Closing the Loop Between Sales & Marketing
Episode 3
Curtis and Tom are once again joined by Mario D’Aquila, Chief Operating Officer of Assisted Living Services, for Part Three of our multi-chapter success story.
In this final installment of the three-episode arc, Mario reveals what Tom calls “The Holy Grail” of marketing and sales — the systems, process and rigor required to inject mutual accountability and visibility into the sales and marketing processes.
Lesson Learned: Tune in to hear the one simple technology Mario discovered and implemented to dramatically increase his close rate, accessibly identify (and remediate) his lost opportunities, and clearly document what success looks like.
Tom Nixon 0:06
Welcome back to bullhorns and bull’s eyes. Welcome, Curtis, how are you been?
Curtis Hays 0:10
I’ve been great.
Tom Nixon 0:12
I’m in good. anxiously awaiting part three from our guest, Mario, we need to reintroduce everyone. Mario dickwella, Chief Operating Officer of assisted living services in Connecticut, you to get over it right by now. How are you?
Mario D’Aquila 0:27
Yeah, you know, that was right, actually. So it was right on,
Tom Nixon 0:31
I just had to pause a little bit to make sure. So today, we are going to revisit the topic that we’ve been talking about. This is installment three. So if you’ve missed the two first parts, make sure you go back and either watch the videos or the preceding podcast episodes. Because today, we are finally going to pay off what we’ve been loosely defining or describing as the holy grail of marketing in that’s how you tie in sales measure ROI. All the things that so many people say are so difficult, if not impossible to do. Curtis, this is something that you and I have been talking at length about and this is right in your wheelhouse. And that’s closing that loop, isn’t it?
Curtis Hays 1:11
Yep. Yeah, sure, as I mean, yeah. So really, a lot of organizations will call this attribution, right. So you want to attribute sales down the line sales to marketing activities that are happening, you know, up early on in the funnel. And I would say, you know, 90%, if not closer to 100% of organizations are trying to do that every day, figure out what that ROI is. And you want to get as close as possible, it can never be perfect, but you want to try to do everything you can. And I think Mario’s got a great story to share of how, you know, some commitment to try to figure that out and putting the right tools and systems in place to do that, and what it can do to your business. So yeah,
Tom Nixon 1:58
Mario, that was the cliffhanger we left people with last time, which was an aha moment that you had, when it comes to measuring ad spend equating ROI, you seem to be what I know of you a very numbers and data driven person. So you wanted to know, as you started to seeing results, the website was starting to generate leads, you wanted to understand with granularity, I think, how exactly where exactly how much. Exactly. So you could I think feed that data back into the marketing, playing was it that?
Mario D’Aquila 2:29
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it’s interesting, Curtis and I were talking off off camera here and off off podcast, but, you know, way back when I think what we did was we used saw it working, and, you know, in my kind of primitive brain back then and still is now but back then it was more primitive. I would say, you know, let’s just throw some more money at it. Right. And let’s see if that works. And, you know, to some extent it does, right. I mean, we through we increased the budget, you know, year over year. And, you know, we we saw some progress, right, some results. But, you know, as we started to evolve, if you will, I think it was, you know, courtesy, you said something interesting before, customers come and say, you know, you need more form fills? You know, and it’s not just that it’s how are they getting there, right? Where where are you? Where are you spending your money? Right? Is it through just, you know, increasing your website’s sort of aesthetic view? Is it you know, spending more money on Google paid ads? Is it getting more content out there? What’s really producing the results? Right, and how do we measure whether or not you know, putting $100,000 into writing blogs or producing content is actually going to be a measurable result? Right. So, you know, I know we really started looking into it, we designed our Salesforce program to really track almost everywhere, online where that lead came from, right, different Google My Business campaigns. You know, and now we’re just starting to track things like commercials that are on Hulu and YouTube, where the customers are actually coming from in that respect. Are they coming from or from YouTube? Hulu, did they see this ad compared to that ad? And, you know, I think it’s important to start tracking this for us and for other companies, because you can throw all your money into one particular aspect of online marketing and, you know, may may work but, you know, it’s sort of broad reach that, you know, we found more success in And in doing at least,
Curtis Hays 5:03
