Insightly_Ep02_final
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Jordan Walker: [00:00:00] All right Alyssa, we're one episode in. This is episode number two. Are you ready?

Alyssa McGinn: As ready as I'll ever be.

Jordan Walker: Good, good. We should start by talking a little terminology. before we get too far, right? And I think one topic that you and I have talked about a lot over the last year and something that I think we're going to continue to hear a lot more about in the year of 2024 is centered around, what first party data is and how it exists within your business, especially [00:01:00] because there's a lot of data privacy regulations happening, which we will go into at a later episode.

Shall we start there?

Alyssa McGinn: We shall start there.

Jordan Walker: Alright.

Alyssa McGinn: So at the most basic level, first party data is your

data.

Jordan Walker: It is, yeah. Okay. First party data is any data that is given to you, your company, your organization, by a person. How does that look

usually?

Alyssa McGinn: They fill out a form on a website.

Jordan Walker: Yes.

Alyssa McGinn: They buy something from you.

Jordan Walker: Yes.

Alyssa McGinn: They even just come to your website. They like something on social media, any of those types of things. But also probably even more than that, once they are your client, and you're collecting data from them as they engage with you or go through your process or work with you over time.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, I like to think of first party data as any touch point that you have with a customer, even from the prospect level.

So let's say [00:02:00] we go to a networking event. I meet you for the first time, you meet me for the first time, we trade business cards. That business card is technically first party data, like whether I'm going and just putting the business card on my desk later and then sending you a follow up email, that follow up email that you then respond to, that's first party data.

Hey, I met Alyssa. Alyssa works at InfoFluency. She's in business development and I emailed her and she responded to my question. That right there is already that like activation of you've met someone, you got their information, and now you're starting a journey together. And I like to think about first party data as all of those touch points that take place from the point of, we meet for the first time, to you are now a customer, and we are doing business together, and then all of those nurturing tactics that could come into play as well.

Alyssa McGinn: So most of that would be sales, considered sales and marketing data stored in probably a CRM, [00:03:00] and then as they're moving through working with you, you're going to find some of that as well in your financial accounting system, and then probably a handful of other marketing platforms too.

Jordan Walker: Like Google Analytics, even though it anonymizes data.

If you have that connected to your CRM system, like HubSpot if anybody uses HubSpot as a CRM you can build HubSpot landing pages. HubSpot landing pages have the ability to tell you, hey, this person in your CRM visited this landing page 100 times. You should probably call them and ask them if they need help.

That is one very simple way that first party data can be captured. But it's usually you, the hurdle becomes, and this is where a lot of sales and marketing tactics really get focused, is filling that top of funnel. We need more leads. We need more prospects. Because once you have that in your pipeline, then you can start to engage that person and then receive all these other touch points.

The issue becomes though is ~that people, ~that companies get so hung up on that [00:04:00] formulaic approach of fill out the form, give us your information. Now I'm jabbing you with a marketing automation or, an immediate sales call or something like that. What we're not doing is we're not really analyzing all of those interactions in between to really understand.

Okay, how can we actually improve this experience? Nobody likes to fill out a form knowing that they're probably going to get a call immediately afterward, right? That's where that value add really comes in, but you can't understand what that looks like if you're not doing the research on what your, most profitable customers look like currently.

What do they want from you? What value have you brought to them? And I know we're now getting into tactical, conversation, but that alone just shows you the power of First party data once you really start to gather it and analyze it.

Alyssa McGinn: And to me that even brings up two sides of the coin is one is capturing that data because It's really hard to activate it if it's a business card that just sits on your desk or information that sits in one of your [00:05:00] employees heads is like how do we get that from

business card or brain into a system or into something where we can actually analyze it because if we can't analyze it, we can't activate it and so there's the capture side, but then there's also the activation side, which I know we want to dive into some activation strategies and different ways that, in this landscape.

I feel like that's such

Jordan Walker: the data universe.

