Lessons Learned and Next Steps

Tom Nixon (00:02.754)
Well, Curtis, as Yogi Berra might say, if you don’t know where to start, go back to the beginning. And we’re going to do that today. We’re not starting, but we’re concluding season one of our podcast here. We’re wrapping things up into a tidy little bow. And we want to go back to where it all began. A three episode story arc with a friend of yours by the name of Mario. And we’re going to bring him back today. I’ll let you introduce him and we’re going to bring him back today. We’re going to kind of.

Curtis Hays (00:10.321)
Thanks

Tom Nixon (00:31.064)
Go back in time, talk about where we left off, and then we’re going to see what’s happened since, and then we’re going to maybe forecast what’s to come in season two. How does that sound?

Curtis Hays (00:38.981)
That sounds awesome. you know, yup, this is definitely where it all started and it’s, it’s great to kind of wrap it all up, put a bow on it. And a lot’s happened this, this last year since we started, I mean, we’ll record it about 40 episodes in, in a year. And, that’s been a, been a lot of work and a lot of fun. And I think we’ll talk about that in our final episode, but, you know, this all started from wanting to have Mario share.

a little bit of his journey in the marketing and advertising space and quite a journey it’s been over the last seven, eight years. And even this last year, we’ve worked on a few new things together. So I’m excited to kind of dive into those things today.

Tom Nixon (01:25.939)
I’m to make you say his last name this time.

Curtis Hays (01:28.079)
Yeah. Mario tequila. Did I get it right? No, because I thought it was tequila tequila.

Tom Nixon (01:31.586)
Nope, tequila.

Mario (01:32.951)
so cool.

Tom Nixon (01:34.35)
you

Mario (01:38.928)
tell you tequila sounds cooler so but it is the quilla

Curtis Hays (01:40.877)
It does. I know, I know. I’ve been drinking tequila. The other day was my birthday and I got a few bottles for my birthday. So tequila is on the mind.

Tom Nixon (01:50.382)
There you go. Well, Mario, whatever your name is, welcome back to the podcast. We don’t need to necessarily dive in in a lot of great detail into the first three episodes because we’ll encourage people to go back and either listen to or watch those. But I think where we left off, we started with sort of your journey into what marketing at a high level was then could be evolved into. We walked through some of the systems that your team put in place.

Mario (01:51.718)
Nice.

Tom Nixon (02:18.984)
And I think importantly, we ended up at a place where you now have very rigid systems in place to not only execute the things that you’re doing throughout the entire life journey of a prospect who becomes a client, et cetera, but then measurables around where you’re achieving success or not at every step of the way that good summation in your view.

Mario (02:40.892)
That’s exactly right. Because what you don’t measure, you cannot manage. And that’s really a philosophy that we’ve adopted, not just in the marketing world, which is what we’re talking about, but in the operations world of our company too.

Tom Nixon (02:55.456)
Yeah, it’s interesting because there’s this weird. I notice I think this weird dichotomy or maybe it’s a conflict where people start doing some marketing modern marketing and they’re like, want to measure everything. Of course, right? But then they don’t really want to put all of the systems in place. Curtis to truly measure every bit of the outcome for whatever reason is I don’t know if they’re afraid of what they might find out or they think.

just starting something is going to magically create success. But even down to the minor detail as to who’s the answering the phone and how are they answering the phone?

Curtis Hays (03:32.879)
Yeah, without getting into specifics there, cause I know we’re going to dive into it. I think there’s so much data you have access to. There’s so many things that we’re all responsible for. especially in a small business, you’re wearing a dozen different hats. And so data is flying at you at a constant rate and weeding through that and being able to take action on any of, any of that, I think becomes really difficult. So I think if you, if you take a step back and you say,

You know, okay, first, what are our KPIs? What are the key performance indicators? What are the things that are going to move the needle starting with revenue and profit, of course, right? So from there, now let’s talk about all those things that influenced that. I think you should then do some delegation to say, hey, I’ve got certain teams that need to take ownership for these KPIs and they should be measuring and reporting back into me, which Mario as COO, I’m sure you do.

add key performance indicators and metrics that you have team members that are responsible for. they’re measured and sort of scored on whether or not from a performance perspective, they’re actually hitting those. But as far as rolling them up to you, you’ve got to have as a chief officer in the business, as a leader, as an owner,

an understanding of the health of the business and what’s happening in specific areas. And then if you see something wrong, then you either need to go to the person who’s the leader in that area or go to a consultant, like in our case, you know, we’re doing marketing and you start asking questions. What’s going on here? Let’s further look at the data. I’ll have clients who care about clicks and impressions and CPCs and all these other things. At the end of the day, they should be caring about revenue.

