today are Devin and Allie from SiteSeeker. Before I turn it over to Devin and Allie, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the webinar via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch on demand at your convenience. With that, I turn it over to Devin and Allie. Thank you. Thank you everybody for joining us today. We're happy to be here and talk about, for us, an exciting and also important topic. Wanna also give a big thanks to AED for putting this on and setting this all up. So big thanks to everybody and thanks for joining us today. Real quick, just again, I'm Devin Hoffman. I am a digital marketing and sales specialist here at SiteSeeker, and I'm happily joined by Allie, as well as a senior account executive, or account manager, sorry. And today we wanna talk about the phases of the customer journey and how to blend your sales and marketing teams together to close more leads. And so the last part of that is obviously one of the most important to close more leads, but what we always see is sales is doing their thing, marketing's doing their thing, and is there enough communication between the two and sometimes it's kind of, where is the overlap lay and exist in terms of interaction with the customer? And there's two ways that we like to look at that. And the first is really kind of understanding that customer's journey, and then also taking a step back and saying, okay, now let's look at that through the lens of both sales and marketing. And for Allie and I, this is a good topic because I work on our end within the sales side of things and Allie works inside of the marketing side. And so we see every day, not just for our clients, but also internally where the opportunity, the alignment, synergy, and things like that exist within this journey. So what we like to do, and one of the things you hear about a lot, and sometimes it's always changing, is the number of touch points it takes to make a sale. And we always see people think and keep in mind the different types and elements of marketing that they're doing. But what's important is understanding if that's balanced across the focus or the stage. And so we like leveraging this visual that we have here and kind of looking at that over these five steps, awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty, because some of these are very marketing focused, some of them are sales focused, and some of them are a combination. But sometimes if you're not thinking about it, you don't visualize it or kind of link them together that way. So what we'd like to do at a higher level is kind of walk through some of these different stages and elements that are within those. And then from a sales and a marketing standpoint, but then also talk about some ways that sales and marketing can better work together that kind of play directly into this. So with that, as we'll start on the marketing side of things, I will hand it off to Allie who can dig into what we're seeing here. That was great. Thanks, Devin. So the first step is going to be the awareness. And that's really just bringing not only your brand, but your service right along to the forefront, get in front of your audiences. So some of the ways that we do that in marketing you might see are display ads or posting on social media, whether or not that's organic or social media ads or sponsored posts. In addition, there's also word of mouth, you're getting your name out there at trade shows. And there's also programmatic ads so that it's being seen across anything like Hulu or Spotify, anything that's a little bit different, but again, just more of that brand awareness. And a great thing to do within the awareness stage is also talking about pain points. So in the B2B world and for AED, something to consider also is a big one that was, especially in the last couple of years, was supply chain delays. So basically letting your customers know, we understand that there's a problem and we're the solution. So that's really just getting the name out there as well. Devin, did you want to chime in on anything on that? Otherwise, I think we can start moving over to consideration which would be the next step of, once you get those pain point out or pain points out. Yeah. So once you have those pain points and you've established them to your audience, what's great is then when they start to really think about your brand and start to get into this consideration phase, that's where you start to really craft your messaging around how you can start solving those pain points. So in the example of the supply chain delays, maybe you'd want to talk about how you have in-stock products and your products are manufactured in the US so you don't have those long delays from shipping overseas. Something like that to really drive home the point of why people should consider your brand. So once people start to hit that consideration phase, that's when they're going to start looking for search ads and actually typing in the product or service that they need and to bring your ads up specifically. In addition, that would also be email marketing, continuing to get in front of them, which again is a little bit of awareness, but also addressing those points and making them realize this is why you should choose X, Y, Z brand. In addition, also video is a big one too, whether or not that's YouTube ads, again, video on your website, in an email, on social media, it addresses all of those points and really brings the whole point home of, I want to go with your brand because you understand my problems and pain points. Yeah, and I think, and just to add to that, what I think is good in kind of looking at it a little deconstructed like this and visualizing it this way is a good opportunity to do a little bit of a self audit and see what items, what marketing activities, campaigns, or initiatives you might have going on and say, are they falling into one of these categories? Are we very heavy in consideration, but are we building or driving awareness? And sometimes, if you have an