Tom, if I could add to that what we saw was from an analytics perspective, because we could, we could track, at least at a level of user behavior, not tied to the CRM, just what users were doing. But at least on mobile, there was a fair number of people who were clicking the phone number to call the business. But there’s no tie back to that actual phone call happening to a specific person. So we see the phone call happened, but unless we took our analytics data by time, and he took his phone system and got a printout of all the phone calls that came in every day, and by time, and we matched them up with caller ID with the CRM, that’d be an extensive amount of work, right? of roughly anywhere from 150 to 200 calls a month that are just tied to web activities. There could be 1000 phone calls coming in through his phone system, but of what we see happening is maybe 20% of that. So there are platforms out there. And these were conversations I had with with Mario basically saying, like, look, there’s a segment of data here that we could tap into, to understand more about the quality of leads, if we install software, a platform. And in our case, we use call rail to match up that event. So this platform basically connects to your Google Analytics pixel, and does caller ID lookup and sort of connects or forwards to your phone system. And then it also connects to your CRM. So it identifies that user, when they make that phone call, it knows where they came from, because it’s tied to your Google Analytics. And then it sends all that data immediately into Salesforce, especially when that sales comes in, and you can configure it or when the call comes in. The person that’s on the under the phone, they have Salesforce open that contact records automatically there. And all they have to do is put notes on it. They don’t have to enter in their phone number and all that they can validate that right. And there Sufis like big companies have sophisticated systems that do this for you, right? But we’re talking about the small business level, and you just have a standard PBX you’re using like, you know, a TNT or XFINITY and some simple phone system, you really don’t have, you know, much way of doing this, but call rail, it’s starting at like 40 bucks a month, $50 a month can give you access to this data was like, Well, what if we did this? And that started in December? Like, what if we install this right before Christmas? And we looked at this, we had a 15 day trial? What if we looked at this over the holiday? What would happen? You remember that Mario? Like, do you remember like after the first of the year looking at the data, and but what do you think at that point? Like?
Mario D’Aquila 8:03
You know, I thought why didn’t we do this? When Curtis told us to two years ago, it was almost scary that it was so eye opening? You know, Curtis has been advocating for us to get a call tracking system for two years. I mean, and we were terrified to do it. Because we said, Geez, these people are going to call this unique number that gets assigned to them, and they’re going to forget our corporate number, right, you know, the customer is going to not know how to get a hold of us, because the number changes all the time. And, you know, we just had to give up that fear and just say, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s more worth it to track where these guys are coming from, than that. The potentially negative consequence of them not knowing our number, right? Guys just use Google. I mean, you know, type in our company name, you’ll find us right there. It’s not, you know, I don’t I don’t think anybody’s writing down our number on their hand, you know, from a phone book or, you know, or anything like that anymore. So who knows, maybe they are but we think that this just was eye opening for us on the operations end, it was eye opening on the sales and marketing end, it was eye opening. And, to be honest, I I would never go back to where we were right. I would never say we should remove this system. Because the data that it gives us is invaluable. You know, we don’t track our operators, phone conversations at all. We’ve never done that. However call rail does allow for calls to be monitored and you can kind of listen to the the operators or the salesperson or whoever is taking a call. You can listen to the conversation for training purposes. And again, we’ve never done it before, but call rail allowed for it. So, you know, our marketing and sales director and myself said, you know, I wonder, I wonder how these calls are being handled just one day, right? You know, you’re allowed to see this. See, listen, this internet of these. And what we found was shocking. I mean, it was absolutely shocking that the calls, you know, we it’s a small to medium sized company, I mean, but we have about 30 people that the phone could go to, that a caller could get a hold of somebody in this company. And what we found that is that some people, you know, it’s not their fault, they’re just not sales folks, right, somebody calls in looking for care, or looking for services. They would essentially not not sell them on the carry, you know, let’s go into something else. Let me, let me give you the price right away, right, you know, the first five seconds out, we’re, you know, $35 an hour or 30 bucks an hour and the customer got that info and okay. You know, and as we