Every business, every owner, every employee has lots of great ideas. Now the crucial part is how one should nitpick and prioritize their tasks. “Experience” is not getting what you wanted. You can hire seasoned mentors to avoid making mistakes, period. Hiring trained professionals saves you time, avoids costly errors and gives you an edge. If you think that doesn’t make a huge difference, well, think again.
At Align2Compete, you have access to industry experts who could drive you to your fullest potential. Today, we invited Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins, co-founders of the organization, to give you a run-through and a clear picture of what they do.
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A How-to Guide for Expanding Small Businesses with Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. My guests today are Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins who co-founded an organization called Align2Compete. Now, what Align2Compete does, I will let them describe this more in their own words than in mine, but the basic gist of it is marketing for small businesses and solopreneurs or entrepreneurs so they’re the ones that are actually trying to help a lot of you that are out there listening trying to get some traction, get your business going, getting noticed, and getting noticed is something that I think a lot of people oftentimes don’t think of. I know I haven’t thought of it nearly as much as I should have even though that’s a huge part of the battle. It’s very common to think a lot about the specifics of your product, what you want to build and even why, the why is definitely important, but, oftentimes, this goes, for lack of a better way to put it, on notice.
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Dave, Mike, welcome to the program.
Thanks.
Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
So let’s start with talking about Align2Compete. I introduced the topic but, of course, you know your business better than me translating a couple conversations we’ve had and what’s on your website. So what is Align2Compete about? What are you doing with your mission?
I guess I’ll lead off with that, Mike. In essence, we turn strangers into customers for small businesses. That sounds as a simplistic benefit but it definitely is the essence of what we do and makes our feet hit the floor in the morning. Now, no question, it’s more complicated to pull that off and probably the best question that we could ever have anybody asked us in return, “How do you do that?” And so we are a marketing agency and mainly a service agency that helps emerging small businesses get the word out and boost their familiarity and I think you had touched on that, Stephen, that that’s the biggest challenge, like I go to meetup groups, that’s what we do is, yeah, if you’re going to build a deck in your house, for example, and you could go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy all the wood and buy all the tools and, yeah, you’ll build something that’s a deck but it’s nice to have a contractor, if you will, or maybe a financial adviser that knows how to use the tools and what tools to use.
Mike and I talk about it a lot about we don’t lead with product, push product. We worked at organizations that were publicly traded on Wall Street, for example, that what’s the product of the month that they want us to push and I just don’t like to work with clients that way and I know Mike doesn’t either and so we really want to focus on what is that business trying to do and one of the questions that we’ll always ask is, “Stephen, one’s the lowest, ten’s the highest, how would you rate from a 1 to 10 the familiarity of your business?” and it’s always an interesting answer we get. Somebody will say, “Well, we’re a 3,” or, “We’re a 5,” and then we’ll say, “Okay, where do you want to be a year or two years from now?” Because we know a lot can change in even those timeframes. “Oh, I wanna get to a seven.” Okay, cool, get a gauge of how aggressive they want to pursue and expand the word. You might want to add to what I’ve missed but, anyway, this this allergy is doing a thing on me.
I’m just curious about when you say the familiarity, do you mean like how familiar people are with your business or how familiar you are with your customers and your market?
So every business should have a — Mike says it best, you should have a cardboard cutout or avatar of maybe three or four ideal customer prospects that you think, (a), you can help with your business, they’re a perfect match for you, near perfect match for them.
I guess the one thing that I get confused by a little bit is that why anyone would want to be anything other than a 10 on that scale of 1 to 10? Because I’ve had previous guests describe the idea of passion about your business and say if you’re going to start a business and they asked you on a scale of 1 to 10 how passionate you are, if you say anything other than 10, you’re not going to make it work. So what does it mean when a business says, “My familiarity is about a 2 or 3,” and that’s the whole cold starting, that big issue, but then they say, “My ideal is 7 or 8,” as opposed to 10?
It has to do with money and resources available, let’s start there. That’s an aggressive play and it depends, obviously, on, number one, how competitive of a field that they’re in or an industry that they’re in and so how much lifting is it going to take to boost familiarity to get them from a 5 to a 10, for example. If it’s more of a mature industry, then you need more money than God to pull that off. You’re spending money at the level of Progressive, Allstate, State Farm, for example.
