal IT person. We'll call her Jenny, and Jenny is just good at putting PowerPoint presentations together for sales, but really 90% of her job is like, okay, well, she is doing IT. You laugh, but that 10% of her salary, we got to carve that out and put that in the customer acquisition cost.

Because the minute you understand your customer acquisition cost is now the minute when somebody like a marketer or maybe somebody with a new product to sell you or whatever it may be, you now know if you can fit that in your customer acquisition costs and how to move things around and say, "You know what? We're going to get a new website, so let me move some stuff around," or "You know what? I'm going to add this to my MarTech stack. So, rather than increasing my CAC, let me move some pieces around." So yes, to answer your question, that can take with a customer... Sometimes I can work with a customer for upwards of a month to a month and a half to really identify all those costs.

Gordon Henry:

Sure. Then on the lifetime value, you're using the word value and not revenue. The difference is you're looking at the contribution margin of the customer towards offsetting all that overhead, right?

Len Ward:

Yeah. I guess you say yes and no. It basically is if a customer comes in. Are they going to spend $1,000 with you one time, or are they going to come to the register three times? Each of those transactions is $1,000, so it's $3,000. I would say a better way to look at that is it truly is the revenue. So, I think the term value revenue might be interchangeable there.

Gordon Henry:

Okay, because I know a lot of people take out of that revenue, the cost of servicing. So, they're really looking at the contribution. So, if I spent $1,000 to acquire this customer, I'll get enough contribution out of let's say three sales to offset that one cost, that thing, right?

Len Ward:

So that's a very good point, and that's where people go off the rails and make a mistake. So, a lot of times, they'll come in and say, "Yeah, but the problem is the lifetime value is this, but it costs me X, Y, Z to service that client," which is baked into the operating expenses. You can't do that. You have to make sure that that's separated. So, if this is what it costs to acquire your customer and this is the lifetime value, then you have to try to get a better return on that. You can't say, "Well, I need my customer acquisition cost to be less because it's going to cost me this to service the customer." That's if your pipeline deficiencies are saying you need leads and you got to generate Google AdWords, and AdWords is $200 a click, $200 a click to a lead, and so forth and so forth.

You can't remanipulate the numbers that are established to say, "Well, I can't run my business that way." Unfortunately, in the digital world, if you are at the mercy of leads, your lifetime value, you are basically at the mercy of what the holes are in your funnel. I know I'm again getting into weeds and that separates it, but that's where some people say, "Well, no, no, no, I can't do it that way. This is sales and marketing, what it costs me to acquire the customer, what they'll generate going forward. Then what that profitability is from there, that's a whole another part I can work with you on."

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So, let's talk a little bit about the cost of marketing these days and generating these leads that ultimately become your customers. Hasn't the cost of generating clicks, particularly Google AdWords, gone up over the recent years? Everything I've heard is that these costs are just spiraling and a lot of businesses are trying to figure out, "How do I do it cheaper?"

Len Ward:

I have a line that I walk in when a customer's like, ""I'm looking to get my customer acquisition costs down," or "I'm looking to get my marketing expenses down." I start with a line that says, "You cannot out optimize a bad spend. Do not forget that line." So every single time a customer come to me and normally if their marketing is failing, you're like, "Something's not going." Right away, I'm like, "Let's look at the investment. Let's look at the holes in the funnel." I'm like, "So you choose to underinvest and now you're blaming the marketing lead." I'm like, "It doesn't work that way." The costs have gotten out of control. I actually wrote a blog post a while ago, and it was called, "Companies will go out of business because the cost of marketing is going to get out of control."

You can actually read that on my website. It has. I feel like what's going on right now is that if you're not properly financed, if you truly don't understand the digital world and you're maybe just getting involved in a digital world now, I think you would be stunned at how much it is to invest in a Google AdWords campaign or a LinkedIn campaign, and then realized that two, three years ago, a digital marketing campaign really could cure your ills. It would generate leads, it would do great things, but if you're not doing five or six different things after the digital marketing, which costs even more money, your campaign's really not going to work. So, yeah, to answer your question, a long-winded answer, it's gotten really expensive.