Is what we’re doing actually growing their company, right? So that should be what they’re focused on. then if revenue isn’t growing, okay, hold me accountable to why it isn’t and ask for an explanation that is backed by data.

Mario (05:41.104)
Yeah. Yeah. Well said. And I, I think that we are, once you, and we’ll, we’ll take a step back to the KPI piece of this and kind of holding people accountable. But you know, what’s interesting is in an organization, you have your mission statement, you have your vision statement, you know, for ours, you know, supporting people in need and in the homes is, is our statement. revenue generation, profiting, profit generation,

is really the core of the business, obviously, because any business that is in there is in it for value creation. When you look at KPIs, what’s interesting about KPIs, even in the operational space, you can assign things to people that you think are moving the needle, but you’re just measuring maybe the wrong indicators.

And you’re thinking that, me hold this person accountable for something that could be trivial. part of my job, actually, here, is to ensure that we’re measuring the right things that are actually making a difference. Because you can measure everything. I mean, you can measure data. I you guys know. You’re practically data scientists at this point. So you can measure every little indicator.

And what we found here, which is challenging, was let’s assign things that actually move the needle in the direction that we want the company to go, but specific to their job. Not just for the sake of measuring it, though. For the sake of measuring it to ensure that they’re working towards something that the organization needs them to work towards. And by doing that, what’s really nice about doing that is it leads to

less micromanagement on the operational end and actually more autonomy on the employees end. You know, hey, you have these KPIs to hit. We don’t care how you hit them. They’re there for you to decide and for you to work towards and innovate towards hitting them. Right. So at least that’s really exciting for me, you know, to put that puzzle piece puzzle together piece by piece with these KPIs. But I think it’s really good for all businesses to implement.

Mario (08:08.362)
And it takes a long time. But once it’s done, it leads to lot better results and some autonomy too.

Tom Nixon (08:15.234)
Yeah.

And I think too about connecting the streams of the various KPI. So you mentioned, you know, we were practically data scientists. The point I was making earlier is that I think as data scientists or data driven advertisers, there’s a challenge to not be overwhelmed and over impressed with the fancy stats, which is look at all the clicks I sent to your website. These were all leads, right? Or, hey, we sent 10 qualified leads this month. And then as we’ve talked about at the beginning of the year and throughout the season, Curtis, there’s this

divide between what happens in marketing and what happens in sales and then sales reporting back into the business, what worked and what didn’t. And so you’ve brought up a concept where that I’d like you to expand upon is that, and it’s a critical piece is if you’re engaging in the types of activities that, that we’ve been recommending and discussing, the concept of sales readiness is something that is critical to making this work. What do you mean by sales readiness?

Mario (09:11.666)
Sure, you know, Curtis and I talk about this a lot. We had a discussion, you know, before this that your marketing channels can be bringing in many leads. And when you make a tweak to one of those marketing channels, you put more capital into pay-per-click advertising, right? You’re gonna get more leads.

Now the magic is, are you ready to convert those leads into paying customers? Is your company ready internally to ensure that that happens? Because if not, you just put the money into that lead gen source and you’re just not ready to ensure that that turns into revenue, right? So a good example with that is, know, our company went through this.

put a lot into our different marketing channels, know, pay-per-click advertising, you know, being one of them. And what an influx of leads that we got. However, our conversion rate either stayed the same or actually got worse. And one could say, well, how can conversion get worse? Well, when you’re increasing leads, okay, you go from 100 leads a week to 200.

Tom Nixon (10:28.302)
Hmm.

Mario (10:40.454)
Well now, you need to convert twice as many for your conversion rate to also stay in that zone, if you will. We’ll call it 50 % for conversation’s sake. And if not, what’s happening is you’re pumping money into a channel and it’s just not paying off. So, one thing that kind of struck us is that we noticed that. We’re like, wow, we’re paying a lot for leads.

And we looked at our CRM, we use Salesforce and we’re like, look at all these leads. Why and how is it possible that our conversion rate is going down or we’re converting the same amount that we were last month or last quarter. And what we analyzed and actually ultimately leading us to get a sales consultant was that the folks that were actually taking the incoming calls. We never really analyzed how well they were doing at converting.

