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#83 | From 0 to 100 with Global Marketing

Paul Bresenden, CMO of Bromic Heaters and President of 454 Creative, started his career with zero experience in global marketing. 

He’s led a brilliant build of a “headless CMS” and “PIM” to optimize SEO for Bromic Heaters with a single domain and unique websites for their in-country marketing and distribution around the world.   

Paul is brilliant and shares a massive amount of information about all that he’s learned and implemented. 

Read Episode Transcript

ATTENTION:  Below is a machine generated transcription of the podcast.  Yes, at Rapport International, we talk a lot about how machine translation is not good quality.  Here you see an example of what a machine can do in your own your language.  This transcription is provided as a gist and to give time indicators to find a topic of interest.

 

[00:00:34] Wendy: Welcome back to another episode of the global marketing show. And as you know, the show's brought to you by Rapport International, where we provide high quality written translation and spoken interpretation services. So that includes, websites and contracts and CE mark materials and sending interpreters out and telephone interpreting all sorts of things. Rapport International does a biweekly tidbit that you can see on social media, or go to the website and sign up so you can get it. People, give lots of good feedback about learning something. So one of the tidbits that they provided for us is about differentiators, which makes sense for our show today, because we're going to be talking about, Heating elements and how they are different. So the differentiating tidbit that we're going to lead off with, is it a sign in a Korean restaurant located in Auckland, New Zealand, read, "We do not reuse the food." So, I don't know that doesn't sound like a good differentiator to me.

[00:01:40] Paul: That sounds a little 

[00:01:41] dangerous 

[00:01:43] Wendy: doesn't it.. Any restaurant who's reusing the food. So I hope Paul, that your differentiators are a little bit better than that one. So I do want to go ahead and introduce you. This is going to be an exciting phone call because this guy throws out words that I had to ask him to define. And, and I love it because that meant that I kept learning.

[00:02:07] So let me introduce Paul Bresenden to you. He's the president and founder of 4 54 creative, a leading marketing agency in orange county, California. His focus is on designing marketing strategy for mid-market firms with a focus on B2B software manufacturing and professional services.

[00:02:27] And one of the things we're really going to get into is his CMO work at AZ for Bromack heating. So welcome, Paul. I am so excited to have you 

[00:02:37] Paul: here. Well, thank you. I have loved being here 

[00:02:41] Wendy: and so okay. You've, you're talking about Pimms and head lists and fancy heaters, but let's, let's start out with Brahmic heating and tell us a little bit about what their differentiator is.

[00:02:56] Paul: Oh, I love it. Yep. Differentiation is probably one of my favorite conversations. This relates to marketing. We tend to think of marketing as just being promotional, marketing. How do I yell about it louder? As opposed to really focusing on fundamental marketing, what are we selling at what price point into who?

[00:03:11] And so differentiation becomes the key in today's marketplace. Cause you, I mean, anybody can pull up their phone and find a viable substitute for anything, almost anything we can offer. Right? So especially when it comes to product sales, differentiation positioning becomes the central task of the marketer of the marketing role in an organization.

[00:03:30] So Brahmic Brahmic is a Australian manufacturer in Australia. They're known for lots of things. They have a plumbing and gas division. They sell refrigerators. You walk into any restaurant like deli. Sort of restaurant where they have all of those like display cases, they all say Abrahamic on them all over Australia, but globally they've expanded out their heating line, their outdoor heating line to become probably the, the, the leading player in and outdoor heating.

[00:03:59] And so the, the differentiator for Bromack heaters is that we focus on providing both superior design and function. You're going to find lots of heater manufacturers that make a pretty heater doesn't work very well. Hey, we're here. That works really well. And looks just awful. We've seen a lot of those right?

[00:04:16] Big square, rusty boxes that are hanging over you while you're eating the heat is sort of melted the way it looked like a little grill that's in front of it. They're you know, they're, they're a hot mess in there too. Just kind of hanging right over your head. And you're wondering if that thing falls, it's going to kill me.

[00:04:31] Bromide doesn't do that. We actually focused on building the most aesthetically pleasing design centric product that actually delivers really great heat. And so we focused on the premium line accordingly in order to achieve that. So you'll find Brahmic heaters and leading restaurants. We kind of made our positioning that leading designers, architects design centric firms, hospitality, restaurants choose bromine consistently.

