WhatConverts?

Tom Nixon (00:01.538)
Welcome everyone to the Bulls Eyes podcast. Yep. For one week. We are rebranding Curtis. We’re to be talking all about the Bulls Eyes part of what we do and probably a little bit less about the bull horns.

Curtis Hays (00:12.925)
I feel like we did a little bit in our last episode too, because we were talking about e-commerce and there was a lot of math in that conversation. But this week, we’re going to switch it up a little bit. We’re going to go from e-comm to lead gen.

Tom Nixon (00:26.178)
Yes, somehow it always comes back to brand though. So maybe we’ll pick stick a pin in that for now. But I did. We finally did get Carl talking about the importance of magic in addition to math. So we might do that as well today. Today’s guest is somebody that you are introducing to me as we introduce him to the podcast listeners. Some may already be well aware, but you are the one who found Michael Cooney and what converts. So why don’t you invite our guest on today?

Curtis Hays (00:54.141)
Yeah. So welcome Michael. And, yeah. So you’re with what converts. I’ll let you explain the platform, but I, for full transparency, I’m a customer. became a customer, back in December. We might talk a little bit about that journey, but I’ve been working with your team and I thought, man, I really need to bring you guys on, to the episode. And, one of, one of your great, amazing, staff members said, actually, you don’t want to talk to me. Why don’t you talk to the founder?

MIchael Cooney (01:04.09)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (01:23.645)
And so we got introduced, we had a short little conversation which feel like we hit it off from the standpoint of I think what we’ve experienced in our careers and problem solving as consultants and agencies for clients sound very similar. And you decided to take the path of building something to help solve that problem.

MIchael Cooney (01:23.951)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (01:48.543)
So why don’t you introduce yourself and what converts and kind of just explain a little bit about that and we’ll dive into all of that through the rest of the podcast here.

MIchael Cooney (01:58.075)
That’s awesome. Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for having me. It’s been really great, you know, learning more about your journey and speaking with you. So I appreciate you having me on the pod. But yeah, what converts it actually the name actually says it stands for what marketing converts into leads and sales. And so many people, they have the issue of they do this marketing, which is great. But it’s like, well, what marketing worked? They don’t have insight. It’s kind of a black hole. And when you mentioned your

dealing with e-commerce versus lead gen. Lead gen’s a different animal to e-commerce because you get a phone call from your marketing tracking that’s a mission, a problem. We solve that problem. But then also we solve the problem, what’s the value of that phone call? Because you could get a spam phone call, which is negative value, or you could get a phone call that’s ultimately worth a million dollars. So our platform.

captures all the marketing data, captures all the conversion actions, including phone calls, forms, chats, and e-commerce. And we put it all together in an ask Bo, enable you to report it. But also what’s becoming more more important with the AI, we send that data back into Google and it optimizes your campaigns a lot better.

Tom Nixon (03:10.222)
Curtis, this is sounds like the, kaleidoscope model. So I could see why you were attracted to this product. Um, because so many marketers like to hide behind the vanity metrics, right? And they don’t want to admit or even delve into what’s converting, right? So what are we doing? Our marketing, we’re sending you leads, right? So go ahead. Sales team, take it. And Curtis, I know this is a dragon you’ve been trying to slay for a long time.

Curtis Hays (03:10.463)
Does this sound familiar, Tom?

Curtis Hays (03:33.343)
Yeah, Mike actually just posted a LinkedIn article that I commented this morning on. It’s like your whole platform, which is what I started doing when I got into marketing over 10 years ago, 12 years ago, was to bring transparency to an area where I felt like there was no transparency, where I was watching marketers present reports to clients where they cherry picked data and

hid behind, you know, things that weren’t working, just to just to give a report that looked good. And it never really moved anything forward. And I was like, okay, there’s got to be a better way to do this. And I was a systems integrator. So I was working within the CRM Salesforce HubSpot, and then got into the advertising channels and organic channels and all of that, and said, look, we got to be able to track this lead all the way through.

pipeline. So, so we’re getting phone calls, we’re getting form submissions, but what happens with them? And so I worked with a developer to just simply set that up on forms to get source medium, you know, those UTM values pass it to fields within the CRMs. Then the CRMs came out with their own pixels and they started tracking it on their own. And that was there. And then we sort of evolved that.

attribution product to what we call an attribution 2.0 when what Mike mentioned was the AI component that came out about three years ago with the conversion APIs, where there’s now additional data within the cookie, GCLIDs, G-BRAIDs, these Facebook click IDs where you can send the data back to the platforms to have them optimize off of. So we evolved our form tracking to include those GCLIDs.

and pass that into the CRMs and then the CRMs like HubSpot, they started picking up that data as well. And then they have the conversion API’s to send it over. But for a lot of this, we were doing manually. And if, because a lot of our clients don’t have CRMs, Tom, like we service a lot of service based businesses. They’re small, but not super small, but maybe not big enough or not the right fit for like a full blown CRM like a HubSpot. And

MIchael Cooney (05:43.067)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (05:55.717)
without a CRM, it was like, well, how are we going to be able to track this? And I think Mike, it was sort of similar for you as well, right? And some of the clients that you guys support and those types of things, they either have a CRM that you sort of sit in front of and communicate with, or it can kind of act as a little mini CRM in a way.