And the question is less like what do you want to be and what are you, it’s a good framing conversation to start with just in terms of listening to somebody sort of begin to walk themselves into an understanding of the work that they have to do. Think about working with small businesses, most of the time is they’re not looking at generating 100, 200, 300 new customer relationships a month. Probably 10 a year. So, when you’re working with smaller businesses, the scale can be smaller, depending upon what you’re doing. Like, for sure, right now, we’re helping a local charter school who’s looking for school teachers, it’s a very competitive situation right now, and we’re helping them dip into four or five other states, they’re really going out there saying, “Hey, look, we have some pretty competitive salary opportunities here at this school.” It’s a small academy that’s competing for teachers in a market that’s very competitive for teachers. I think in the Denver Metro area, they’re known. When you get outside of Colorado, they’re not.
Oh, I see.
That factors into helping them develop an understanding of what it was going to take. Because, inevitably, more so with small companies, but always with businesses, they’re very aggressive in terms of timelines. They’re not like, “Yeah, six months from now, we would love to have some new customers.” And that’s why in the white paper really that Dave wrote, we have this picture of this farm and it’s like the farmer talking to the soil saying, “Give me the crop first and then I’ll plant the seeds.” Well, you can’t do it. Plant this, then the crop grows, because people are — and I don’t want to generalize by saying everybody but it’s difficult to sustain something when the results aren’t immediate. That’s why a question around what is your familiarity score in your own mind, it frames the job to do, to come in to somebody and say, “Look, it’s a six-month lift at a minimum,” if you really want to begin to dig in and get a name out and start to own some real estate for yourself, relative to the problems you solved and how you solve it. It’s not a single this or a single that, I’m not going to run an ad on Facebook, I’m not going to have a rapid little search engine campaign. It doesn’t work that way.
Yeah. And so you’re talking about becoming noticed, having people familiar with whatever business someone is starting. Now, my question is, how far does someone need to go with that? Because I know there’s some people that really want to take a business and they want to grow it, like gangbusters to be known throughout the world and other people that are more content with serving their niche, whether it be in their community or their one group of people that they tend to serve best. So, it’s part of this initial conversation as well as the initial conversation that any of you listening out there need to think about as you’re planning what business you’re trying to start or whatever initiative you’re trying to start, trying to figure out how much you need to be noticed, how much the world needs to know you for you to continue to fulfill this mission, this passion that you have.
Mike and I talk about this frequently. He coined the term “trial and sow, own your patch” and so you just spoke to that there, Stephen, in that, let’s say you’re just starting out, you’re in your first couple years of business, and the goals, you’ll want them to be achievable, more than anything. I mean, you all probably heard of SMART goals and that’s one of the acronyms, it’s doable, it’s doable over the next three, six, nine months. You can stair step your way to that. So, it might be that what’s good for you as a business is to use nextdoor.com where you can buy two or three zip codes and really then get known in those two or three zip codes because, number one, you don’t have to travel very far to service your clientele if you have to go to them or they have to come to you, it’s achievable. We talk about some that say, “Well, I wanna be known in the entire front range,” which we say okay, that’s Metro Denver Boulder, that’s Fort Collins, and that’s Colorado Springs.
That’s going to be a tall ask. It’s doable but you’re going to have to understand how much competition you’re up against and what type of repetition of frequency and we haven’t really talked about that yet but that is a tactical execution that is commonly done poorly and so what I mean by that is if you have a realistic patch that you want to own, it’s a city or a collection of neighborhoods or even zip codes, then you’re going to want to get some frequency, some repetition going. It’s just like if you meet somebody at a meetup event or a cocktail party or whatever, you met them once, second or third time, every time you meet them, they build up more street cred, if you will, because if it was a good experience, like, “Oh, it’s Stephen,” or, “It’s Mike,” you do that thing and, yeah, like talking with you then it starts to become a thing, that, “Hey, I hope Stephen or Mike are there at this party. It was fun talking to them.”
Yeah. I guess building relationships with any people, regardless of the setting, and something that some great speakers like Simon Sinek have pointed out quite recently is that it’s not a one and done, it’s not like a check off thing on your checklist or anything in the realm of instant gratification, it’s something that takes some repeated contact, whether it be being part of the same community group and showing up to that group or whether it be some of the campaigns that you’re talking about or a lot of the campaigns and many of you listeners out there are thinking of as well, like if you have a CRM and you do a weekly distribution or a monthly distribution, that’s how that repetition comes about.
