Webinar: Tech Channel Sorcery: Make Your Competition Invisible to Prospects

4B Marketing Director of Strategy, Sam Grise, was recently joined by Vation Ventures Vice President of Client Success, Michael Hopfinger, for an engaging discussion to help tech channel partners understand how to silence the marketplace noise to reach their ideal prospects.

With over 30 years of combined tech channel experience, we understand that now, more than ever, the noise in the channel is deafening and only becoming louder.

But for an industry rooted in innovation and futurism, the tech industry often clings to an antiquated marketing mindset that limits growth and positive financial outcomes.

In this webinar, Sam Grise and Michael Hopfinger uncover what it takes to turn the volume down on your competitors so you can reach your next best customer without interference.

Drop below to read the transcript or watch the webinar recording above to learn:

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: Thank you all for joining today. This webinar focuses on how the tech channel partners can make their competition invisible to their next best prospect. 

I’m your host, Sam Grise, 4B Marketing Director of Strategy. 4B is an outcomes-driven full service marketing agency. And when we say outcomes-driven, everything we do ties back to revenue, cost, risk, and cash flow utilization. Our pantry full of ingredients from a marketing strategy perspective has to tie back to those outcomes.

We’re built like this because we’ve spent careers as sellers in this space. I’ve spent a career in sales for resellers and emerging technologies focused on the federal government, SLED, commercial enterprise, and global. So that’s my introduction. But with that, we’re lucky to have Michael Hopfinger with Vation Ventures here today. He plays a pivotal role within the whole ecosystem as well. 

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: Thanks, Sam, it’s good to be here today. I’m Michael Hopfinger, I’m with Vation Ventures. I manage the client delivery organization. And I have a rich channel background. 

You could say I was born in the channel. 

I started working in the technology channel around 2004 or 2005, and have been in it in some way, shape or form since. Mostly in marketing and marketing leadership roles during that time, but quite a bit of business development and partner development work along the way there, too. This is some of my favorite stuff, working with partners to help grow their business. 

And that’s a little bit of what we do at Vation as well. Vation Ventures is a research, innovation and consulting services company born on the assumption and basis that innovation is really hard. The two main business units I manage help a couple of different constituencies deal with the challenge of innovation.

So on one hand we provide research and innovation services to technology solution providers because it’s hard to keep up with all the new stuff that’s coming out. Whether it’s trends or specific technologies, it’s difficult to keep up with this rapidly changing landscape. Getting to market is another way innovation is hard, and we also try to alleviate some of that pain. So we represent and consult with emerging technologies looking to get to market to accelerate sales and growth. 

We help them achieve the financial goals they seek faster.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: I appreciate you making the time, Hop. Always great to chat with you. 

Before we dive in too far, we will have the chat open. So if you have any questions, we have the Q&A as well. I know that we want to keep this interactive, so we’ve got a couple of opportunities as we get going to use that chat. As well, at the end we do have an offer for your team, so be sure to stick around to the end to see what that looks like. 

As we dive in, we’re focused on what’s different from each partner to the next. 

Being a seller in the space, all too often I saw we have the best engineers, we’re client-focused, right? But what’s a truly unique value proposition that differentiates your business from the next? What will be the “why” for why somebody to work with you? I know that you have some thoughts here.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: Oftentimes, we’re  overwhelmed with the different ways we can market and they usually do webinars, social media, paid digital ads, or all these different options. But if you don’t have your story straight, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to have a core and consistent value prop that is different and there’s a process to establishing this and it’s a lot of introspection; talking to your customers, talking to your employees. 

Defining what makes you special and different in the market, because that’s a first-step requirement for you to get the best return on your marketing investment. So it’s just that essential first step and it’s one that’s often skipped over. So it bears repeating today.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: We call that the foundational phase. It’s a part of building the house. All of the extra marketing stuff that we can do, like ads or programmatic or campaigns or webinars. 

