Are You Signalling That You're A Thirty Bob Company? – Episode 147

You know that. Like they say, the important thing with advertising and marketing is repetition. People need to see your brand over and over and over again. If you are annoying them over and over and over again, is it always a bad thing? It feels like it probably is. But is it?

I don't think it's really dependent on context, isn't it? Like people who do it really well are like, I know we bitch about them sometimes on this show, but like SaaS platforms like Monday and things like that, because they're normally quite smart about it. Generally, you'll see their adverts six or seven times throughout the day, but it will always be in the context of something to do with work. I very rarely have to skip Monday adverts in my personal life outside of work, which means that, you know, although it's slightly frustrating, I'm always seeing them in the context of work and I'm thinking, oh yeah, Monday, you know, I see that all the time while I'm at work. The repetition is good and it works. But when as soon as they start sort of getting in the wrong place and appearing in your private life, You're like, oh, these guys are annoying. Good, because it's going to tell a very racist anecdote about my grandmother, about her being racist.

Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And you interrupt us as we talk about Alex's racist granny.

She is she is quite racist. She's of her time.

Of her time. Yeah. There is, there is that, um, to those of you watching in black and white, the pink ball is behind the blue. As somebody once famously said, um, the reason we, Alex and I went to a meeting this morning with a potential client, which would be nice to and surprisingly in Aberdeen and we don't actually go into Aberdeen, see clients very often because we tend to be working with companies outwith, as they say, in these parts. Um, so if anyone's wondering why Alex is dressed as if he's up on a GBH, um, assault charge and trying to look credible to the jury. Um, that's why I.

Thought I'd go to jail for.

And if, um. Yeah, if you're just listening to this, then, uh, then Alex is wearing a nice, a nice pink number. Uh, we don't see Alex in a shirt very often. And we see me in a shirt. Never. These days I've gone through my shirt phase and I don't do shirts anymore.

Shirt phase. Like your goth phase?

Yeah, it's goth, then shirt. And then I did a bit of.

Yeah, a bit of Burberry.

Bit of emo. Is that the same emo and goth? No, no. Are they not? Oh no. Oh, have I just offended about a million people?

Yeah. You can't, you can't do that. You can't go calling goths emos.

Yeah.

Not on.

Um anyway, um something that I this isn't new, but it's it's it's something that I've been researching more and more is, is one of the topics I want to chat about today because one of the things, right. How can I put this when we're speaking to people, We're not ever trying to flog them a new website. We never want to do that. What we want to do, as it says clearly on our home page, is help tech and engineering companies generate business online. That's what we want to do. We generally do it using websites because even if you're using social media, you tend to be sending people somewhere to show them something, video or a piece of content, whatever it might be. So a website, a good website is at the center of most credible businesses, you might say. But it's always a bit to me, always feels slightly awkward because I can look at a company, um, and, and quite quickly recognise maybe that their website is rubbish.

Mhm.

But at the same time, that still doesn't mean I want to flog them a better website. I want to understand the business, develop an understanding of what they're trying to achieve, where they're trying to get to and everything else. And you know, and quite often that will involve revamping the website, but it's never it's not our opening gambit. It's not. It's not what we're trying to do. I mean, within this quite compact organisation of twelve people, we have got designers and developers who love building websites and web apps and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And we've got that fantastic capability and we like doing it. And we like to keep those people gainfully employed and give them nice work to do. But fundamentally, it's not the thing that we're trying to, to sell.

Sell.

If you like. But if you flip that around and somebody says, well, okay, you know, we've got to the point where you've decided you've said my website's rubbish. It might be rubbish because it's badly put together. It might look quite nice, but it's badly put together or it might actually not even look quite nice. And that's where I'm kind of going with this. So is I think if I was asked to try and communicate, You know why a website should look great. You know why not just white words. Take it or leave it, you know? This is what we do. Do you want to buy it sort of thing. You know why? Have something that looks great. And it's a combination of marketing. And you heard me say this in the in the meeting we had with the potential client this morning and signaling. Yep. So I think for a long time that was kind of lost on me a little bit, if I'm being brutally honest. So a beautiful website is nice to look at, but you can have a beautiful website that doesn't generate any business at all, but it might still have a very positive impact on that business. If it signals that this company's got resource, they've put that resource, they've got so much resource to spare that they've put they've put it into this, um, luxurious website. Therefore, they must be pretty credible because they've got money to spaff on things that are not important. If you see what I mean. So what I'm driving at is, you know, the difference between marketing and signaling.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because I said, if you remember this morning, we said that like this company had produced a video which they kindly showed us. And in the video, it showed people doing the thing that this company does and the lorries that this company own driving around, etc.. But on their website, all they had was some sort of almost avant garde abstract video of the machines doing what they do and not not really enough, not really enough.

Not enough people realise it either.

Certainly nothing of the lorries. And you know, and I made the point to, to, to the guy we were meeting with, lovely guy that, you know, on the one hand, these vehicles are going around with your brand on them and a message and that's like messaging, storytelling, whatever. But the fact that you've got this fleet of rather nice expensive lorries, not tatty old things that are dropping apart signals that you are a big, credible company. That difference is quite stark, isn't it?

I think like the analogy, because we're contractually obliged to make at least one car analogy per show.

Well, I've.

Already done it.

No, no I haven't. I mentioned lorries. It's not the same as a car analogy, is it? Oh.

Yeah. It's a little bit like if um Bentley didn't invest in nice showrooms. Right. It's like there's a shiny showroom help you sell a Bentley. Well, technically no, because somebody come in to buy a Bentley based on the technical specs and your capabilities and what you can deliver. But in reality, if you walk into a grubby old warehouse and somebody's in jeans and a t shirt was like, yeah, this is a Bentley, it's half a million pounds. You'd be like, no, you know, I'm going elsewhere. And I think it's that really like a website does many things. Part of it is telling a story. But like you say, part of it is just setting expectations. What kind of company is this? What bracket do they fall into? What should I expect from them? And I think that's where, you know, just sort of like messy designs, poorly thought out designs. Things that look ugly really sort of, unfortunately do sort of massively inhibit your ability to sell something to someone. Yeah.

Because if you look at other, other, um, uh, examples, you might be, I don't know, five thousand quid to be on an electronic billboard next to the motor next to the motorway. And how effective is that? Don't know. Might, might get the message across. People might get home and immediately go to Google or go to their laptop and go to the website that you somehow manage to communicate on this billboard as they rocketed past at seventy miles an hour plus. Um, but more importantly, they might just see red evolution on a billboard and, and subconsciously they're going, these guys can afford to advertise here. They must be doing well. They must be pretty good. If they're doing pretty good, they must be if they're doing well, they must be pretty good. And if they're pretty good, then maybe I'm going to speak to them about that project or whatever it is.