So we always converted at a consistent rate. And when we added more leads, that doesn’t mean that they’re converting any better. They’re going to convert the same amount. So what we did was we implemented call rail. I think I alluded to that in another podcast of ours. The unique part about call rail is not just that you’re able to attribute that lead to your website or your page or wherever.

you put that significant number or that special number that would lead to it was that you get the opportunity to listen to your sales calls. And upon reviewing some of these sales calls, we pumped the brakes. We’re like, whoa, wait a minute, what did that representative just say? What did that person that answering just say? No wonder we lost that client, right? Or that customer.

We didn’t provide them with the insight that they’re looking for and the comfort for them to come to our company and use us for services. And furthermore, even if we did a really great job with that sales call per se, there was no action item to follow up. It was just call us back when you need us, when you decide, you know, when you converse with your family or whomever, give us a call back. There was no action item. We left the

Mario (13:05.072)
ball in their court per se and listen sometimes people just don’t call you back sometimes they do but we didn’t have that follow-up to say listen we’re going to schedule an appointment with you you know for a week from now when you decide we can come out to analyze what’s going on in the home we didn’t have that system set up and we said we need to fix this and we need to be ready for these leads that are coming in

Tom Nixon (13:31.096)
Curtis, does this sound familiar as examples? I think I heard two examples. One would be training of the intake individual, but also, Murray, you mentioned another one, that not having a process for follow up, right? So Curtis, these are, I’m sure examples you’ve heard from other clients or now you’re saying, wait a minute, before we engage in these things that you want to hire me for, do you have these things in place, right?

Curtis Hays (13:53.903)
Yeah. So, the, example is exactly what I was talking about earlier, where you say like, had these high level KPIs and, I was asking to increase budget because I was seeing success, what appeared to be from a conversion perspective and Mario saying, wait, I don’t feel comfortable increasing the budget. Cause my revenue is not increasing. And we said, okay, well, we got to, we got to measure the quality of leads. So let’s take that step.

And then we realized there was this gap, like you’re getting business from phone calls, but we’re not measuring those. Okay. Now we start measuring that. this is a process and you got to have some patience. You got to collect the right data to make decisions. And then it didn’t take long. I mean, I think we had, we started call rails, a trial in mid December, kind of over the holidays. And it was by February 1st. So it was four to six weeks that they said, okay, hold on here. We’ve been listening to phone calls.

We’ve got some changes that we need to make internally, which Bravo to you guys, Mario, for like taking the ownership on that and saying, you know, Hey, you guys are doing a good job, but like we can do better too. So let’s then that’s that whole sales and marketing piece. Like we have to come alongside this together, look at the right data, which isn’t about pointing figures. It’s just about where do we find improvement? Once we’re looking at the data to say, okay, this number looks good, but this number down here doesn’t look good. So.

Let’s look at all the things that happened in between and then figure out where that gap potentially is and where the improvement needs to happen. said, okay, follow-ups and intake phone calls. And then, you know, guess what? we start closing more business. Now we feel comfortable increasing conversions. And so, the, other question you asked me then Tom, and, and this lesson that I’ve really learned, cause this was.

Gosh, has it been two years since really we started this? It feels like it. that we’re, almost coming on to two years since, since we started call rail and it’s been a process. And I know you guys have training is continuous, right? And so, you know, and you’re going to have some level of turnover and you’ve got to bring in new people. And those are factors that you got to be concerned about. But the lesson I learned with this is then questions that I have to start asking. You’re new prospects as they come to want to do business with us who have an expectation.

Curtis Hays (16:15.885)
And ask like, well, if I spend $3,000 a month, how many conversions can you expect that I get? So, well, I can give you a number, but how many do you expect that you could close? And then do you have a system set up that’s going to close the deals? Cause if you have a hundred percent close rate and I only bring you five leads in a month, that might be pretty good. You’ve got a great close rate. So we’re happy to pay for those five conversions. But if I bring you 20 and you only close one, like that’s not very good.

And then you could point the finger at me that I’m bringing you bad leads, but then I could point the finger at you. says you don’t know how to close them, but we could work together to say, okay, let’s talk about the types of leads. Let’s talk about the types of service or interested. Let’s talk about the process you’re taking them through and then figure out a way to improve that from both a marketing and sales perspective.