All of it has to tie back to that foundational piece because if we’re building the house, we need to have the avenues and the roads to drive to that house. But if we don’t have a structure that’s stable and foundational, we’re going to have a tough time getting that message across to the market.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: And to add one more point, the market’s one thing, but your employees and the culture you’re trying to build within your company should be predicated on the same unique value proposition and propagated through your organization at every level. So it’s an inside and out thing and again, it’s foundational, to your point.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: Big piece with the internal employees because everybody’s a seller, everybody’s representing your brand. Ensuring everybody is on the same page is extremely important. When we talk about marketing in general, we talk about revenue generation.

There are two primary ways to make money in this industry.

There’s net-new clients, and here’s the growing existing clients. Getting new clients is extremely challenging. Being top-of-mind is one of the biggest things right now, especially with the economic downturn and uncertainty. Being the first one to call, being there so that they know exactly who they’re talking to and what they’re going to get from that customer and how they can go out and find the correct technology solutions provider for the organization.

When we look at where the market’s sitting today, there’s over 500,000 technology solutions providers, consultants, software companies in the United States alone. There is immense competition. Customers have many options on who they can go with to be able to provide these solutions for them. That challenge for sellers and marketers is extremely difficult to be top of mind for those customers when they’re looking.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: And when you start in the consideration phase as opposed to higher up the funnel, it costs you money, it’s going to cost you probably more people hours, it’s definitely going to cost you more time to get to the deal if there are competitive folks in there, and that’s to say nothing of the fact that you might have to play with margin to win the deal too, just on the transactional margin. 

There is a definitive cost and multiple definitive costs associated with entering the game and trying to compete at that consideration stage. If you can just be top of mind, you avoid a lot of that mess. And here it is. I mean, it is absolutely real, this margin erosion, and it comes in different ways, shapes and forms, but none of them are very good.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: And the margin erosion, I love that story because it is spot on. From my history of being a seller in the space, any time I got into a deal in that consideration phase, as a reseller you make your money off of margin. You’re playing with little to no points in those deals. 

And for a business perspective in order just to be able to operate, you need 2% margin on a deal. Where are you getting that margin? Are you waiting for rebates? Is that how you want to run your business model? 

What value can you actually bring to the client when all you’re focused on is price? We want to be entering that awareness stage first of mind, first of call, so that we can bring value to the customer and transform their business. But we don’t have to worry about margin erosion and fighting for two points on a deal just to ensure we can keep our business afloat.

So when we talk about that right of being first to mind, we never want our customers to be out there thinking, “who does this, what is this? I have a challenge today and who can I go to for this?” And a perfect example of this was Zoom right before the pandemic. They were giving away their licenses for free. An example of this is my own mother.  She’s retired. She’s not in technology. She doesn’t do anything with technology. But the first thing she was doing was going, hey, let’s do a Zoom. It was synonymous with web conferencing.

And for somebody that doesn’t know technology, has never done a web conference in their life, to take their logo and their name and use it as a verb to be able to communicate with us was something that was truly amazing. 

And it was a testament to Zoom and how they were out there being aware, doing awareness of marketing, not knowing that a pandemic’s going to hit, but being prevalent within the marketplace so that when it did hit, they were sitting at 600 million in revenue in 2019. 

Now they’re at 4.5 billion, but they grew to 2.5 billion in 2020 alone. Having that awareness, being first of mind was a total driver for their business.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: And not only that, you just shared some some short term benefit, but as we look at that landscape, the web conferencing space, their level of market dominance, even in spite of of teams being sort of native on what a lot of people run their businesses on, they’ve not only enjoyed short term benefit there as Sam just talked about, but they have a road in front of them based on what they did before the pandemic hit, and and they they’ve got a market dominance right now and it looks like they’re going to be that way for a little bit. So short term and long term benefit to that kind of an approach and it certainly has paid off for them.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: That’s a great point. They did one of the two ways to get clients or get revenue. They’ve landed a whole bunch of new clients. It’ll be interesting to see moving forward with Zoom how they take advantage of those new clients, and remarket to them, because they have more technology than just web conferencing. 