And you have to be prepared to sustain it too. Like if I say The Strong Arm in the Colorado Front Range, I think we all know that that’s Frank Azar, an accident injury attorney, and we’ve known that because he’s made an incredible investment in soaking the Front Range, magazines, billboards, radio, television, he is really committed to a very consistent message and that’s what it takes. And think about that in the context of that geography that he’s blanketed, the Front Range, this Colorado Springs, not easy and not inexpensive.
No, not at all.
He’s a regional player. He’s not a national player, he’s a regional player. You’re talking about the region being Colorado. It takes quite a bit to play in a patch that’s relatively modest, like Colorado Front Range.
Yeah, let alone something bigger. You encounter a lot of people that don’t have the right understanding of what their patches or don’t have a realistic expectation around it and that could lead to spreading so many resources so thin that you end up really not getting any traction anywhere.
Yeah, that is a huge starting point for us is to really set that expectation and to walk people into what that really means, because you are talking about your ability to identify your ideal customer. It’s not as easy to do as you think it would be, you’re sitting there, and you really want to get into really identifying this so you can be very focused and very targeted. It’s committing to doing it over time. Because the thing that we battle the most when we get into these engagements is it’s one thing to say. “Yes, I understand I’m gonna do it for six months,” but I’ll tell you what, two weeks in, four weeks in, all of a sudden, my phone’s not ringing off the hook, I don’t know if this is working, it’s like — yeah, it takes a while.
It brings us back to the farmer that says, “I’ll start planting seeds once you start filling me a crop.” You know they’re thinking it and Mike and I have worked for some pretty big companies and have worked thousands of campaigns and you get into a cadence when you’ve worked with enough customers and if you have that broad experience of being in the reputations in the industry in marketing and advertising, helping businesses, that you see it all the time and we just addressed it up front to say you really need to know the game that you’re playing here, and I shouldn’t say “game” but it’s an aspect of your business strategy that is as serious as your light bill or your business insurance.
And it takes like, for instance, long before Dave and I were working together on Align2Compete, I’ve been doing independent marketing and I’ve had the same customer back east since 2014 and we do two email sends a month, we’ve done that since 2014. Of everything that they have, what they share with me is this is the number one driver of folks to the lot that buy cars. And it did not start there. It’s evolved there because we have soaked that patch since 2014 with basically the same tactic. And then you fast forward the clock. The dividends now are significantly higher than they were when we first started, because we’ve created massive familiarity. Now, look, this particular dealership is in this community so people drive by so there’s a lot of different touchpoints against this brand, but this is something that we hit the same people over and over and have for years and it really makes a difference.
So one of the things I think a lot of people are dealing with psychologically from a mindset perspective is the level of uncertainty as well as passion. People obviously feel way more comfortable with an unnatural system but system that the standard employment produced, at least for a little while, of, “Okay, every two weeks, I’m gonna get this check, every two weeks I’m gonna get that check. Therefore, I put in this, I get this out and I know what that’s gonna be.” What is the level of uncertainty if someone is starting a business and they need to get some of this traction? What is the true level of uncertainty that someone is facing with, because even the most risk seeking, risk tolerant person would prefer to not have that uncertainty, it’s just that they’ve processed it differently?
You got to know what you’re trying to do and that goes back to having realistic goals. Click To Tweet
So one example might be, yeah, it would be great to run a Facebook campaign this next three months and it led to X sales and this much revenue. Sometimes, it’s more gray than that, that the business might be better served in looking at, “Hey, I’m at,” pick a number, “I’m at 1,000 unique visitors on my website right now. I did this campaign. I did it for six months, I did it for a year. Now I’m at 1,700,” and so I went from 1,000 to 1,700. That is trackable growth as far as if it’s Google Analytics. And it’s more realistic in the world right now because we have a saying that there are more people not on your website in the world than are on it right now. So, that being the case — and then the other thing is we’re at a record time in the history of man of short attention spans. So, used to be it would take, for salespeople to get an appointment with somebody, it would take seven reach outs, and there was a Harvard study that said most salespeople quit after like the fourth attempt because they’re saying, “I can’t reach that woman, I can’t reach that guy.”
The ones that persist to seven get the most appointments just because of that repetition. So, back to what you said is that uncertainty, you got to be comfortable with the arena that you’re competing in, first and foremost, to say, “Hey, I realized I just started 18 months ago and I’m up against your restaurant,” or your golf range, whatever it is, you got to realize where you are and it’s true for any small business. I mean, it’s been true for us that, wow, through the content things that we’ve done, we’ve been able to get more familiarity and attract more eyeballs and more interest and that is a function of time. I can’t preach about this enough, time is your equalizer as long as you realize you’ve got enough resources to be in it long enough.
