Brad Smith podcast cover
Episode: 5

Brad Smith - Alignment of sales and marketing

Posted on: 08 Oct 2020
Brad Smith podcast cover

Brad Smith is a digital consulting expert from the UK and founder of Succeed Digital Consulting, which helps agencies better position themselves in the market and grow their digital business.

In this episode, we discuss how important it is for sales and marketing teams to be aligned and work towards the same clearly outlined goals in order to truly bring value to a business. Brad describes the steps needed for alignment of sales and marketing, also including some concrete examples and addressing some of the main pitfalls that can cause a misalignment. 

 

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Transcript

“You need clearly competent individuals but the best sales and marketing teams are those who have the competency to understand how to bring the best out of each other. Can sales, can marketing align and make each other the best version of themselves?”

Intro:
Welcome to the Agile Digital Transformation podcast, where we explore different aspects of digital transformation and digital experience with your host Tim Butara, content and community manager at Agiledrop.

Tim Butara: Hello everyone, thanks for tuning in. Our guest today is Brad Smith, Digital Consulting expert from the U.K and founder of Succeed Digital Consulting. You can find out more about him on succeed.digital or reach him via brad@succeed.digital or at 07590 059133. In today's episode Brad and I will be talking about how important the alignment of sales and marketing is in a digital strategy, in terms of both processes and people. Welcome Brad, it's great to have you here. Would you like to add anything to the intro?

Brad Smith: Only to say, first of all, thank you very much for having me on. So a brief little background of Succeed. I established and set up Succeed Digital two years ago after working for a range of agencies and for platform vendors over the last 19 or 20 years or so and our primary focus is on helping new business growth and acquisition and retention for agencies.
So helping them with their sales, their leads, pitch doctoring, pitch mentoring, closing business, qualifying better, that kind of stuff. And I also work with a number of brands helping brands to select suitable platforms, technologies and agencies for their digital projects.

So things like if they need a new CMS platform or a new CRM platform or a new agency to help implement those technologies I'm the person that they wheel in to help make sure that they're getting the right technology, the right products, the right businesses, the right agencies ideally at the right price that are going to be able to really wow them and impress them. Make sure they have a successful digital project rather than a failed one.

Tim Butara: Okay thanks for the extended intro, Brad. So I suggest we start with the basics in our topic and that is; what does it even mean to have alignment between sales and marketing? Like what does this alignment look like in practice?

Brad Smith: That's a great question to start with Tim. I think interestingly there's been a sales and marketing divide or a lack of alignment, if you will, for many years. We certainly won't be the first people, I'm sure we won't be the last people to discuss this on topic. But for me, sales and marketing alignment starts with sales and marketing being aligned by having a common goal.

That goal will differ from business to business; it may be a set of goals. More often than not in my experience you need to ensure that your sales and marketing team are aligned around a revenue goal, a revenue target but ultimately it's not about making that just a sales figure or a sales number or even just you know a marketing target.

It is about bringing together both teams, defining what that goal is, and making sure that both of them are aligned to that goal. That's the first thing that you need to get right.

Tim Butara: Yeah it's more of an organizational kind of goal not just the focus of one of the two teams, right?

Brad Smith: Exactly, right. I mean therein lies the problem, it-- doesn't it? The fact we separate sales and marketing so often in business means that by default we end up with two separate business units within an organization so there's already a divide by getting sales and marketing working together from the beginning as teams and around common goals. That is the key thing to starting off in the right trajectory.

Tim Butara: Yeah I definitely agree. One of the first things I actually had to learn when I got into digital marketing was how to collaborate in the best possible way with the sales team and kind of work together to achieve the same goal as you just said, yeah.

Brad Smith: Excellent. 

Tim Butara: So what would be some really clear or obvious indicators that you need better alignment between your sales and marketing teams?

Brad Smith: Again, good question. There are a few things actually I mean obviously we're not going to go into every single scenario today but a couple of examples. Both your marketing and your sales teams need to understand what qualifies and what constitutes a lead into the business.

So you know you'll have heard acronyms thrown around like SQLs, MQLs. So sales qualified leads, marketing qualified leads and again often those things are defined in separation of one another so there is not a joined up holistic way of thinking where marketing understands exactly what sales is willing to take on and sales understands exactly what marketing is going to, if you like, hand over or pass over the wall.