opportunity to kind of look in where some of those efforts are focused, kind of creates an opportunity to see where there might be areas of growth in terms of marketing initiatives. But yeah, so from consideration, that brings us to acquisition. So ideally the biggest thing with acquisition is you really want someone to convert, whether or not that's picking up the phone, giving you a call, filling out a form on your website, scheduling a meeting with a salesperson. And that's obviously the biggest driver for all of those closed business and any new leads. So in the marketing realm, that's obviously going to be our biggest goal. And then so that once we get those new acquisitions and new leads, then we can ideally send them over to sales and ideally go for some closed business and get a little bit extra money in the pockets. Yeah, and I feel like this stage is the one that has the most overlap between how marketing and sales would look at kind of that journey. But I like the split between the top ones of phone call, form fill, and scheduling a meeting, and the bottom one of closed business because that's kind of where the definition change would be. For marketers, sometimes the goal is to get that conversion so that they can hand that off to sales and that's that acquisition. Whereas for sales, sometimes it's that closed business and confirmation of a customer that would be considered acquisition, but they both kind of align to that same touch point. And I like it this step to kind of jump back and say, okay, now let's look at this again, because when we look at this journey, acquisition, as anybody would know, isn't the end. Now we've got a new opportunity to kind of continue to interact with those individuals. But one of the things that this presents a really good opportunity for sales and marketing teams is to kind of do a check. Acquisition might be sort of the first goal that you would have. And so you want to know what kind of led into that acquisition. So right before that service touch point starts, we kind of call that the handoff to sales. And one of the big goals of this area in kind of reviewing or auditing your efforts is transparency, understanding what got to this point, how did it work, what's working, what's not. So one of the things that I mentioned it before, it takes blank touch points to make a sale. And we know sometimes that number changes and it evolves. And years ago, that number was referred to as seven. It takes seven touch points to make a sale. By 2024, recent studies that have been done, that number is closer to 30. And so historically, you didn't have that transparency into those touches that were taking place prior to it coming to sales. But that's what's been so great about the growth of digital is you've got more insight into that. And so marketing can use all sorts of analytics tools and technology to really understand what worked from their efforts so that they can use that kind of collaboratively with sales to continue to build off of it. So here's just some things that's like really important for teams to kind of review when they get to that sort of handoff to sales. And so we've got analytics tracking, using something like GA4 to understand what sources are working, what's got the highest conversion rate, things like that. Digging into your messaging, maybe you've got high traffic in certain messaging, but low conversions. So does that have to be adjusted? Obviously tracking through to the end of it of close one or close lost and understanding the impact that different campaigns and different messages are having. And then that trickles through into understanding and tracking individually on different audiences you're going after, as well as top KPIs, which is key performance indicators. So obviously let's say you're running paid advertising, what is your cost per click? What is your cost per conversion? What is the optimization score and things like that so that you can continually kind of monitor how your efforts are trending. But once it gets to that step and you've made that handoff and now it's gone to sales, now is where we talk about service. And so this is another good opportunity to kind of visualize internally, items you might have in place that are working to this, but now is the opportunity to be an answer or a solution provider for a customer. And so what we typically see, especially in B2B, what is a driver of that is being a resource in terms of being an industry expert. And so that's where folks will come back to read blogs, get answers, service support, things like that, where you know what's got the majority of those questions and outreach that you get and building content around it, downloading PDFs. Again, if you've got technical data sheets or catalogs or brochures or things, resources, it's really impactful to be able to track who's engaging with that and at what volume. And all of that leads into this last one, which is upsell opportunities, whether that's service or additional parts or other support that's needed. So even after that closed business acquisition, you still have opportunities to continue to get new touch points that lead to additional business opportunities. With then the last touch point category being loyalty, because once you've kind of continued through that service and you've continued to build that relationship there, that's where you kind of grow an opportunity to now leverage that relationship to even be support for the people down the road who are in that awareness and consideration phase. So like it says here, you can leverage your success stories as case studies, or just people that have had good experiences or relationships with you to get reviews, or even if you have the opportunity to generate some testimonials, because that's gonna be one of the things that people need to digest throughout those initial marketing stages like consideration. And so through this process, you're now taking elements of people who kind of had already gone through the touch points in the journey, and then leveraging that for the people who are now just kind of starting out that journey, which is very impactful. And from a marketing standpoint, what's great about this service and loyalty one too, is that you're continuing, even though a lot of it is the sales and retaining a customer, it is also a benefit to search engine optimization. So you're constantly providing new content both for your website, again, with like the case studies, any of the testimonials, the PDFs, the blogs. So it's continuing on your marketing efforts too, even after that sales effort has been essentially completed or won. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so, again, coming back to sort of, I'll call this the home screen here, that is definitely looking at the phases of the customer journey. So awareness, consideration, acquisition, service and loyalty. And I like to look at it, and this is a type of analogy I use too often, but like almost as a Venn diagram between marketing and sales, where the first half we're seeing on the left is marketing, the right is gonna be sales, and then in the middle, there's a little bit of overlap. But really the opportunity to make that marketing side and that sales side even more impactful and just, I guess, make it just two circles that are overlapped, is where we get into the second part of this that is blending the teams to get closer together and which will ultimately generate more leads for you. And so when we think about that, and again, keeping this journey and this visual up here, it's not something that really happens after consideration or before consideration or during service. What it really has to be is kind of strategically aligned that's gonna be really before you dig into any of this. So sticking with this visual, we usually put those types of efforts right before you even get into it. And we kind of outline here three ways to improve sales and marketing alignment. And so those three ways are communication, buyer personas, and technology. And so kind of to start it off, we'll jump in on communication. And I'm sure Ali would agree, this is crucial. And the key word you'll see across these five that we have here is share. And it really is just being open between your sales and your marketing teams so that everybody knows either what you're working on, what's impactful, what's upcoming, things like that. I know sometimes meetings are tough. It's one of those things where the more opportunities to share, the better. So it's just finding a way that's balanced and kind of works internally. But as we look at these, we've got share strategies, share budgets, share processes, share brainstorming, and share KPIs. Share strategies, we put up at the top because one of the biggest things, and it really comes down to messaging opportunities, like those strategies that sales is using in the meetings with the actual prospects and ultimately customers is gonna be messaging that your marketing team is gonna wanna leverage and build their campaigns around. And if you've got strategies you're using as a salesperson that have been impactful and that are working, marketing is gonna wanna know that so that they can say, are we capturing the same, something Allie said earlier, pain points? Are we understanding, and is that messaging clear in this social post, or is that clear in our descriptions inside of our Google ads? So strategies is really a good opportunity to make sure that from start to end, there's just alignment with how branding and messaging and everything that's taking place looks. Budgets are huge because it shows where, you know, priorities lie. An example that, you know, we talk about is, you know, sometimes sales might have a really big trade show that's coming up. The biggest one, you know, they're getting most of their efforts around that, you know, so you would think that the same amount of priority and focus is being done on the marketing side around said show, whether it's build up during follow-up. But then the same kind of comes on the marketing side to say, hey, we're really going to jump in and do a big, you know, retargeting effort, you know, next quarter or something along those lines. Then it's good to kind of bring sales into the loop on that so that they understand whether it's someone who's seeing, you know, an ongoing ad or engaging with it, you know, that they understand kind of what's taking place there. Same with processes, you know, understanding the different steps. You know, I know sometimes probably if there's going to be a campaign that there is alignment, maybe sales is expecting it quicker than marketing was planning to make it or, you know, marketing's timeline and sales timeline, you know, are they mapped up? So just to understand, okay, what do you need from me and when, and when can I expect what, you know, we're going to see for a launch or a rollout, you know, also kind of reduces any friction in there. Same with brainstorming. You know, one of the things that, you know, that we like to do internally is connect ourselves and marketing teams to kind of hear what's been going on and in kind of come up with ideas together because in real time, sales might be like, I don't think that that's going to resonate with at least the people I'm talking to or marketing might be like, that's too complicated of a message, you know, and try and kind of create some synergy there. And then getting into, you know, KPIs, as I had mentioned before, you know, marketing might be saying, hey, listen, we're getting a lot of these conversions and what are you seeing? And sales might be saying, well, we're not closing a lot of deals. Well, you've got to kind of bridge that gap there and say, okay, well, let's look at those conversions and let's understand what we didn't like between those KPIs and that performance so that we can adjust it. So again, the key word is share. But like the more opportunities you can have to get some alignment between the two teams really kind of opens the door for the first part of