Yeah. Well, even Dave and I, we had that same challenge when we started Align2Compete and what we did was we relied upon networks that we had developed in an area where we had reputation already and called people that we knew that knew us to say, “This is what we’ve done, this is what we’re doing and we’d like to do it for you,” and, fortunately, it went our way. And then from that, you need to get very aggressive and be very consistent with your outreach and with your attendance and the things that matter because you can get that little beachhead, which I think a person starting a business, the little beachhead, know somebody, a beachhead to pull up upon, and then you put everything else up there. And, even today, I’m advising this small company in Arizona that they do Salesforce implementations for small businesses, which you think about among big businesses. These guys are small business and they’ve basically built their business on the back of three services contracts that they’ve had since the beginning, so that was their beachhead so they were able to pull that in so they had a little teeny bit of cash flow and then they’re going to leverage that. All you got once you get that beachhead established, is you got the story of the problem you’re solving for XYZ Corp. Because, inevitably, when you call people, the first thing they ask is who you’re working with so you have to have a story. “I work with this company and do this,” and that sort of checks the box of, “Okay, well, then, maybe you’re in business, let’s talk a little more.” I keep giving these examples and that’s not the only thing we do, but that was just what was happening today.
Well, it sounds like you had to live by your own principles in a way. You said you work with small businesses and entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, people like that. Is that part of like the reason, the mission behind your business of wanting to see a lot more of these smaller businesses thrive in a world where we’re seeing some increasing market consolidation, especially in some industries?
Well, the smart business person, we’ve worked with enough larger enterprises that you get to the point if they’ve got a big marketing department or they’ve got VP levels of marketing, it’s so codified, if you will, so solidified that it’s really more difficult to make a big difference to where if you’ve got somebody that’s either bootstrapping a company or maybe they’ve got some investor money and they really want to get it to the next level and you can see that they take in like a sponge in the meetings what you say and when you talk about tactical strategies. I like to look at Google, I call it Google footprints or curb appeal of the business. Many people don’t realize that their curb appeal is poor on Google. They might have a handful of good reviews and they might have some bad reviews or even links that they’ve never even gone to, they haven’t even Googled themselves. We’ll go in and say, “This is what your prospects are looking at. What are some things that, holistically –” yeah, we can talk to you about targeting your market and some frequency things that you can do but we look at extra things just because of our marketing experience and working with companies that we say, “Hey, we’re doing this and if you’re not doing this, you should be doing this.” Just by the relationship, we want to confer that type of value to where we have no interest in turn and burn, we really want to have customers that every year, we’re their guys.
Well, it’s interesting. That reminds me of even the trade-off that people will get with employment, whether you work for a small company or a big company, and a lot of things people don’t say or people will say when you’re just graduating or considering a career path in school is that if you’re going to try to work for a big company, you’re probably going to be a lot more in that burn and churn and these established processes and then it’s in these smaller startup companies or some of the companies that are way more decentralized that you actually get a chance to build something, to create something, to be like a co-creator on whatever it is being built and that’s a really important thing for a lot of people out there to consider, just whether it be what kind of job I want or what kind of clients do I want to work with.
Well, every business has its own unique challenges with customers and vendors. So, I have a lot of experience in the automotive business so I am very comfortable talking for a rooftop dealership or an individual franchise, because when I was with cars.com, we helped solve their problems and would even be out on the sales floor doing walk-in studies and interview the customers and hearing from the general managers, these are some of the best salespeople out there, they’re real businesses, these are some big retail businesses that have fierce competition, high operational costs with their inventory, for example, finance costs, that they’re under a lot of pressure. And it’s really fun when you can get into people that they get what you’re trying to do, they get marketing, they’re conflicted because everybody’s coming to them because they spend a lot of money on marketing of, “Hey, I’ve got the next best thing since sliced bread. You should work with me,” we call them shiny objects. That’s a real challenge. Not even so for those size businesses. They might have 200 employees.