Tom Nixon (17:05.9)
Yeah. So Mario, what, did you learn? You don’t have to give us specifics if you don’t want to, but you learned obviously in that four to six week period that there were some things that were revealing themselves. You implemented some changes and then what was the results?

Mario (17:21.052)
Yeah, I could give you specifics actually, because I think it’s really important that we talk about it. Because these were the steps that we went through and the results can speak for themselves. So what we did was we realized the issue. We’re like, OK, our operators, our folks that are taking these calls, we just aren’t.

They’re just not converting in the way we want them to. They’re not conversing with the client with the way that we want them to. Not all of them, by the way. Some of them were excellent, but some were not excellent, right? So what we said collectively is let’s get everybody to be at a level of excellence that we would accept, right? Because we’re bringing in leads, we’re spending capital to ensure that these leads are coming in.

let’s just make sure that these folks are prepared and that we invest in them. Cause our investment in these guys, in our intake specialists and anybody answer the phone, our investment in them is an investment in the company and that equals a return on our spend. So what we did was right away, we actually did some research on a sales consultant, right? And

You guys should have him on the show sometime. He was fantastic. And we hired him and we said, here’s what’s going on in our company. So what he said was, send me some of the transcripts of your sales calls. Send me ones that you think are good. Send me ones that aren’t good. Send me ones that you don’t even know if the customer ever called back or not. Just send me a bunch.

What he did was he analyzed these in aggregate and he used his own framework to more or less create a presentation for us in which was difficult for some to attend because he said, I’m going to pick on two people, okay? And, you know, we’re going to…

Mario (19:39.27)
we’re going to self reflect here on how they’re, how they’re doing. It’s not going to be comfortable. They’re not going to like me after this. Right. But he said, I promise you one thing, they will be some of the best salespeople that you have after this. my methods are unconventional, but you know what? Let’s, let’s do it. So, we, we had these meetings, this, one meeting with this, with the sales guy and he just, we played the call and he’s like, just

segmented it piece by piece and really was hypercritical of every little piece that this person said. We did it for them, they were shrinking in their chair, you felt uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. Like I was uncomfortable, weren’t reviewing my call, this was somebody else’s call. Everybody in the room was uncomfortable about it. The person was, you know,

Tom Nixon (20:22.094)
Thank

Mario (20:37.264)
red in the face, they picked out another person, you know, as well. And he said, went through that presentation and they said, here’s what you could have done. And he said, here’s what you need to do in the future. You need to have a sales call meeting every single week now. And I’m putting somebody in charge. He put our sales and marketing director, you know, in charge to follow this recipe that works, right?

There is a recipe that works on the phone with customers. Empathy is important, by the way. You need to feel what they’re feeling. That was one thing that he analyzed and said, listen, you have people answering the phone that aren’t empathetic. That’s a big deal to customers, especially in our space, by the way. We’re selling a service. It’s a very delicate time in people’s lives. So we went through that. They hated him. They were like, please don’t have him come back. Like, it’s embarrassing.

Tom Nixon (21:25.582)
Thank

Mario (21:33.106)
blah, We’re like, okay, we won’t have them come back, but you’re gonna come to these sales meetings because we need you to improve. And if you don’t, we’re having them come back, right? I’ll tell you that they have improved so significantly that the folks that he picked on initially, I’ll call it safe picked on, are now the best people on our intake calls, the best. They’re incredible. They’re better than the people that were really good, right?

Tom Nixon (21:54.606)
you.

Mario (22:02.77)
That self-reflect, you you look in the mirror and you go, okay, you know, I can either improve what I see or it’s good enough, right? And what he did was he put that in front of them. He had some steps and then we did this weekly, right? So some folks are like, I just don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to review this stuff weekly. We’re like, we don’t have time for you not to do this. have to, this is revenue.

that we could have had that now we’re ensuring that we get in the future, right? With this investment in our marketing, now we’re investing you in your sales readiness. So I can tell you that that has improved us. I’ll tell you there’s been 100 % improvement on our sales readiness at this point. And every new hire, we send them through the same process now. We’ll do let them know, you know, it is uncomfortable, but after a while you wanna hear yourself speak and you wanna be

self-critical now. You can start to grade yourself based on these criteria and that’s what our folks have been doing ever since and I highly recommend it.

Tom Nixon (23:10.784)
In the conversion rate, I gotta imagine just went through the roof. I would imagine at least you saw.

