Insights On Growing With A Lean Team

Insights On Growing With A Lean Team

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Brian Tankersley and Jamie Aragon from Elevate Risk Management with me today. Welcome, guys, and thanks for taking the time to be here.

Brian Tankersley
Thank you, Tim.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So before we dig into this, I'm going to ask you guys a few rapid fire questions to just kick things off. Are you guys ready to jump in with both feet?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Awesome. So very quickly, what do you do How long have you been doing it?

Brian Tankersley
Well, I'm Director of Sales and Business Development for L&D. I've got about 28 years in sales and marketing on both sides of the desk. So that's my story.

Jamie Aragon
And I'm Jimmy I'm on, and I'm currently a security analyst, but I have about 20 years of MSP work and some IT and sales there as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. 20 years in the MSP space is a long time.

Jamie Aragon
It's a long time.

Brian Tankersley
Not even then.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's the most important lesson you guys have learned along the way? Anything come to mind?

Jamie Aragon
Yeah, I think for me, it's quick and easy. It's patience is key. It's definitely not going to go the way that you expect it. And so rolling with those punches is very important.

Brian Tankersley
I think a lesson I've learned in sales, not just in this position, but in this position as well, is repetition is key. Getting that message out there over and over again. Sometimes it doesn't matter what the message is or how it looks. It matters how many times somebody sees it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I love both of those. The repetition is key with the message really resonates with me from a marketing standpoint, because it comes up often, like when we're helping clients with messaging, they're like, Gosh, I feel like I'm repeating myself. And I'm like, Yeah, that's the point. You got to repeat yourself because it takes multiple impressions for things to really start to resonate. And if we're changing that message and they're seeing a different message every time, it's never going to click. So thank you for sharing that. Look, we know growing a business is tough. Jamie, 20 years in the MSP space, plenty of ups and downs there, I'm sure. Do you guys have any mantra or something motivational that you say to yourself, share with your team to push through those hurdles and roadblocks?

Brian Tankersley
I'll take this one first. I had a mentor by the name of Paul Roland, back when I worked in the retail space. And on our random email one day, she sent me something, and the last paragraph was, Listen well, study hard, think before you speak, and make a difference every day. I have kept that little motto as one of the statuses on my Facebook. I've copied it over and over again, and it's been so valuable to me over the years.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love that. Say that one more time. There was a lot in there, but I like it.

Brian Tankersley
Yeah, it's, Listen well, study hard, think before you speak, and make a difference every day.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Man, you keep those top of mind every day, you're going to be in good shape, right?

Brian Tankersley
Mm-hmm. Just keeping them top of mind.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's right. Well, that's where the repetition and the message comes in, right?

Brian Tankersley
There you go.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Jamie, how about you?

Jamie Aragon
I wish I could be so inspirational, but mine, at least to myself, is going to be, they're not all going to be winners. And it's basically how I get through a hard day is just understanding that some days you're going to have bad days, and it helps keep my perspective to being positive.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. In that line, one of the things that always resonated with me was somebody said, and I'm sure said multiple times where it's just like, nothing is as good or as bad as it seems, right? To help us stay even keel. It's like, hey, when it's great, it's not as great as it seems. And when it's bad, it's not as bad as it seems either. So it just helps push through those challenging times.

Shifting from an Outside Lead Gen Firm to Building a Sales Processes In-house.

Tim Fitzpatrick

So I know, Brian, when we had initially connected for the pre-interview, you had mentioned shifting from an outside Lead Gen firm to building your sales processes in-house. What prompted that change? And what early lessons have you learned from doing that?

Brian Tankersley
I'll let you start off with that, just because we're on.

Jamie Aragon
The idea behind that is that we thought we were going to be able to generate a lot of leads and get a broader sense of the market and cool in more things. And really what it turned out to be for us was we got random leads and the quality wasn't as what we had hoped for. Really, it took a lot more out of our day to help focus in and redirect and move. Instead of it being a more cost-effective and easier solution for us, it turned out to be a more time-intensive and not as high-quality.

Tim Fitzpatrick
How long did you guys do that? Do you remember?

Jamie Aragon
I want to say we did it for about a year It was about a year. About a year.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It was generating leads, but it wasn't consistent and they weren't the quality that you were looking for.

Brian Tankersley
Coming into the company after that first year, I'm taking a look at the quality of the leads, taking a look at the way things were being generated, the methodology that they were using, the lists they were using. Even the people that the company was targeting, they weren't necessarily the right people. There were a lot of meetings scheduled, but most of them were no-shifts. Most of them were we're going to have to call them 10 minutes into the meeting to get them to attend, if they were.

Jamie Aragon
I don't know what you were going to get. And that's really what it was. It was in the air and it was random. Somebody just saying yes to get you off the phone, basically.