Somebody has 15 employees or 10 employees, same thing is happening. Everybody’s calling about marketing, “I’ve got this, I’ve got that,” and so there’s this media fragmentation that has occurred during Mike and I’s careers that is completely different from when we started in the business decades ago. Clearing the desk, if you will, and say, okay, let’s go back to who your best customers are. Are you trying to sell Ford F-150 trucks or are you trying to get service customers? What is the business need right now? And then how can we align the business goals to tactical things that actually are going to make a difference day to day? And even dealerships get confused by this too because they get drawn over by, “Well, you need to be on all these TV and radio campaigns,” but, hey, maybe people are moving in from New York State or Illinois and they’ve never seen your TV commercials. What are you doing to reach those people? We’ve had some funny conversations.
To me, the small business is just more interesting. Dave hit at it on having that impact and being able to see that impact. This company that I’m working with right now, they have an e-commerce cart and a payment platform and they just raised a small amount of money, pretty good amount of money, friends and family round, they had purchased this platform so they’re a new ownership team and they’re coming in the marketplace and they really identified Magento as a group of developers they want to go after, they said, “Hey, come and start doing this work on us,” so they came up with the idea on GitHub, reading through all the posts from developers and then backtracking the developers to their offices and then contacting them through Outreach. It’s a lot of fun because it’s clever and it’s creative. We went and created a fiber campaign to get the guys to extract the data for us. I mean, it was multifaceted, multi-part. And then when it worked, it had such an impact. It was so satisfying. So, on our website, we try to do things that don’t just start with G and F so it’s not just, “Hey, let’s just throw up an ad on Google and all our dreams will come true.” No, it’s more fun because you got to get clever. That’s where the masses are going. Big money’s full of that thing. I mean, you want to go buy injury attorney on Google, good luck. That keyword is expensive. Is that what you’re going to go do? That just doesn’t seem satisfying to me. So, I like working with these entrepreneurs, these guys that just put together, they bought technology, they raised money and now they’re sitting around, they knew me through friends, they did outreach, we got together, we put together this plan. It’s fun. And then, ultimately, let’s watch them win.
So it reminds me of this trade-off that we all have in our head because there’s always a straightforward, I’d say, easier way to do things when you know what the problem is, you know what the result is and that’s pretty easy, but, sometimes, figuring out a way more complex problem and, believe me, we have tons of complex problems that we’re all trying to figure out. I have a number of them in my head at any given point in time. That can be really frustrating because you’re trying to figure something out. You’re going to try something, it’s not going to work. You’re going to try something else, it’s not going to work. But then when you finally figure out, it’s just so much more satisfying to have something a little bit more meaningful. Switch gears a little bit and talk about your origin story a bit. You said that you’ve been in the marketing game for a while, you’ve seen some significant changes, which we can all figure out at least have something to do with technology but also some cultural churn and stuff. What made you decide that you’re going to partner with each other and what made you decide to start Align2Compete as opposed to sticking with all the other options out there for marketing, the corporate businesses and stuff?
It was a big leap of faith for me. There had been always something burning in me to, at some point, be in my own company, be in my own agency that would — Mike talked about, draw on the different creative things that are more fun to do than just the mashing that you have to do at some of these companies, do more and more and more, Wall Street quarterly goals.
It’s fun to be creative and it’s fun, as Mike talks about, to come up with a creative idea that nobody had even thought about, just because we have a lot of experience working in a lot of different scenarios and with vendors that you know a person over here, you know a person over there that it’s not just one product that we’re always focusing on. And so having that type of creative license, that’s really the word for me, is it’s just been fun. I mean, yeah, not every day is swimming pools, ponies, and unicorns but — it’s a challenge to run your own business but I’ve had the most fun of my life. The things Mike and I have collaborated on, the different types of clients that we’ve worked with, and the creativity, more than anything, it pulls out skill sets you didn’t even know that you had and I think for anybody that’s looking to start up their own enterprise, that’s what you’re going to find. And I cannonballed, I quit my job at cars.com, perfectly great job, great company, and I said, “End of 2018, I’m done. I’m doing this, we get this agency, it’s called Align2Compete for me.” That’s how I go into things, I cannonball into the deep end of the pool. It’s the only way to go.
Hiebeler and I worked together — I was at Media News and he was at Denver Post, and we — which is the owner of the Post, and I was in the interactive group and then Dave was on the ground at the local property, we got to know each other and became fast friends and stayed in touch after Media News and after Denver Post. And then Dave reached out to me and said, “Hey, I wanna move into the entrepreneur life,” and I had been doing it for a long time. So we got together and had a cup of coffee and it was just a fun conversation and I have a lot of respect for Dave and what he can do and I wanted to do it so that was sort of the origins of the hatchling, but, yeah. I’ve been involved in three startups that ended up selling so it’s been —
Like exiting?