that growth and understanding. Yeah. And likewise, you know, Devin, I know that you mentioned with, you know, sharing like KPIs and it's also an opportunity to basically go back to the drawing board and, you know, do we need to change our messaging if things aren't getting closed? Likewise, what we also need to look at is having that synergy between the teams. So let's say you've so let's say you've sent, you know, a salesperson to a trade show, but you've been email marketing, you know, a bunch of people. Well, if the salesperson comes back and says, oh, I talked to John Doe, you know, I have a meeting set up with him. You don't want to also still have marketing be sending all those emails to him and, you know, possibly, you know, overloading this John Doe possible client. So likewise, having that, you know, kind of communication and synergy between the teams that gives sales also an opportunity to come back from those kind of shows and say, this is now in my camp, you know, marketing, you've done your job, I've got, you know, we've gotten in front of them, but now it's shifted over to sales. Yeah, absolutely. So then from, you know, the first one of looking at communication, we get into buyer personas. And, and, you know, we find a lot of value in a lot of our partners we work with do as well in kind of having mapped out identified buyer personas that the teams kind of across the boards can leverage. So when we look at buyer personas, we like to go a little bit more visual with them. And so up here on the screen, I actually have two examples of buyer personas of ours that we, you know, had put together in understanding our customers and the points of contact that we, you know, typically interact with, I, you know, the number of personas a company might have can vary, some might only have two or three. We've worked with companies that probably wanted to go more with like seven or eight. We've also seen instances that when we did, you know, create buyer personas, similar to what we're looking at here, they actually hung them up on the wall of their boardroom so that when they were having team meetings, they could reference them. And the purpose of that is to always kind of have the persona, you know, have a person in mind when you're kind of getting into your marketing campaigns, because messaging is going to vary based on who you're thinking or talking to. So in the two examples we have up here, we like to give them an identity for it, but we have Mason, the marketing director, and Peter, the president. But the way we're going to talk to Mason is going to be different than the way we're going to talk to Peter. And so we know that, you know, when marketing is going to come together and kind of say, okay, here's an initiative or campaign we want to roll out, either how are we setting it up to speak to one or the other, or what is the way we're going to look at it so that we can kind of talk to both or all if there's going to be more. But the underlying structure of a buyer persona really is kind of going back to the communication one, and getting as much information from the sales team who is regularly interacting with these people to get a better understanding of sort of the key points related to them, so that marketing has that in mind. And so you can see there's a couple different, again, in this version, but, you know, I know some people will have WordDoc versions, but from a categorization standpoint, you know, there's kind of a high level, you know, general takeaway, some buzz notes, you know, some key things to keep in mind, and then sort of a combination of all of the interactions that, you know, a salesperson, you know, may have with the, you know, the ultimate average of the president or the marketing person they may interact with to put that story together, so that when a campaign is going to get worked on, and let's say you are going to be speaking to a president, you can kind of go in and say, okay, this is, you know, talking to all of our sales team with them thinking of all the deals that they've done over the last five plus years, these is the summary, this is the summary of what they find to be true with this individual. So is our messaging, is our focus, is our even verticals, you know, where we're going to be running advertising or focus going to capture this person, and so that you can always, you know, make sure that you're kind of keeping that information in mind as you're building campaigns, but then also revisiting it, like we talked about when you get into a reporting or, you know, kind of auditing the efforts to say, well, if this was what we were planning for communicating with presidents, is it not performing the way we thought? Do we need to revisit that persona? Has that changed? You know, obviously, you know, these personas from 10 or 15 years ago are different than today, and will be different in another 10 years, so it's also kind of constantly evolving, which goes back to that sharing communication. And then from personas, you know, we get into technology, and so obviously, as a digital marketing agency, technology is crucial for us. You know, there is everything in terms of tracking performance, understanding how people are engaging with you, and really answering the question of what's working, why, what's not, and like maybe pinpointing where some things might be falling off so that you can understand how to address it. There's, you know, almost countless programs and tools that are out there today to really help you with maximizing that, so we've got four categories outlined here, so you've got customer relationship management tools, or CRMs, lead intelligence tools, project management tools, and then reporting tools. So starting off with CRMs, customer relationship management tools, one of the big ones that a lot of people use today as an example is HubSpot, and this is a good tool to track that interaction that is taking place. Sometimes when, you know, we're looking at tools like this, or one similar to HubSpot, the