Brian Tankersley
You see that in sales.

Jamie Aragon
Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You guys are not alone in that boat. I mean, I would say the majority of people I talk to that have outsourced lead gen, cold email, cold calling, or a combination of those and other approaches, it just tends to not work very well. And that's not to say that there aren't some good outbound lead gen services. I think a lot of times they're targeting very broadly. And it needs to be narrowed down, and they need to be provided with a really specific message that you know already works, right? If you don't know whether the message works, they're testing, right? And that takes time. And it's just, yeah, it's very challenging. So are you guys doing similar things now in-house, or have you shifted with what you're doing in-house?

Brian Tankersley
We've actually shifted a little bit. I think what I've tried to do and what I've tried to bring to the company is to separate us from our competition. You look at the materials from a lot of MSPs, MSSPs, anything in the tech space, you're going to see a lot of circuitry, a lot of sparkly graphics in the middle of pictures. I've tried to separate us out from that and had a human element into the messaging that we're sending out. Then also just making sure that what we have looks professional, it looks like it belongs in the space. Then, like I mentioned at the top of the interview, it's that repetition. That's something that we weren't getting from that other company, definitely. It was the repetition we're getting now and the ability to nurture. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What types of tools are you guys using to nurture once they come in?

Brian Tankersley
Well, we utilize HubSpot as our marketing tool. So I'm doing a lot of cold email campaigns out of HubSpot, which I'm sure you know there are a few challenges these days with cold email campaigns. We're working through that. We do a lot of that. We do some organic social media as well. But really, a lot of it is just down to making sure that they're getting a call from a human being every 2-3 months if they're not in an active campaign. If they're in an active campaign, they're probably going to get a few more calls than that in a more confined area of time.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, got it. You're taking an omnichannel or multichannel approach where there's some email, there's some social interaction, there's voice, or phone, but it's a combination of those.

Brian Tankersley
Yeah, I know a lot of sales managers, a lot of sales experts get stuck on call, call, call. Calling is the most important thing. Pick up the phone. That's not the way it is these days. I consider it touches. That's what I look at. I want to touch a prospect via email, touch a prospect via social media, touch a prospect via phone, maybe even via text, depending on the prospect and what I know about. But I think that looking at it modern like that, that's what you're calling a multi-channel approach. I definitely agree.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Especially in the MSP space, MSSP space, where you can't force anybody to be ready to buy. They're either ready or they're not. And it's so important to stay in front of them for that extended period of time because it is an extended period of time. They ain't going to switch unless the pain is very high, right? There are plenty of people that are staying with their existing MSP, and they're not happy. But the pain they're dealing with, the perception is that switching is an even greater pain, and so they don't want to do it, right? And so staying in front of them until the pain does get great enough, if you haven't stayed in front of them, they're not going to think of you, even reach out. And so it goes back to what you guys said earlier about patience. We have to be patient, which many of us are not. As humans, we're hardwired for instant gratification.

Jamie Aragon
A little bit of dopamine right away is real nice.

Brand Awareness in Crowded Spaces

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's right. So I want to dig into brand awareness a little bit, and this may cross over into some of the things that you already shared, Brian. But with brand awareness, it is a big challenge in crowded spaces, cyber, IT, MSPs. What types of things have you guys done to boost that visibility? And what do you wish you had more resources or clarity on?

Brian Tankersley
As I mentioned earlier, we've done a lot of... I've completely redesigned our sales. From any of the social media posts we're putting out to the electronic lead behind PDFs that I send with emails or that I'll utilize in other ways. All of our messaging has changed. The company that was doing lead gen for us before was sending out plain text emails. We no longer do that. Our emails look professional, look modern, and hopefully separate us from the pack. I also mentioned earlier, like you said, it's a crowded marketplace. And most of the materials that I see from our competition coming out look very much the same. And I want to make us a little different.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Specifically in the message, are there certain things that you guys are focusing on in the messages that help position you differently?

Brian Tankersley
There are. But It's very simple. It's not something real salesy either. It's basically giving people only what they need and nothing more. You see selling enough charging in this industry. It's unnecessary. And it's really detrimental to our clientele. So we want to make sure that we're focused on only what you need, and you're only going to pay what is necessary. We're not going to over for services that they truly need, especially because most of the prospects that we're dealing with are small businesses. And there are small businesses that, until now, have been pretty much ignored.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I saw this on a LinkedIn post this morning, and the guy was talking about in the MSP space, it's like people aren't buying IT, right? They're buying the problem that you're solving for them and the outcome that they can get from that. And it's not an IT outcome. It's an overall business outcome. It's like, what does IT enable them to do? And I see this. This is not just a problem in the MSP space, but just in general, too much messaging focuses on us, like what we do. And one of my mentors shared this with me with messaging, and it's always stuck with me. And when we're out there trying to promote our services, we need to focus on the problems our ideal clients have and don't want and the results they want and don't have. Again, it's very simple, but that's what's going to grab them, right? And that's what allows us to just continue to engage and have that further conversation because at the end of the day, they don't care about us. They care about what we can help them do.