[00:04:54] And so if you go to any high-end establishment, chances are you'll look up and you'll see a Bromack heater. And it's funny, you don't notice them until you notice them. And then you start seeing them everywhere. 

[00:05:03] Wendy: That's funny. Yeah. I'll have to start noticing it more as we start actually going out more and more, but I did go to the website and voiced some of their pictures where they're showing the bro heaters and that's B, R O M I C heaters.

[00:05:17] They look like places I'd want to vacation. Just go hang out in that room. So they are beautiful. And it's good to hear that they, they work so well. Okay. So they, they start out as an Australian company and they decided to take that the heaters global. So tell me a bit about that. Did you come in after they had started going global or did you come in at the beginning when they wanted to enter a new market?

[00:05:43] Paul: No, I came in early on when they had entered the U S market. And so we were primarily U S Australia. We got a few scattered sort of. Either sales reps in various parts of the globe, worry of distribution, but you don't really have a presence, a direct presence in the U S they were starting to gain ground.

[00:06:01] When I started in the U S it was a fairly small engagement from the agency side, and we were working with the Australian marketing team. And what it ended up happening is we ended up growing on the U S I mean, U S. Significantly bigger market Australia's. So even at home where they had sort of, you know, a decade or more, you know, significantly a few decades of, you know, history and, and brand reputation, that's built up, we entered the U S market and it's, you know, Australia is roughly the population of California.

[00:06:34] So it's not hard to eclipse the sales of the parent country when you have a much larger audience. And in fairness, also the us tends to be from a marketing and technology perspective. This is probably gonna sound a little harsh, but it's, this is what our client acknowledges and tells me all the time.

[00:06:51] We're roughly three to five years ahead of them in terms of us like consumer demand, expectations and technology implementation and how we go to market. And so when I came in in the U S we, you know, started just doing us marketing that quickly expanded to U S and Canada. And then I was hired to lead marketing.

[00:07:10] Global perspective for robotic heating as a division. And so I function as the chief marketing officer of SERP for Bromack heating, we're actually working on changing some of that role and we've hired some new, additional staff bringing on some agency partner support for a localized execution in various markets.

[00:07:25] And so we've, I dunno, I would say we'll probably double maybe even triple the size of our team this year and we'll continue that growth pace. As we grow up, we hired a new agency in Germany this year. We've hired a new agency in the UK this year. And so we're, we're continuing to expand out and build out localized expertise as we grow.

[00:07:45] Wendy: Okay. So they're saying we're, we're, well-known in Australia. We're going to go into the U S they hire you, it expands dramatically. And then. They decide to go internationally. Well, 

[00:07:59] Paul: sort of, right. So they, they already had a U S team. So I came on to support the U S team so that the organization is primarily sales driven by them picking up the phone and calling architects and building relationships and kind of focusing on that design community and part of what our goal was was to expand that out so that we had an inbound structure.

[00:08:18] Right. And so when it went from a handful of leads every month, right? 20 or 30, I think now we're, you know, in the thousands of leads every month of great relationships and architects and plans going into spec. So the idea was how do we, how do we start fishing with nets as opposed to hunting with Spears?

[00:08:35] And that's where we started to make a lot of ground. Okay. 

[00:08:39] Wendy: And so what I wanted to get to is, so you, you do this in the U S and then you say, we're going to go beyond the borders here. How did you figure out the strategy of what you were going to do. 

[00:08:54] Paul: Well, I mean, every country that we could implement a same similar strategy in what you're trying to do is to take the strategy that's working the best and then apply the constraints of each market as you, you know, kind of build some inroads into that market.

[00:09:09] For example, Canada there's castle laws, canned spam laws in Europe there's 

[00:09:15] Wendy: so can spam. So, 

[00:09:18] Paul: and Canada, you're technically not allowed to do outbound emails without it being permission based. Okay. So it limits your ability to do the same sort of like account based marketing approach, where you find a list, buy a list, join trade associations, and get their list.