Yeah. It's ultimately you're putting a shop front up on you and saying, this is what we're about. This is who we are. And if it doesn't look credible, if it doesn't look like it puts you in the right bracket, you will lose customers because of it. I have a quite a funny anecdote from back in days of yore when I used to freelance about this, though, where I had a guy who was a very boring business. He sold drainpipes, he sold cast iron drainpipes, and he was obsessed.

When I was a lad, drainpipes were jeans. They were stacked with drainpipes. Yeah, I'm gonna get a pair of drainpipes.

These were actual drainpipes for holding water.

You'd look stupid walking around with them on your legs.

I'm glad we can have these conversations. But he was obsessed with his catalogue. He produced this catalogue and he sent it around to all of his business clients. He was like, it's got to look perfect. You know, if they open the catalogue and it looks shit, they won't buy anything off me. Don't care about my website. Websites are silly. They're a waste of time. Nobody buys off the internet but my catalogue. It's like everything you put out there, everything you put out there is being assessed by people. People look at it and subconsciously or consciously they'll say, oh, well, you know, that looks like somebody I'd like to do business with or Jesus, what an idiot.

And don't you think this comes to the fore in a digital context with display advertising? Yep. Because it means that you're putting your brand on some of the world's shittiest websites that have only been set up to display adverts. And Google's quite happy to do that because if it shows your advert a thousand times, then you pay it whatever per one thousand views and it doesn't care where they are and you are potentially trashing your brand. And that goes for remarketing. You know, if you're using remarketing, which means your brand crops up on, you know, you know, fresh lugworms available every day for fishermen sort of thing. Do you know what I mean?

Well, the worst thing about the remarketing thing, I think, is, is when people don't, um, restrict placements properly. And pretty sure if anybody listening to this is doing any remarketing and you go and look right now and you Google ads, what you'll see is that your remarketing ads are frequently appearing in mobile games.

Yes.

And this is to me, this is like the most reputationally damaging thing in the world because it's like, I don't really play mobile games. But if you imagine somebody sat on the sofa playing Candy crush, and they've just finished a level and they want to get on to the next level, and you pop up an advert and you're like forcing them to look at your brand. Yeah, there's nothing good about that. That experience, like forever, they are gonna think, oh my God, does that. Not even a brand that ruined my day.

You know that like they say, the important thing with advertising and marketing is repetition. People need to see your brand over and over and over again. If you are annoying them over and over and over again, is it always a bad thing? It feels like it probably is, but is it?

I just think it's really dependent on context, isn't it? Like people who do it really well are like, I know we bitch about them sometimes on this show, but like SaaS platforms like Monday and things like that because they're normally quite smart about it. Generally you'll see their adverts six or seven times throughout the day, but it will always be in the context of something to do with work. I very rarely have to skip Monday adverts in my personal life outside of work, which means that, you know, although it's slightly frustrating, I'm always seeing them in the context of work and I'm thinking, oh yeah, Monday, you know, I see that all the time while I'm at work. The repetition is good and it works. But when as soon as they start sort of getting in the wrong place and appearing in your private life, you're like, oh, these guys are annoying. And then.

Mhm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, what was I gonna say? I, I must admit, because I refuse to pay for YouTube. Maybe you should, but I don't pay for it. I don't know if you do. No. Um, so I put up with the adverts and it is like, yeah, Monday dot com comes up a lot in those adverts. Yeah.

Where their target markets.

Yeah. I'll tell you an annoying one that just now every time I, I tell um um the, the, the Amazon speaker lady Alexa.

Oh yeah.

Every time I say Alexa, play LBC, the first thing that happens is LBC. Send me a canned. Did you realise you can connect your Alexa account with your with your WhatsApp or whatever, and then you can just tell Alexa to send you send us messages and you'll get, you know, be so good if you can do that every single time. I'm just like LBC, you know, stop trying to get me to do something I am never gonna do.

I love the just just stop.

Just when I say you play like play like. Not an advert that I am never going to take any notice of apart from to mention in this podcast, because it is really annoying.

Things that tech companies do that pretend to make your life simpler and are actually just very annoying. It's like, I don't know if you get the Google Meet pop ups at the moment where it's like, you can start using gestures now in like a big text box at the top of my screen, I'm like, I don't care, I never cared, I'm never going to care. Stop annoying me. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think there's a lot of things that brands do like that, that sort of ruin their reputation in people's eyes. Um, certainly a lot of people who use back to your point about remarketing, reuse it, uh, that use remarketing badly, um, do definitely alienate customers for sure.

Yeah. Okay. I'm just looking for a name, so keep talking, try and be interesting.

Try be interesting.

I know you'll struggle with that.

Yeah, I've got nothing. I'm just looking.

I'm just looking for something. Um. It was, um. Yeah. Here we go. Um, yeah, I mean, I was listening to, and I recommend this podcast, nudge the nudge podcast because it is fantastic. And I was listening to the episode with, um, Tom Goodwin and he was basically the episode's called, you know, we've tried to be somewhat controversial with our podcast titles. Sometimes I quite like the last one is marketing just a bunch of tools using a bunch of tools. I thought that was quite good. Anyway, ninety nine point nine percent of ads are genuinely awful. It's caught by Tom Goodwin, and he was talking. And then in that podcast, which is yeah, you know, it's twenty nine minutes of your life, which you will not say at the end. Well, I'll never get that back. It is just a brilliant podcast and so insightful. Um, but in that, um, he talks about, um, frantically going back to his notes that, you know, part of the reason for marketing is waste, you know, you should be marketing should be wasteful because that is part of the signaling, you know? Yeah. Like I'm, I'm spending a lot of money being in front of people in these expensive places. And it may not result in a direct sale right now, but it's actually sending out a really powerful signal that I can afford to waste that money. We are a brand that's got resource.

And, you know, it's interesting because it's cheaper now. I mean, especially with like being able to use Google ads to put adverts up in YouTube videos for like literally pence per view and that sort of thing. I think it's cheaper than it's ever been before to reach into people's homes and show them something. But we still have that sort of innate respect for brands that can advertise to us. I get exactly what you mean. You know, when I see people advertising on YouTube, the assumption it might be initially, wow, this is really annoying. But the next assumption is, you know, this is a legitimate company. You know what I mean? You don't see them and think, oh, well, you know, these guys have clearly got no money. You think, oh, okay, right. They can afford to, to do this sort of thing. So yeah, one hundred.