know, you don’t give the price right away, right, you have to sell, right, that’s, that’s, you have to sell them on the value that your company presents. So how this boils down to I mean, we have, we lost probably three to four clients in a matter of two days that we tracked, you know, these conversations essentially going nowhere the customer, how do we know that we lost them? Well, because call rails good enough where we could see if they ever call back, or if a call was made back to them. And we were listening to these conversations kind of gone, gone wrong. And we said, Whoa, like, we extrapolated that data, you know, over two days, you lost three to four clients, multiply that times 365 days in a year, right. It’s a scary number, right. And so after we found that data, we had to make some operational changes in order to make sure that the cause were going to internal sales folks, and that he had increased our conversion rate tremendously, just from operational changes. And tremendously I mean, that we converted, we increased our, our conversion by 33%, in quarter over quarter, when we made that change.
Tom Nixon 12:40
Amazing. So just, we I always have to point out, we are not affiliate marketers with call rail. So it’s not that we are pitching call rail, it’s just we’re pitching the concept behind it. And then, more importantly, or as importantly, the processes and systems that, you know, have to follow on operationally. But just to step back, so you’re talking about those lost opportunities that you are now tracking. But before you’re even tracking it, you estimated that 30% of your lead web clients were out there, but because they called in, they weren’t even being tracked at all. That’s just dark data, right? Because you don’t know if they called No way. Now, that’s another slice of revenue that you haven’t accounted for. So have you done the math? So since then it can you look at like almost a whole year’s data worth now and say, it’s either increased our conversion rate by x month or increased the inbound traffic this much what are those analytics, say?
Mario D’Aquila 13:36
So we did the first three quarters of 2023, compared to the first three quarters of 2022. And I think Curtis has some of that data that we were just talking about.
Curtis Hays 13:50
Yeah, yeah. So total, trackable conversions that we came into the system. So that was a 241% increase of data that we’re actually converting. And I did this with a with another client, I’ll just kind of give you an example. Like, you’re like, Whoa, how are you converting that many more. And so this sort of like real time ability for the system to create that lead record. I was working with another client and listen to some of their initial phone calls that were coming in their teams were answering the phone call, answering all great questions for the prospect, you know, leading them down where they needed to, and then it was like, yeah, oh, you’re gonna come into our showroom on Monday? Great, we’ll see you there and hung up the phone and never asked for that person’s contact info. And, you know, that would have been like Question number one, or if not, question number two, can I get your name and phone number? So in case we get disconnected, I call you back. Right? And so now they have no idea if that person is that the person who shows up on Monday or is that somebody completely different and did they you know, again, where are they socially? gave us some. So it’s just yeah, if it if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist. And so it sort of goes back to that, well, we actually assisted in that process of making sure that it was going to make it into the CRM. So it was true. And so there’s a 240% increase just initially there. And then we looked at what I guess we would call like, the actual leads, then that were convertible. So we might have a volume of records that are created. And we did ways of weeding out phone calls that would be unqualified, say somebody is calling looking for a job, or it’s some telecom company wants to sell your new phone system, right, those aren’t being generated as leads, we want to true leads. But then there’s another level of which ones are the fully qualified leads that could lead to an actual sale. And that we saw an increase of 70%. And then on top of that, then we saw an increase of 80% of the web leads that were actually resulted in new business. So we closed 80%. So we’ve almost doubled close sales from web. So we’re kind of thinking well, yeah, there could have been 30%. Before maybe that we just couldn’t track, there was no attribution previously, so we couldn’t track. So there’s at least a 50% increase. And the other crazy thing is, we didn’t spend any more money doing this. This is entirely just implementing a very inexpensive technology and improving process. When we look at this year versus last year, we didn’t, we’re not spending any more money from a marketing perspective. And we’re really not doing any different tactics, we might be in those tactics, pulling some different levers, because now we have access to some more granular data about what’s working within the channels. But for the most part, the channels are exactly the same as they were a year ago. So it’s, it’s pretty cool.