MIchael Cooney (06:03.61)
Yeah.

MIchael Cooney (06:10.597)
Mm-hmm.

MIchael Cooney (06:14.563)
Yeah, I mean, as you’re talking, my mind’s going, I could cover, you know, 30 topics on this. But it’s very interesting that you came from the CRM side back into the marketing side. When I started my career, I started with the industrial directory, connecting advertisers with engineers and trying to, yeah, trying to show the value there was always difficult. But then we got into the digital marketing space and what happened is

Tom Nixon (06:21.228)
Mm.

Tom Nixon (06:33.486)
Good luck.

MIchael Cooney (06:43.803)
SEO was new and back in 2003, I could pretty much guarantee you I could get you to the top of Google. It was easier in those days. And I got my clients addicted to growth rates in visitors. And then like a couple of years down the road, I renamed it the dreaded SEO plateau. Because once you get your clients to the top, it takes two years to max out. And then the growth rate is small. And then they’re like, well,

Where’s your value gone? I based my value on your growth rate. Now your growth rate’s gone. And so we got fired by a few clients when we were delivering maximum value. And so I was like, well, that makes no sense at all. But it happened a few times. And that’s when I really dug into, we got to understand the value of leads because at the end of the day, we now say that marketers are sending these reports with impressions and click-through rates and bounce rate.

and the clients don’t get it. And so the clients spend dollars, you need to report to them in dollars. And so we do a lot of that in uncovering the value of marketing. And at the end of the day, I I’ve still got my old agency with a handful of clients. I have people that manage them and I spend very little time on them, but the value they get out of what they pay me is enormous.

And so I switched it from being activity based and growth rate based and impressions and things that aren’t tied to dollars. I switched it into reporting in dollars. And as long as they’re getting a multiple of the dollars they’re paying you, they’re happy.

Tom Nixon (08:24.43)
What was your experience early on Curtis? So obviously I think you’re a convert and we are not being paid to say anything about this product. We should make that clear, but you truly believe in it because I was in a meeting the other day and you’re like, oh, I got to get you guys on what converts and here’s how it works. What was your experience like?

MIchael Cooney (08:32.955)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (08:41.683)
Well, okay. So, Antonio who’s introduced me to Michael is, the sales rep there at what converts and Cole called me and we weren’t in market for platform. were still doing the spreadsheets and manual uploads or the conversion APIs with the other tools. There were some other tools out there like high rows, which I just felt like we’re too markety to, least to me and pushing the sale too much and not necessarily like a helpful platform, but.

You guys take a different approach, Mike, and Antonio wanted to know about my business and he wanted to know what we were doing. And I gave him 30 minutes because there was sincerity in his call to me. Like I didn’t find you guys. He cold called me. And I took that meeting and by the end of that meeting, I was like, you know what? I will try this out.

MIchael Cooney (09:13.744)
Mm-hmm.

MIchael Cooney (09:28.591)
Yep, I loved it.

Curtis Hays (09:39.433)
I didn’t have to be convinced in the problem you guys solve. I already knew that. What I needed to fully understand was the value in the real time data being passed to the conversion APIs and the simplicity of your platform that takes the sort of an Excel spreadsheet that I was giving to my client. So it’s basically exactly what your platform lays out in a user interface where I was giving a spreadsheet.

MIchael Cooney (10:06.011)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (10:08.167)
a list of rows of leads and they would click yes or no, that’s qualified or unqualified. You do the same thing in what converts. I can go to a lead dashboard and here’s just a list of leads and I can click each lead and say, quotable or unquotable, qualified or unqualified. And the system takes care of the rest. It was just really easy. There was no friction for my client to sort of onboard and train them. If they just did that one step.

MIchael Cooney (10:34.959)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (10:37.203)
What kind of difference could that make? So what you’re bringing up, Tom, is one case we have with a client where we onboarded in December. they now, since December, doing that one change to now do… You have a really good analogy for this, Michael, I want you to explain, which is the free throw analogy you told me about. So they went from me importing leads at most once a week, likely once a month, to now daily imports of

MIchael Cooney (10:54.767)
Yes, I’m gonna give it to you.

Curtis Hays (11:07.007)
good leads and they now have three X times the number of leads than they did in December and they’re spending 8 % less. Three times the leads, 8 % less. What were you gonna say, Tom? Yeah, I’m sorry. Let me clarify that statement. That’s not three times the number of leads. That’s three times the number of qualified leads.

Tom Nixon (11:17.64)
And what about quality?

MIchael Cooney (11:32.431)
Yeah. So yeah, I’m going to come back to, I’m going to come back to Antonio and I kind of lead the sales department at the moment. And there’s one thing I drum into the people is like, if there’s two words I can give you is be helpful. You know, we here as Welcomeverse to be helpful. The other thing I tell the salespeople, I tell them, if they are not a good fit client or customer, I don’t want them. I do not want you to let them in the door. So.