So sales and marketing need to understand what lead is, what an MQL is, what an SQL is, what is an opportunity, what does a real prospect look like for our business but more importantly than even that, both the sales and the marketing teams have to be able to agree on what are the variables, what are the different stages that make up each stage of the lead life cycle.

So some examples might be; at some point, a lead is going to enter into your CRM. That might come in via any touchpoint. They may have filled in a download form. They may have, sorry, filled in an online form, completed a download request for a white paper or signed up for an event, whatever it is, that new name, new business opportunity, that lead could be a contact, and entered your CRM from any one of those touchpoints and a whole host of other potential touchpoints as well.

Another example might be a marketing qualified lead could be a lead that is from a target country or it could be a lead that uses a specific type of platform. So if you're a digital agency and you're looking for clients who are in Fintech, who are on the WordPress platform as an example it might be that you're able to identify by the fact that they're already on WordPress, that constitutes as a qualified lead of somebody that you know sales will want to talk to.

Whereas if they're on another platform, say as an example, Kentico or Sitecore or Episerver, it may be that your agency doesn't focus on those platforms and therefore don't have any value or immediate value to be able to provide, so you, therefore, may not accept that as a lead whereas to another agency that might be a perfect lead.

Final example might be an opportunity or a sales qualified lead. Could be a project that simply has a defined project that will start within, as an example, three months’ time with a defined budget, with a predetermined set of internal and external stakeholders. You know, there is a time scale, there is a budget, there is a real project with a real end goal and metrics that are focused on driving that business forwards.

So there's a whole host of just different examples of where there could be opportunities for disagreement if sales and marketing aren't aligned on defining what is it that qualifies a lead and each stage of the lead lifecycle.

Tim Butara: So okay we've covered kind of the indicators that you need better alignment but how do you go about achieving this alignment? What are the most important things that you need to do if you want better alignment of sales and marketing teams?

Brad Smith: One of the things you have to do apart from just if you're like defining the framework, is the sort of the third step in the process is almost defining who will follow up. What is the follow-up process? So, who will follow up? When will they follow up? How will they follow up?

These are the types of things that need to be understood by both sales and marketing. What you don't want, which creates a “disalignment”, is when marketing is marketing to people who have become sales qualified leads or salespeople are trying to do marketing to opportunities that aren't really actually sales qualified yet but they're kind of trying to do marketing's job for them.

So you have to clearly define a number of key stages. For instance, when will sales follow up with a sales qualified lead? How many times will they follow up with that lead? Over what period of time is it appropriate to follow up with that lead? And then it may be what drip feed or drip-fed campaigns will be in play alongside that agreed level of follow-up to ensure that that brand, your product, your service remains front of mind.

So what you want is for marketing to be doing that drip-fed, high value, very much selfless way of thinking pushing out valuable content or providing valuable content that actually isn't expecting anything back but then makes it much easier for traditional, if you like, salespeople to be able to follow up when genuine interest is shown and get sales and marketing working better in that way as well. So defining that follow-up process is really key so that you don't have multiple people in the kitchen or trying to cook the same meal.

Tim Butara: Yeah and that's a very good analogy. I’ve often heard the saying that too many cooks definitely spoil the meal so this comes into play here as well.

Brad Smith: Yeah absolutely.

Tim Butara: And what are some of the things that can go wrong here? I mean you've already pointed out that maybe salespeople could try to do marketing to people that aren't sales qualified leads. What are some other potential pitfalls that you have to be aware of when trying to improve your alignment of sales and marketing?

Brad Smith: One of the key things I've observed over the years has been how sales and marketing teams and individuals can become almost wholly reliant on platforms and technology but to a level where they believe that the automation almost negates the need for them to have to do their job in a personal and human way.

Now I've got nothing against automation as a principle, as a process, and as a technology approach. Clearly, there is a time and a place where automation can work very well but if you think about what I said a minute ago about you know as a lead moves through each stage, for me the kind of the fourth step in aligning sales and marketing is defining what happens when a lead moves from each stage and the risk is if you do not do that, you simply either lose the lead, the lead loses interest in you or everyone's thinking everybody else has taken responsibility and ownership for it and actually nobody's done that.
So once you've defined what those lifecycle stages mean and what the, if you like, the characteristics are for each stage, then it's time to define how are we going to move a contract through the various stages of our lead lifecycle stage. So as an example you've got things like HubSpot.

I mean that marketing advertising sales all the time, you've got Salesforce, you've got Marketo, you've got Eloqua. There's lots of sales automation technology platforms out there and they have a place in the market where they can enable you to automate a certain amount of that one-to-one and one-to-many interaction.