Alyssa McGinn: The data landscape of today. It's such a chat GPT thing of me to say. Unlock your potential in this data landscape.

But, in all honesty, like as it becomes more important for businesses to leverage the data that they're collecting, because we all know it's easier to keep, retain, and upsell the clients you already have than it is going to be to ever get more clients and fill that top of funnel, right? But yet, it's still all about leads, but it's harder work and more effort to start analyzing your customer base and start to add to the services that they're already So I feel [00:06:00] like we have two sides, capture and activation.

Jordan Walker: Yeah. There's always a need to get more leads. That's how business is built and you will never have a hundred percent of the marketplace but to your point, ~if you're, ~if you have a customer base already. How can we actually be using that first party data to then hone in our energy on the right kind of leads?

From an advertising perspective, for the longest time, we've had access to what's called third party cookies. And we'll go into that in a much later, because you know I can go onto a ramble with this one, but we've had access to third party cookies, which are essentially little data points that all get captured while we're using browsers and apps and things like that, that gets sold to a middle party, that middle party sells it to an advertising platform.

Google has both first party and third party data, right? That third party data has allowed us to take the Lazy approach in gaining new leads. And lazy because we could easily [00:07:00] say, I want to target CEOs at a company that looks like this, that makes this kind of revenue, that has shown interest in purchasing this type of a thing within the last six months.

If you came to me and asked me to build you a campaign around that, I could do that with third party cookies. Those are being phased out because of data privacy regulations and, people don't want their data being used to have other companies make profit off of that just to then advertise products and services that may not actually be super relevant to us.

The point that I'm trying to make here, though, is that like the reason why that has not been, it's been successful to a certain point, but now it's being phased out because consumers don't want it anymore either. We've been barraged by messages. You don't really want to hang out on Facebook sometimes because you're getting a lot of irrelevant ads.

Maybe you looked at the one website that one time, and now you're being followed for, the next month consistently. That becomes annoying. That does not generate [00:08:00] revenue for that company. It actually gives a bad perception of, now they're just annoying me. I don't want this anymore, on the reverse side, though, If you're looking at your first party data, you're looking at your customer interactions, you're really understanding what do they like, what don't they like, what have they praised us for, what have they critiqued us for, how often are they purchasing from us, what else do they need from us?

That is a very different experience. Now you're not just barraging them with messages. That's where you can now get into more personalization. Hey Alyssa, I saw that you just bought these kind of shoes the last time you were on our site. Now you're looking for bags. We actually have a bag that matches those shoes that you just purchased.

You're gonna be like, good on you because that bag is hot. I want it. Maybe, right? You're closer to actually getting that purchase. Going back to what you said a little bit ago, it's you're always going to have a need to fill up that funnel, but now it's an opportunity to do it a better way and really, reduce the amount of waste [00:09:00] that you're going to spend in trying to get anybody who could fit in the net.

Now you're going after the people that you know are more likely to purchase because you already have purchasers just like them.

Alyssa McGinn: And it can also inform you internally of different strategies to take in marketing, so for example, at InfoFluency, we started looking at all the attributes of clients that we considered tier one, like our best clients, most profitable, stayed with us the longest, what were things that were true of them, outside of just their company size, outside of just normal attributes you'd look at, and one of the things we noticed was that all of our tier one clients were working with consultants that were another champion of our services in the business.

Jordan Walker: There you go.

Alyssa McGinn: So we were like, how do we leverage that? Because that's not something that you can necessarily deploy in, a digital campaign. So we're like, let's build a partner network and build and start to invite more of these types of consultants that are working with businesses that already [00:10:00] have a consultative approach that is required a lot of our services So I think there's even, so many different ways that you can approach the activation of what you find when you start to look at your customer base.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, that's such a beautiful example, because what you found is the partner network is a referral system. So then as you start to engage strategies with those individuals, they likely have additional clients that they're working with. Now you're really building up their partnership and their network to now become a part of your network.