Curtis Hays (11:34.342)
So explain that.

Curtis Hays (12:00.361)
you

MIchael Cooney (12:00.835)
I said, you know, when they come to the meeting, they are not sales reps. don’t consider them sales reps. I consider them what converts product experts that knows how to talk to you, do discovery, find out what problems you’re dealing with. And then like, can our product be used to solve those problems? And if they can, they’ll demonstrate how we solve the problem. So if we can’t solve your problem, you know, we’ve let them know, don’t take them on as a client.

So, you know, we don’t just come out and sell to everybody. I once said, the salesperson I dealt with, and he says, I can sell us to an Eskimo. And I said, like, why would you want to do that? I said, we, that’s the opposite of what we want to do in our organization. We only want to help people. We can genuinely help. And there’s a good reason for that. I’ve had bad fit clients and they disruptive, you know, we just want high quality, you know. But coming back to Antonio again, he is really great and he’s got an analogy. This is where we got it.

from. what happens with Google is they’ve got an algorithm that operates in seconds. And then you’ve got a sales process, whether you use a CRM or not, sales can take weeks or can take days, weeks or months even. So you’ve got this algorithm on Google’s side where they can make decisions and optimize on the second. And then you’ve got a sales process that takes days. So there’s an inconsistency. And what you’ll find in Google ads, like the PMAX campaigns,

You hear people saying PMAX is terrible, but then you’ll hear an e-commerce agency saying PMAX is great. I’ve lowered my conversion rate. I’ve lowered my conversion costs. And what you find is if you send data back quickly, you reduce the marketing feedback latency, the algorithm in Google for Legion works so much better. You allow them to really operate more efficiently and give you better results, which you experienced. So Antonio.

Here’s the analogy. Imagine you want to get good at basketball, but you can only throw a few free throws once a month. How good are you going to get if you just throw a couple of free throws once a month? It’s not going to work. You need to do it on a daily basis regularly to get that result. And it’s the same thing with the Google algorithm. That’s one piece of information that they don’t have. They have trillions of other bits of information. One thing they don’t know is, was that a good phone call?

MIchael Cooney (14:26.053)
they don’t know what the value of the phone call is. And as soon as you fill in the gaps for them, it just allows them to operate more efficiently and give you much better results, which, and you’re testimony to that.

Tom Nixon (14:36.136)
So now we know it’s Antonio that is paying us to do this podcast. I get it now. Okay.

Curtis Hays (14:39.807)
He, he’s actually a diehard, bull horns and bull hi, bulls eyes listener. He’s a, he’s a diehard. Yeah. We, he and I have conversations every couple months and he always tells me, that was a great episode with so-and-so I learned so much. So yeah, he’s, he, listens.

MIchael Cooney (14:39.993)
Yeah, he’s backhanded.

Tom Nixon (14:43.821)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (14:47.267)
is he really? Okay. Well, hello, Antonio.

Tom Nixon (14:58.968)
Great.

MIchael Cooney (14:59.215)
He’s great. Yeah. And I mean, that’s the quality you want in your people as the people that want to learn and are, know, voracious learners. And, you know, we’re lucky to have him.

Tom Nixon (15:04.939)
Mm.

Tom Nixon (15:09.164)
I wanted to bring up a topic. This is like the, think attribution is the third rail for marketers. A lot of times like, don’t ask me about it. You know, I don’t have that kind of data. That’s your sales team should have that, but it comes back to solution aside. Attribution is a people problem a lot of times in getting people willing to want to talk to each other. How do you both it Curtis? I’ve seen you do this in real time. You create mutual accountability systems.

Right? And so why don’t you go first and then hand it off to Michael for how he, he, his tool helps us do this better.

Curtis Hays (15:46.109)
Yeah, so the way I was able to do it with clients who had a CRM was me getting access because I was an integrator. A lot of marketers that are doing advertising don’t have access to the CRM. But because I was also an integrator, and I was helping in the CRM at times, I had access to the data. So then I was coming to meetings instead of with those vanity metrics like impressions and clicks and click through rates and conversion rates. I wouldn’t even talk about those. I would say

it looks like you got 10 leads from your Google Ads campaigns. What happened with those? So I would force that conversation into quality, just trying to understand is what I’m doing working. There was no conversion APIs. We weren’t sending data back to Google at that point. It was just like, am I providing value here? What I realized at the same time is I could be as an agency partner, I could also hold accountable other vendors they were working with.

So I could bring value by saying, hey, we’re going to set up all the tracking. You’ve got another vendor who’s doing your Facebook advertising. We’re doing your Google advertising. All that data comes into the same CRM. Let’s create a system of accountability, not so that we can tell the Facebook advertising company they’re not doing a good job, but simply so that we could learn, so we could get better at what we’re doing. Because we know these channels don’t.