But marketing automation falls flat on its face if sales and marketing are not aligned with regards to the types of messaging, the frequency of the messaging. What that service or that product is that's on offer and why that's a valuable… why it's a valuable commodity to the prospect that the marketing and sales teams are reaching out to. So some of the things that can go wrong is you start off with great intentions. Sales and marketing sit down, they have a plan, they have a strategy and they then start to plan through what those tactics are that are going to enable them to convert as much business as possible. But the problem is sometimes what to you or I may seem very simple questions are often missed out.

So as an example, what happens if a “lead” in inverted commas comes into the business but that lead, it's a very soft touch. Maybe they're not even ready to be a marketing qualified lead by the qualification process that's been agreed internally. Well, what happens then? Or another scenario; what happens when a marketing qualified lead is sales-ready?

They do want to pass it over so that the sales team can accept it as an SQL but actually, the sales team just can't get hold of the lead and you know they've genuinely tried, there's an audit trail, they've been reaching out by phone, email, you know social channels, whatever, and they genuinely can't get hold of the lead. If you spend the time defining, considering, really thinking all the what-if scenarios, what happens if this goes wrong? What happens if this person isn't available?

What happens if this person hasn't responded by this time? If you go through all of those scenarios what you actually end up doing is removing any unsurety or ambiguity later on in the process and you end up with a marketing sales and team working together actually supporting each other through that process which for me is the ultimate thing that you want to get to.
It's not a us and them, it's a new business, it’s everybody's business type mentality. We're in sales, we're in marketing, we work together to achieve the end game, and the person who opens the door and the person who closes the deal, they're all equally valuable, equally responsible, and ideally accountable to each other and that really would then lead into sort of I suppose the next step which is around accountability.

Tim Butara: Okay great. And you have probably worked with organizations of different sizes. You work probably with small businesses, with larger businesses. Like my kind of kind of intuitive thought would be that it's much harder to do something like that, it's hard to achieve alignment in larger organizations. That's probably the right assumption, right?

Brad Smith: It's a very fair assumption. The problem is the larger the organization the more cogs there are in the wheels connect together to get the mechanism moving. You also have more opinions. You have more potential gaps for things to fall through the cracks. When it works well is when you have a team that sees themselves as a team, not as almost Maradonas isolated big-I-am individuals that think that they do everything on their own and basically you know if they weren't there the whole business would fall down.

There's that age-old saying, you know there's no I in team. You need clearly competent individuals but the best sales and marketing teams are those who have the competency to understand how to bring the best out of each other. Can sales, can marketing align and make each other the best version of themselves?

There's an old analogy I remember from many years ago which talks about the flying v shape of the way the birds fly in the air and the way that they kind of move in that formation means that the lifting power of the wings not only means they go further, fly faster, but it also means that at times they're there to carry one another. So as those at the front who've done more of the flapping need to take a rest or a sideways step, they can slowly move back from the front of that v formation allowing someone else to step into that place.

And for me, sales and marketing needs to work like that flying v bird formation. Sometimes marketing need to lead the charge, sometimes sales need to lead the charge, but the point is they're all going in the same direction. They're all supporting one another. They're all looking for ways to complement, give each other a break, give each other a rest if you like but be there to support each other and help them get to that destination in the most efficient and effective manner possible.

And in order to do that, the step five that I mentioned, this thing of accountability, most larger organizations certainly medium and large organizations not so much to be fair some of the smaller ones will have you know internal SLA’s in place. They'll have service level agreements. They will have interdepartmental agreements that determine what has been defined as acceptable in terms of perhaps, you know, what constitutes a marketing qualified lead, what constitutes a sales qualified lead, as an example.

So if this isn't done already, now is the time to do it. And basically, the SLA doesn't need to be war and peace. There's some key things that every person in sales and marketing, you know there's sorts of stats, if you will, that keep people up at night.

So, okay what is our conversion rate? What is our lead to opportunity conversion rate?
How many people do we need to get in through the top of the funnel in order for us to convert x number of people, deals, or business that means that we're then happy, we've done what we said how to do at the beginning of the year? Another thing other than lead to opportunity conversion rate for instance would be, is our AOV, our Average Order Value. What is our average deal size?

Is there an opportunity to uplift that, to cross-sell that, to refer in more services and more products? How can marketing and sales working together help to achieve a greater number?