Certainly in the past, over the years, from time to time we've been confronted by Spurs, certainly when we were a bit smaller, we've been confronted by see, I've been looking at your website and I was thinking of getting in touch about a piece of work, but then I've checked you out on companies House and you turn over doesn't. It's out of kilter with what you what you actually look like. You look like you're way more successful, way more. So, you know, you can always dig in anyway. But, um, I mean, that situations, you know, thankfully changed a bit for us, which is great, but, um, I can understand that, you know, you know, we looked, we're better than we were. Excuse me, we're better than we were. Um, yeah. You know, maybe we'd, we'd put a lot of resource into our online presence, as you would expect us to do, because, you know, it's one of the things we do, but.

There's still a massive difference between that, I think, and what we were talking about in the last podcast was this, which was this whole idea of sort of fake it till you make it and sort of slightly overexaggerating your position in the market and trying to look bigger than you really.

Think. That was the time before, actually, we put two out last week, and I think it was the one before it where we were talking about dishonesty and lost. It's been confirmed by the operative.

You're gonna get stabbed.

Yeah, I deserve it.

Um, yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a huge difference between, you know, doing the bare minimum foundational stuff, like making your website look good, making it look like you care about your presence. I think this just goes back to the fact that, you know, like a homeless person can, can dress up in a really nice suit and people will take them seriously because they've put the effort and the time into doing that. It's very different from Overexaggerating and filling your CV with a load of rubbish. It's just, yeah, like you said.

So in a very practical sense then is, you know, if somebody says, yeah, but you know, you're going to charge me ten grand to do a design and then you're gonna charge me twenty grand to build the CMS templates or whatever in order for me to have this website, which I've then got to populate, or I'm going to pay you another twenty grand to populate it all. I can just use an off the shelf design and an off the shelf template, you know, is the is the obvious answer to that is the obvious comeback to that. It's like, yeah, if you, if you want to send out the message to signal to your market that you haven't got any money and you've actually used an off the shelf template for your website, then yeah, you go ahead and see how much good that does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is this is also that thing that is just, I think, true in life in general, which is like, you can wear a nice looking watch that's like the uninformed will just, oh, it's a nice watch that. But people who know, know, and instantly, as soon as you're sort of like wandering about with you, sort of like pseudo Rolex on people who are in the know think that guy's a poser and a bit of an idiot.

Well, isn't this back to the lack of what did I call it? Um, in, in the, the guy that sent us that it looked like a handwritten envelope and it looked like a handwritten Post-it note. And it wasn't, what did I call it? I said, I got the word wrong, didn't I, but didn't realise I'd got the word right. But yeah, you know, it's funny. I mean, I haven't got any very expensive watches. I've got watches that are maybe worth a thousand quid or something. I certainly haven't got any of.

The normal person watches. Yeah.

Patek Philippe or whatever with Philippe Patek. I don't know which way around it is. Even I'm not.

Submariners.

But anyway. Yeah, but it is, it is right. Because you can see sometimes, you know, when I'm out and about and I'll see somebody like, what's a nice watch? And then somehow you get a bit closer maybe, you know, like being like a watch stalker. Yeah. And you go, oh, actually, it's not an expensive watch. And suddenly you feel differently about it, you know? And it's ridiculous.

This is the thing. You can have a nice first experience on a website. You can open it up. You think, oh, this looks great. You click through to a content page, it looks like an absolute dog's breakfast. And you think, okay, my initial assumption was that these guys were across it. They were competent, they knew what they were doing. And now I think they've sort of half arsed this. And maybe my perspective on that is different because I'm in the industry, but I don't actually think it is. I think a lot of those studies that we refer back to all the time about, you know, first impressions on websites and you're only having a few seconds to convince people. I think humans are fundamentally very good subconsciously at recognising patterns. And I think we have a really good radar for bullshit. And I think as soon as you land on a website that looks a bit half arsed, you think, oh, probably wouldn't trust these guys. And I don't think people would necessarily be able to communicate why that was. But I think it's very true.

I do. And the one exception, which I think I've spoken about before, maybe on the podcast or not, was I for a while, I was kind of quite into my swimming and I was going swimming every day and doing, you know, the lengths and all the rest of it. And I needed to get some swim fins and basically, and I finished up buying them online, not surprisingly, from a website that looked like it had been built in nineteen ninety six. I mean, it was appalling looking website. It worked fine, but there was something about it. I just thought, this is a little business, a little shop somewhere that I've got a website and if you went in there would be informative. There would be fantastic. I just for some reason, my brain just told me that story and I bought stuff from them. And right enough, it arrived the next day or whatever. It was fantastic service. The kit was exactly what I wanted, but their online presence was just basically clipart. It was horrible.

But I think that actually that is the whole point that we're making. I think I think that's a perfect example of how effective this stuff is, because how much did you spend? Thirty quid and you wouldn't have spent three hundred quid on that website. Not a chance. Okay, but this is my point. If you're in the business of selling people cheap things that they could probably buy elsewhere.

It doesn't matter.

Well, the opposite, it's actually probably to your strength to appear slightly seedy.

You think that's what Ling did at Ling's cars?

Somebody who? Yeah, if you can. If you can make people think, oh, okay. I'm on the website of somebody who is fifty years old, they drop ship out of their garage, but they've been doing it for the last twenty years. I'll probably do it, you know? Mhm. That's still signalling. It's it's very effective signalling. I think it's part of the reason that eBay still looks so crap, for example, because I think if eBay looked super slick and super shiny probably wouldn't work quite as.

Good question. Why is my go to Amazon and eBay? Well, because often it's available on eBay. The delivery is pretty good.

Yeah, I'm getting like knockoff Chinese.

Crap on eBay. I bought motorbikes on eBay like without even seeing them.

But but well, the answer is because Amazon spend literally more than any other company in the entire world on CRO. Effectively, they're absolutely enormous amounts of money that they plow into how to make this feel trustworthy, how to make it feel like it's real, how to make people buy.

So if you're building e-commerce, just basically go and copy Amazon.

I mean, I mean, again, back to the whole thing. You probably couldn't sell big ticket items through Amazon. It still has that problem where it looks cheap and therefore is great for spending twenty quid. Terrible. If you want to buy an Omega watch, you know, you just never do that. You go to somewhere that looked flashy and slick. And I think again, it's just it's just signalling. It's like, it's like understanding what your customers expect to see, right? If Tkmaxx suddenly had like, you know, glossy black floors and floor to ceiling mirrors, you'd be like, well, what? Why are these jeans T.

Max is a good one because, um, it doesn't have a down market feel about it.

No, it just sort of feels.

It's not bog standard. It's not, um, Harvey Nicks darling, but it's not, it doesn't feel downmarket. It's just, you know, it's not even badly presented.