Curtis Hays (23:16.197)
Well, what I can share is there’s a, there’s a 40 % increase in our marketing efficiency ratio since doing this. Right. So, and we haven’t changed a whole lot on the marketing side. So still the same website, still the same, you know, core business services, like those things really haven’t changed. There’s better data off the qualified leads and converted leads that we’ve been giving Google, but

I think a lot of people are actually struggling in the Google ads platform with CPCs going up and you know, those types of things. We’re actually seeing clients see conversion rates go down or prospects coming to us that say, you know, we’re working with an agency or conversion rates are down. Our return on ad spend is down, you know, all these things. And yet over the last two years, we’ve really seen in assisted living case that they’re,

For every dollar they spend, they’re making 40 % more from a marketing perspective than they were previously. So it’s, huge. It’s absolutely huge. And then it allows you to invest in new things, which, which hopefully we get to talk about a little bit today.

Tom Nixon (24:13.998)
Huge.

Tom Nixon (24:19.766)
Yeah. Invested new things with confidence. why don’t we, if we guys don’t mind, I wanted to shift gears because as I’m sure everyone knows, not every investment in advertising and marketing is necessarily designed to result in a direct sale right away. Right. So, as companies evolve from us, you know, when you’re a stage zero, you’re a startup, almost everything should be about client acquisition.

Curtis Hays (24:22.255)
Right.

Tom Nixon (24:47.8)
But as you grow and as you evolve, you think about how big brands operate just to, you know, put on the very other end of the spectrum from a startup. And you see a commercial for a Range Rover, right? Some aspirational premium product. The expectation is not that we’re going to put an ad on this Sunday football game. And later that afternoon, somebody is going to go out and buy a Range Rover, right? This is not how auto sales work, right? You have to be in market. You have to be the right type of product or consumer who can afford that.

level of a car, but they’re constantly investing in brand building, which is a different form of marketing and does not have necessarily all of these clear attributable KPIs that says we put the coin in the slot in the gumball machine came out. And as you’re evolving Mario, tell us what’s happened since our first three episodes. Maybe you started to think about additional approaches to building your brand and where is the company now and where do want it going forward?

Mario (25:47.826)
Yeah, we

are beginning to notice that we provide more than just our service, right, which is home care in the home. We want to be a resource now, right? We’re investing in becoming a resource for our customers in the future. We want them to think of our company name and think,

let me check their website out or let me listen to some of their content. And although I don’t need their services right now, I’m learning something, right? About home care, about the funding sources, about what to do in an emergency, what to do as my parents age or as I age. And by becoming that resource, not only is it, I mean, it’s just a…

It’s a good thing, right? If you think of it, it is a good thing. We’re doing a good thing for people. We’re helping them to be prepared for later in life or when they need our services. So that feels good. But we’re also becoming that name where they said, gee, I read that article or I saw that video that showed us about estate planning or that showed us about the different options for senior care. And gee, what was that company again?

Tom Nixon (26:50.094)
Absolutely.

Mario (27:14.438)
Right? That we learned all that great information about. And really that’s marketing that transcends from, you know, like you said, the Range Rover where nobody’s going to go out and buy it right now. But they saw that commercial or they saw that, you know, blog, that infographic, that podcast, whatever it might be. And they said, now is the time. What was that company? And now it’s fresh in their mind to say, they helped me before.

that resource, I’m going to give them a call because I need them now for something. So that’s been sort of our next mission in our company and our marketing is to really provide value now, not just value in the home because that’s what we do, but to provide value to our prospective customers and professionals and just any individual or institution that

could possibly need some advice on senior care.

Tom Nixon (28:16.684)
Yeah. So it’s sort of like a deferred gratification type of approach. Right. So, but when your proverbial Range Rover customer decides that either their lease is up or they want a new car, they’re not going out shopping for new cars. They’re going to the Range Rover place to pick out the Range Rover they want. And that’s kind of what you’re doing. And Curtis, this is not an approach. I don’t think that you would recommend first to, or even exclusively, but you found that once all these other lead gen activities are in place, isn’t it way

more effective when you layer on what you call brand work? You always say, what are you doing to build the brand? Right?