thing that kind of, you know, people can't believe it when they see it is, let's say somebody, you know, looking, taking that journey map back in mind, somebody from an awareness stage engages with, you know, a display ad that you have out there, and they come to your site, and they look around. That's a touch point, but then they leave. They didn't make themselves known to you, they didn't fill out a form, they didn't do anything like that, but if your site has all the, you know, the proper tracking and things in mind, they've been cooking. So now maybe they come back to the site later through a search ad, because now they've moved into that consideration, but they still don't fill out that form. Maybe they do that two or three times. Well, your CRM can still track that information, where then, you know, ideally they come into the acquisition, they come back, they fill out that form. For your sales team, it's not just that they came and filled out a form and, you know, answered the values in the field that they filled it out, so you knew, you know, what they were looking for right at that moment, but you now can also have the historical information of how they've engaged with you over the prior six weeks that they didn't kind of raise their hand and let themselves be known yet. And sometimes in the instances that we work with, that's even more impactful than what they showed in the form itself, because it shows the different levels of engagement. And as we talk about the 30 touch points, instead of just thinking you're at touch point two, you actually can see that you're at touch point 20, you know, and that can be really helpful. But then even continuing it past that, you know, a lot of these tools can support, you know, into marketing automation and email marketing, and then also continuing through as they close deals and you continue to interact with them and track when you last reached out by email or last had a meeting or last had a call, just really keeps it organized and, you know, provides a lot of insight, you know, from the marketing standpoint of what kind of influenced them. Lead intelligence is now getting into kind of the future of technology. And so, you know, there's a few different lead intelligence tools out there, like Zoom Info can do it, Site Insights, things like that. And what these are is, you know, leveraging code that you put on your site that is identifying the IP addresses of the businesses that are coming to your site, but not converting. And so in the example that I kind of gave in looking at CRMs, if somebody comes to your site from a display ad and they visit some things, and let's say they're working out of their office and their office has a known IP, these tools can identify, hey, somebody from this company was on your site. It might not be able to tell you who the somebody was, but it can tell you the company. It can even, you know, in some cases tell you down to the location if they have multiple locations. But in terms of when you think about prospecting for sales, a really impactful prospecting tool for a salesperson is knowing that someone from this company has just been on our website. Someone from this company has just visited these pages related to this product or this service, so they're interested in this. And you can kind of put yourself in a position to start to do some outreach and interaction prior to waiting for them to convert on their own. Project management tools, this is just, you know, again, for the benefit and the purpose of organization. Organization, accountability, and tracking. Internally here we use Wrike. Some of the other ones that are out there, Monday.com, Asana, we've got partners that are using. But it's a good place to, you know, build timelines if you're going to be working on multiple campaigns at once and you need to time them, let's say, against a trade show or something like that. It's a good way to, you know, not let things fall through the crack, but also know, okay, we don't have to start on this yet, but it is coming soon. And then also tag in partners and, you know, co-workers and ask questions and things like that, where you don't have to rely on just having, you know, constant meetings to address those things. You can kind of just, you know, keep people accountable and set that up through, you know, an aligned tool. And then reporting, again, you know, we see ourselves as a data-driven agency, so for us reporting is so important. Really one of the key reporting tools that people are used to is Google Analytics, now Google Analytics 4 or GA4. It's a really good way to, you know, see how people are engaging with your website, see, you know, how they're getting to your website, where they're converting down to location or device, things like that. Even within the Google Suite, you know, for marketers, Google Search Console is very helpful as a reporting tool because it shows you kind of everything up to when they come to your website. It's everything that's happening inside of that Google search results page, whereas Analytics kind of gives you that insight once they've reached your site. But then you can use, you know, a suite of other tools. Looker Studio is a really good place to bring all those different individual reports together for a kind of customized, preferred, aligned report layout or leveraging reporting inside of the other technologies that exist in the sections above, you know, whether it's your CRM or within a lead intelligence tool. So it's, again, it's understanding what's really going to be the most impactful, what you're trying to align between sales and marketing the most, and then, you know, deciding, you know, based on what you're currently using or would like to use, where reporting can best fit into that. Yeah, the big thing with technology, Devin, you touched on it a little bit, was the accountability that all of the technology brings, not only just with the CRM in the terms of, you know, there's a sales pipeline, there's a marketing pipeline, and really seeing, you know, what people are doing, but also internally, you know, your marketing team can use these tools to make sure that they're being held accountable with, you know, are the correct people showing up if you're using lead intelligence? Are those the right companies and audiences that you want to be targeting? And likewise with sales, you know, seeing those reports, making sure, okay, all of marketing's efforts, you know, here they are, are we closing enough? What can we be doing? You know, do we need to change our sales process? Is there something else that, you know, we're missing between the two teams? So I think that's a big thing that, you know, obviously technology is great, all the data it provides, but also that accountability aspect all over, you know, I think that's, it's a big point to, you know, to mention. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it goes back to, I know it's one we had when we were talking about communication, but, you know, accountability definitely falls inside of that alignment of synergy as well, you know what I mean? And making sure that everybody is working together and, you know, hitting the expectations that both teams have for each other. So again, I like how that fades back from there, back into this visual, because like I said before, we kind of got into those three ways. That is definitely something that if you really want it to be impactful, you know, it's something to do before launching or branching into some of these campaigns or these efforts. Now that's not to say, well, you know, we're already underway and we don't have that alignment or that synergy, so we'll just, you know, it's, we're not at the start, so it is what it is, and we'll just stay doing it the way we are. It doesn't mean that, you know, it just means now is the time to kind of look internally and say, you know, let's start with some level of alignment if you feel like there isn't one, and set up that initial, you know, conversation to do a little bit of brainstorming, sharing, and see, you know, it's a good way to kind of look at, okay, what are we currently doing in the marketing realm? What's happening? What's live? And then understanding, you know, if the goal is that that is just set to be live, if we've got search ads that are running and, you know, they're being optimized and they're being managed, but they're gonna keep running, now's an opportunity to kind of have that sort of conversation, that alignment and say, now that we've had this conversation, does our messaging fit? Do these things fit? And kind of, you know, again, as I said early on, like look at what you're doing and see where they might fall into these categories here. And then understand if you walked through those, where is there opportunities for improvement? And then just kind of continue and keep up that communication. And again, it doesn't have to be, you know, every Monday at 8 a.m. we'll do a two-hour meeting and get sales and marketing aligned. You know, it's something I think we meet, you know, is it quarterly? You know, just to kind of, as we plan towards into the next quarter and what's coming up and, you know, it started out probably a little bit closer or a little bit more frequently, but then, you know, they're just kind of opened up a more collaborative ongoing relationship, which definitely, you know, definitely helped in the long run. So again, you know, I like kind of piecing all this together where you've got the visual of the customer journey to kind of think of what actions you've got of your own happening inside of it. And then that sort of then spills into, you know, keeping that in mind or with that as the lens you're looking through, what can sales and marketing do to kind of, you know, blend together a little bit better. Yeah, I mean, and this, and Devin, as you mentioned, this is, you know, definitely a fluid chart. You know, if you're finding something that's, you know, in consideration that's not working or, you know, one of the points that we talked about in consideration was the touch point of a search ad. You know, for example, maybe you're seeing a search ad, what someone is searching for doesn't necessarily align with what you thought was a pain point or part of that awareness. That's always an opportunity then to go back to the drawing board, kind of change things up, you know, reevaluate everything with both your sales and marketing teams. Should we be looking at it from this lens because this is what the customer is, this is the information we're getting from the customer. So that's like the great thing about this phase of the customer journey, even though we're seeing this as the awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, loyalty, know that it can change and you can always bounce back and, you know, maybe someone searches and then they see a display ad. So you're getting all those touch points as we go. One thing I also did just want to point out is if someone is, anyone on the call here is listening and is kind of questioning, I don't know if my sales and marketing teams are as aligned as they should be. We do have something on our site. If you just kind of want to, it's a quick few questions survey, kind of gives you an idea of the tools and everything that you would need to know if you are aligned. So if anyone is interested in that, I'll drop that link in the chat, but it's going to be site-seeker.com slash unify. I'll drop that in now. Awesome. So I think we left enough time for answering any questions, if any came in. We actually had a couple of questions come in to the chat. The first one reads, so lead intelligence has the ability to show who the tire kickers are, but essentially a cold lead. And then you could possibly put them into a different category for remarketing purposes to see what might actually trigger them to take action. Yeah, sorry. So that's, you know, and the thing with lead intelligence, and that's the perfect point on it, what to keep in mind is it's, you're identifying the