It feels like a supermarket.

Yes.

And I think that's probably what they've gone for. Yeah. They just want it to you to not really notice the shop and sort of focus on the great deals.

So do you think like, I mean, just digging into this a bit more, do you think like with with Aldi Lidl esque type type places, are they using signalling very cleverly by saying, look, you can clearly see that that we are just piling this stuff up for you to shovel into your bag and buy off us, and we're not even going to pretend to try and make it look nice. And that's how we keep the prices.

Because that's exactly.

And your brain's going, it's cheap in here, but but it looks cheap, but it is cheap. And I'm going to save a fortune by shopping here. Yeah. And this is what I expect it to look like because of that.

If you go, if you walk past anybody on the street and you're like, why is Aldi and Lidl cheaper than Tesco? They'll say, oh, well, there's no checkouts. You know, the whole checkout frenzy thing. And also like they just whack stuff on the shelf and it doesn't look nice. And Aldi and Lidl perfectly explain their sort of price advantage like that. If they didn't do that, people are like, oh, that is a bit suspicious. Now that you mention it, it, why is like beef twice as cheap at half the price? Is it really beef? Maybe it's horse, I don't know, but this is the thing, isn't it? You can use signaling to sort of position yourself in a, in a way that deliberately answers questions you know, people are going to ask. And I think that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. There's a benefit sometimes to not looking too slick.

Speaking of horses, I'm now watching Yellowstone.

Ah, yeah.

Pretty brutal, isn't it?

I've not seen it actually.

I've heard good things about it. Karen's not really enjoying it.

What's it about? Ranches in Texas.

Ranches, horses. Cows. Cowboys.

Oil.

No, no, no, it's in Montana. So it is all about ranching and stuff. And and yeah, I'm not going to go on about it. But anyway, um and segueing we'll be able to um watch it ever more confidently going forward. Because when we got back from that meeting, I opened my email and um, no, I'm gonna, you know, I'm going to go back a little bit last week, week before last week, um there were um, men, men wearing orange and hard hats, um, in the road outside our house. I'm not going to say street because it's not a street. That's really annoying when you're trying to buy something in the place, it insists that you put a street name in.

So it's like, I.

Don't live on the street. I live in the country.

Give us your zip code.

Anyway, the men in orange suits and hardhats, uh, were, you know, going up and down, um, telegraph poles. And I thought, hmm, that looks suspiciously like fiber. Now, two weeks before that, I'd been online and the website had basically, oh, bless you. No plans for your area, mate. Sorry, you're stuck with the steam powered broadband that you've got. Um, you might even be better going back to dial up. It might be a bit quicker than what you've actually got. Uh, that's I'm overegging it. Our broadband was usable, very usable, but it wasn't what everybody else seems to be getting. Anyway, it came back from that meeting and there there was an email from Openreach saying you can now have, um, You can now have fibre to the premises. Please don't say premise. Not you. I'm not going to go into that in any more detail just now. But it's not. It's not premise. You don't premise is a thought or an idea. You don't have fibre to the premise. You have it to the premises. Everybody, please, please stop saying premise when you mean premises. Um, so we now get fibre to the premises. So I checked the, uh, I checked for the office here as well and boom, we can have it here as well. So I just went straight on to Zen. I would only ever use Zen for my broadband. Zen are wonderful. I've been with them since two thousand and five. And no, they don't sponsor this podcast.

If you would like to sponsor an episode, they.

Probably should sponsor.

This podcast.

But, um, yeah, I've only ever used Zen. That's not true. I think I use Tiscali when Broadband first became a thing.

That's a.

That's an old name.

Isn't it?

Yeah. And then moved to Zen in two thousand and five, I think. And I've been with Zen ever since. Um, and anyone ever says, what broadband should I buy? I always say Zen. Anyway, I got on to them and um, that's the orders in. So in the next, I don't know, two or three weeks, whatever we should have like a gig down and a couple of hundred Meg up and at the house and the same here. And um you've no, no idea how happy that makes me. I don't need a gig down at the house and two hundred up. I just don't need it.

But but it'll be nice.

Not wildly more expensive to have that compared to the five hundred down sort of thing. So I thought, you know what? It's only an eighteen month contract. I'm just going to do that.

You've also got that whole like slippery slope thing, haven't you, with capacity and speed where I feel like, you know, when we were kids, if you sort of loaded a page on your mobile phone, and I do still remember the first time I got a smartphone, um, you know, thinking how old were you? Fourteen, fifteen, fourteen fifteen. Yeah. Um, they were the, it was like the second generation of Apple phones where it started to become sort of affordable. Not really though. Um, and, you know, you were sort of, if a web page took 30s to load, you were like, oh, this is quick. And then, you know, the faster everything gets, the faster your expectations are. So you'll go to your super fast broadband and then you'll do what I do, which is like you'll go somewhere without like whenever I come in here and I need to download something and I'm like, oh, I'm back in the dark ages. This is terrible. What's taking so long?

I got watched seventy down and twenty up in the.

Office, which again, is more than.

Usually becomes an issue for Leslie when she's trying to do video stuff. So I think, I think as of a week or two from now, we'll have two or three hundred up, which is.

Still a.

Huge difference, huge difference, because I know it's a huge difference between the house and here. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, connectivity is so important, you know, it's just it's just a utility now, isn't it?

Yeah.

Plus what I've also done in both cases the house and here is got rid of the house phone.

Yes.

Because the who.

Uses.

Them. We don't need it. We just don't need it. We did. We did have it because we needed to buy the line for the for the traditional broadband, but now we don't have to have it because with the with the digital, sorry, with the fiber, you can elect not to have a phone number. And so so I haven't got a phone number anymore, which is great. So that's probably twenty quid a month.

No more savings.

I would've thought. Well, we didn't get any anyway. Very rarely rang the home phone number. And I can't think of anyone who's only got a home phone number. Everyone's got the mobile number, I think. So it should be fine. I'm sure this is fascinating for people to listen to. Really self-indulgent. Anyway, I'm so excited about getting the superfast broadband here at the office and at home. I just thought I had to mention it. Okay. Um, so this week you and I, um, or rather, last week we had a show and tell with the, uh, the guys at lead forensics. Now, we've had lead forensics have been around for about fifteen years, and we've been talking to lead forensics for about fifteen years. The challenge always was and still is for us. Like, if you want us to evaluate something, uh, and, and if you want us to potentially promote and sell this to our clients, we want to evaluate it and truly believe it's got a value and it's useful. And in order to do that, they wanted us to buy it off them. So they wanted us to buy it in order to evaluate it, in order to then sell it for them. Um, and there is a broader conversation we could have about the way SaaS companies treat people who resell their products. And I think it ranges from, um, appalling to bloody awful. You know, bloody awful. Is that the, the good end of the scale and appalling at the other end of the scale, you know, when you think, you know, like we act as unpaid virtually anyway. Unpaid, um salespeople for the likes of HubSpot, lead forensics, any of these organisations. It kind of irks me. But anyway, I know there's a flip side to that argument, but let's, let's be honest about it. Um, go on. What are you going to say?