Brian Tankersley
Very true..

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So it's a shift in mindset that needs to happen with that. I want to keep going down this marketing path. What's been your most successful marketing or sales effort to date? And what do you think made it work?

Jamie Aragon
I I think I'm going to bring it back and say that really for us, the beginnings of going into and hiring a specific salesperson who knows the market, right? From the pulse, They're aware of the customers. They're two with the customers. They know what we're trying to produce as being more the technical side. They're able to translate that and put that message out to people. And then through that, allowing what I would say essentially is our heart to come through, that produces a much better meeting. It produces a higher quality relationship. That's ultimately what we really want to do for our customers, provide that relationship between us and them. For us, that's, at least in my point of view, one of the biggest things that we've done to really have pushed through and just dove in and said, Okay, we're all in with sales.

Tim Fitzpatrick
How many sales reps do you have? Do you have just the one or do you have multiple?

Brian Tankersley
One.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. Okay. Yeah. So it's you, Brian.

Brian Tankersley
I'm sales and marketing for a thing. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Jamie Aragon
It was me, and that wasn't great. I was hoping to lead, and it's like, We need help.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's really hard when you have a bunch of other things that are on your plate. And because when you're in that boat, and a lot of business owners or higher-level executives are in that boat, it's just hard to devote the time and the energy that it needs. And the only way it's going to build and get to where it needs to be is with that consistency and that dedicated effort over time. And look, I run into that from my own business. I have a business development rep who does... She's not making a ton of outbound calls for me, but what she is doing is she's doing a lot of LinkedIn activities, connecting with people, engaging. If I had to do that, and I do try to do some of it for certain contacts, I do a lousy job at it because I got other stuff that are higher priorities for me that end up taking That I end up spending time on first and foremost.

Jamie Aragon
If I can jump in on that, too, and just say, not only is it just time, not that you can't learn it or you can't be okay with it, but it really is a skill set that you have to... You have to be real with yourself. What is, do I really have that ability? I can get you to the first couple of thousand, but after that, what are we going to do? We need someone to be able to make that focus and have that skill set and passion.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Jamie, it goes back to, again, what's the highest and best use of our time? What do we enjoy doing? What's our unique ability? If it's not sales or marketing, then we need to figure that out.

Jamie Aragon
And the rate is over.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And I see that a lot, too, where I'll come across prospects who have hired out marketing. They've hired a marketing agency, or they've outsourced to a freelancer, and they feel like, great, it's now washed. My hands are washed. I don't need to manage this. But that's not the case. Even when you hire out, whether you're hiring out or in-house, you still have to manage that person. And so at a certain level, you still have to have a high enough understanding of what are they doing and what do I need to do as their manager to keep them accountable and provide them the resources they need to be successful. And if you can't do that, well, then you need to find somebody that can help with that, right?

Brian Tankersley
Absolutely.

Tim Fitzpatrick
The way I think about it is when we think about building a marketing engine for clients, you have strategy, you have planning, you have leadership, right? Strategies, the fuel. Planning is where you're picking the parts and assembling the engine. And the leadership is that mechanic, right? That's keeping that engine running efficiently. And even if you've hired it out, even if you have a marketing executive in-house, as the owner, you still need to have an idea of how to support that person and how to hold them accountable. So super, super important.

Insights On Growing With A Lean Team

Tim Fitzpatrick
So I'm going to shift gears. For other B2B startups trying to grow with a lean team, how many team members do you guys have? Just to give us some context. Say that again.

Brian Tankersley
We're currently four.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.

Brian Tankersley
I think four and a half.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, four and a half. What's something that you've learned the hard way about trying to generate qualified leads or building that marketing engine?

Brian Tankersley
I think really, aside from a few lessons with cold email that I'm still learning, I think that the hardest lesson has really been that nobody really cares The idea of what you are. Well, I don't want to say it. I don't want to say it anyway. Nobody People are looking at offers every day from 100 different companies to do the same thing. I think the lesson is figuring out how to separate yourself from that and make yourself stand out. Lessons that need to be learned. I think that we've learned those at this point. Now, I've come to finetune some things.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I really like that because that is a common challenge. Especially in the MSP space. You go to five MSP websites. Odds are they're all five are going to say the same flavor of message. And when that happens, it's like the only thing prospects can do is default back to price because they don't see any other differences. It's like, why should I work with you? And so figuring out how to stand out, what really makes you unique over everybody else is really important And it's important for people to understand, too, this is a process. It's not going to be perfect. What you put out there in the beginning is not going to be perfect. But as you continue to put When you get it out there and you get feedback and you gather more information and data, you can continue to refine it and hone it so that it gets better and better and better. But if we don't take the action, it never gets better. Because you don't have any of feedback. So I like that. Thank you for sharing that. So looking ahead, what are the top one to two things you'd love to have figured out or improved in your sales and marketing over the next 6 to 12 months, would you say?