MIchael Cooney (17:04.507)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (17:08.857)
sit in isolation agnostic of each other. They actually support each other. So let’s understand the customer journey and all those different types of things. But if you stop at the phone call or the foreign submission and you don’t understand the rest of the journey for that user in a lead gen environment, you’re missing a big part of really, I think what matters for marketers and helping them make a lot of decisions into what they do.

particularly with budget and how you allocate budget and those types of things. So that’s where I was at with that whole thing. And I had to set up, it was just something that came natural to me. Like those were the way I structured my meetings and pointed those conversations with my clients.

MIchael Cooney (17:41.68)
Mm-hmm.

MIchael Cooney (17:52.943)
Yeah, and I mean, that’s exactly it. You know, at the end of the day, you want the full customer journey from marketing all the way to sale to repeat sale with a customer. That’s what you’re trying to get to. And when we started Whatconverse, we did not want to create any CRM like features because we were like, we’ll just integrate with CRMs. And we learned pretty quickly that the technical challenges is not the problem. We can integrate with anything. That’s not the problem. It’s the people problem.

You know, there’s processes that are needed and people don’t want to follow processes. People don’t want to do an extra step. So you have to really create a system that actually makes it easier for them to use. And I heard you say that your your clients actually like using what converts because it’s like a game, you know, makes it fun. And that’s by design. And that’s something I’m always focusing on, like, how can we make it less friction than the current systems? Because it’s like water, they’re going to go the path of least resistance.

Curtis Hays (18:37.119)
Yeah.

MIchael Cooney (18:50.265)
And so you’re right, it’s attribution. So getting the attribution data is not really the problem. It’s getting the people to add the value to qualify a lead to make sure that, you know, if they’re using a CRM, put in the data that’s required or categorize the thing, or if you’re using what converts, you know, like marketers quotable or categorize the lead. So it’s the people thing. And so that’s what we’ve also been finding is we’ve now

because we’ve got the product, the product works great. We’ve now developed the process that people can follow. And so you bring it all together and you just make it easy. And I’m wondering which way to go because, with the process, what we’re finding is with Google ads and with marketing and analytics, the data overwhelm is just so much. And so for marketers, one thing we’ve made really easy for them is optimizing their campaigns.

So instead of looking at thousands of data points to try and figure out like how to optimize this campaign, we just give you the platform. Just tell us what are good leads and the system will optimize it for you. And so we’re finding we’re doing things like that. So people, like you said, are optimizing their campaigns and they don’t even realize they’re doing an optimization activity. They’re just doing it and then they get better results. So I think that accountability part is huge.

And I think the responsibility is on us creating the tools just to make it easier to use in their current systems.

Tom Nixon (20:25.742)
You mentioned Curtis, you may have mentioned it first or maybe you did, Michael. I apologize. This whole gamification of this play. How have you seen this in play Curtis? Because I think you said you have clients that are like getting competitive. They are like look at the scoreboard and right. They want to up their game.

Curtis Hays (20:41.247)
Yeah, so that I mean, two examples I would share one would be Mario who we’ve had on the podcast quite a few times now he’s not using what converts he’s there in Salesforce. And we’re doing the conversion API and everything there. But you know that what where they set up a system of accountability is when we implemented call tracking. And then they had they started listening to phone calls. And then they realized we need to train our people better.

And so that system of accountability was just sort of like bringing transparency for everybody. was like, they didn’t do it in a way where they, you know, there weren’t penalties to the people that weren’t intaking the calls appropriately. They saw it as a training opportunity. And they actually found that those people who probably got the most criticism over the way that they did sales in the beginning are now their best salespeople.

because they took it to heart and they realized, you know, hey, I really want to be better with this. And they just, in the end of the day became better salespeople. I just, feel like there’s, so we talked about it, Tom, is like integrity. know, there was a little bit of integrity that was sort of forced on there because that call tracking, you know, hey, everybody’s listening to these phone calls. I need to be on my game. I could be having a bad day today, but I got to put that aside and I need to be on my game for this phone call.

And it matters, not just to me, but to the whole entire team, I think. And so I think it brought the team together. And then this other client that has the 3X return, they’ve got multiple locations. And the owner came to me in November and said, hey, look, my salespeople say they want to get more involved. How do we get them more involved? And this is a consumer hybrid service and retail business.

I said, I have a way if you’re open to doing it, let’s look at what converts. And so we implemented what converts. Head of marketing came back to me two months later, two months of them into it and said, they were resistant at first, the people who were answering the phones and managing the leads at each of the locations. But then as we were listening to the phone calls and then having sort of internal conversations about the calls and how we handled them, we sort of turned it into a game.