I'm just struggling to think of the flip side.

Well, the flip side is a little bit of commission that you get.

I'd rather. Yeah. You see, the thing is, I, I don't know, maybe this is a controversial thing to say. I'd rather not have the commission, but have a better, you know, a more sort of, uh, collaborative relationship with them. Yeah, I.

Wouldn't argue.

With that. You know, at the end of the day, if people like HubSpot, like you say, want you to become a sort of unpaid advocate, at least they could do is support you in that.

Yeah. We don't do what we do in order to try and get a bit of commission from HubSpot. We do what we do in order to, um, help businesses and get on a nice chunky retainer, make good money ourselves by helping our clients to make good money. Yeah. That's what, that's where, that's where the good stuff is. And if we could, um, have a more collaborative relationship with, for example, HubSpot, then I'd be quite happy not to get any commission.

Yeah.

If they said, well, tell you what, you can have our software free of charge, as long as you promote it to your customers and tell them how great it is kind of thing. Um, which we would only do if we thought it was great, I hasten to add. But anyway, we had the chat with lead forensics and immediately came up with four clients we were happy to experiment with, with the client's permission. Um, put this, put the tracking code in and see what it threw back. And then Tuesday of this week, we had another session with lead forensics where they said, write a week's worth of data. Here's the sort of things you can do with the with the tool and interested really to to hear what you thought about it. I might play devil's advocate on this because I'm not sure whether you're going to be positive or negative. So I'm throwing it out there.

So neither am I. What do you think. So.

So we're discussing.

We'll see which.

Efficacy if you like, of lead forensics.

I think. So first things first. The biggest problem with lead forensics is that.

Like any of the.

Any.

IP lookup table services.

They tell you what company.

IP lookup table, the way that lead forensics and the others work is they they see somebody come to a website with a certain IP address. They then have a lookup table. So they know that IP address belongs to a certain company. Like we've got a fixed IP address at this building here, and I've got one at the cottage as well at home. Um and then therefore they build up this huge table. So in like so they know who's who, which IP addresses are used by which companies. And then it helps them say, right, that's BP on your website, that's shell on your website. Just use two behemoths as examples.

Yeah, absolutely. But but they're, they're perfect examples because this is the biggest flaw with it, isn't it? You know, you, you can say to somebody, okay, well, shell have been on your website. Shell is an organisation that employs one hundred thousand people, probably, probably, maybe more. And the point is it's massive. So knowing that somebody from shell has been on your website is completely meaningless, especially if you're selling something that's like a sort of a cheap commodity, something that's like a sort of impulse purchase, it literally doesn't help you in any way, shape or form. Um, because you know, what are you going to do? Get your sales guys to ring up their front desk and say, oh, we know somebody was on our website. Yeah, please ask around and find out who it was.

And to be fair to lead forensics, they had an immediate comeback to that, didn't they?

They did. And to be fair, I sort of you know, I've sort of come around the other way on that. So that's the always been my biggest complaint about it in the past is that the data is interesting but not useful. It'll tell you something that is like, good to know and sometimes very flattering, but ultimately doesn't serve any particular purpose because there's no way of reaching back out. Where I think they made a very good counterpoint and I think is actually sort of like changed the way I think about it slightly is that when you're selling something like software, for example, or I guess for a lot of B2B clients, you know, a big considered purchase, you know, that there's only a very finite number of people in the company who could possibly be purchasing that thing or would be interested in it. And it therefore does become much easier, especially now that things like LinkedIn exist. And, you know, you can go and look people up and find out what their job is and what their function is. It's not so difficult to narrow down who you want to talk to, as long as what you're selling is like quite a specific considered purchase.

Yeah. And I think, I think that's true. And I think that's the criticism of all of these IP lookup services is that like, it's a little bit so what? Yeah. However, I think I think a trick that that certainly I'd been missing was, for example, you could upload into the lead forensics a list of your current customers, and then you could see when your customers are on your website, if that was going to be useful to you for upselling, cross-selling, or anything else, you could upload a list of prospects, people you'd like to work with, and you kind of know who the contact is at that company, and you upload that and it can and it can alert you to the fact that, you know, um, Susan Smith from Acme Engineering was on your website looking at your lead gen services or whatever. And then you think, ah, it now would be a good time to reach out. Um, I guess as well, you could, you could say, well, these are our competitors, you know, and set a trigger up. So you get pinged when your competitors are crawling all over your website, that sort of thing.

And I think the other thing that sort of swung me in that meeting, um, back to I was thinking it was more of a useful tool. Was the whole piece around being able to actually see what page people have been on and how long they've been on it for. They can't tell you who the person is, but they can tell you exactly how that person engaged with the website. Now, obviously we can do that through tools like clicky and stuff anyway, but I suppose there is something quite nice about being able to go and say to your marketing manager or whatever, you know, oh yes, somebody from shell was on our website that looked at these six pages for four minutes each. So we know that we're getting the right kind of customer and that we're engaging them and that we're telling the right story. So I suppose in a sort of like proving that your marketing works way. Um, there's a certain sort of utility to having that data.

Um, one of the things that's slightly irritating the two guys we spoke to at lead forensics, uh, you know, nice guys, knowledgeable. Um, one of the things that irritates is I after the show and tell I, I said I would, um, for two of our clients, I said I'll contact them and, and, um, say, look, we've seen the data, it looks like it might be useful. And we would recommend that you sit down with lead forensics and let them talk you through it so you can decide whether you think it would be useful. And that was fine. And after and I got to thinking, you know, maybe there's something in this and maybe we should buy it, read evolution, buy it and, and use it and evaluate it and everything else. And that's when it all starts to get a bit icky for me because it's like, I just pinged the guys. We just had a meeting with them. They know we're an agency. So I pinged them and said, guys, what would what would it cost for us to have this on our website? And the guy came back, oh, well, I need, I need to refer you to the other guy, which is fine. He deals with it and he said, um, but you're, you're definitely right. You know, agencies that use it themselves, they find it easier to sell and it makes much more sense. And I'm like, yeah, that's why I asked you for a price. So I could decide very quickly whether we could afford to put it on our own website and start using it and evaluating it. And, and the and then the guy came back to me who was going to price it and say, oh, well, yeah, well, the pricing can kind of depends on the quality of the people who are looking at your website. And I'm, I'm thinking, you're losing me, guys. You're already losing. If they just come back and said two hundred quid a month and you can have lead forensics on your website. You can then you can just crack on and play with it to your heart's content. Oh, and by the way, um, we'll let you have it for six months at two hundred quid a month, you know. And if it's after six months, it's no good, you know, but no, no, no, no, we need to decide what we're going to charge you. We're not going to tell you. We're going to look at the contacts that you that you might be able to make from it. By the way, we're going to try and tie you into a two year contract. Well, if I figure out after six months, I don't like this software and it's not helping me paying for it for another eighteen months at the rate of two hundred quid a month, it's just going to really piss me off.