Curtis Hays (28:52.175)
Yeah. Right. So, demand generation versus demand capture. I think once you have the systems in place where you’re, capturing demand that exists in your marketplace, you’ve got those systems in place and you’re measuring then, you know, growth and scaling has to come from building brand and generating demand. And, you know,

Demand generation in Mario space. He’s not going to make people age. He’s not going to make people need things. There’s some things that he can do. mean, certainly families would, I would say many probably prefer that their mom or dad live at home as long as possible and not go to a facility. So that’s certainly one of the things that you could do from an educational perspective to some degree is to say, no, we’re going to educate our communities on

Tom Nixon (29:25.998)
You

Curtis Hays (29:47.671)
all the things that they can do to ensure that mom and dad stays in their home for as long as possible. And if they need us along that way to help support that, that care, companionship, whatever it is, like, you know, we’re here, you know, as a resource, but it’s not just that. Somebody discovers that on their own or they’re talking to a friend. So you should get up, you should find a home care provider and then they go and search for that.

Right? If you’re doing those things ahead of time, as Mario was saying, now, now you become the brand that people trust and say, they did a good job the first year or two helping me keep mom and dad at home, but now I need some help. And I know who I’m going to go to because they’ve been helping me along the way.

Tom Nixon (30:30.84)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (30:34.358)
And that’s the shifted mindset that I wanted to ask you about Mario because it takes a certain amount of faith. takes a certain amount of willingness to say, I know I won’t notice this happening today, next week, whatever. But the activities that a marketing consultant like Curtis would recommend maps to what

You say to him is this is the vision now. The vision isn’t can we increase our conversions 10, 20, 30 % now the vision is can we become the household name in an entire state for an industry such that when people think of this service, they think of us first and they think of us as the premium provider of that service. That’s exactly mapping to what you would do to build a brand.

How uncomfortable was that for you as a KPI driven, I need to know what levers are pulling what in is somewhat uncomfortable for you to say, I gotta have a little bit of faith and I look at longer time horizons before I’m measuring success or failure. I had a sense.

Mario (31:35.856)
very uncomfortable because this input does not necessarily give a direct output. Now, it does have an outcome.

Tom Nixon (31:52.078)
Hmm.

Mario (31:53.564)
but the output is not so direct, right? So it’s very difficult. There was difficult for me and Curtis and I had this conversation. How do I measure the effectiveness of this, right? I think the marketing efficiency ratio was something that Curtis introduced me to. Again, very uncomfortable still with it. I’m learning, I’m getting there. However, this is something that

is the next step in at least our company’s evolution. Where, you know, I can’t just measure my conversion rate at this point, right? That’s so easy. Did a lead come in? Did we convert it? This is content or branding that’s going out, right? Radio, it’s going out in podcasts, it’s going out in online.

articles, it’s going out in commercials or segments or news interviews and things. you know, one can say, well, you can measure that, you know, can measure that in views and different things. But, you know, I think what’s uncomfortable for me right now, and I think that time will tell and you have to have a little bit of faith just to say, okay, this is the next step, right? We’ve gotten this far doing what we’ve been doing, right?

Let’s now provide some resources. Let’s provide that value add and let’s give back hoping that some of this could potentially come back to the company to expand our mission. So yeah, it’s a little bit of faith that you have to have in the process. The good news is there are some metrics, right, that Curtis is teaching me a little bit about like the marketing efficiency ratio and such.

So that’s more comforting for somebody like me who needs a measure to manage.

Tom Nixon (33:54.734)
Yeah. Well, I’ll just say Curtis, I’m not, I’m not a management consultant, but I do know that there are natural phases that you could read about Nikon 101 that companies go through stages, stage zero, stage one, stage two, stage three, become enterprise. One thing I do know is it’s very unlikely that you will evolve from stage two, which I think is where your company is currently Mario to stage three. If you only do stage two tactics.

Right? If you’re not going to operate like the big brands that are already where you want to go, then it’s going to be very difficult to just keep piling on more of the same stuff that you’re doing at stage two and expect it’s just going to naturally happen. Do you agree?

Curtis.

Curtis Hays (34:36.773)
Yeah. yeah. Yeah. I wasn’t sure if you were asking me or Mario, but totally. So the, when you have a profitable business and you’re, seeing a return on your investment from your advertising and you’re in a comfortable spot that you can reinvest. And that’s where it’s key in measuring that marketing efficiency ratio. And you can, you can invest in the branding side. And then the, the, the key that Mario was just talking about there and measuring that marketing efficiency ratio.

the key thing you have to look at is time because when you do branding, you don’t have that direct output. So you, you have to, basically, you know, annotate when you’re making changes across the timeline and measure the efficiency of your marketing spend across that knowing you might increase spend, you know, here, but if you see. Well, other things stay the same.