That's what innovation really is, right? It's finding different ways of activating your message and your product and your service. Like the other thing that we've talked about before too, is like some of those insights will lean into different pricing strategies, maybe different package deals that you can offer.

If you're looking at just customer service inquiries, maybe you're hearing a theme come through in a lot of like customer service, like chats and whatnot, that now leans [00:11:00] into a new product that you could actually provide.

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah, and there's so much that you can do with starting to, attribute your revenue to the cu the customer characteristics.

That's industry, that's lead source, that's company size, that's seasonality of purchase. There's just so much that can be mined from starting to look at your revenue in attribution with your customer base, trends over time, over the year trends based on lead source, trends based, the list goes on and on from starting to understand who's our customer base and when are they buying and what are they buying.

One the cool analysis ~ analyses? Analysize. ~

~I don't know, we're the data people. ~

~I don't know the plural of that word, but the analysis is ~even bucketing your customer base into, I think we call it an RFM analysis. Starting to bucket them into recency, frequency, and monetary value. So then you start to bucket them according, I think the top bucket is loyal all the way down to lost.

And you start to see some of the clients that are falling off the edge.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, that's like the attrition modeling. I've seen that in other clients where they've been able, within their [00:12:00] CRM, and it, again, it doesn't have to be super sophisticated. It's just you're looking for those attributes that tell you either somebody is going to become more loyal to you, or they're starting to show signs of churn.

And so if they, and you can base that based off of like, how are they engaging with your product and service? How frequently are they? If they start to dip out a little bit, then maybe that's showing signs that they're going to start churning. So then how do you activate strategies to maybe get them more engaged again?

Alyssa McGinn: But back to the democratization of data.

Jordan Walker: Yeah,

Alyssa McGinn: if your salespeople have no idea what's going on with those people how would they even know how to approach those conversations?

Jordan Walker: Yeah, usually that might be a big sales meeting that you end up having to wait for internally. Where then it's just a list of people saying that, these individuals aren't spending like they used to last year with us.

What's going on? By the time that report is pulled, maybe some of those people on the list actually quit spending as much earlier in the year, but you're not having that meeting [00:13:00] until September. How are you going to go back and win them over and re engage them if there's been months where they've had opportunities to think about and reflect on where am I spending my money? Where am I going to spend my money next?

Alyssa McGinn: That brings up the real time of the data. And if the data sources aren't connected and in some sort of visual format, it's really hard to have real time access. I heard a really good quote from, it was a CEO of a company, and he said, last year's facts become, quickly become this year's assumptions.

And I feel like that speaks really well to what you're saying is that the cycle of reporting that we get into and that most companies are stuck in, honestly, is even if it's monthly, quarterly, annually it can be just a little too late.

For some of the stuff that needs to be real time and activated and when he said that I was like we need to put that on our website

somewhere.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, and that goes exactly back to why we're starting this conversation about what is first party data in order to make those informed decisions. If you think about the way that [00:14:00] we just engage with any brand or company, right? Like I may not need to call that salesperson, but I can go to the website and find more resources.

Maybe I'm looking for. I've been looking at campers recently, alright? So maybe I'm looking at use and care and maintenance facts of campers to help me make my decision on what I want to purchase or what I want to modify, that sort of thing. I don't have to talk to a salesperson to do that. So usually we think, oh we have to have that like human to human interaction, which yes that is always great, but if I'm not in a position where I actually want to talk to another human I want to do my own research, now I'm on your website.

Those interactions are just as important as that sales call. And I think sometimes we don't see that a priority to look at. But if you're saying then in your CRM man, I'm a camper company, Jordan keeps looking at all this maintenance and care about our campers. Maybe we should be sending her [00:15:00] information about how easy our campers are to care for.