So we're back to signaling, I think.

Right, go on.

Then, I'm.

Interested. You've got me intrigued.

Well, if you it's back to that whole thing, you know, if you walk into a shop and you say, how much is that hat? And the guy behind the counter says, that's three thousand pounds. You think, okay, that's expensive, but it's probably worth it. He's confident. He's he's named the price of his hat. He knows what it's worth. It's a lovely hat. Um, when you go into a shop and somebody says, oh, well, you know, the price depends and all you'll have to sign a contract first. What you're signaling is that, you know, price is a major sticking point for a lot of people. A lot of sales enquiries end as soon as you name the price and you're not confident about that. And I think this is the thing, you know, a lot of people, what.

Are they signaling?

Well, they're signaling that they're very nervous. You're going to go away.

Yeah, they are exactly that.

And they're probably going to lose the sale as soon as they oh, you know, please don't go. Don't worry. We'll work something out. All of that experience is awful. If they just named a price, you would forty, fifty percent.

Even if they said, yeah, it's three hundred quid a month. And I go, oh, you know what? It might be worth it, but I just can't afford that. Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute. Okay. See what we can do for you, you know, let's see what we can do. Then they turn into barrow boys, you know, but what you would call a hat or what?

Uh, I don't know.

A tit for tit. Tit for tat, tit for tat. There you go. A rhyming slang for you, Leslie. Tit for tat hat.

Um, anyway. Point making or they don't bargain with you. They let you walk away knowing full well that in six months time you'll be like, well, you know, it was expensive, but it was clearly worth it and I should have gone for it. And then you have remorse and you go back and you buy it. You know, big car manufacturers are not shy about how much their cars cost. No they're not. And this whole sales tactic where you delay naming the price to keep somebody on the hook, and then you keep hammering the benefits home just doesn't work. It just alienates people, I think.

Because if they decide if they give us a price and you decided to buy it, then they would sausage you. Gregory.

Yeah. What?

Sausage you. Gregory.

Oh, yes. You know.

Well, you'd send them a Gregory and they'd sausage it.

No, I genuinely can't tell if you're joking or not.

I'm not joking. You sausage and Gregory.

I.

Sausage and mash a Gregory Peck. Cash sausage and Gregory.

Fucking hell!

You didn't know I was a Cockney, did you?

I didn't.

Know. You sound like a Cockney. Do I?

I don't know.

Just all I could do another.

Now I just want to go on record and say that Cockney rhyming slang is stupid and it doesn't help people.

Yeah, I wouldn't disagree.

Um, but yeah, I just think it's that whole piece about how you present yourself and what you make people feel. And I think that it's exactly the same as if you go into like DFS or somewhere to buy a sofa and you point to it, you're like, how much is that? Like, what's the best price you can do on that sofa? And you will get the biggest runaround in the world. And if people are just like, yeah, do you know what, mate? Actually, this is the best I can do. You could make a decision.

I'm trying to think, well, who does that very well. I don't know, Apple.

Yeah.

You cannot get deals on Apple. You can buy second hand. You can sometimes Costco. If they bought too many MacBook Pros and Apple upgrade it, they might discount them and get them away. But you pretty much can't get discount on Apple stuff. If you went in the Apple Store with cash in your hand a couple of grand and the laptop was two thousand and ninety nine pounds, and you said, look, I've got two grand. I want that laptop. They'd say, no, it's two thousand and ninety nine and that's it.

Yeah. And look at what that sort of positioning does. You know fifty percent of people will say, oh, Apple's overpriced rubbish. It's terrible. The other fifty percent of people would only ever buy Apple. I'm one of them. Yeah. And maybe those percentages are different. But the point is by being very confident and very bold and sort of making their case, yes, they alienate some people, but they also win other people over. And I just I don't think this whole sort of like, yeah, this sort of nervous.

I wouldn't say that it was dead in the water. The thing, the lead forensic thing. I mean, I would like, I would like to put it on our. In fact, he sent me the tracking code and I, I did install it. So we'll be able to have a show and tell before.

You got a price.

Yeah. I only put the tracking because, you know, I want, I thought I might as well just go along with it and let them show me the data and, um, and then we'll see, you know, and then I guess what they do is they watch how you respond when if you're going like, oh, wow, they were on our website, oh, we'd like to work with them and suddenly going, okay, we can charge a premium here. Um, unfortunately, that I don't care who's on our website. I would not, um, be prepared to pay over the odds for an IP lookup table.

They're just boring games, you know.

They are a bit tedious, aren't they? I mean, we're very straightforward. I mean, one of the things we do when people send us an enquiry, you know, we'll get back to them very quickly and say, you know, yeah, this is this is the, you know, this is this is how we work. This is the process that we use, which involves discovery and understanding and learning about your business, which we do free of charge. It's on us. We make that investment. But at the same time, we say, by the way, generally people who are in your situation, this is the kind of budget that they will spend and that very quickly allows people to go, oh, you know what? That's absolutely fine. Or that's yeah, you know, actually you sound too cheap or that sounds yes, we can, we can definitely have a conversation and we, you know, we don't muck about with it, you know, we don't muck about.

I don't think.

We've even got prices on our website, which yeah, whether we should or we shouldn't, I don't know. I mean.

I'm not sure about that.

I'm less sure about that as well, you know, but again, you know, there's a school of thought that if I go to your website and you don't tell me how much it costs, then I'm gone. There are people who are quite adamant about that. So I don't know whether that's true or not.

Yeah, I think it's also I mean, another experience like that. I think it actually just happened at the end of last year. And I may have even spoken about it on a previous episode, but that thing that HubSpot did to one of our mutual clients where, you know, the, the, um, the, the client in question had been a HubSpot customer for about eighteen.

Months, spends a lot of money every month with it on an enterprise product.

Yep. Spends quite a lot of, um.

Maybe a different client. Yeah. But yeah, go on. I see where you go with this.