an increase in revenue happening two quarters later, then there’s a good chance that the branding that you did six months prior is actually helping to support what’s happening here. Now, if you see that graph start to go down, right? So then you need to say, okay, our marketing, either we haven’t waited long enough or our marketing and branding isn’t doing what it was supposed to do. And so we better change that up. We better…

We better stop radio and shift over to TV or we better stop TV and, do this over here. so, that’s important. And, totally you’re going to tap out from a demand capture perspective. You know, if there’s a hundred people in a room that need your service, that need the service that you offer and they go and they do a Google search, you’re going to get some percentage of those people that come through and then your competitors are going to get other that’s way different. That’s somebody going to Google and searching your brand name.

Tom Nixon (36:32.91)
Mm.

Curtis Hays (36:33.647)
And when they go and they search your brand name, guess what? The 95 % of the time they’re clicking your website and they’re calling you, you know, and that’s, that’s really when you, when you’ve won, right? When they’re, when they’re searching you, know, if, if, if I have an affinity for a specific pair of shoes, you know, I’m not shopping for shoes on Amazon or on Google. I’m going to looking up that brand and looking at the new runners they have for, for this season. I’m searching that specific brand itself. So.

Tom Nixon (37:02.36)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (37:02.607)
That’s when you know you’ve won and you’ve got to that next stage.

Tom Nixon (37:05.25)
That’s the ultimate outcome is to eliminate the competition at the point of search. Right. And so that’s why you’re doing all this stuff. My friends ask me, you know, why would a quick lube place, sponsor a stadium, a football stadium, you know, how many quick loops would need to pay for that? That’s not what they’re doing, right? They’re not generating the lead. They’re building a brand and they might want to be acquired someday, or they might want to franchise it. Who knows what it is, but, Mario, we’re to the point where we’re going to have you back next year and maybe we will

have some KPI that says that we’re seeing a lift, right? So that’s my final thought. Any final thoughts from you in terms of somebody who might sense that they’re kind of at the same place where they are considering taking the next step, you know, lead gens in a good place, lead capture sales is in a good place. Now it’s a now what any recommendations you would impart?

Mario (37:58.364)
Yeah, I think that, you know, I can’t stress the importance of sales readiness once you implement this, right? So when you’re ready, right, to accept these leads and when your team is ready to sell well, then I think some of these other things should be implemented, right? So that you could be ready because if not, you are spending

Tom Nixon (38:04.022)
Mm-hmm.

Mario (38:27.986)
capital, right, spending your hard-earned money on things that might be working, however, not necessarily turning into dollars. Like Herta said, he could bring you many, many leads, right? And if you can’t convert them, this is not marketing’s fault. This is your ability to actually turn this into cash.

Tom Nixon (38:52.61)
Yeah, that’s a great point, Curtis. I’ll let you have the final thought. just love the way you just put it Mario. It might be working, right? You’re looking at data that says it’s not working. It might be you’re just looking at the wrong place, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (39:04.689)
Yeah, I like what he said there. know, it’s, it’s turning that into cash, right? So you take those leads and turn them into cash and, and that really is key. And, and I just want the feedback. mean, honestly, when I come in and I want to do marketing, I want you to tell me, hold me accountable. Are they good leads? Are they not good leads? You know, let’s look at this data together. If they’re truly not good, you know, we’ll work to try to fix that.

But if, if they’re good leads and you’re struggling to close them, you know, then we’ve got to take a look at maybe pausing our ad spend, maybe taking a break until you find the right people or get them trained or change your processes or, know, one those things. So there’s nothing wrong with putting on the brakes for a little bit in a process and then let’s turn it back on and let’s start measuring again.

Tom Nixon (39:56.534)
And the worst thing that can happen is if Curtis doesn’t know if the leads are good or bad because you’re not reporting that back because what can Curtis change if he thinks every lead looks the same from him, right? You didn’t tell me otherwise. So put that process in place. That’s a lesson. I think also from season one of Bullhorns and Bullseyes, which we are wrapping up, but you need to come back next week for the dramatic conclusion of season one of Bullhorns and Bullseyes and then come back next season to see how the Mario saga ends up.

So, with that, we will leave you with that cliffhanger. We’ll see you one more time and we want to thank Mario De Quilla for coming back one more time and learn more about him at assistedlivingct.com. Is that right? more to come. Bye guys.

Mario (40:39.218)
That’s right. Thank you very much for having me.