How little maintenance you really need to do on the camper. How much you would maybe need to budget on annual maintenance. Like, all of those kind of decision making. Factoids that help me understand or at least work me along that journey a little bit further. Those first party interactions we often think, don't think about unless we're looking at how's our website performing health wise?

What are our top pages for viewers? And I'm not saying that any of those metrics are not good to look at, but it's surface level. That's just how do you optimize the site that doesn't tell you how to truly optimize your customer's journey.

Alyssa McGinn: And, for people who are selling B2B, there's a lot of data to support that B2B buyers are doing more and more research without wanting to talk to anyone than ever before.

One, it becomes valuable to give them as much information as you can but also, to your point, to be monitoring [00:16:00] what are they looking at. What are they downloading? What are they typing their email address in to get? Because that will tell you what are they looking for. But in, this gets into sales strategy, so I will digress, years past it's been, here's what we do, ~all the ~ so we're just trying to funnel everyone to the demo, get a demo.

And we still have that button on our website, schedule a demo, but it's like, how do we give them what we're hearing people asking, how do we give them that information? But then to your point, how do we see what they're looking at so that we can make the most personalized, strategic approach to reaching those people who are in the research phase?

Jordan Walker: Yeah. I go back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier with the advertising model. ~How it was ~how third party cookie targeting was really more of a lazy way of doing it. I think when you are taking more of a first party data strategy in your business model, especially in sales and marketing, you're not just about making revenue at that point.

Yes, every business is in business to make money. [00:17:00] We are all in business to get more clients. Given, that's a duh, right? But it transitions it away from us just being self serving to reach our goals and it transitions it more toward how do we create a better experience for that customer.

And so to your point, okay, maybe the free demo, give us your email and you get this thing, isn't the way to go. But can you offer them a different experience? Are you asking them to download a white paper that is literally the same thing as what your website already says? or the blog that they just read, or the video that they just viewed.

If it is just regurgitating what you've already given to them, you did not actually provide them value. And so this is where and we can get into this in later conversations too, but this is where like having your first party data in a way where you can learn about your best customers, like who are you energized to work with?

Who do you love? Who do you want to clone multiple times, for your business? How do you marry that then with good consumer research [00:18:00] that helps you understand their sphere of influence beyond just how they interact with you and your business? In the B2B landscape, especially, I get a lot of questions about CEOs aren't on Facebook.

CEOs aren't doing this. CEOs are humans just like everyone else.

Alyssa McGinn: They're scrolling Facebook at home.

Jordan Walker: We are all mindlessly looking at something sometime and true maybe that is not a channel that will turn revenue for you immediately but it probably is a channel that they're at least viewing and so all that is to say that if you are looking at their sphere of influence okay how is that CEO spending their day?

What, do they wake up early in the morning and start reading books? Are they listening to other podcasts? ~Are they, ~do they go on retreats? Or where do they go with their family? ~What are the,~ who are they as a human? And then how does that relate back to your business? That's when you start creating.

And it's not just about I sell you this thing, you buy this thing from me, I just give you customer service along [00:19:00] the way. It's no, I'm here to actually help you make your business better. We're now entering into a partnership because I've now given you ways that instead of me just saying, Hey, give me your email, I'm going to give you this thing.

It's now you can develop messaging and get creative with what are you truly offering so that it's meaningful for them and it's actually helping them make the decisions that they need to make so that their company continues forward?

Alyssa McGinn: And you could even do that same exercise on a business front. So you think about the type of business you start to say, ~what, who are,~ who is this business playing with?

What type of people does this business hire? You start to put the business in a persona, almost. This is a manufacturing company. Manufacturers need X, Y, Z. Oh, this is interesting. ~We have, ~they often work with an efficiency consultant. Or, someone helping them with strategic planning. That starts to inform it as you're trying to create partnerships or go to market strategy around

the ideal [00:20:00] client that you have named, you start to say ~what, ~who is this business playing with? And I think that, so it can just be true on the persona side. If you're selling directly to individuals, it can be true on the business side. If you're selling to businesses,

Jordan Walker: absolutely.