Yeah, yeah. Bezos acquired us. And then we went into MediaNews Group, which big giant company and it was a lot of fun and incredible period of life and then after that, I’ve basically been self-employed since. And that was 2008 that that ended for me.
And so, Mike, as a veteran entrepreneur, someone who’s done entrepreneurial pursuits, got organizations, companies built to exit, when Dave approached you with the idea, when he called you with the idea, how did you know, like is there something that you’re looking for in co-founders, people you want to work with that you know that someone has that mindset to be a good entrepreneur as opposed to you probably have heard tons of people that have an idea but probably not going to follow through on it?
It’s something that’s a little more evident now than it was then. A little bit of retrospect here. The reason it caught me was because I’m a big fan of Dave’s and like him. He’s a good buddy. Very successful guy. So that was enough. I mean, basically, you have to have that level of respect to come into something. I’m talking with somebody who can bring the heat. And then you have to sit around the table and you have to think about, okay, how do we complement? Are our skill sets the same? Are they completely overlapping? Are they complementary skill sets? One of us the outreach guy and the other the operations and it turns out that Dave is masterful at both, which makes my life super easy. He’s a real operator, real detail, real, just thinking operations and build all kinds of infrastructure that quite frankly I never built. And I was like, it’s fantastic. That’s a good idea. I’ll do that. Way to go, Dave. Do more of that. It started with us, with the base of friends, respect, mutual respect, and then something that we both had a big background in around demand generation, around marketing, around selling. It was something that we were both interested in doing so that was it.
And let me add to that, I think what makes any good partnership is there are things that Mike does well that I’m like I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole type of thing but he knows it well, “Hey, you go do that.” Other things that might be the same type of thought. And then things that we meet in the middle where we have a weekly call that — oh, my god, some of these conversations we have sometimes, it’s like, “Oh, we need to talk about that,” because that’s a current need that we’re finding on the ground with talking with people that we need to share our perspective on it so we like to — I call it providing insights, a background I got from cars.com, leading with insights, and that goes back to the challenger book as far as being a challenger seller. And it’s more than being a seller, you have to deliver value, whoever you’re working with. But you need to challenge your customers and a great way to do that is to lead with the insights about their industry or their business that maybe they know about when you bring them up, they go, “Oh, yeah,” and they tell their little story. Or maybe it’s a trend that’s changing that they don’t know about. And so it’s fun on the smaller businesses to come in with that challenger mindset to say, “Hey, I’m gonna find out –” I’m working with a guy right now that does business evaluations and it’s becoming more of a thing in that you’ve got startups that maybe have been three or four years going and they don’t even know how much they’re worth where the market or investors say, “Yeah, these guys have been doing this, this company is worth X.” From an accounting standpoint, that’s what he does and so, doing some things for content for him and some consulting and that’s a fun conversation, because this is a one- to four-person operation, he’s got a smart business idea and he needs help with communicating the word.
Content marketing is another effective form of boosting your familiarity. Click To Tweet
So, yeah, it goes back to ham and egging your strengths and views of the world. You’ve got this idea and that idea. And then power of three, I call it, where you come to give the idea, that’s where the magic is.
And that reminds me of what I hear about experiences. Took the leadership training course with the Adventure Cycling Association and they asked, “When you go on a bicycle trip,” which is what they do, they do long-distance bike trips, “how many experiences are there?” and people answered some numbers and they said, “The answer is N plus one.” Each person has their individual experience with this journey but then there is a group experience and so if there’s 10 people there, there’s 11 experiences on the exact topic. And so you founded this it sounds like at the end of 2018 or the start of 2019, and do you use your own personal journey as far as like how you got noticed as Align2Compete as an advising point, I guess, for lack of a better way to say it, for your clients that are also in that same position now where they’re saying, “Okay, I got this great idea. I know it works. I know I’ve served a customer too well, but now I need to actually get my name recognized”?