Tom Nixon 16:57
What this is, I’m gonna finally reveal, I guess, in episode three, what I find to be the Holy Grail, and Mario, this is way more unique than you would even give yourself credit for. But it’s not always, you know, having the best sales team. It’s not always having the flashiest marketing campaigns or strategies. It’s this closed loop that exists or should exist, but almost never does between what the marketing folks are doing and having a transparency in terms of what leads are being generated, then a mutual transparency to say once those leads come in, how are we operationally addressing them? And do we need to fix things operationally. So now we have marketing operations that lead to sales. And then usually, if you get that far, which is where the data dies there, because no one’s feeding the sales data back into the marketing, to tell them this lead closed, this lead was a great lead, but didn’t close. This was a horrible Lee, we don’t want any more people like this, because they don’t fit our customer profile. Because you could take all that data, which we’ll come back to in a second Curtis and feed it into your marketing algorithms. But this closed loop, is this just your nature, Mario? Or does this something you had to discover along the way that there’s too many holes between sales operations and marketing to get full, full circle solution that’s going to actually work, drive and be measured?
Mario D’Aquila 18:20
Yeah, I think it was an aha moment when we implemented CallRail. Because, you know, Curtis, on a monthly basis, would ask for data to come back so he could feed it to make the algorithm better and better. And what we noticed was that, geez, if we’re losing three to four clients in two days, there’s so much data that he’s now losing. Right? And, you know, it’s this perpetual problem where we can spend 50% more marketing 100% more marketing, and guess what the results will be? No better because we didn’t fix the internal sale product sales process, right. And, you know, our sales process is a little longer than we’ll call it like, a product and iPhone or soda or something that, you know, a thing a tangible thing. We’re selling a service that, you know, people don’t need right away, or they do need it right away. It’s not a consumable good. It’s a sort of a, you know, a necessary service that requires some growing right over time. But what was interesting, and we discussed it today, is that we have different marketing mediums, right? And that there wasn’t one fix. All right, like Curtis said, we didn’t spend any more in marketing this in sorry in the web marketing this year than last year. But there’s better results. We didn’t spend more in PR this year than last So you’re advertising, commercials radio. In our newspaper, we didn’t spend more as a matter of fact, we probably spent less, but we have more conversions. Right? So I mean, this is a hypothesis, but it’s like, there’s no one marketing channel, that’s like a fix. All right, that’s that you should be responsive, you know, hey, all these leads are coming in just because we did we spent more on the web or more on PR. There’s no kind of one marketing, attribution. But but it is that one thing on your internal sales, and that can ruin all of your marketing efforts. Right? So if you’re not actually capturing those leads, in our instance, it was going to the wrong folks, right? If you’re not capturing the leads, if you’re not actually solidifying what the client wants, and actually converting the client, getting it to the right, right, people, almost all that marketing kind of goes to waste, right? Or at least a significant part of it. And in Curtis’s example, where, you know, the company that they just didn’t ask for the phone number, right, or the email address. And folks were showing up at the showroom. And they didn’t know if it was actually the people that they’re marketing to. That’s the exact example that we’re talking about here. In r&d, it was actual clients that we truly knew wanted service, they were sales qualified leads, they were convertible sales, qualified leads. And because they were going to the wrong, folks, we weren’t able to convert them, right. And that all equals revenue. Right? That’s all the ROI that we spent on the marketing kind of going away. Just because operationally it’s gone to the wrong folks internally.