[00:09:38] Right? What you need is more of an inbound approach where you're leveraging a platform to get in the leads and then doing a permission-based marketing approach, as opposed to a more directed sales approach. So we kind of, we kind of have to bite off and create the right engagement strategy by market.

[00:09:55] Now, Europe is even far more restrictive, so we have to have a double opt-in for every market and an opt-in even for our data analytics. So that gets even stricter on how we go. So you, we start to create the right strategy for each market in the U S it's very, if you're familiar with an ABM structure, account-based marketing structure, we identify the ideal company profile.

[00:10:16] Right. Who are the architects, mechanical engineers, brick and mortar locations that are carrying our product in, in COVID the biggest growth came from us pivoting direct to consumer, right? A lot of the architecture that the normal design through spec plans went away. And so we spent a lot of time going direct to consumer and had massive explosive growth.

[00:10:37] I would say that now commercial construction, even residential construction has really taken off the level where the industry can't even support it. So we've pivoted back now from homeowners. Specking a design plan themselves and implementing it themselves or with a look, I mean, this requires a licensed electrician.

[00:10:56] If it's a gas heater, licensed plumber, right. To now having an architect, that's involved to being more of a, like a bigger sort of engagement where it's does it's put into plan by the actual designer. 

[00:11:07] Wendy: Okay. So, okay. So you had to, you had to adjust along the way. And so I want to bring you back into strategy because when we're working with companies on their language, it's always, you start with strategy.

[00:11:18] So it sounds like Canada was your first target. 

[00:11:21] Paul: Yeah, I mean, we kind of go in order of the opportunity, right? As, as the global unit, there's a different division leader, that's responsible for each market, right. So I have a sales leader. In Europe. I have a sales leader in the U S I have a sales leader in Canada.

[00:11:38] I have a sales, a different sales leader in a different sort of structure in Australia and New Zealand. And so everybody wants equal attention, right. But I have to look at how do I make everybody happy? How do I help everybody grow? But then where does the biggest opportunity lie? And so for us, the biggest opportunity that came from growth potential came in U S and Canada.

[00:11:59] Now I'm going to spend the same effort helping Europe get launched, right? In terms of time, energy PR probably even money, but the investment that put that same amount of money just into lead gen into the U S will provide an exponential exponentially different rate of return than trying to get something off the ground in Europe.

[00:12:22] Now it doesn't mean we don't do it. It means that the metrics and the investment decisions on why you do that require a different level of sign off. They're not going to get the same results. 

[00:12:32] Wendy: Okay, so you, so your decision was very, what's the return, the ROI, what's the, I am getting 

[00:12:40] Paul: it. I have a growth objective globally.

[00:12:42] And so there's, I have to balance the tension of how do I grow and meet the overall growth objective for the entire organization. And then how do I balance that with the growth objectives for each market? And ideally you kind of achieve all of those in hand, right? Like everyone's going to be thrilled, but then you also have to make subjective decisions based upon yours, internal constraints, right?

[00:13:04] Like a good example of this. We paused all of our lead gen efforts in France right now and reallocated those that money in a different way, because France right now a day, just they passed a law a year ago that said that they don't want any external heaters in Paris. It's our biggest city. Right. Because they don't view it as environmentally for.

[00:13:29] Which is just a short-sighted way of looking at it. Right? Most people's assumption on outdoor heaters is that you're heating the. Right. And, and if that was actually true, that would be incredibly wasteful because you can't keep the air the way that infrared or infrared heaters actually work as the heat objects that heat people, they don't heat the air the same way that the sun works.

[00:13:51] And so the sustainability aspect of outdoor heaters that that should be told, and hopefully that we help educate the general population on is that installing outdoor heaters allows you to use outdoor spaces in a flexible manner, and just keep people when you need it, as opposed to building structures, to keep people comfortable.

[00:14:11] And so you look at any of the leading design firms, Gensler, for example, had this as one of their leading design trends that they're pushing all of their architects Lee, one of the leading architectural firms in the world right now, especially for sure in the United States. But what they're saying is that we're really focused on these flexible outdoor spaces where we can have multiple uses to them.