Absolutely, we do. Good example would be, it’s free, the Google — it was called Google My Business, I’ve spaced what they call it now, it’s just Google Business, but you can set up your profile on Google, that’s a real opportunity that many people, they might read a story about you in a blog post, they might see you in a Facebook ad, and then, eventually, they’re going to Google — either they Google your name directly or they’re going to check you out and so it then goes back to that Google footprint so I can, because of what we’ve built out or having content on your site, having a site that asks you to do something, Mike and I call it building a better mousetrap, that you can advise them to say, “Hey, I went on your site and I really didn’t see that you’re asking me to do anything or I was kind of confused about this page that talked about how you do roofing and how I get a hold of you,” and back to what you said, Stephen, you can definitely lend your experiences to say, “Hey, I’m not telling you just to tell you this, I know this works so that’s why we’re giving you this advice.”
It’s interesting because I think the other thing that you’ve alluded to a little bit here is also the power of having another set of eyes on what’s going on because people who are trying to start something big, and what it means big is it could be a small business but it’s still like big impact on your life, your community, and the people you serve, there’s often a lot of things to think about, a lot of things on your mind, and so there will be blind spots, people will be surprised, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my website doesn’t have a call to action on it,” like people don’t know where to click the button and I still see that pop up quite frequently, it seems like there’s a value in just really any conversation about what’s going on, anytime you have someone say, “Hey, you know, let’s look at each other’s plans and let’s look at what, oh, is there this thing that I didn’t consider.” If anyone listening to this conversation is in the position where they are looking to get noticed, what would be the best way for anyone that’s interested in talking to you about your services to get a hold of you?
You can first visit our website so it is align2compete.com or they can text us or call, whatever you feel comfortable, be direct, 720-218-2374. And then, Mike, go ahead and give your contact info.
Yeah, through Align2Compete, obviously, and then it’s 303-332-3370. And Dave and I are a couple of talkers. You got to know what you’re getting into when you’re calling us. We wrote a white paper and it really is what we think how we approach things. I’d say anybody that’s interested in that, read it, think about it, see if you agree with us, see if it represents the kind of people you want to work with, come and talk to us and we love doing that more than anything, talking to entrepreneurs, talking to people that have started a business or contemplating, they’re thinking about starting a business. And the variety of that is a ton of fun. Dave just found lots of interesting people that are doing all kinds of interesting things from speakers in helmets and exercise, this one entrepreneur had developed his own exercise gear and stuff and it’s all so good. I tell Dave the story about I gave up a long time ago pretending that I actually know what’s a good idea. I’m a child that grew up with pet rocks. You remember the retail stores, but they came in boxes and stuff and I said, okay, somebody had that idea, somebody had to say that’s the worst idea. Yeah, you’re going to sell a rock to somebody? And it worked. And I look back on that, I’m like, “Okay, I don’t know anything about what will work because pet rocks worked.”
It is tough, like I remember the first time someone tried to get me on to Facebook and they showed me what it was and I was like, “This is dumb. Why don’t I just call my friends or just like walk over and talk to them over there?” and I’m sure the first person to come up with like the smartphone had the same thought, like, “Really? You think people are gonna want to carry a mini-computer in their pocket all day long?” For those who have seen the recent Super Bowl ads, there’s a famous one for crypto, which has recently crashed, but the one with Larry David where he plays that character throughout history and you see someone presents like, “See? It’s a wheel, it can carry things –” Hit or miss. Yeah.
That’s funny.
So many spots, like printing press, he’s like, “Not your best idea.” Everything is and I think we all know people like that. The last thing I wanted to ask you about before wrapping up was some of these trends that you’ve observed in marketing. I think a lot of people can be a little bit frustrated by how wild the world of the Internet can be, given that, at any given point in time, you can get connected to any single thing and the challenge is finding the right connection. Do you feel like the world of marketing is really moving where someone can say, “Okay, I wanna connect with the type of people that think like this, type of people that talk like this, do these types of activities or are in these types of industries,” can get better over time as opposed to some of these blast campaigns you see where, I mean, like Frank Azar, The Strong Arm, is a good example, that billboard was seen by anyone that’s driving a car, they may never get in an accident, they may never want to get an attorney to litigate it.
The two big things right now is there is an abundance of rags to riches marketing stories, getting noticed stories, that many of these stories, and for anyone to be — they’re cautionary in that most of these stories, they’re great, they happened, but most people dial into those stories to where there’s not much backstory that it probably took that person four to five, six years to get to that point. And so there’s no acknowledgement to how much time or how much work to get to that riches story. And then the second, I’ve seen marketing, there’s been so much disruption, so many different places or channels that someone can market to that I don’t know if you agree with this, Mike, but I think it’s more of a time to get back to basics of marketing. And number one is know the profile, know the intricacies of who you’re trying to reach, how do they roll, that’s the best thing any business can do and if you haven’t revisited that, start this month, you’ll be happy that you did that.