Tom Nixon 21:46
So Curtis, why do you think there is this like, sort of invisible curtain between sales and marketing in most organizations? Why are they so afraid to share data back and forth? I mean, I have my own biases. But I guess the bigger question is, then how do you overcome those? Whatever those apprehensions are, how do you overcome that? And why is it so important? I mean, I think we’re demonstrating here as a case study, but just generally speaking, why do you demand these mutual accountability meetings where demand is a strong word, but in ask for the data?
Curtis Hays 22:18
Yeah, well, it’s complex. And that that may be the biggest thing with this, it takes time. And oftentimes, an organization is driven by trying to fix things quickly, or plug holes. We’re behind on our numbers. And so we need to throw money at x in order to drive leads, instead of taking a step back, looking at the big picture, and that’s probably the biggest thing is oftentimes we fall into the situation in marketing, where a company needs to hit numbers, and says, you know, can you do X, Y, and Z, because we need to get to this by the end of the quarter, by the end of the year, or in this next fiscal year, without taking a step back saying, Do we have the systems in place, not just from a marketing perspective, but inside the sales organization, to do this all effective. And so, you know, if there’s willingness in the organization to do that, in, which is usually a champion, Mario’s our champion, at assisted living, if there’s a champion in the organization is willing to put those pieces together, then I think it could all come together. If there’s not, then you’ll have a chief revenue officer, a CMO, a CEO, you’re gonna have somebody at that level, who’s just basically saying, No, we just need to put more money at this. Because we need to drive drive leads and into the pipeline. And then from our perspective, we’ve just feel like they go into a dark hole. And we don’t get the information that we need. I
Tom Nixon 24:00
also find sometimes there’s a misalignment of incentives, you know, it should go without saying that marketing and sales at the end of the day are all should have the same end in mind, which is increasing revenue. But marketing has become so sophisticated that it can be seducing to chase, the wrong metrics, say, clicks or form fills, you mentioned, right, let’s get the form filled, let’s get some conversions into the funnel, where we’re talking about a company now that has some percentage of their sales are going to come from a phone call, because that’s the most natural medium for that prospect to communicate with you. Right. So if the metrics are how many clicks are we getting to the, to the extent that you’re ignoring the natural course? Well, now marketing is going for clicks and sales are just going for closes in the sales metrics. They’re not looking beyond the close, because once that’s in the pipeline, they’re on to the next thing, right. So how do we align Mario’s a question for you, maybe how do we how were you successful in aligning so sort of big picture incentives so that people aren’t in vacuum saying, Well, I hit my quota, I hit the clicks quota, and I hit my quota sales quota.
Mario D’Aquila 25:09
Yeah, that’s an excellent question, actually. And, and it boils down to the accountability metric. You know, again, we don’t measure. Clicks are nice and views and things like that are great. We measure our conversion rate. And we measure is revenue coming in. And we pin incentives, from sales all the way to marketing and those things, right, so I’ll give you a great example. You know, our sales reps, our external sales reps are incentivized on how many clients that they bring in directly, okay, they go out. They essentially foster relationships with referral sources, and they directly get the referral. And then they go and foster the relationship and convert that client. Now our internal marketing and sales works in tandem. Right. So there’s no Well, no conflicting incentives, right. They’re incentivized on all leads that convert internally, from web, from calls from our PR efforts from calls from our advertising efforts. They’re incentivized in that respect, right. So there’s not a competition, right, with marketing and sales, it works in tandem, because they’re incentivized in tandem. Right. So when you create these incentives that actually have sort of nothing to do with each other, right, that you get people going after the wrong thing. I always look at business and and KPIs. Sort of like Polly’s right. So if you incentivize one department, right with this carrot, right, it weighs down this pulley and it lifts up this other one, right. So essentially, I like my incentives to balance each other out. So that one department isn’t going after something that actually at the detriment of the other department. That at all costs. Good example is our recruiting. Right? we incentivize our recruiting in a similar fashion, that we incentivize our sales efforts, so that it balances out. Right. And that that’s one thing that through the years, we’ve we’ve experienced, and it didn’t happen overnight, we’ve made many mistakes. I can tell you that our our sales and marketing commission structure changed probably six times over the past seven to eight years, right? You know, you guess in check, right? You get feedback from folks that worked here, and you come up with something over that amount of time, that works really well. But I can say that a takeaway on that particular aspect of it is that it’s not going to be perfect the first time, as a matter of fact, it’s gonna be very imperfect the first time we come up with a system, but you have to throw it away and redo them over and over again, based on feedback that you get. And based on, honestly, your results, right, because at the end of the day, its revenue, and it’s profit, we need to invest that back into the processes.