Curtis Hays (23:05.063)
And we got excited about it. And it was like, who could handle better leads? And who could convert them, but have more conversions every day or a conversion ratio. And they just now enjoy the process. It’s not work that we put on them, basically. And I think that’s apprehension my previous clients have had when I’ve said, yes, you can hire us to be lead gen marketers and we’ll bring you leads. But then what are you going to do with those leads?

when I bring them to you? What does that process look like? And are you willing to share that process with us and look for ways to optimize that? And just like you, Michael, what converts those who say, yeah, we don’t want you to really be part of that process, and we’re not going to share that, they’re not a good fit for us. Those who are open to it, and that feedback loop, was, I remember Googling it a long time ago, know, 10 plus years ago, I was like,

MIchael Cooney (23:51.344)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (24:04.351)
What is closed loop marketing? I had like heard this terminology as like, what does this mean? It was like, oh, sales and marketing actually talk. They close the loop. And, you know, my whole methodology was basically centered around that. So yeah, Michael, how do you see people sort of game of, or what was your approach? I mean, when did you guys realize like, oh, we could make this a bit more fun, not just user friendly, and maybe fun’s not the right word, but.

MIchael Cooney (24:32.869)
Yeah. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (24:33.575)
You know, to make me want to log in every day and utilize the platform and not have it be like a Salesforce where, mean, if I talk about Salesforce to a client, got to log in there.

Tom Nixon (24:43.31)
Yeah.

MIchael Cooney (24:44.358)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, there’s a few things that I’ve experienced that are counterintuitive. You know, sometimes where people ask for a feature and we make a feature where we turn it on and it just does it for them. And when we’ve done that, those customers, they they’re like, OK, cool. And they don’t see value in it. But when there’s customers where they have to do something and be part of it, they then see value. So sometimes you don’t want to take them all the way.

Curtis Hays (25:13.459)
Yeah.

MIchael Cooney (25:13.547)
You want them to be part of it so they can see how the sausage is made at the end of the day. But the other thing is also motivation. What’s the motivation at the end of the day? And I think there’s more people that if they just have a clear path and they know what to do and they can see they’re doing a good job, that’s motivating to them. The other one is where we’ve had clients and I said, hey, let’s do this. It’s going to help us.

And they resistant, but then a competitor comes in the market and they ending up spending triple on the Google ads campaign because the competitor is bumping up the, you know, the cost as well. So I’m like, you’ve got two choices. You can just spend more to get the same amount of leads, or you can give us qualified data. And then we will strategically bid on the ones with the most value and optimize that way. Which, what do you want to do? And then they start doing it. It’s just that motivation.

pieced to get it done. So we do get pushback, people say, my client will never do that. And I kind of think like, well, that’s, I don’t want to be harsh here, but you’re not really doing your job as a marketer if you don’t do what you do. And you said like, okay, I’ll require you to do this. And I’ve just seen the top marketers, the ones that really thrive and do well, they’re not just marketers, they understand their clients’ business, they understand what

products are profitable, which ones sell better, how they sell them, what’s the closing rate. And they become real trusted partners to that company. So I think if you genuinely want to be a marketer, you can’t just know marketing. You got to know the client’s process as well. And if you do that and you use the tools which are there, you’re just going to thrive.

Tom Nixon (26:56.75)
Yeah, I think, you know, you guys touched on it. But just to kind of bring more emphasis to it, the problem that you’re solving is this universal problem that I’ve seen. I’m old enough to have been in this industry for 30 some. don’t know. But can’t count that high. But there’s always been this like willful apprehension or even antagonistic.

approach to communicating. So the marketing person is afraid to ask if any of this is working because they’re afraid of what they might hear, right? And I’ve been in boardrooms where the owner of the business is afraid to tell the agency that it’s working because I don’t want them to raise my rates. And then you’ve got the sales team who will sit there and say, well, I’m afraid to tell you, but none of these leads were good. Why are you telling me now six months into this program? Why weren’t you telling me that before? And they’re maybe afraid to admit that maybe they’re not

MIchael Cooney (27:31.003)
Mm-hmm.

MIchael Cooney (27:38.821)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (27:52.27)
doing a good job closing. So it’s all these people who are afraid of things. And just having a process like this, Michael, I mean, was that the main problem you were looking to solve? It’s like get everyone talking, get all the data out in the open, because when you do, you’re actually going to solve this huge problem. And you’re going to know where you’re spending and where you should be and where you shouldn’t be.

MIchael Cooney (28:10.619)
Yeah, I think it was just, I mean, the founding story, and hopefully it will answer your question. I had a client, they loved us. You we had a great relationship. They appreciated what we did for them. And they told us, you know, we see a lot of value in your company and we were working on a campaign and we’d actually doubled leads that month. So I walked in and I said, like, we doubled your leads. Isn’t that great? And he says, well, I don’t know. I said, what do mean you don’t know? says, well, it seems like we’re doing a lot of quotes for existing customers.

So is it marketing or is it just our existing customers coming back? And he genuinely didn’t know. And we had data, we were using another call tracking provider before we started WhatConvert. And we were capturing the forms with the attribution data. And for me to answer the question, I’d have to go and dig up all that data and then also look at those existing customers. Where did they come from? Where did they come? What was the most recent way they came through? And it was a day’s worth of work. So that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

And I was like, forget it, we’re gonna create a platform that gets all the attribution data together so that no matter what the question is, we can answer it. So going back to that same meeting, if I go to the client and he says, well, they seem like existing customers, I’m like, click, let’s go look at them. you mean this one here? Yeah, okay, so that resulted in a $100,000 quote? Yeah, let’s look at their customer journey and we go back. originally that came from Google Ads, searching for this term.