It will be interesting to see how the marketing and sales teams continue to grow the business because now they have a good foothold on the marketplace. But what are they going to do? How are they going to be first to mind with the different solutions that they have?

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: That’s right. SaaS, they ring the bell when they sign the renewal.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing:  So, being first to mind is your advantage. 

And this is one of the immutable laws of marketing, from a great book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries. 

And really what this is, is based off of the first law of marketing in the book and it talks about how the leading brands in the industry and every market, almost every single one of them, are the first to mind.

Being first to mind so that they know, that’s who we need to go to. That’s who we need to call. Those are going to be the solutions that will be the most effective. 

And even if that solution may not be the best, they’re first of mind. That’s the key. They’re getting the opportunity for the sales team to have a conversation because they are first of mind. Then the sales team and engineering team can have the conversation and come up with customized solutions to be able to support the business..

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: So a little interactive session here. So in the chat we’ll just ask a simple question and you get to enter in one name. So enter in the first brand that comes to mind if you were to have to buy a new television. And we’ll give it 30 seconds or so. And let’s see what names come back. I don’t know if you can see chat results on your end. Let me see here.

We did an unofficial test around our respective offices yesterday and 100% of the people polled answered Samsung, and you know, as long time marketers, you know there was something to this and it isn’t an accident. 

And in fact it’s more of a really great and sort of current story that we’re living with right now about a brand that went on offense during the 2008 recession and continued to market and advertise heavily as everyone else was sort of pulling back in the face of the uncertainty of those days.

And Samsung, you know what, while they did that and they took that approach prior to the 2008 downturn, they were ranked #21 in global brand value. Today, Samsung is number six in global brand value. And you might say, oh, brand value, it kind of sounds soft, you know, that’s great. But what does that mean? 

And for those of you that are skeptics in the audience about brand value, what I will share is that there was a very specific market that was critical to Samsung’s strategy overall and that was the television market and the flat screen television market. And in 2007, the statistics from the primary market researcher Display Search showed that Samsung share was 13.6% of the overall television sales globally.

LG Electronics was behind at 11.4%, and then there were a handful behind them. Fast forward to 2022, Samsung now holds a 29.7% share of the televisions sold in the world, and they’ve seen a steady yearly increase ever since 2007-2008. All the way from 2007 to 2017 to 2020, they were gaining more market share.

LG still holds second share at 16.7%. So you can see this sounds a little bit like Zoom, that brand that went on offense during the downturn was the brand that emerged and broke away from the rest. 

And here 15 years on from that, you know 10 out of 10 people, if you ask walking around what kind of TV are you going to buy? You know if not ten out of 10, out of 12, we’re going to probably say Samsung right off the bat and once you’re first to mind there it presents such a massive competitive advantage and we’ve seen that just year over year over year of market share gains from this brand. So it’s a pretty impressive story.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: That’s a great example of restructuring from a business perspective, but also having the internal team understanding where the vision for the company was going. We talked about that a little bit at the beginning of the conversation, but it truly is, you know, for me personally, I know I have two Samsung TVs. I always thought of phones and so on.

But that was a great rebrand for them and a focus of brand awareness that I think all of us can relate to because all of us have TV’s at some point in our house or, you know, I’ve got a TV right next to me for Zooms and stuff like that. 

So a couple things that we’ve already touched on too, talking about the length, talking about the length of awareness, marketing and it is a long time. And it takes time to show results and we need to be there ready when the time arises. We talked about that with Zoom, of how they were ready for that when it happened. Same with Samsung about being ready, being first to mind when it came to those kinds of situations. 

And that makes it difficult from a budget perspective. 