Brian Tankersley
For marketing, I'd like to have possibly more funds to do more outbound marketing and definitely increase the amount of networking that I'm doing, both locally and regionally. So Sales, I'm always on a quest to shorten the sales. I have a ridiculously long sales cycle, so I'm always trying to find ways to chop that thing down.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Have you found anything that you think is getting you in the right direction?

Brian Tankersley
I think we're gradually getting there. The better meetings that we have, the better level of clientele that we're getting now, and we're speaking to decision makers will help quite a bit.

Jamie Aragon
I think something else, too, that we're trying to do, that we're trying to bring across is that we want to increase our immediate trust with the client. I want to shorten that down to... Because like you said, they hear the same thing over and over. We use a lot of the same verbiage. We do all this stuff. Really, it's our job is to increase that trust. The quicker we gain that trust with them, then all of a sudden, Oh, I was able to talk to Oh, I was able to do this. And it just reduces that. As a company model, in just trying to maintain the relationship, have good relationship, and reduce the length of time it takes to build that trust immediately. Something that you can.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Which I mean, that happens by the more they see you, the more they engage with your content, the faster you can build that.

Jamie Aragon
The more touches, the more absolutely it's all coming together. It's like you have a question for us. We want to give you an honest answer. We want to be direct and truthful. And if we don't have the answer, we want to be able to email that to you right away.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. That's awesome. So before we wrap things up, I want to ask you guys one last question, which is knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently?

Jamie Aragon
I can say it's watching for when it's time to to make the cut, right? And and you're not and knowing that it's not that you're quitting, but that you're adjusting your plan or you're changing. The goal is still the same. You're just making an adjustment. And so sometimes you feel when that you're quitting. And I think that that's a hard thing to like, why? How do you quit doing that? It's not that. It was just the plan because the market's asking for this or this is viable.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So what you're saying, Jamie, is just being able to make that decision of when it's time to make the cut or the shift.

Jamie Aragon
A little sooner.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, sooner.

Jamie Aragon
And recognize and not be worried about, are we quitting on this plan? That's the wrong verb. We need to adjust them. The right way to approach that situation, I think that's the better way to say it is.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Sometimes, too, it's not just doing things too long. On the marketing side, a lot of times, it's doing things for too short a period of time. They're giving up before they've given it the opportunity. And I think one of the things that helps with that, at least on the marketing side, is just knowing what your goal is and identifying the metrics that are going to help you determine whether you're on the right path. A lot of people just don't know whether they're headed down the right path because they haven't identified what the real goal is and what metrics are we going to track. So there's no waypoints along the way that say, Hey, we made it past the first quarter mile. We're doing good. We're feeling good. We're going to make the next half mile mark, right? That type of stuff helps you determine, do we need to shift, right? Are we on the right path? Do we need to cut it? And I'm sure that those same principles can be applied to other aspects of the business. But I think you're right. It's especially from an entrepreneurial standpoint, a business owner standpoint, I don't know. I especially like, I don't quit. I just keep going. But there are definitely times where I should stop doing certain things, but I don't. I keep going down the path longer than I should.

Jamie Aragon
Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So that's a tough one.

Jamie Aragon
Yeah. It is. It definitely is.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, it's been awesome, guys. I really appreciate you taking the time. If people want to connect, where can they learn more about you guys?

Brian Tankersley
Well, they can always go to our website. He's scrolling across the bottom of the screen right now. That is elev8rm.com. We are also on LinkedIn. We are on Alignable. We are on Facebook. We are on Instagram. I'm not doing that X thing now, but we might do that in the future. And I think you can find us on thread, even though we don't necessarily use that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Cool. So we'll make sure that that gets in the show notes, but it's elev8rm.com. So reach out, connect with Jamie and Brian. I appreciate you guys so much for taking the time and sharing some of your thoughts and experience. Those of you that are watching, listening, appreciate I appreciate you as well. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com, which is rialtomarketing.com. The other resource we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. When we help clients build their marketing engine, we look at nine key areas. And if you want to know which of the nine are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. Totally free, less than five minutes, so take advantage of that. And until next time. Take care.