Gordon Henry:

What are the alternatives? I mean, everybody hears Google, Google, Google, Google or Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. What are some of the alternatives that might be more efficient for this small business advertiser so they're not just blowing all their money on Google?

Len Ward:

That comes back to the question of let's just pretend there's Mike. Mike is a home remodeling company. Mike to hit his revenue of $3 million this year, he's fairly new and he knows he's got to live within the lead pool. We would go in and take a look at it and we would say, "Okay, well, Google AdWords. We feel as if you would need X, Y, Z amount of traffic to come to your website, which would generate leads. Your close rate is 25%, so it will cost X, Y, Z." We would tell them. So, then you have to take a step back and say, "Well, maybe AdWords is not really the answer." Then maybe you do look at third party companies. Is there a way in which we could buy leads? Is there a way in which there's maybe an outreach company that could help us?

So, you want to weigh it and think about what would be the most efficient way to generate those leads to get you to your revenue goal. But to answer your question on other platforms, unfortunately, I believe we're at a stage right now and I'll touch on something in a minute where Google and Facebook/Instagram/YouTube, which are all the same thing, you're really at the mercy of them. I'm a big proponent. I know a lot of people don't like to hear this. I think TikTok is a rising power. I think it's something that it's an underutilized resource. I think more people should be using, whether we're going to be able to use it or not in the next few months, who knows? But I think TikTok is one of those dark horses coming up the corner that if people are not paying attention to it, they need to.

Gordon Henry:

We were talking there about the alternatives. People say, "Well, my advertising costs are too much or marketing costs or cost of acquisition too." But as we said, there's two sides to this. There's the cost of acquiring and there's a lifetime revenue or lifetime value. If you're looking for three to one and you can make the lifetime value grow, maybe that allows you to spend a little more on the marketing side. So, what are some of the ways to increase the lifetime value as opposed to just focusing on the marketing cost?

Len Ward:

Yeah. Well, and I think the other thing too is if a customer does come back and it bolts onto the answer, it comes back and is like, "Well, my marketing is too expensive" or "I can't afford that." I'll tell customers. The first thing I'll tell them is like, "Let's take a look at your operating expenses. Do you really need an office this big? Let's take a look at the fleet of cars. Do you have to do business travel or can you do Zoom?" The problem you're dealing with right now is that if you're at the mercy of generating leads and your sales team, they're basically waiting for the inbound leads and they'll go market them, you have to start looking at your operating margins. It's not agency after agency. Let's do another dog and pony show creative and let's try maybe this.

We'll hook them this way with a line. It doesn't work that way. For the first time I think ever, companies are like, "Am I really going to be downsizing my office or am I really going to maybe cut my car fleet in half because Google and Facebook are requiring it?" Yeah, if you need leads, you need to really start thinking about that. Increasing the lifetime value of your customer is where you want to start looking at retention marketing and start going into, "Do I have a constant email newsletter that's going out? Am I actively going after my followers on social media? Am I maybe even mailing a postcard to them once a quarter or whatever it may be?"

So it is that account based marketing that I think a lot of companies really, they're like, "Oh, well, they'll let us know," or "We'll run a special wherever salesman, maybe touch them once every six months." No, create an account-based marketing, because the more you do that, the more revenue they spend, the less you're reliant on leads and the less you have to maybe downsize that office or spend on Google and so forth. So, retention marketing, account-based marketing is another really underutilized tool in the marketing world.

Gordon Henry:

That really requires some type of customer relationship management or CRM system. You have to know who your customers are. You have to know all this history you have on them. What jobs did we do for them? How much did they spend? Then you want to be able to market to them. Again, you have to have a database of your customers in some history, right?

Len Ward:

Yeah. I'm sorry, Google Sheets is not a CRM. So, you need a real CRM. There's a million ones you can look at. There's very affordable ones all the way up to very pricey ones. Find the one that fits you. But if you have a marketing and sales team, even if you're just a small company of four or five people, invest in the CRM. It's one of the greatest investments you can make out there. I know they're complicated. I know they're can be cumbersome, but the minute you really figure them out and learn how to use them, it's a great investment and that goes in your customer acquisition call, so invest wisely.