And they were basically running up close to the end of their contract. So its renewal time. So HubSpot rep gets on the phone, somebody they've never spoken to before rings them up, says, oh, your contract's coming to an end, but, but I can do you this sweet deal. If you sign up for these extra two packages you don't need, I can keep your price fixed. Otherwise it's gonna shoot up. And of course, you know, what they're banking on is that the client is scared about the price increase, and they'll just say yes and they'll just do it. But it's such a scummy tactic. It's such a weird tactic because instantly, you know, what you've signaled is you're a little bit desperate for this business and you really want to keep people.

The I want to buy a new iPhone. I need this commission tactic.

Yeah. And it completely backfired because the client in question, well, unfortunately, they had a new marketing manager in post. She wasn't particularly sold on the solution. And she was like, well, if you're gonna up the price, then I'll just go somewhere else.

Yeah.

You know.

What have they done now? Well, they honored the original price.

Yeah, of course, they have climbed back down and shat themselves.

And back in the box.

Yeah, absolutely. But it's just that whole thing, isn't it? I think sometimes sales tactics, people are so fixated on the fact that occasionally scummy tactics work that they think that justifies sort of acting like that and don't realise what a massive reputational harm it is to their business to, to act like that. Mhm. Yeah.

Did they shit themselves or shat themselves?

They shit themselves. You can't shat yourself can you? Isn't isn't the English language a wonderful.

No but yeah, but it's like if I if if you say like, if somebody says, oh, it's really scary. Oh, and you know, I shat myself. They do say that. People do say that. I would always say I shit myself. I think we should stop talking about shit. We can talk shit, but we shouldn't talk about it. Um, okay. Um. What do you think is an idea?

I try not to.

What do you think about, like, a a creatives get together? A big, a big happy get together of creative, creative, um, agencies in a, in a, in a specific area. Okay.

I you're trying to bait me. No, I'm not.

I don't, I'm not trying to, um, I'm not trying to, um, ridicule anyone when I do this. I, my, my, my, the jury's out for me, but I guess what I'm saying is like, you get industry bodies where people who are in the same industry come together, they discuss best practice. They like the Law Society, for example, you know, that's, that's made up of people who are competing with each other sort of thing. And that's, you know, slightly different there. They're a governing organisation, governing body or whatever. But I mean, broadly speaking, you know, like people who do what we do, um, in this geographical area, you know, there's a suggestion of putting together a, you know, little sort of working party to figure out whether it's worth getting together once every now and again to discuss. I don't know the state of the nation stuff. We're doing stuff that we'd like to do best practice, that kind of thing. I'm yeah, I'm not sure I put it out to you and the team and, um, to see what they thought of it. Um, some people didn't respond at all. Um, and some people did respond.

And.

You know.

With kind.

Of.

Mixed.

Mixed review. I mean, I just thought an opportunity just to, to discuss it. You're, you know, you're, if you like, reticence was basically it would just be a waste of time talking shop.

Yeah. I mean, look, I, you know, full disclosure, when I used to work down in Leeds, there were a lot of these events, sort of industry events.

It's very sophisticated. It's bound to have them up.

There's a whippet over there. Have you ever marketed a flat cap? Tell me how you do it.

You roll.

It. But no, I mean, you know, we had these, and occasionally they'd be really interesting. There was one guy that ran an agency in York that used to be shit hot at getting really good speakers. So he got like Zara's head of international SEO to come in and give a talk.

And Leslie started piercing. That usually means she's bored.

I'll try and hurry up. No you don't.

I don't mind.

Leslie does though, and he was good at getting you know, he got people in from sort of Google and, you know, interesting people with interesting stories to tell. And you go along, you get a free sandwich, you sit down for half an hour, you'd listen to somebody tell you something that you didn't know before, and you'd come away thinking, oh, I learned something quite useful. And then you talk shop a little bit and it would all be fine. I went to others where it was literally just like, you know, people sitting around for two hours having a. I was gonna say, I won't say that on the podcast because that'll ruin our clean rating.

Which got anyway, you always swear on the podcast, so I don't think we have.

It. Um, but, you know, just just generally sort of, um, jerking each other off. Um, it's a complete waste of time. And I think if you're going to put the time and the effort into making these events in their own right, then there can be some utility to them. But if the question is like, do I want to sit around with a load of other people who have the same basic experience as me and talk about, you know, doing our jobs? Not really, because the internet exists and you can do all that online with people with far more broad and interesting experience.

I mean, face to face is nice, isn't it? I mean, you know, no, it's nice. It's nice to get together with with people, I think I think there's a danger. I think you're I think there's it could go one of two ways. I think it could be hugely helpful. And I commend him for, for suggesting it and may well um say yeah. Include me in the working party to see if it's feasible. May well do that. Um, at the same time I totally appreciate that what they often can be these things is like is just people like trying to brag out, brag each other. Oh, yes. Well, we've just got a client in Florida. Oh, well, we've just got a client on the moon. Do you know what I mean? And it's just like people just like, well, you use it as an opportunity to big up themselves and speak absolute shite.

Well, like the Law Society dinners and stuff like that, you know, it's like everyone's like, oh, yeah, sick. Like, you know, I get to take a day off work. I'm technically working, but I'm not doing anything useful. It'll be a bit fun. It'll be a bit of a gas, but it is all ultimately just a complete waste of time. Unfortunately, I just don't think I've ever really learnt anything super useful.

Well, interestingly, the um here in Aboyne, which is, you know, population three thousand where our office.

Is thriving hub of the internet marketing.

Industry. There's been a the lady came to see me and there's a, there's an initiative to, um, rejuvenate the Aboyne Business Association. And you know, the email came in three businesses. Well, there's quite a lot of businesses out in the sticks out and about Aboyne and you'd be quite surprised. There's some quite, quite interesting businesses, a multi-million pound businesses like on our doorstep. You know, there are it's quite um, you know, it's, there's a lot goes on out here in sticks and um, I, I'm not not going to, I was in, I was instrumental in bringing it together and either just before Covid and then during, after Covid and, and I ran in this very room some lunch and learns and tried to get the thing moving, but what predominantly happened was other up their own ass business people were like, well, I'm very busy. Um, but if somebody else is prepared to, to, to organise these things and, you know, if I've got time, I'll pop along. And I just thought I, I just cannot be asked for that because so that's one of the things that can go wrong with these is that people expect somebody else to do all the heavy lifting. And if they can be bothered, they might rock up and add no value whatsoever.

Yeah.

And I'm well, certainly with the local business community. I mean, because we don't really do any business in this area predominantly. It's, you know, all over the place. We just happen to be based here because it's a lovely place to live. Um, I think it's more the local business community is more for local businesses trying to figure out how to get more footfall into their shops and bring people into the area to spend money and that kind of thing. Nobody's gonna.