When we’re cutting budgets because of an economic downturn, all of these pieces come into play, and it’s difficult to show ROI right away because it takes time. You talked about Samsung starting this in 2008. 

Well, now we’re almost 20 years down the road, and some of the value that it has in the market share that they have today is a big difference. But it took time to get there. This wasn’t something that popped right away. They had that initial release and initial growth that was fantastic, but they’re still in a journey for awareness, marketing to continue to grow. What do you think about this?

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: During a downturn or recessionary environment, people want instant results; we need now. And there’s always that urgency and so you see a big shift often to demand generation. And I think a lot of times people make what I would consider the mistake of demand generation with a focus on new logos during that time because that is really expensive and it’s not going to give you those instant results that you’re looking for anyway. 

Kind of sounds good on paper, but you know it’s just it’s an often taken misstep over the years that I’ve seen. I think you’ve got to think about balance and everything. You know, if it’s demand generation versus awareness, it’s we’re cost cutting versus spending on awareness. It’s a short term versus long term strategy at the end of the day. And you’ve got to strike that balance. And I think a really, really, really important thing to remember, and it’s hard to remember this when we’re being bombarded with news designed to scare us sometimes on the finance side, but recessions don’t last forever. 

The average post war recession length is 10 months. This one in particular is sort of engineered by the Fed to stymie inflation. I mean, we have a Fed that’s actively seeking to stymie our economy by raising interest rates, targeting mortgages, increasing the cost of capital etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 

So first off, you know you’ve got to stay on balance, you’ve got to stay on discipline and you know ,secondly you’ve got to remember this isn’t going to last forever and it probably will last a shorter time than most of us are led to believe.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: That’s a great point. And you know, recessions don’t last forever. And one of the pieces that I would talk about specifically is having a holistic strategy. 

You need a holistic strategy that isn’t just demand generation. We need something quickly. It needs to be cyclical. It’s something we talk about with our clients all the time. We can do stuff to get generations going quickly, but what is the overall strategy? Because if we just investigate something quick, we can do that. 

But how successful is that going to be for the long term of the business? And one of the things that I always talk about is meeting our buyers where our buyers are.

The buyer journey has changed drastically over the past five years. It’s changed all the time. But over the past five years, especially during the COVID era, everybody working from home, everybody having access to information, the buyer journey’s changed by the time they’re coming through. 

From a lead perspective, they’ve done a lot of research. They’ve understood who your business is. They understand the challenges that they have. They understand whether or not your organization is somebody that can truly help with that.

And one of the things that I, I always touch back to is the buyer cycle and their cyclical fashion for budgets. You know in the technology space a lot of times budgets are based off of 557 years. 

Think about our licensing model within the space, three-year, five-year, seven-year. There are one year options to be able to combat time if you will, but the majority of the time from our perspective, we’re trying to get them into a three-year so that we have three years to go fish with them, if you will, to help sell.  

And we need to match that as well with our holistic strategy, right. Since there is so much information out there and people are looking for that information, we need to be able to provide that information which is awareness, so that people are understanding what we do, so that we are top of mind when that need comes. If they have a five year budget cycle, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be purchased this year, next year, year after, it could be two years from now, but we want to be educating that buyer because they’re out there looking for it anyways.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: That’s right. You know, helpful educational marketing, adoption, style marketing, this is an example of taking all your digital or taking all your awareness marketing out or all of your search out and replacing it with with more pure demand generation and that new logo acquisition, you know, you can still you can still drive demand, and drive demand within your existing accounts that are probably ready to buy based on what you know about their buying patterns and get out in front of with an expansionary strategy. 

And then you know you can still afford to go out and do some of that broad based marketing that’s more at the brand level and awareness that’s going to help you accelerate through the downturn. 

You know a lot of marketers fail to accept or realize or whatever you want to say that the sales organization and the customer experience or customer success organizations are the two most powerful and probably most expensive media channels a company has. And so you got to really think about how you leverage those folks in a downturn to get you the short term results. 