Gordon Henry:

Right, exactly. Then once you do have that CRM in place, those retention marketing efforts can really pay off, because I know as a homeowner, car owner, owner of various things myself, I'm surprised how many times I use a service business that does not contact me again. Even if for something that obviously you need to do, for example, you need your car inspected every year or you need maybe every spring your air conditioner to be looked at to make sure it's working properly, you would think the companies that service you the first time would send you email, text, something to remind you, "Hey, it's time to do it again." I get very few of those. Actually, I'm surprised how little recontacts I get. It's up to me to remember, and I don't often remember who I used last time.

Len Ward:

Yeah, it's funny. It's the companies that make the most money on service and some of the really smart car dealerships. We had car dealership clients who were making points to me a few years ago that they make all their money in the service. So, yeah, they want leads. Yes, they want to sell cars, but the goal with them was we need to feed the service department. Some car dealers are masters of the account-based marketing. You get the postcard, you start to hit on social media, they geofence you, then they'll actually call you, they'll text you. So, yeah, you are right, but it is amazing how many times you'll have to remind yourself, but if you can get that established in your funnel, in your pipeline, I would be stunned if your revenue doesn't increase dramatically by doing that.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, for sure. Just switching gears a little bit, we have listeners in a variety of categories and verticals from home services to, you mentioned, auto, fitness, real estate, finance. Some of these techniques you're talking about, are they the same for different categories or they're category specific tricks and techniques?

Len Ward:

I think the overarching tried and true digital strategy right now, which is what a lot of people implement, can be used everywhere. I'm sure that there's some agencies that may say, "Well, we do it this way. We do it that way." That's okay. But at the end of the day, geofencing, retargeting, keyword search intent, and things like that, account based marketing and how you do a drip campaign for email, a lot of it stays the same. If you're working with an agency or your internal marketing team is not doing every single thing I said to you, you do want to take a step back and that's where you need to start questioning people and saying, it's the buyer's journey. The typical buyer may need to be touched 10 times, whether they're an existing customer or a new customer.

Do you have a current marketing campaign that is actually going to be able to touch them to the 10 points? That is where the overarching strategy should be. I think one of the biggest changes in digital marketing that we've seen since the internet started, maybe even bigger, and I think ChatGPT and AI is going to completely turn everything on its head. I do think as you just mentioned, anybody listening, you need to be prepared.

Start reading and start listening because it's going to have a major impact on your customer acquisition costs. But yes, the overarching strategy, back to your question, I deviated, you need to have an overarching strategy and nobody's really invented a new way to run the mousetrap. It's all the same thing. It's just really good creative and having a really good offer and a good product.

Gordon Henry:

You mentioned the buyer's journey. At the beginning of the buyer's journey, I guess, is this awareness or consideration piece where I'm looking for somebody to service my car or what have you. Maybe I Google car service or something or auto service, how do you recommend or what do you recommend in terms of awareness? Because you've been saying a lot about Google AdWords, but there is the more brand building piece out there where businesses think, "Maybe I should be doing more general advertising where I'm building a brand, whether that would be TV advertising, billboard advertising, maybe advertising in local circulars or flyers or things like that. More get my name out there as opposed to just the Google links." Is that something you advocate?

Len Ward:

Yeah, I mean it's huge. I think it was it David Ogilvy who said it, let them know they have a problem, and that's the awareness campaign. So, you have to bring it up to somebody that they have a current problem. The awareness campaign is a mandatory component of investing, whether it is billboards, whether it's some print. Again, I like how you said, sponsor your local church, synagogue, whatever it may be, an event there. Anything along those lines and let people know like, "Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that they did that or I didn't know they were local." Spotify's great for that. YouTube ads are great for that. You can even advertise on Hulu. You can advertise on podcast. But yes, it's a mandatory component.

The problem you run into awareness campaign is if a company comes to you and is like, "We really, really, really need leads. We're up against the wall." Then from your customer acquisition cost standpoint, if I'm looking at an allocation, I'm like, "All right. Well, I'm going to have to pivot my money over to leads and I don't like to live in that world. We'll leave a little bit to awareness," but ultimately, if you have 100% digital marketing campaign, you're operating optimally. When you are running 25 to 35% of your investment is in the awareness stage, which is letting people know that they have a problem. So, yes, I'm a big advocate of that.