And most recently, they came from Bing ads and they searched for the product term. They didn’t search for your company. So if marketing didn’t put you in that position, that quote was going to somebody else. And so having that data and the tools to access that data so clearly and to have it so that both the client and the agency can look at it together and just say, like, let’s take it to the data and answer the question. So now it’s like, OK.

double the leads, that’s terrific, can we do more? And it’s like, well, as a matter of fact, that’s what it’s coming to you for. I think we can double this budget, that means you get double the sales. So I think it’s a tool that’s just having the ability to answer the questions. So that was just one question one client asked, and there’s a thousand different questions like, who gets credit, sales or marketing? And I’ve got another example of like with an HVAC company.

Tom Nixon (30:27.275)
Hmm.

MIchael Cooney (30:31.995)
So have you ever replaced your heating, ventilation and cooling system? OK, how much does it cost? no, it’s going to be like 10 to 20 to $1,000. But how many times did they come out to repair it beforehand?

Tom Nixon (30:35.694)
Yep, just did it last year.

Tom Nixon (30:48.005)
God, six or seven in the last three years, probably. Yeah.

MIchael Cooney (30:52.641)
Exactly. So that sales process started three years before from marketing, but the big value came three years later. Now in a CRM, the credit for the twenty thousand dollar order goes to internal sales. Marketing gets no credit. But with our system, we can say, OK, here’s the full journey. And yes, sometimes sales gets full credit for following up and doing it.

Tom Nixon (31:09.347)
Mm-hmm.

MIchael Cooney (31:20.261)
but many times it’s marketing that have been consistently bringing that person back time and time again. And when they finally wanted the repair or the replacement, it was marketing that came in again. So it’s like, okay, wow, marketing needs more value. So many times these big HVAC companies, they’ve been skewing the budget to sales and operations and sort of shortchanging the marketing side. So that’s another example of how having the data all together and where you can access the data and see the data allows you to answer

questions that real business owners have.

Tom Nixon (31:51.732)
And or questions that maybe sometimes they don’t have but should have because Curtis, I was in a meeting with you recently and you pulled up a data point cost per lead was down 65 % over some time period. The cost to acquire this lead that closes down 65 % and the owner of the company is like, wow, that’s huge. What are we doing with that money?

MIchael Cooney (32:04.037)
which is a good thing.

Curtis Hays (32:05.213)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (32:14.218)
I think the answer speaks for itself, walk us through that story, Curtis, how you got there.

Curtis Hays (32:20.189)
Well, if I remembering the correct story that you are, I I sort of started out the conversation by saying kudos to your team and what your team is doing because we wouldn’t be where we’re at if they weren’t working the leads and getting us the feedback. So it’s like, I’ve been starting out all of these conversations with clients like this isn’t anything we’re doing differently. This is you guys, keep it up. Like keep working the leads.

MIchael Cooney (32:34.853)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (32:43.16)
Hehe.

Curtis Hays (32:49.075)
Because in reality, at this point, I think what it frees us up to do more of, Tom, is branding. We spend more time being creative and less time trying to be analysts because we have the ability now finally to rely on the algorithm, if done appropriately. You need the proper setup. You need the right data. But if it can start working, you’re not in there managing bids and keywords. And in the case of a couple of my clients, like, I mean,

Drop CPCs that would normally be like six, eight dollars down to like, you know, two dollars and less. You I can just see their competitors paying so much more average CPC. And yet here we are, you know, seeing our lead volume increase and our qualified leads increase at the same rate or higher rate because the algorithm is going out and finding the good ones. And it doesn’t trail off and go after spam or…

You know, we can add brand exclusions now, so it’s not being wasted on brand and those types of things. I think that, I think that answer your question, right?

Tom Nixon (33:56.438)
Yeah, exactly. So, the business owner didn’t say, hey, Curtis, track the cost per lead over the last six months and tell me what you find. This was a completely foreign data point because this person’s not a marketer performance marketer. Right. And so this going back to what you were saying, Michael, is you are providing data and clarity into the business questions people should have, not just the marketing digital marketer questions that they have.

Curtis Hays (34:08.007)
Yeah, right.

MIchael Cooney (34:22.831)
Yeah. Yeah. You want to give, so as a business owner, you have to make decisions. And many times marketing decisions are kind of smoke and mirrors. Like it’s kind of gut feel. it work with, it? But so with a platform like this, it allows you to make decisions on real data. And many times, you know, we’ve shown them like, Hey, this Google ads campaign is creating, you know, 10 times ROI, you know, so for every dollar you getting $10 back, and then you start getting the questions. Can we spend more?