And then again, can’t say it enough, we saw it with Kellogg’s versus Post in the breakfast cereal wars over the years, and that was where Kellogg’s pulled away during the Great Depression because marketing and being growth oriented during that downturn and that’s still a level of dominance that that company still enjoys. So the same thing happened in the 49 recession, 61, 1981. 

Bane did like an 18 year study on how companies performed after the 1981 recession, bears it out once again that if you’re growth oriented during these downturns you really give yourself an opportunity to to get outside growth on the other side of it. I read an article a few years ago and I can’t remember the guy who made the quote, obviously, but the quote was something to the effect of downturns are kind of like the turns in a horse race. 

It’s hard to make up ground on competition and it’s hard to break away on the straightaways in a horse race, but if you have skill you can make a move at the turn, and that’s a lot of times where races are decided. 

And I love that analogy that you know, viewing recessionary environments or downturns as sort of just a turn and sort of a normal cycle that we all go with, but one that represents opportunity to us. I think it’s a really good way to think about it. 

And the best quote that I’ve ever heard about recessions is from Sam Walton and it kind of goes along with that, and it’s, yeah, there was a recession, but I chose not to participate. And I think that’s really the bigger lesson is that, you know, you don’t have to participate in this stuff. Just keep it in balance and keep on rolling sort of a deal.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: I love that Sam Walton quote, by the way. That is a good one. And I think that it’s so important to keep things in perspective. 

We’ve heard about the bounce backs from all the years that you listed of recessions and people taking advantage, if you will, during those times. And it’s clear that, if you aren’t doing it, somebody else is. 

Somebody else is out there doing the marketing side of it, being aware with their customers and taking advantage of it. And you know one of my favorite quotes is with every adversity there’s a seed of equal or greater opportunity or benefit planted. 

And with that, all it says is we may be in adverse times, right, but our perspective should be this is a great opportunity. Our competition is not taking advantage of this to be top of mind. We want to be the first ones to be called and it’s a good example because we are already top of mind with somebody. 

Who are we top of mind with? And we’re top of mind with our existing customers today? We’re already working with them. They know who we are. But in the case of Zoom, Zoom has a whole platform. 

Do customers even know about the whole platform or do they know them just as the verb of let’s do a Zoom, how do we take advantage of the second way to grow revenue during a difficult time like this? 

We’ve already talked about the net new clients of being aware and so that we’re the first to call when a new opportunity arises, but how do we take advantage of the customers that we have today, andexpand in what we would consider the loyalty section? When we talk about the loyalty section, they’re already our customers. 

And we don’t want to go back to the consideration phase when we’re talking about a different solution or talking about a different product that we have. We’ve already got them in the loyalty stage. We want to keep them in the loyalty stage that they continue to purchase from us.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: That’s right. And again, your company is already investing in the resources that you as a marketer or as a business owner/operator need to be successful in this. 

So it’s a matter of just getting your teams to work together. It’s not a matter of, okay, I need to go find another X amount of dollars for the media budget. It’s really just getting your teams on the same page, dialing it in and finding where those customers are, meeting them where they are in their buying cycle from you and then creating an expansion plan at the right time to go out and renew and expand.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: Definitely. Especially in the partner community, service provider, consulting side of the house. There’s a lot that we do. There’s a lot that we can provide for our customers. And a lot of customers are looking for somebody, they can do all of those things so that they have a true trusted partner within their environment. You may get in on a security deal.  

And having a great security conversation, well, security touches everything within the ecosystem.  So if everything is being touched already by security, how are you keeping those people within that loyalty section to say, hey, look, we can help you with your network, we can help you with your cloud practice, we can help you with data center, we can help you with your collaboration practice to support them. 

Because the last thing that you want to have happen is we’ve got the security deal. We’re doing great things for them. It’s fantastic. Oh, well, we need to do a network refresh. And next thing you know, you’re up to bat again against the 500,000 other partners out there that they may be considering. 