That’s kind of my view of the world today. I freak out every morning when I’m on LinkedIn and Flipboard and I’m going through and reading this and some days I feel like I don’t know anything and I just want to retire, and other days, just like, “I got this, I’m jumping into this conversation, I got this,” because this is craziness. I think we all go through that right now.
The world of marketing automation has certainly made it easy to be lazy. We call it fishing with dynamite. And the problem with that, obviously, is it kills everything. So, attention has become something very difficult to get because people are very guarded, because so much time is wasted and time is wasted because people don’t take the time to really get to know you as a good prospect. You’re just, generally, in the profile, you’re a vice-president of sales and VP of sales, “Buy my product so I’m gonna talk to every vice-president of sales.” It’s just noise to most of them. I was talking to a company very recently, 220,000 contacts they purchased, okay, for 100 appointments. I’m just like how is that possible? Like you wasted everybody’s time. Well, it’s so inexpensive. I think they paid just a few thousand bucks for this contact data so God knows how good it was, how recent it was, and he infrastructure to serve it, they must have had some sophistication because Google and others are pretty good at streaming out the spammers, but to get to that small number, I’m just appalled. I’m like why don’t you guys really change gears on that approach because it’s not working. To go through that number of people on a list to get to that small number of what you consider to be prospects is absurd. Because what you’re doing is you’re wasting the time for everybody else because of all these people that had to delete, blow up, unsubscribed, stay away from me.
Yeah, so much of that. We all have too much in our inbox, too many calls, too many close labeled, potential spam even. I don’t need to talk to another goddamn person about my car warranty that expired. Absolutely we can all relate to.
And too it’s just this cascade of people that want to talk to you about a business opportunity. It’s like what in my profile suggests I’m interested in that? It’s just so easy and so inexpensive to just be lazy.
So it sounds like the main message for everyone out there listening, whatever your endeavor is, is to know who you’re in this business for, know who you want to talk to, and be discriminate about it every time you get a notification about something that’s inconvenienced you, unless it was something that you really, really wanted to hear. Dave, Mike, I’d like to thank you very much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes and wish you the best in continuing to level the playing field, bring some of these small businesses, some of these entrepreneurs, people trying to get noticed into a place where they can actually meet their customers, turn strangers into friends and customers, serve them the way they intended. And I would also like to thank everybody out there listening to Action’s Antidotes and encourage you to tune back in for more episodes where we talk to more people who have not only inspiring stories about how they pursue their passions but also interesting tidbits about what you could be thinking about yourself, such as who your customers are and how you can find a creative way to go about finding them and reaching them.
Thank you.
Pleasure to be here.
Thank You
Important Links:
- Align2Compete
- Contact details: 720-218-2374
- Contact details: 303-332-3370
About Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins
Dave Hiebeler
Co-Founder, Digital Analyst. He focuses on using his consumer market instincts and insights to crawl into the heads of what motivates your best prospects. He directly oversees campaign creative direction, results from analytics, and business operations. He has over 30 years of experience in marketing and sales with large-scale media channels. He recently completed extended tours at Cars.com and Trulia, a Zillow Company. He has a passion for competitive golf, and I have a degree in Economics from The University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.
His business philosophy is that you must provide value well past the price you charge, do what you say you are going to do, and nail the details. His wheelhouse is effective direct response advertising lead generation from consumers. He has deep experience in the Automotive and Real Estate industry sales channel customer attribution. Customers and colleagues regard him as a trusted, go-to get it done person.
Mike Higgins
Co-Founder, Digital Analyst. For the past 25 years, he has worked in all things digital sales and marketing. As a principal in Align2Compete, his focus is to assist the customers in developing a deep understanding of the consumer segments that comprise their core audience and then develop tactics to speak to that audience in the appropriate tone and language.
He also founded Brushfire Sales, which assisted companies in optimizing outbound sales channel efficiencies. Brushfire helped digital ad agencies with novel tactics and strategies to support their end customers. As EVP/COO of Media News Group Interactive, He oversaw tech strategy, product, training, strategic partnerships, and revenue for the 2nd largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. As a digital pioneer, he was on the ground floor at MapQuest and Weather Labs, a start-up that was acquired by the Weather Channel.