And then you look at it and you say, like, no, we’ve pretty much maxed out, you know, the search volume for what you’re getting. So no, you can’t spend more. that, by saying that, it actually builds a lot of trust. And then they come to you with ideas and they say like, Hey, Michael, everyone’s talking about Facebook advertising and you know, we really want to try it. And I’m like, okay, I haven’t seen it working, but what we should do is let’s run a three month pilot campaign, track it with what converts, review it after three months, and then decide where we go from there. So.

It gives me the ability to take a customer request and say, OK, let’s try it, and then look at the data together. And in that case, this was a few years back, we looked at the Facebook data after six weeks, and I was like, there’s nothing here. Let’s cut it. So we tried it, and that industry, just didn’t work. So it’s really a helpful business tool. mean, another example we use is like,

when we talk to the customer and they’re not sure what the value is, we say like, well, how much are you willing to spend on a lead? And for a marketer, if the guy says we’re willing to spend $150 for this type of lead, now you’ve got a target and then you can measure it and you come back. like, you know what? We actually came in at $50 per lead. So we can increase the budget and get more of those. You know what you want to do? It just makes decision making much easier. And it has real results on the growth of the company.

Curtis Hays (36:15.295)
That kind of gamifies it as well because you know, you have a scorecard. And you know, you’re actually working towards something and that’s what we did with Mario. Mario came to us after working out lifetime sales values and our estimated customer values and a whole bunch of metrics that were difficult to track because they had a long sales cycle and you know, oftentimes couldn’t calculate a lot of things that were further down the pipeline.

MIchael Cooney (36:18.821)
Yes. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (36:43.199)
But eventually came to us and said, hey, I did a bunch of math. Let’s get to $1,500 cost per new customer acquisition. We knew our conversion rates, we knew our cost per conversion. We started tracking qualified leads, marketing qualified, sales qualified, all through the pipeline. And then two years later, we started at, I think around $22, $22 in 2023.

Our average cost per client acquisition was $2,200. Last year, it was $1,200 below that $1,500 target. I think the challenge we’re running in now, Michael, is with some organizations, and this is where I think shifting to more of the real-time metrics that allow us to make quicker decisions is trying to get the business owners to shift from setting a budget at the beginning of a year

for, okay, we’re going to spend 50,000 on this channel and 100,000 in this channel. And, you know, they release the budget and then they don’t look at it again at performance until the end of the day. They try to look at performance, but they don’t change or pivot the strategy once they execute on that budget. And I’m really trying to advocate now for a lot of my clients to say, you know, look, yeah, we’ve got to set a budget for the year.

MIchael Cooney (38:01.947)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (38:08.895)
But we need to be somewhat agile with that budget because if we see five months into a year, we’ve got a 3x return in a specific channel, we should at the very least incrementally be increasing that 10 % a month, 15 % a month until we get to that point where there is no search volume. We’ve hit the diminishing return and then you know, but we could be spending $2,200 a month on that channel right now. By the end of the year, it could be $6,000. I don’t know, but to sit at $22,000,

I’m sorry, $2,200 a month for the rest of the year seems like you’re leaving a lot of business on the table.

MIchael Cooney (38:39.131)
Mm-hmm.

MIchael Cooney (38:44.057)
Yeah, mean, if somebody’s for every dollar they put in, they gain $10 back, who wouldn’t want to put more dollars in? know, so yeah, absolutely. We see it shift and we see it in lifetime. So people, they may start with a marketing budget and they’ll start and they’ll allocate to this channel, that channel, that channel. And then what they find is, OK, well, this channel is doing more. let’s, you know, change it like 60 percent on the best channel, 30 percent on the other channels.

Curtis Hays (38:50.814)
Right.

Tom Nixon (38:50.894)
you

MIchael Cooney (39:11.727)
And then even within that channel, like with the Google Ads, you got your campaigns, you got your different products, you got your different keywords. You can get it down to keyword level, landing page level, and you can say, well, this campaign is performing more, or this campaign is generating fewer leads, but much higher value. And so then you tweak it. And then you’ll find some campaigns like they’re just not working within this channel. Let’s cut that, move it to the better performing channels. And it’s those small little tweaks.

that by the end of it, you may start out, you even if you’re getting 10 times ROI, you can end. So there’s one example where they were at 10 times ROI and then it’s just incrementally changed and you look back over five years and they’re now at 25 times ROI.

Tom Nixon (39:55.692)
Well, yeah, well, my big takeaway, I’ve never used the tool. I’m not a performance marketer. So there you go. You know, nobody paid me to say that, but I would say the my takeaway is don’t be afraid of your data. Don’t be afraid of difficult conversations. I know because that’s, think what gets people stuck in the, well, we don’t know how much is working and marketing is difficult to attribute all those conversations. But really we want to

Curtis Hays (39:55.871)
We’re gonna…

Tom Nixon (40:22.296)
pinpoint with a bull’s eye as much as we can, Curtis. And I know you said before that when you deliver bad news to clients, they trust you more. They don’t hate you more. They trust you more. So that’s my big takeaway.