Having looked at the average order value, having looked at the lead to opportunity conversion rate, well what about the opportunity to close rate? It's all very well having a load of leads coming into the business. One of the things I work quite extensively on with agencies, let's say that as an average just keep the sum simple an agency wins one in five deals, okay?
Some are one in ten, one in six, one in four, some can do one in three, but the point is let's just say one in five. So if a hundred leads coming in the business at the top of funnel what that means is, that your lead to opportunity conversion rate will be the number of people within that 100 that you actually convert to being an opportunity.

So you might say well those 100 leads, you know, 60 of them became genuine opportunities, 40 of them didn't, and then your opportunity to close rate would be of those 60 that we saw, we demoed, we met with, we engaged with, we responded to an attender, we won 20.

So then your opportunity to close conversion rate would be one in three but if we said for the purpose of sums it was one in five, it's an interesting thing to consider here, a hundred leads come into the business, one in five of them you know you'll win 20% that means that 80 of those people didn't want to work with you for whatever reason that we may choose to determine or define having spoken to them.

Most agencies, most brands, most businesses who are selling a product or service, the first thing they're interested in is where do I find my next hundred. Where do I go and get my next hundred so I can win another 20? For me, it's about looking at that 100 and saying, how do we turn those 20 in that 100 that converted into 40? What do we do to double your turnover overnight, almost?

What do we need to do differently to convince 40 not 20 out of 100 that you're the right business to do business with? And that's where we're back into the kind of the seven-piece of marketing and looking at price, product, promotion, place and all those other things and understanding the target market.

But to go back to the sales and marketing alignment piece this is really important because if marketing have a really good handle on how many leads they generate and sales have a really good understanding of, of those leads how many go through to become a genuine qualified opportunity and then both sales and marketing understand how that translates into real-world business with an average order value size of x, suddenly marketing and sales know what they need to do in order to maintain that volume over the next three, six, nine, twelve months and then you can focus on putting your efforts into refining and honing your process to increase your lead opportunity rate, to increase your opportunity to close rate and ideally to increase your average order size value where possible which all, in turn, contributes to driving more revenue into your bottom line.

Tim Butara: Yeah. Those are some excellent insights. Sorry, did you have-- did you have something to add here?

Brad Smith: The only other thing I would mention around if you like, what that service level agreement needs to look like between marketing and sales.

Tim Butara: Sure.

Brad Smith: We talked at the beginning, step one; having a common goal. So let's say then that's a revenue goal for the purpose of the conversation today. All you would do is you'd say, okay our revenue goal in annual revenue, just to keep the sum simple, is 1200 pounds. It’d be lovely if that was all we had to achieve, wouldn’t it? 1200 pounds in a year.
So that means that our monthly goal is a hundred pounds. We need a hundred pounds of new names, new business revenue each month. So then the question is okay well how many deals do we need to close that volume and achieve that goal? Well if our average order value is 25 pounds per deal, we need four deals to achieve that figure of 100. But how many opportunities do you need to close that many deals?

Well if we win one in three then we know that we need 12 of those opportunities in order to get those four. How many qualified leads do we need to generate that many opportunities? Well, if we get to see one in five turn into an opportunity as well then we know we need 60 leads in order to generate that number of opportunities that will then generate the conversion that will give us the value that we need.

So, at the end of the calculations, you'll have something like marketing is expected to deliver 1200 pounds worth of new business opportunities per month to-- for sales to close. Sales are expected to close or convert that 1200 pounds. So in order to make that happen, we need x number of marketing qualified leads, in this case for the analogy, 60 which will need to convert to 12 opportunities, 4 of which will buy.

So a final service level agreement might strip right down to a single paragraph signed, agreed, approved, and aligned between sales and marketing that says every month marketing will deliver 60 qualified leads to sales, sales will contact each marketing qualified lead within 24 hours, and will document any reasons as to why they've had to qualify out of this elite or what they've qualified it in to become an opportunity.

This opportunity then in theory based upon the last 12 months’ worth of statistics will result in 12 qualified opportunities which based on our current close conversion rate should equate to four sales per month enabling us to collectively hit our target. So it's about making that marketing and sales piece a joined-up way of thinking. Getting agreement from both the whole way through the process. Not about doing it in isolation then telling the other department what it is they need to do.

Tim Butara: And probably the most straightforward the clearer the agreement is. Like if it gets lengthier it's just-- there's more room for error probably. As you said one sentence, two sentences something like that so that you don't stray… you don't get the option to stray off the line.