And next thing you know, you’re in that battle again of margin erosion. You’ve already got a great customer, you’ve already got a great relationship with them. How do you tackle it and keep them wholly consistent so that you can continue to sell services and continue to grow revenue?

So how do you do this? And this is a big piece that comes back together when we talk about sales and marketing.  It’s a team game. It’s revenue growth between both parties being on the same page to grow business. 

And especially in that loyalty section because your sellers are having conversations with those team members every single day. You need to continue to build those relationships from a sales perspective, but also through a marketing perspective. We want to be able to surround those customers as well, even if they are existing, we want to invest into those customers. 

And there’s a wide array of tactics that you can do to help support those kinds of things, but there’s a couple of areas that are very key that we called out, which are frequent touch points. Your sellers are already doing that, but having frequent touch points with your sellers to understand where they need help, where they need support within those accounts. If you’re on the security side, how do you get to the data center side? 

How do you enable them to get to that side? Couple different ideas here – how do you get them to adopt more of your technology, more of your services.

I’d love to hear from you on this as well? 

What do you think?

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: Again, it’s about being helpful. I think the tone and the approach that you take during a recessionary environment is much different as well. I think you know that this point that you make around adoption is so critical because you’ve already sold them something, it’s costing them money, they’re getting billed for it. 

Going in and trying to sell them something new on top of something that they may not even be using, you know, half of that’s a bad look and and alternatively going in and saying what can we do, you guys are only at 50% utilization, you paid for this. It’s costing you money. I want to help you guys get more value out of this investment.

What do you think’s going to happen at the next renewal there? It’s a way that this speaks to not only the work you do and where you focus, but how you show up. 

And then that has the dual benefit of, you know, probably making that renewal a little more likely, but also it makes your brand great with those clients and again next time they need something, are they going to call the guy who was trying to sell them on top of something they already sold them they weren’t even using, or are they going to call the guy who is in there trying to help them extract as much possible value out of their technology investment that they’ve already made? 

So obvious dual benefit on both the brand and the demand side.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: That’s a great point. In difficult times like we are in right now, right, all these deals are taking three, four, five more signatures. Especially the net-new business, it’s taking four or five more signatures. Chuck Robbins, on his last quarterly review call, explained hat deals are taking three months longer because there is a review process.

Just because we’re feeling the recession doesn’t mean our customers aren’t. Everybody out here is feeling that pressure. And so being able to not only grow revenues but also protect what you have. 

There’s competition out there. There’s people coming in that are going after your customers that you have today that are doing awareness marketing, trying to be top of mind and focus on landing that net new business, trying to pull them out of your loyalty stage so that they can land the new business. 

So if you aren’t doing it even to your own customers, somebody else is right somebody else is out there trying to do that and support those customers. And so you really need to focus on not only the growth aspect but also protecting what you have and grow it from there.

So again, we talk about tactics as a part of a holistic strategy from a marketing perspective. But I think the biggest thing is, if you can only do one thing, you need to focus on that relationship.

Focus on growing that relationship with your customers, you know and also internally, growing your brand internally with your team so that they understand where the vision is and what the team is doing moving forward, as we’ve touched on a couple of times. But that relationship is so key in that loyalty section. The only way to keep that thing is building that relationship and continuing to grow that relationship, whether it leads to direct revenue growth or protecting that revenue that you have today.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: Yeah, that’s right. I mean it’s one of those things where doing the right thing is the right thing. 

And you know, whether it’s for business or otherwise, that during these periods where times are tight, staying close to your customer, you know trying to maintain in your sales approach, but really importantly from a marketing perspective, that empathetic tone, that “how can we help,” people don’t like to be sold to when they’re sort of over the barrel or perceive that they’re over the barrel. 