Alyssa McGinn: But to your point it's not a lazy way.

It's not an easy way, but it's an effective way. And if you'll make the investment of time, and sometimes money to get all of that sorted out. It's incredible for your growth and I think long term sustainability.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, this is another conversation that we can get into later, but it's that difference between are you looking for immediate gratification just to say we got a hundred new leads on the pipeline, just to find out that maybe only one of them?

~It's all ~it's amazing to me how often I hear if we only get one client off of this, that'll pay for everything. So we're going to pour all of this energy out there to cast this big old net to then go and try to grab as many people as possible because if just one of them buys, then we're good, right?

That is not right. [00:21:00] That's, you can't duplicate that success over and over again. That's like maybe a one, two, three time thing and then you have to reinvent the wheel and find something else to do to cast that net, bring everybody in, get that one. But if you really start from what we've been talking about, like truly get to know, develop that persona based off of the customer and the first party data that you already have and that you're gathering, start there, ~get the, ~give the time because then maybe it's a little bit of a longer sales time.

But what you're gonna get is quality in return and you're not wasting a bunch of energy trying to vet through leads that maybe you shouldn't have started talking to in the first place. But you did the engagement, you reached out to them, so now you've got to follow through.

Alyssa McGinn: I'm left speechless. From your crazy intelligence. I want to talk to you about, someone listening to this, it's okay that's great.~ How do I tech, ~how would I go about technically doing this?

Jordan Walker: Yeah.

Alyssa McGinn: Because ~I,~ I don't want to leave that stone unturned because I think that in theory, it all sounds really great, like we've mentioned.

But I want to give, leave a little nuggets for [00:22:00] how would you take a first step to technically implement this?

Jordan Walker: Yeah. Where would you start?

Alyssa McGinn: Broadly speaking, I would say that this, when we're talking about revenue attribution and we're talking about customer touch points and bringing all of that together all the marketing platforms, I think that's a beast in and of itself, right?

a lot of times it's really the simple marriage between your accounting, so like your QuickBooks, and your CRM and so what basically needs to happen is that those two data sources are connected, and you understand which of the points will give you the information that you're looking for, and you can put those into a visualization platform.

So there's, handfuls of tools that can be used for doing that, but that's technically how this would work on a very high level and I know people have done it in all sorts of different forms, but it's going to be really hard to see the full picture of your client base, and the full extent of your first party data without bringing together at least accounting and CRM.

Jordan Walker: I think that goes [00:23:00] back to our first episode of, it's the difference between just making ~decision, ~data driven decisions in a silo and really adopting that culture of bridging the gap between some of those sources. Outside of the technical like bridge that needs to be made here, when you were just describing that, the other thing that I think of is like a mindset shift.

So even with companies who maybe already have They're CRM and their financial data married and they're starting to look at what does that look like for, from a profitability standpoint? And what does that look like from a customer like purchase standpoint, recency, frequency, all of that kind of stuff.

The next question then becomes, okay how do we use this to make better decisions moving forward? And I always go back to, it's more of a mindset of we've got to get clear on what our goals are. And it has to go beyond just, we have to increase revenue by 10 percent year over year. Okay, why?

What's the reason for that? Is it because we hit a milestone last year so we just want to [00:24:00] increase it this year? Or is it really like a driving force of if we can increase our revenue by 10%, then we can actually hire this particular role that then can stand up a new division that we've been wanting to create.

That's a very different like goal to achieve because then now it's not just about looking at it of okay, who's our most profitable people that we can either upsell, cross sell, duplicate, go find more people that look like them. Yes, that's a strategy ,but now as you're thinking about that next step, you can now start looking at your data and identifying, okay, what do we need to be learning about now?