company. And so it's then the question of who, and so a lot of, you know, efforts that we do or partners we work with with lead intelligence will kind of aim for their persona, their preferred persona within that company. Is that to say that that's the individual who was on the site? It isn't. The only way, you know, some of the times where that you see a kind of success we were talking about like CRMs, if it's set up in such a way, you know, if they do get to the point where they convert and they end up in your system and you can identify that historical activity, sometimes you can see, oh, yep, they were the ones who were on the site when we took that initiative. But sometimes what the effort looks like is, you know, looking to get multiple people from a singular company, either, you know, as a part of a retargeting program or some other way to communicate or outreach, you know, emails, things like that. And, you know, internally kind of two things take place. One, the ideal goal is that you do end up getting back in front of the actual person who was on the site and then they have the opportunity to reconnect. Or two, the, you know, the messaging that you communicate to them with, they end up connecting with that preferred persona. So we have seen kind of examples of each of those where, you know, maybe the person that we identified from a given company we reached out to was, you know, wasn't the right fit, but they passed the information on to the person who was, and it resulted in, you know, a, you know, a positive sales call and in a, you know, a close one deal. So, yeah, so definitely lead intelligence is just where as awareness is casting a very wide net and, you know, talking to the people who, you know, might align to be interested in the product in the industry. Leveraging lead intelligence is now casting a net to a company, which is just a more specific approach. And you can also use lead intelligence in the reverse order too, is, you know, let's say a lot of, for example, what we see a lot of is education, you know, ones that are coming to our site that we know are mostly college kids who are looking for, you know, resources. They mostly go to our blogs, they're getting stuff for like research papers, anything like that. So if you're finding that there are certain industries that aren't on your, you know, what your targeted verticals are, you can also use lead intelligence to identify them, pull those lists, and then actually start excluding those audiences from your ads to make them more targeted and more relevant to the audiences you want to get in front of. Okay, and then we have two more questions. The next one is how can you track conversions that happen between devices and platforms? Good question. So thinking back to the reporting, Google Analytics 4, the new GA4, which rolled out initially two years ago, but Universal Analytics phased out last year. And so everybody moved to GA4. It had enhanced features and reporting capabilities from Universal. So one of those items was the ability to set up reports that do cross-device or cross-domain. And so to that example, what that kind of is referring to is, it's possible that I'm doing some research, you know, in the morning laying in bed on something from my phone, but then I go to the office and now I'm looking from my computer. Historically, those could be tracked separate from each other, even though it's a, you know, a singular person who's interacting. Now the ability exists to be able to identify, you know, that cross-device. And similarly, you know, based on how people are getting to your site or interacting with you from across domains. So there is a kind of template reports that are set up within GA4 that you can leverage that'll give you that level of insight. Okay, we had another question come in. It says, how can I effectively track calls for Facebook ads? It says link clicks, but that's not very specific. So the link clicks, a lot of the times also that's including if someone's actually just clicking into your website. So I completely agree, it's not very specific. Certain things, especially within Facebook ads that you can do is setting up a pixel and actually putting the conversions and, you know, tracking them that way through the pixel, which is also can be set up through Google Analytics. So within tracking calls, whether or not it's, if you're talking, I guess I'm just kind of under, or trying to understand when you're tracking the calls is that through the Facebook ad itself. So you're asking people to call directly from the ad or you want them to click through to your website and then track the click to call there. So it's a little bit more of a question back, you know, if it's to the website and then to track that way, definitely you can use analytics, Google Analytics or the pixel as I mentioned. For Facebook ads though, you could also use, you know, a little bit, I would assume, I think a UTM parameter. But Devin, do you have anything to add on that question? No, no, I was thinking on the UTM if it was going in that type of traffic, but yeah, it's just, I think based on the specific, there'd be a couple of ways to do it. Okay, and the last question is, how would you recommend getting public reviews and asking for testimonials? So definitely start with any sort of asking for reviews. Start with your customer base, you know, especially ones that have been around for a while. It's great to have, you know, especially on Google My Business, we're seeing, you know, the companies that get pulled up a little bit more, especially organically are the ones that have those reviews. Doesn't need to be all five stars, you know, something that obviously you want it to be positive. But, you know, starting off with customers that you know are happy, that have been around for a long time, that you've built that trust with, start by asking them and just, you know, make it casual. So likewise, you know, any new customers that you've, whether or not you've just provided a service or product