So going in with a helpful educational and and importantly to, you know, a financial outcome based approach during times like this, you know, it’s essential. And again you get the benefit, you get that brand afterglow and it puts you in a better position for when the skies do clear to capture that growth revenue.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: And it’s more prevalent now, because everyone is very concerned about the financial outcome. 

And it’s funny because that should always be a big driver for you, as you’re in there focusing on those financial outcomes because we’re in a capitalistic society. Whether we like it or not, that’s what people care about, revenue, cost risk, cash flow optimization. 

Understanding that is extremely important right now. It’s just the top tier, top of mind for everybody today.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that’s the last thing I would sort of leave everybody with and you’re probably running into it already. 

But you know when Cisco talks about three months extra and three or four more signatures, I guarantee two of those are people in finance. So I think everything you do for the next 8 months, you need to have in mind that ultimately you’re selling to the Chief Financial Officer of your customer in some way, shape or form. 

So yeah, good luck and keep grinding and keep doing the right thing. I think that’s the thing to keep in mind and also that these things don’t last forever, and really, they do represent an opportunity zone for a lot of companies.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: To wrap up, It’s important to be known, liked, and trusted. And awareness marketing is the way to do it. Being top of mind, being there when the time arises so that when the time arises they know who to call. And they’re calling somebody that is trusted. 

The trust signals are out there. You’re doing the awareness side of it so that you can capture that and really take advantage of the opportunity that’s presented in front of you.

We’ve talked about a lot today. We’ve gone back and forth from the two different ways to make money. 

We’ve talked about the awareness side of it and fighting in the consideration phase too much within the partner ecosystem. 

We’ve talked about the loyalty section and being able to capitalize upon those existing customers that you have to either grow or protect those revenues that you have today. I’d love to hear the last thoughts you may have today.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: Yeah, just to net it out, I mean, and at the risk of sounding tactical or repetitive, I mean I think an environment like this invites people to fight to keep marketing budgets flat. 

You know, you’re not going to get an increase right now, let’s be real, but to orient that raw dollar spend towards awareness marketing, making sure that you’re positioning yourself for growth and greater market share and potentially market dominance down the road. 

And then do use your already paid for or already accounted for internal resources and partnerships to go after those existing customers from a marketing perspective in a low cost fashion, but one that is going to give you that more short term benefit where you’ll be able to expand in some of those accounts potentially or win renewals etcetera, etcetera. 

So when I think about very specific thinking around short term, long term, I would sum it up as such. And again I think that the important thing to consider too is that this isn’t going to last forever. So I think that staying disciplined and sticking to your guns is the way to go.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: A holistic strategy, right? A holistic strategy that encompasses all different aspects to drive revenue growth. It’s a difficult time and that’s ultimately what we need to do and figure out how to do it. And the holistic strategy is a great way to do it.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: That’s right.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing: So the last thing that we have today is an offer for the attendees. 

This is a free SEO analysis and competitive analysis. So going ahead you can click on that link, I’ll drop it into the chat as well after I stop sharing the screen here so that you have it. Ultimately what this is, is to help with that awareness side. 

Where are you ranking against your top competitors, getting an understanding of being first to mind.

We’re all using Google. We’re all searching for stuff. How are you the one that’s being top of mind for those customers that are looking for those certain solutions or the certain challenges that they’re trying to face.

I want to thank you so much for taking the time this morning to chat with us. Your insight is invaluable. 

I can’t thank you enough and I can’t thank Vation Ventures enough for allowing you to come over and chat with us. We’re looking forward to working with Vation Ventures coming up soon with our partnership that we have and we know that we can do a lot of great things together. So thank you so much.

Michael Hopfinger, Vice President of Client Success, Vation Ventures: Yeah. Thanks for the invite, Sam. It was great to be here today with you and talk a little bit about this stuff. Much appreciated, man.

Thank you all for taking the time, for joining us this morning to listen to Hop and I chat about the importance of making our competition invisible to our next prospect.