Walk.

Past that shop and come in and spend seventy or eighty thousand quid on a marketing campaign.

No, but the answer to that question is simple. It's called open the shops on more than one day a week.

Well, yeah. No, they don't do too bad. They mostly do. Okay. But but with the wider community and the agency community, I can I can kind of see why as long as people leave their egos at the office and just come with an open mind to share and talk about like, what works for them, what doesn't work for them. And you say, well, this works for us and this doesn't work for us. And so I believe I saw you'd got a customer down in, you know, um um. Falmouth. How on earth did you get that? How did that work? You know, where did that come from? Oh, you know, we did this campaign or we, they found us online or whatever, that kind of thing.

Still, though, it's just it's difficult to see how that would ever work without people always being suspicious that you were about to sort of eat their lunch, you know what I mean?

But I've always had an issue with agency get togethers, because it seems to be an industry where people have egos the size of planets, and they they kind of come along to these things and strut about as if they're a cut above. And that just grinds my gears. I can't be arsed with it. You know, I really can't. And I my worry is that that's what it would be like. Yeah.

I guess you have to give people the benefit of the doubt.

You kind of don't when you get to my age because you've given all your doubt away. You know what I mean? You've kind of been through it. You know, I'm a big believer in people show you who they are, just believe them and move on, you know, and really, really can't be arsed with it. But, but anyway, um, so your view is on these things?

A ginormous waste of time.

You've seen the good, but you did say that sometimes it's been okay.

Yeah, sometimes it can be really good. But it goes back to that thing you were saying before. I mean, what what we ended up doing in a past life was pivoting away from that and doing a, a business sort of e-commerce meetup for businesses looking to sort of improve their e-commerce. And it was sort of open format, come along, ask questions. And it was more about engaging with businesses rather than engaging with other agencies. And that worked really well. But to your point, the whatever you're going to do, you have to put a lot of effort into making it interesting for people, otherwise they won't keep coming. And that would be my biggest concern about something like this is that it will just be like, oh yeah, we can just invite everyone and we'll sit in a room and talk, but that won't happen. You'll get that like, you know, year six school disco thing. Whereas like each agency has its own little pocket and they'll all stand there eating sandwiches and talking to each other and nothing will happen. Mhm.

Mhm. Um, just one last little, um, one last little takeaway if you like, from, um, the book I'm reading the one of the choice factory, which I recommend.

Listening to.

Listening to. I have actually bought a physical book this week because the audiobook is edition one. Oh really? That's interesting. Addition two of the book, which has been updated in light of stuff. Um, is only available as a book ebook. So I bought it because I'm not interested. Um, but, um, what I was going to say was one thing we know because we talk about marketing sometimes in this thing is one of the, one of the lessons that came across, and I'm just going to kind of condense it right down to don't spend any time marketing to people who will never buy what you're selling.

Mhm.

Now, the reason I'm saying that is, is that I've had an email from an insurance company guy, a guy who works in. Have you got any insurance policies coming up? Maybe we could help you. We could maybe call you happy? You know what I mean. And then he sent a follow up email. I got my last email. And what he doesn't realise is, you know, and maybe I'm being contradictory here, but what he doesn't realise is, is I've got, um, a good relationship with an insurance broker who, who, who was with, I can't remember what they were called and has now moved somewhere else. And whatever our insurance needs are, then I'll go to Amy and Amy will sort it out for me. So I don't care who sends me an email. I don't care who forms me to try and sell me insurance. I will never buy what they're selling because I have a trusted source. Now, if I said to them, look, take me off your CRM because I've got somebody I trust implicitly to sort all of my insurance requirements out, both personal and business, and you will never get any business off me. So please take me off your CRM. I don't know if they would.

Of course.

But and I don't know, like other than me telling them that how they would ever know. But I think it's not that difficult to figure out who who might buy off you if you get the messaging right and the timing right and everything else, and who will never die off you. And if you get people in that they will never buy offers pile, just don't waste any time on them. Don't go. I am determined to win this piece of work. There's just plenty of other people you could be going after, surely?

Well, there's just a little bit of the, like, positive thinking trap here, isn't there? Like, I think there's a certain type of person in business who has been sort of brought up to believe or who.

Don't take no for an answer.

Come to, well, it's worse than that. I think it's more insidious. It's like anything's possible if you just try hard enough. I know salespeople where like, if you like.

The black and white business books, aren't we where they just explain the world in black and white and it's like, oh, right. If only I'd known this twenty years ago, I'd be a millionaire by now. And then you go off pursuing the black and white thinking that's in the book.

Yeah, I know salespeople personally who if you said that to, oh, I've got I've got someone trusted. I trust her implicitly. I go to her with all my insurance needs. I'm not a good customer. So. Well, but but you can persuade him otherwise. You can show him. You can prove to him that you're better than her. You can. Do you know what I mean? Like they'll have tactics and strategies, and the head will be thinking, oh, okay. Well, he's he's thrown up a roadblock. And now I've just got to overcome it. And, you know, there's this horrible mindset problem where people think that, oh, if I just try hard enough, if I just throw myself at this often enough, and I think you do see it with business owners as well, you know, they'll be selling something, a widget or a piece of software that could technically be for anyone in the world. They've tried to sell it to a big player in the space. The big player in the space has said, look, you're a tiny company. I'm not interested in working with you. I've got this software solution. Somebody else handles it for me and they just won't. They don't absorb that lesson and think, okay, I need to limit my thinking. I need to go after a different market. They're like, oh, if I could only overcome that objection, if I could just find a way of showing them that my software is better and I applaud it, I think a certain degree of it is necessary. But my God, is it frustrating when people are trying to just just go all the time and you.

Applaud it in the same way you implore and applaud a clown getting a custard pie in its first.

A little bit. Yeah, it's just annoying, man.

Um, okay. So if you are looking for business insurance and this is just a shameless plug for Amy, uh, contact H&R insurance and ask to speak to Amy because, um, she will give good service because she's been looking after us for long enough. Um, that's all. I can't think of anything else.

Just exhausted ourselves.

I think we have. And considering you came to this podcast without a shred of information without, with not a single idea, I think I've done rather well to keep the conversation going.

Do you want do you want some applause too?

I would like a custard pie in the face. And if you had one, you would, I'm sure. Okay, thanks for listening to me. Listening to Dave and Alex on the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast, where we sometimes talk about digital marketing, and we'll be back with another episode soon, if you like what you hear. Yeah, actually, do tell people, you may as well tell them. Tell them why not or don't.