Brad Smith: 100%, and if you can nail that and it… to me really sometimes it is as simple as going back to those basics and asking ourselves, okay well what have we agreed to do? Salespeople and marketing people are happy to be accountable to something that is achievable and realistic.

So if you set someone a target and it's not achieved when it's not realistic we all know the reality of them saying, yes they can do it and actually being able to deliver it, it's probably highly likely that that would be what they would say and then everyone's setting themselves up for a fall.

Whereas if you've worked with the numbers, looked at what's worked in the last 12 months, look at how working back from that we arrive at that final figure that we need, in the case of my analogy, four qualified… sorry, twelve qualified opportunities that leads to four final deals that are closed, because you've got the SLA defined it kind of leads nicely onto step six which is; you've agreed this SLA, you've had this internal discussion, sales and marketing have both bought into it, they both agree the numbers are right, they both agree it's achievable because you've based it upon the real-world stats so now it's time to get some commitment.

You want to be able to hold sales and marketing together accountable to achieving that number, each agreeing that their part is crucial to achieving that. Now, this isn't a one-off you know conversation. Well we told you this is what we, you know, we agreed, you agreed on it, we're never going to talk about it ever again.

What we're saying is that this is a monthly recurring thing or a quarterly recurring thing some people use the term smarketing meetings, smart marketing meetings. I'm not a massive fan of the term, but it makes the point. Let's have sensible good use of our time meetings where we focus on; what were the results, what were we trying to achieve, let's review the metrics.

Are we missing out from a sale? Are we converting one and three anymore? We are actually now converting more like one in four or one in five. Are we getting the top of leads in the funnel or are we getting less but converting one in three one in two? You know you… the end result is what matters, but you do need to align and look at those metrics as you go to continually try and refine and hone the maximum opportunity for conversion. And if you identify and address where the problems are early on as the top priority then actually nothing becomes a surprise three, six, nine, twelve months down the road.

You can see from a commercial perspective the warning signs that highlight, you know, what we need to put more time and investment into content marketing or some thought leadership or some events or whatever it is that's going to drive traffic and interest in the product or service that you're offering.

A model that I've, if you like, observed, become aware of over the years, it's not what I did, I hasten to add, I've heard of this model called the “pop” model which stands for purpose, outcome, and process and it's a very good very simple model. Basically, if your leads aren't closing at the expected rate and you use this model of purpose, outcome, and process you can work out where the issue is.

So purpose; why is the close rate for marketing leads lower than we first thought? Stop. Fix it. Don't just you know carry on. Let's get the purpose right. The outcome; what is the specific action that we have to put in place in order to fix the close rate? Is it a people issue? Is it a process issue? Is it a market, you know, issue that we haven't allowed for? Again, don't wait six, nine, twelve months to suddenly work this out. If you're reviewing this on at least a quarterly if not a monthly basis you'll be able to identify these pain points early on. And the process part is about identifying the source of the problem, developing an alternative at times or another possible solution or strategy, and then create a very quick plan to implement that solution. So a great example of that recently is COVID.

When COVID came in and impacted businesses then obviously we have a clear understanding of the reason why the close rate for some organizations in certain sectors might be substantially lower. Travel's going to be impacted, people aren't going to want to travel that's going to have an impact. What are the specific action items for fixing the close rate?
Well, maybe you need to use this time to create awareness, credibility, visibility around your brand so that when people start to travel again your first thought in their mind is you… their first thought in their mind is you. And then the process might be you have to develop a possible or a different solution, create a plan to implement that solution as I just said, and come up with different ways of sort of skinning the proverbial cat.

There's very rarely only one way of doing something. So it's looking for other ways to be able to roll this out as a strategy, different channels, different opportunities that may present themselves. It might be through partnerships, through affiliates, it might be through a new marketing strategy, it might be going into a brand new sector that you and I can identify, there's a problem in that you can solve that you've never worked in before.

But whatever it is, it requires you to go through that model; purpose, outcome, and process. And if you do that generally it's a good way of seeing where we're going wrong or where we went wrong, if you do it retrospectively and nipping it in the bud early on rather than talking about it the following year and then starting apportioning blame. Sales didn't do this, marketing didn't do that. Which is the very thing that creates the divide and separate sales and marketing departments.