Tom Nixon 28:40
So, Curtis, what is a final question for you? And then I have a final question for Mario. My final question for you is just kind of big picture. If you step back in all three episodes, we’ve talked about, is there a major big lesson takeaway? So you know, if you could turn back the clock to when you started working with Mario, look at the entire chronology? What’s the lesson? What what is the lesson for most companies who might be like you said, they come to you first, like maybe chasing a quota? Is it to step back? Or what is the biggest lesson or takeaway?
Curtis Hays 29:16
I think you have to at some point, there’s certainly times where you need to be focused on Okay, well, you know, we’re trying to generate revenue here because of XY and Z. And so we’re focused over here, but you do need to take time away, whether that’s time when you’re budgeting every year, whether that’s time when you’re working on strategic initiatives, look at systems involve other people in the organization. You know, have have a plan in place, put together a plan, you know, have a culture in the organization that people are gonna buy into that and follow along with it. And then then have a partner you know, on the opposite end, who you know, is willing to do that, and there has to be some level of trust and transparency. I mean, Mario che hearing me very intimate details of his business, he’s got to have some level of trust to do that with with me and the people at my organization. So there’s a little bit of caution, I think organization should take with that. But if you have, you know, get the right people in place, you’ve selected the right partners, I think that you can step into something like this. And maybe it only takes a year. But that year of building, you know, what it could do for you down and you know, in the long term, and I was just looking at numbers here, as Maria was talking, like, we actually have spent 4% less in, in what we’re doing from a web and advertising perspective, it’s 4%, less than it was last year with an 80% increase in new business. I mean, that’s, that’s crazy. Who wouldn’t take that, right? So, but we were able to put that sort of in place quickly, because there was already the culture in place, Mario was able to go into his organization and talk to sales and improve things because that culture already exists, that he can easily, you know, change different levers. There’s, there’s two letters we talk about pretty frequently as the, like, the volume that comes in, and then that conversion rate, and it’s not just the conversion rate on the website, that’s the most common conversion rate, we talk about marketing. But it’s conversion to sales, qualified lead, and then from a sales quality to what you could actually close as a new customer. There’s actually multiple conversion rate points. And there’s opportunities at each point to find areas of insight and optimization to understand what’s happening in that funnel. And you have to get clarity in that funnel, you have to be able to measure it and look at each stage, drill down into that stage and then be like, Whoa, there’s an anomaly here. What’s causing that? What do we need to fix? And, you know, just think if you’re able to do that without waiting for the bleed to happen over a six month time period, that you can actually have data that was like, Oh, yep, we’ve got to hold a plug, and we don’t have to panic. plug that hole. We look at, talk to the right people. Oh, yeah, we do. See there’s something wrong here. Let’s do something about that. Yeah.
Tom Nixon 32:20
So I’ve heard you both preach patience. You both preached the value of sort of looking at data and responding to the data and learning from lessons, you know, Mario, you keep saying it’s not going to be perfect at first, but you’re going to learn from it. So same question, do you, Mario? And if you can, I want you to leave us with Your Game of Thrones analogy. Because this gets to patients in looking back. So now we’re talking about you guys. I think this whole journey started in 2017 or so. So six years later, it what did you have to say about Game of Thrones irrelevant to this conversation? We’re pretty
Curtis Hays 32:54
much six years to the date to I think we started working together in September of October. So it’s yeah, it’s like to the date almost.