So that when we get there we can go ahead and make the next move. And so now that you've got this data brought together, you have the opportunity to say, now we're here's the strategies that we're engaging, but here's where we're going next because once we hit that milestone, we're going to be ready to roll.

And so then you have the opportunity instead of scrambling instead of having a reactive approach to now we've got to pull this report, now we've got to analyze all this data, you're now setting up a roadmap and you're looking [00:25:00] forward. We've bridged this gap, here's the next gap that we need to bridge.

And while we're working on this, we're now going to bring that together so then we're learning about where we're going to go next.

Alyssa McGinn: And the why is underneath the revenue growth or whatever the question may be can be even, bigger picture than that. We worked with a company who wanted to, use revenue attribution to prove out industry diversification amongst their client base to maximize their valuation for sale.

Jordan Walker: Wow.

Alyssa McGinn: So it's like the big picture can be so much more motivating. The why than just increased revenue.

Jordan Walker: Yeah.

Alyssa McGinn: Year over year. So I think about that and with the culture piece too, like everyone has to be aligned on that, right? Like, why are we trying to, understand the diversity of our clients?

Because anyone that wants to buy this company will have to know that our client base is not fully dependent on oil and gas. We have a diverse client base. Another case or example was this company that does aerospace distribution. They were gonna acquire a company, but they had to do some proving [00:26:00] out of their current product line to even move forward with an acquisition.

And so I think that there's even use cases past just growing to grow.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, absolutely.

Alyssa McGinn: Or even just to hire someone, I didn't even think about all the different ways that data could be utilized in M& A or sale

or anything.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, we live that world every day too. Yeah. It's just the possibilities just keep.

Keep coming up and even as you were describing that, I think it also relates back to that data governance piece and in a way it's correlated to, when you create a mission and a vision for your company and you have a set of values, like those are the things that when you're onboarding new employees, you want them to be bought into, right?

Because if they believe in our mission, we have similar values and we're all here for the same reasons then we can all move forward together. I think of that in the same way as what we're talking about here. Data governance has to be a part of that conversation, data has to be accessible, but if we have these goals [00:27:00] that we're trying to reach and we're communicating internally, here's why we want to reach them, this is why this is important to us because that motivates your sales team, that motivates your, marketing team, that motivates everybody who touches any piece of the business of wow, this is where we're going next. This is what we are a part of but if you're not sharing the data with them to then allow them a way to tap into it and help drive it forward, then you're gonna be waiting for them to wait for instruction.

Alyssa McGinn: The reactive workforce.

Jordan Walker: Yeah.

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah.

Jordan Walker: Lots of spin offs from this episode it sounds like.

Alyssa McGinn: This went in directions I wasn't expecting.

Jordan Walker: Oh, I know.

I think, based on what we've been talking about here I think, first party data, it's your customer data, it's all of the interactions that they have with your company and your brand, on and offline, they're willingly giving you these interactions.

What we're trying to communicate here is care about it and start paying [00:28:00] attention to it. And like you said, start simple by first marrying your CRM customer level like information with your financial data because that alone can start giving you so many powerful insights to start taking action from.

Alyssa McGinn: Mic drop.

Jordan Walker: Boom. Any other final thoughts before we conclude today?

Alyssa McGinn: ~No, I think, ~

~well, Yes. Yeah, I mean,~ as we're gonna continue to say, getting started, bringing this to someone above you if you are not in a position to make these moves, or if you are in the position to make these moves, getting in there and getting your hands dirty is gonna be the first step.

But as always, if you have any questions or you find yourself in a scenario that you want to troubleshoot you can reach us

at

hello at insightlypodcast. com.

Feel free

to just say hello shoot us a scenario or a question that you want us to answer on here. We'd be happy and we would really enjoy it to interact with you guys.

Jordan Walker: Yeah. Hopefully you've recognized by now that we actually just really love talking about this. So give us all the problems.

Alyssa McGinn: [00:29:00] Please.

Jordan Walker: All right. See you later.