It's a shared problem. It's a problem that's halved when the two departments work well together. Focus on solutions. How can we as a sales and marketing team work toward making sure that this goes more smoothly next time? What do we need to do differently together to ensure that this time we do this better? They're the types of questions that will continue to align and bring sales and marketing together rather than creating two disparate disconnected silo departments in the business.

Tim Butara: I wanted to touch upon another concept that's quite crucial to collaboration and effective teamwork and that's psychological safety. How would you say that that influences the alignment of sales and marketing?

Brad Smith: I think there's a couple of sort of quick things; being understanding, being empathetic, demonstrating that you're engaged both internally in internal meetings and equally externally when pitching or marketing to somebody else. So as an example you're in a meeting, how do you demonstrate engagement?

Well, the first thing is, where are your eyes? Are you focused on the conversation in hand? Are you talking to the person showing an interest and listening? Are you asking questions to show that you're, you know you have the intention of wanting to learn from your fellow teammates? Are you also contributing to that environment? Are you providing something of value? Are you offering your input? Are you showing them that having listened to them you've now got something valuable to ask?
So you know your body language… is your laptop open and you know or shut? Are you making eye contact? They're really key things in a marketing and sales team to show that this isn't… if you're working as a sales director as an example and you've got this really core focus on how you should do something and no matter what they say, you ask the question you don't really care about their answer, they're going to sense that, they're going to know you're not really understanding, you're not really demonstrating engagement.

We've had a lot recently in the news and quite rightly so around the importance of inclusivity. That applies not just from having people of different ethnic origins and backgrounds and races but also, be inclusive in decision making. You know, make sure that you're getting everybody's input, everybody's feedback there might be a golden gem in the newest team member not just from the person who's been doing this job for 10-15-20 years.

So, making sure that you're looking for opportunities to draw out opinions, feedback, and input. If you're a leader it's only going to make your role easier the more that everybody contributes into it. It's going to help solidify that team mentality rather than it being a sort of a dictatorial type leadership role where you tell and you hope they listen.

And I think the final things around you know really fostering psychological safety is around showing that you're confident, you have conviction in what you're saying and what you do but at the same time, you maintain humility. You don't have to have an ego the size of a decker bus.

You don't have to, you know, appear inflexible in any way. You can be confident and resolute and have conviction but always being willing to change if your team comes up with something better, more valuable, or just a different way of doing things that hasn't been tried and that's where for me humility needs to come into every leadership and every agency and brand owner. If that's a quality that if you master, your team will love you, enjoy working with you and want to contribute to the overall success of that business.

Tim Butara: Those are definitely some essential pieces of advice, thank you. I think I covered most of what I wanted to talk about related to alignment of sales and marketing. Just before we finish the call I want to ask you more of a general question, I mean we did already mention COVID before and I’m wondering if you have any words of advice for business owners and decision-makers as we kind of… we've moved into the second half of 2020 and now we're kind of expecting the second wave of COVID. Like what's the number one thing you suggest business owners do to kind of keep afloat and stay competitive?

Brad Smith: Very simple piece of advice. Understand the value you bring to your prospects or your customers. Understand that value more than you've ever understood it before and then go and start giving away or demonstrating your willingness to provide that thing of value to others.

When you know what you're great at and when you know what you do that makes a difference, so much advice is around you know maximizing that from a cost perspective. One thing I did personally during the first four or five weeks of COVID was actually I chose to give away five weeks of my time which actually led to eight deals closing in eight weeks. So COVID has been a crazy time for most businesses.

I'm very fortunate that I was able to win and work with those clients moving forwards and I am-- I feel both privileged and happy that I was able to do that. But I was able to do that because I understood the value that I could provide to those agencies or to those brands and I was willing to invest time to help people without expecting something back.

I think in the time of crisis people are looking for people who are genuinely willing to help and people remember those who genuinely help them, and when the time is right, they will come back, they will refer you to someone else, they may usually use you or your service or your product themselves and if not they'll always have good things to say about you and the world of digital, the world of marketing, the world of sales is actually sometimes a lot smaller than we fully appreciate or understand and it's amazing where opportunities, leads can come from that you didn't even foresee or be able to forecast. And for me it's all about can you give away some of that value upfront and really demonstrate that you care about people and helping solve their business problems. If you can do that, you'll be memorable.

Tim Butara: Thanks Brad for the great insights and the great chat. I hope our listeners also enjoyed this episode and found something new and interesting that will help them, guide them through their digital journey. Well, that's all for today everyone. Have a great day everyone and stay safe.

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