for, if you know that things went well, you can have your salespeople just kind of generally ask as they're finishing up a job, hey, would you mind leaving us a review on Google or Facebook? As long as you really keep it casual, it's, people are generally okay with it. But if you do need to kind of, you know, really start asking everyone at once, it would be recommended to, if you wanna send out an email asking, or, you know, any social posts or asking on your website, if you're happy, please, you know, fill out a review. What I've seen a lot of positive feedback for as well is people just saying, you know, being honest about it. If you're happy, we'd love to, you know, send us a review on Google My Business. If there was something that we could do better, please let us know. So that way you're also sort of filtering out any sort of those quote unquote possible bad reviews, but you're also getting to the root of the problem without it being, you know, completely publicly posted. The one thing I'll add to that, especially with Google, what sometimes if you're going to take an effort to, you know, have a follow-up email or just, you know, some people, be honest, they'll work it into their signatures. You can generate a direct link to the Google, like review widget for your company. So rather than, you know, expect someone to go to Google and find you and click reviews and then leave it, which might not sound like a lot of work, but just like with a website, every extra click someone has to take, like 60% of them are gonna say, ah, forget it. But you can cut most of that out. And so you can generate a link that then if somebody, you know, they click it, assuming they're signed into Google in some way, it'll take them straight to your listing and pop up the review section where literally all they have to do is leave it. So that's been impactful for people who have done some type of review effort. Hey, we've had another question come in. Does HubSpot have a texting platform within all of their offerings? You know that, Allie? I don't believe it's within all of their offerings. I believe it's with, I know, I think their marketing hub, it's available. And I think in some situations, if you don't have all the hubs, you can do it as an add-on, but it's not, unfortunately, it's not like a free option. You do need to have some of the hubs available for it. Yeah, and I think you're right in terms of a marketing hub, and especially to set that up as a part of, you know, some type of a workflow as well. Okay, it looks like that's all the questions that have come through. Devin and Allie, thank you so much for joining us today. If there's anybody that has any questions or needs to get in touch with you, is there a way they can do that? Yeah, Allie, do you want to put our information in? Yes, I think there's a possibility that when I'm doing the chat, though, it's only sending it to the panelists or the host. So I don't know if I can post it somewhere else. I just went ahead and opened it up so that you can post in there for everybody to see it. Okay, thank you so much. You're welcome. Yeah, so thank you. If you've got any questions, anything specific to any of these touch points we talked about or any of the ways for the sales and marketing teams, or as to Allie's point, if you were to go to do that short little form on our site to kind of get a better understanding of how it's working on your side, we're happy to answer any questions, jump on any calls, hear any pain points, give more insight into what's working for us and anything that kind of helps your internal team grow is a positive for us as well. We had another question come in. It says, for a smaller company with a small marketing budget, would you focus on awareness, consideration, or the acquisition phase? Good question. What I would look at is, how can we work into something that would kind of touch each? Obviously, when we went through these, there's three or four things that are in awareness and four or five things that are in consideration and acquisition itself is an action. So the touch point itself is what is pushing them to sale. So it'd really be, the goal is getting them to the site and then from the site, they're gonna convert. So between awareness and consideration is how you're gonna be able to get them there. And so it's not to say, put awareness off, do five things for consideration. That's what's really gonna be impactful, but it's gonna understand, how are people learning about your company if they didn't already have some introduction or experience? And then, how does that play into consideration? So as an example, some of the touch points we looked at in awareness fall under the category of Google ads. Some of the touch points we looked at in consideration fall under the category of Google ads. So that presents an opportunity to say, we should focus some of our spend and focus some of our budget within Google ads, but we can have consideration-focused campaigns, we can have awareness-focused campaigns. And you can even, again, sticking with that, go the route of setting up retargeting audiences inside of it that then are gonna kind of branch a little bit more pushing from consideration into acquisition, because now if somebody's come to your site through some other, one of those means or another one, you're gonna kind of continue to communicate with them. So I would say it wouldn't be to cut two or three of these stages out, but it'd be to find an opportunity for more focused efforts that then can kind of branch between them. Okay, it looks like that was the last question that came through. For anybody that wants to reach Allie or Devin, she did put everything into the chat. I thank you again, Allie and Devin for joining us today and everyone have a great day. Thank you so much. Thank you, bye.

Sales and marketing alignment

Lead generation

Customer journey phases

Synergy between sales and marketing

Communication

Buyer personas

Technology for team alignment

CRM systems

Lead intelligence