[00:14:31] I can reconfigure it like you think of a restaurant with fast, casual, most fast casual restaurants are really working for indoor outdoor dining options because it's significantly cheaper to build it. If they can keep people comfortable outdoors. Right. Especially in states that don't have wet functions, you've now saved a ton of money and a ton of energy in consuming all of this extra building materials to heat and like clean and keep all this stuff clean.

[00:14:57] Whereas I can just heat the people with an outdoor heater for less than $2 an hour. 

[00:15:03] Wendy: Wow. Yeah. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So go back. You take the money from France, understandably because they outlawed the, the global heaters. And where do you redirect it? Like, how do you decide where that's going to go 

[00:15:16] Paul: then?

[00:15:17] Well, right now we're pushing heavily into Germany and. And to be fair, they only outlet heaters in Paris. I believe I'll have to double fact check myself on that one, but you know, we're what we're looking for is it's not just that the demand is lower, which it is. Right. What's also true in that regard is that we're lacking a good sales leader in that particular market right now for distribution.

[00:15:39] So it's this constant like. The other thing that's interesting is outdoor heaters clearly have a cycle, right? Yeah. So, so we were, we kind of balance our lead gen efforts in market based upon the seasonality. So when Australia is frigidly cold, right? Or it's normally shoulder seasons, right? You're extending into shoulder seasons.

[00:16:02] You're trying to make the outdoors comfortable up until the point where it's not reasonable. Now COVID was actually this huge, huge boon for us super successful for us, because now you have areas like Chicago, where you would normally never have outdoor dining in the winter. It's just too cold, right?

[00:16:18] Well, now, if you want a restaurant to survive, they're scrambling to make that happen because of COVID. So we have a lot of innovative design around things like igloos with heaters in them, right. And then worked with Chipman architecture, which is fascinating. They built this beautiful in Chicago, this beautiful igloo sort of design that restaurants could deploy.

[00:16:37] The city of Chicago actually introduced this design concept that said, how do we keep our restaurants open dining outdoors during COVID? And so we got to be kind of in the middle of that story, right? It's a super fun story that exists in that. 

[00:16:51] Wendy: Okay. I love heaters, but I am going to get you back to this global experience.

[00:16:59] Paul: I'm here to talk about Bravo. 

[00:17:03] Wendy: That is definitely true. This is very interesting. And so what I got out of that was that you, you don't have a clear strategy, like we're going to go into this country and we're going to master it and then do another one, but there's a lot of moving parts and you've got to be a little opportunistic, which is very interesting to hear because when the law changed in Paris, you've got to adjust to Germany in the UK, but you've got to look at also the weather conditions of who's it appropriate to go for.

[00:17:30] And you're probably not marketing down in the Caribbean at all. Kind of like our, our pool service in new England, you know, there are certain months we need them and then, you know, they need to fly down to the other hemisphere 

[00:17:46] Paul: because they're installed product. Right. I have to be super aware of timing because I have to market ahead of you needing them because it requires an electrician or somebody to install a requires a little bit of lag time there.

[00:18:00] So I'm marketing ahead of the consumer demand for the product. 

[00:18:05] Wendy: So right now are where you w what, what regions are you focused on right now? 

[00:18:12] Paul: So what we do is we build out a scorecard and we benchmark the historical lead flow. And I have, at this point, a couple of years of data that we benchmark against what we're doing is we're looking at what we would call an Sal, right?

[00:18:25] I'm not looking, I'm looking at cost per lead acquisition, as it relates to buyer into. Right. And so it's not just what did a lead come in. As I think leads is the most dangerous word in, in any organization because the marketing team is going to define leads drastically different than the sales team is going to finally, it's one of the first things that we come to come in and help an organization do is to build a customer journey where we're defining both fit and behavioral activities that justify interest or need.

[00:18:54] And so instead of just saying, Hey, we got this lead and the lead means anybody. They gave us their name. We're looking at buyer intent and that we can look at buyer behavioral signals, how intent or how ready are they to purchase? What are the steps that they're taking in there? What's our close ratios.

[00:19:09] As we're nurturing people. That customer journey. And so we have a targeted lead for a sales accepted lead. That means they have an active opportunity that they're looking to start a project with, and they could be a homeowner, a commercial end user, or an architect where they're specifying it into plan.