Curtis Hays (40:31.177)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (40:37.587)
since you are a content marketer though, if I could ask Michael about content marketing, because I was listening to you and speaking a couple of years ago, and I know that you guys invested a lot into your, to your website and creating content and SEO and you’ve been doing some advertising. How was that paying off for you? Because that’s something that Tom and I have really been trying to advocate, both to our listeners, as well as our clients.

MIchael Cooney (41:01.275)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (41:05.311)
to invest in content that truly helps your, not just to gate and sort of trap leads, but to create content that truly helps your ideal customer. And if you do that, it may not pay off in a initial campaign in the first month or two, but down the road that is. And I think going back probably five plus years ago, you guys were investing in content. How was that paying off for you today, especially in a world where

MIchael Cooney (41:13.605)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (41:34.793)
PPC is getting more competitive. Advertising is more competitive. You’ve got to put more money into play. Is that content still paying off for you?

MIchael Cooney (41:41.499)
Yeah, so I mean when we started what converts and even with my clients before we were definitely focused on performance marketing and We had a strategy where we had start off with PPC You know and it was a way to get to find out the keywords that converted so it was researched But as well as getting sales we would take that and put it into organic that the organic content building is like a moat

because it moves slower, you have to build up reputation. And if you invest in it for the long term, there’s no ceiling to it. So PPC has a ceiling to it. And just when things are going well, you get competitors that they can just spend more than you. So you find that PPC tends to have a ceiling and this you’re going to be spending the biggest dollars. But with organic results, which is sits on top of content. And so I’ve just I’m a huge believer in content that ranks in.

search results and it comes back to be helpful to your audience. Create content. Don’t, I hate the burning passion content is created for search engines. You have to create content first for your audience and then consider the SEO terms that you put into that. If you do that right, Google will recognize that the user engagement will be better. You you build your reputation over time.

and it works better. mean, so in the days…

Tom Nixon (43:11.02)
Now that is something I can endorse right there. I will say that I fully endorse that. Yeah.

MIchael Cooney (43:15.295)
OK, good. Now we understand. And I’ve always like people always come to me and they say like, SEO is always changing. It’s always changing. What are we going to do? And I’m like, if you start with great content, you’re pretty stable. You know, I’ve seen pages that have been ranking in the top of Google for 10 years with all the changes. And it’s just because the content was great. But if I look at what converts in the early days, you know, when we didn’t have organic position, you know, Google ads was bringing in the most trial signups.

but now it’s organic and direct. And so this also plays into branding. I was never a big believer in branding at all. And what I’ve seen with our data and also with our customers’ many times the branded terms are the top terms that come through. And when you get a branded term or a branded search that come through, I know some people want to exclude them from their search campaigns, but you shouldn’t because they convert.

at a much higher rate and they cost you less if you’re that brand. So I’ve just seen the what converts brand. That’s the top search for what comes through and they come direct, they come through Google organic. And I’ve just become to be a a much bigger believer in brand instead of just pay for performance.

Tom Nixon (44:34.638)
We’re back, the bullhorns, we’re back baby.

MIchael Cooney (44:36.825)
with that.

Curtis Hays (44:37.457)
Yep, I’m a full believer in brand. I have always been in search, but now I understand that brand comes before marketing. That you got to know who you serve and what you’re all about before you can go to any channel and talk about your product or service and the problem that you solve. but for brand, we typically put it strategically into its own campaigns.

MIchael Cooney (45:03.973)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (45:04.285)
So we’re definitely bidding on brand terms in most cases. then, so we kind of have our seeker top of funnel type campaigns. And then we do remarketing and try to control costs within those various campaigns and also understand and deliver messaging to the right people at the right times within their journeys. So it becomes the sophisticated process that might.

MIchael Cooney (45:18.244)
Absolutely.

Curtis Hays (45:28.059)
start out simple in the beginning, but as we do better at communications and we do better at understanding our users and their journeys, we can sophisticated that process and understand those touch points and where they convert, which is critical in both lead gen as well as PPC. this has been great. Tom, know you, your head might be, I know you got some branding here recently, but how, how’s it, was it too much kind of math and analytics here? Or did you learn something?

Tom Nixon (45:53.774)
No, we had more math. We had more math with Carl that we had today. So I’m good. I’m good. I wanted to thank Michael for not only coming out of the podcast, but for solving the problem that you’re solving because it’s it’s critical. We’ll have you back and talk to you all about branding if you’d like. By then we will be renamed the Bullhorns and Bullseyes podcast again. So that will be good. And I would just my final plug is at least in the world that I work in. Not every lead, I should put it another way. Most leads will not come via search.

Curtis Hays (45:57.457)
Okay, good. Good.

Tom Nixon (46:23.928)
So if you’re writing your content for search engines, you’re only going to find the wrong leads. The right leads are the people who want to hire you for your ideas and they don’t need to go searching for that because you’re going to give it to them. All right. That little sermon is over. Thank you for listening to my Ted talk. Thank you, Michael, for being on the podcast. It will see you next week. I’m bull horns and bulls eyes.

MIchael Cooney (46:43.269)
Thank you.