Gordon Henry:

We have to take a quick break. We'll be back in 30 seconds with more from Len Ward and we'll hear a little bit about close ratios and what you should be expected to deliver. Don't go away.

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Gordon Henry:

We're back with Len Ward of Ward Consulting, talking about a fascinating discussion about marketing effectiveness really and how you can do more with your money from a tactile TV perspective, cost of acquisition versus lifetime value of your customer, and how to dial that in. So, we talked a lot about marketing, a little bit less about sales. A lot of people have sales teams of various sorts. Len, what is good in terms of a close ratio? I generate 100 leads. How many of those should turn into jobs?

Len Ward:

I think that is on a case by case basis. I think that's on industry basis. I know it's funny, because a lot of times when I was running marketing campaigns for people, we'd come in and be like, "Hey, if you get me 100 leads, I'll close 90 of them." All right. If you're selling water in the middle of the desert to somebody, you're probably going to close 90%. Or if it's an emergency and I have a pipe broken, I need it fixed, yes, your close rates should be very, very high, but I think it's on a case by case basis. You can increase your close rates again by making sure that when they are in the consideration stage that you are running the right type of marketing campaigns to really try to get them there.

So, if they have that proposal, if they have that scope of work in front of them, if they visited your showroom and have some stuff, if you're able to retarget them with relevant content, if you're able to geofence them and so forth and really help them along their decision process, that will help your close rate. But close rate is bar none, one of the most critical things you have to look at in your sales and marketing investment, because a lot of times, companies will come back... I'll give you an example. One time I had a roofing company and they were like, "Well, we need more leads." This is going back years. I'm like, "Okay, well, we'll keep generating new leads." We kept looking at the one thing. We're like, "Man, our close rate is really, really low."

We're like, "All right, we'll let it go. It was like 10%, 15%." He's like, "I just need more leads." I'm like, "Let me ask you something. If I generate you the leads that you want, won't we have a roofing epidemic on our hands? Everyone's roof is bad." They're looking at me and I tell this story a lot on the podcast, but you have to identify your close rate and maybe fix it. For someone like you, which probably should be in the 35% range, 40% range, that's where you should be living for that. So, hopefully, that answered your question, but that's where I live in regards to closing rates.

Gordon Henry:

Right, because all leads are not created equal. For example, if you get a lead that comes through your own website, that's different than a lead that maybe comes through somebody like a home advisor where we know those leads get sent out to about five different vendors. So, you may be competing with vendors for who's the first one to call the customer and make them an offer or a bid for a project. So, sometimes it's just your lead. Sometimes it's the lead that's being shared with others, and your close ratio is obviously going to be better on the first and the second, I would think.

Len Ward:

Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. I mean, if you have a value proposition that's tremendous and your product is tremendous, your close rate is going to get really good. Let's just say your close rate has not changed. You've done all the marketing I just mentioned. You're doing really good. Well then at that point, you need to take a step back and say, "Well, how can I go in and really enhance my product? What can I do to innovate?" That is truly where the great innovations do arise is when people are like, "You know what? I'm going to do it this way. I'm going to invent this and work that way." Then you watch your close rates go all the way up, but close rates are such a critical, critical part of sales and marketing. You really are.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, we talked a lot about paid advertising or paid marketing and there's the other piece, which is earned, I guess people talk about, which could be everything from your SEO, making yourself more findable up to things like PR or blogs, which in theory are free or social. What is your thought on that piece of the chain?

Len Ward:

Mandatory. Something like public relations, I like how people were trying to kill that off five, six years ago. They thought our social media will kill that off. I think public relations now is more relevant than almost it ever has been. If anything, it almost should be a mandatory investment in your customer acquisition cost, doing things like sponsoring events in the community, being seen in the community. I think that is tremendous. I think from an SEO perspective, I think you should be investing in that. It's not about why I need to get to the first page of Google. What typically an individual, what type of questions would they ask a search engine or ask Alexa?