Mario D’Aquila 33:04
As a long time ago, a great journey, though. Yeah. Yeah, the Game of Thrones analogy, I look back that long ago to where we were. And I think we that we’ve, we came so far, we’ve made so many mistakes, we’ve made so many fixes. It was a journey. I mean, it it still is I mean, we’re, we’re just getting started. But when I look at how long Game of Thrones was, and I go, Oh, man, like, the first episode of That was so far away, you know, to where it finally ended with the I don’t want to spoil the blow up for everybody. But like, it was just such a long series. And it was so intense, and every episode is an hour. And it’s, you know, different characters are introduced, different things are done throughout it. I’m like that. That’s an epic right there. Right. And I can relate it a little bit to or a lot of it to what we’ve done. I mean, we started from getting five clients on a good year, through our web efforts, using variant event, a very antiquated web platform, all the way to now where we’re tracking where every single lead and phone call and little thing is coming from. It’s just amazing, right? And, you know, to echo what you said, Tom, was that there’s only one way to do it, and it’s just to go forward with it. You have to try it. You know, we were we had a lot of fear of wasting capital on different things and I think that you don’t have to go in it, where you have to throw a ton of money in and let’s see if it works. Let’s throw a ton of money into it. You can Do these things for relatively, you know, relatively low capital, I mean, you know, call rail, for instance, or another system, right? Because we don’t, you know, you can it’s, you know, few bucks a month. I mean, just to try it out right to see if it works.
Tom Nixon 35:16
Pass or Fail. That’s the thing, as too many companies go into this sorry to interrupt Maria, what it’s a pass or fail mentality, we’ll know if it’s working in six months. And if it doesn’t, we’re gonna pull the plug that can’t do that. It will let you have the final word Mario. But just to point out, I am the only person I think in the world that has seen the first episode of Games with Game of Thrones, and nothing else. So if you tell me, okay, I loved it, though. But now I’m looking at it. I’m like, Alright, six episodes of this. An hour long. It’s epic. Like, do I have the time and the patience to do all this? You asked me now? I say, I don’t know. But once I get to the end, I’m gonna look back at it and say that was so worth it. And it went a lot quicker than I thought it would. Which is that’s your analogy. Correct? Exactly.
Mario D’Aquila 35:58
I mean, if I had to be in your seat, I would watch it. I would just be aware of that. Yeah, it takes a while and just enjoy the journey. I mean, I mean, that’s my biggest takeaway, you have to try to see do you have to try these things to really know what you have to fix? You don’t know what you have to fix yet? Because he didn’t try it. Right. I’m just speaking to a broader audience about this type of thing.
Tom Nixon 36:26
Absolutely. Great. Well, I think we’ve told the complete story here and three episodes and we kind of are like Game of Thrones, we got a three part saga. Right. But maybe that’s more like Star Wars. So thank you, gentlemen, for telling the success story. Hopefully people out there have gotten some things to take away and learn. If you haven’t checked out the first two episodes. Go do that either listen, or watch the videos. And we’ll thank everyone and we’ll be back soon with another episode of bull horns and bull’s eyes.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Other episodes in this series:
Episode 39: Lessons Learned and Next Steps
Mario D’Aquila — the guest who helped us launch Bullhorns and Bullseyes — returns for the penultimate episode of Season 1 to discuss the lessons he’s learned since we last spoke with him.
Episode 1: Trial and Error and Investing in Success
In Chapter One, Mario shares his experiences and best advice on the early stages of a company's exploration into marketing and advertising: what worked, what didn't, and why you need to push yourself to start early in investing in your future success.
Episode 2: Systemizing Sales & Marketing
Curtis and Tom are rejoined by guest Mario D'Aquila, Chief Operating Officer of Assisted Living Services, for Part Two of our multi-chapter success story.