I don't talk too loud, my Alexa will kick on in a minute. Then what would they ask? Then writing and creating content where you can come up for that. I think the shift that's happened is for years, public relations might have been the tip of the spear or SEO is definitely at the tip of the spear. Now, I think it's just part of the buyer's journey and it's interweaved there, but yes, an investment should be made in both of them.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, and then I guess the final issue people face is the attribution. The old John Wannamaker, half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half. You do the PR, you do the SEO, and you don't know. Did the leads come in because of the PR? Did they come in because of the general image advertising? Was it a lead that came in maybe through one source that ended up at another? Maybe you do a podcast and someone hears the podcast. Then five days later, they click on your website. How do you know it came from the podcast? That thing.

Len Ward:

Well, that comes down to the last click attribution. Even when you have somebody like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, I think they got together a few years ago together, which was amazing and said, "Really, really watch last click attribution." We know that we make our money on last click attribution, but you have to think about an individual that maybe went to, let's say, a flooring store, looked at some of the flooring and looked at a couple different places, but then they saw the flooring store car driving by on the road. Then maybe they saw the billboard. For some reason, they were getting targeted and let's just say they Googled that flooring company around us, Hatfield, New Jersey. That's exactly who we wanted. They go and they click that pay-per-click ad.

The problem you're looking at there is people would then come in and say, "Well, look at what pay-per-click did for you." That's not necessarily true. Actually, it might have been a million different ways for them in which to touch you. I know that there are some programs out there that can help track that for you. I know there's some programs that can really look at the buyers and where they were and where they weren't, but there's no programs out there tracking who saw your billboard driving by or that wrapped up truck or maybe even somebody in passing. Somebody on Facebook said in a Facebook group, "Hey, can anybody recommend a great flooring company to me?"

Oh, by the way, there's that company that pops up again. So, it really is embracing the buyer's journey and understanding the right mix of your investment. Is that investment ultimately getting me to my target at revenue number? If it's not, let's take a look at the pipeline. Let's look at the funnel and how do I reallocate this? If that's not working, then I need to step back and really look at innovation. What can I do that's going to completely separate me from my competitor?

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, terrific. We haven't talked much about you, specifically your firm. What kind of clients do you handle? Are they small companies, medium, large? Who's your typical customer?

Len Ward:

I really like dealing with the small businesses. I have worked with some larger companies. The issue working with larger companies is there's just a lot of dynamics there. There's a lot of moving parts and trying to get everybody on the same page is really never easy. But typically, the companies I like or the companies like $2.5 million and down in revenue are the ones that I typically really work well with because I can really get my hands dirty. I can really pull out all the numbers, take a look at it and say, "This is what you need to do."

I like to pretty much only work with the business owner and then from time to time have the marketing manager in. A lot of times, agencies will bring me in to try to say, "Hey, look, we got a great client. We've had a great relationship, but it's failing and we don't want it to go away." So I work well with agencies where I'm like, "All right, I'm like the mediator. You're doing this right, you're doing that wrong. Let's find a middle ground." So those are my clients that I typically work with.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. Terrific. Where should people find you and learn more about what you're doing and potentially become a client?

Len Ward:

It's pretty easy. Just go to ward.consulting. You can jump on my website. I upload videos. I have my Weekly Notes and thoughts and so forth. That's pretty much it. You can also find me on LinkedIn at Len Ward and just request me and we can take it from there.

Gordon Henry:

Okay, great. Just curious, how big is your company these days?

Len Ward:

My company's small, so I still own an agency, but it's not an ad agency anymore. We just stick pretty much with just web maintenance and web hosting, so I still own that, but my company is solely me. So, if you work with me, when you work with the Ward Consulting, you are working with me. So, I am very limited on the clients I take. I try to typically take no more than about 10 to 15 clients, but it's refreshing just being me opposed to having to manage 20 to 35 people.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, understood. Well, this has been great, Len. You're a fount of knowledge, obviously really deep, deep understanding of this subject area. I'm sure you can be a big help to a lot of our clients. So, hopefully, folks will give you a ring and thanks for coming on the show.

Len Ward:

Great. Appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Gordon Henry:

I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman, our coordinators, Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. If you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends, and family to subscribe. Please leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us in the rankings. Small business runs better or Thryv. Get a free demo at thryv.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

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