[00:19:24] All of those have drastically different sales cycles and they have drastically different average opportunity side. And so what we do is we 

[00:19:33] Wendy: go ahead, go ahead. How do you do it? So 

[00:19:35] Paul: what we're doing is we're breaking those apart and saying, okay, our normal deal flow is X, right? We got, you know, 300 of these last, last may.

[00:19:44] So how many am I looking for this month? And so we set a growth objective and it's normally a uniform growth objective. We kind of average it out over the quarter. And so we have a scorecard now that we optimize against and we try to keep our costs port per Sal in scope for market. So if it's an established market, us Canada, Australia, we have a hundred dollars per Sal threshold.

[00:20:04] If it's an emerging market that we're walking into, we set $150 threshold. We're now getting to the point where we're creating some nuance into, we believe like. So a lot of our work reaches out to architects or commercial partners or contractors or that kind of stuff. And so we're setting different cost thresholds on acquiring those type of relationships because we feel we can nurture them into multiple opportunities and not just one.

[00:20:28] And so we're, we have a different strategy as it relates to what we would call our specifying 

[00:20:33] Wendy: channel. Okay. And when you say sale, what do you see, I'm asking you to define a term, 

[00:20:39] Paul: so I'll just walk you through what a normal customer journey is, right? Like, uh, and it's 

[00:20:44] Wendy: always fun. What does S-A-L stand for 

[00:20:47] Paul: accepted lead. A sales person is now responsible for the relationship as opposed to the marketing team and MQL marketing qualified lead.

[00:20:57] Wendy: Okay. So it's accepted lead, but then would go to an SQL, a sales qualified leads. Yeah, 

[00:21:02] Paul: every organization is different, right? So some, some organizations have an SQL stage or even a SGL sales generated lead. So there's different stages. And what we want to have happen is that there is one of my favorite phrases is there has to be one team in one goal.

[00:21:18] Yeah. Right because we ha we lack the nuance and the language to hand people backwards and forwards. Right? Most organizations have a well defined path on how to hand people forward. I would say also most organizations lack a way to hand somebody back. And so what happens is a lead gets a lead. Well, I'm using the same sort of mess a person.

[00:21:39] I contact a relationship and account, whatever sort of language you want to do gets progressed forward into a sales relationship. And then they live and die in salesperson, purgatory, and Salesforce, right? Where there actually isn't very much nurturing happening. There's no behavioral triggers. They're sending out emails probably through Salesforce that lacks any sort of engagement criteria.

[00:21:58] You don't even know if this person has a spam trap or a honeypot or some other sort of thing. We're just keep sending and we keep viewing the value of. Salesforce builder our CRM as the number of contacts that exist in them without any sort of engagement health score, it just leads to being a hot mess.

[00:22:15] And so now when you go to migrate or upgrade or do anything, you don't know how to do that because there's this legacy of data that exists, that's all tied together and you're scared of losing it when you don't have the real metrics of what actually counts inside that CRM CRMs, ideally should have some sort of health metrics based upon their context.

[00:22:32] Wendy: Absolutely. Absolutely. And how do you do that when it's across countries and languages? 

[00:22:38] Paul: Very gingerly. I don't know. So right now this is sort of the, the struggle that we're having now, we're actually upgrading some of our CRM processes and creating a divergent path between how the us does sales and how the rest of the world does sales.

[00:22:52] And so we're switching to a different sales structure and ABM strategy that I'm leading that initiative right now with the head of the U S division. And so we're necessarily having to morph their CRM structure and implement a new marketing automation platform. And so already we're having the discussions.

[00:23:05] How do we set up the marketing automation to integrate with the sales platform to provide. One for one data. I'm not looking for a single, like two one-way sinks, right? I want one for one true information that sync between those two platforms. But I also want to have the flexibility to adjust that as we learn, because most people specify a sales process and then they build their whole CRM around what counts in that sales process and where those data records live.

[00:23:32] And because most CRMs are built for enterprise, right. They're built for nobody right out of the box. It means that anybody can use them, but nobody can use them right out of the box. So there's this inherent danger where the organization self specifies and kind of paints itself into a corner. And then they don't know how to unwind that.

[00:23:49] So you've got to have enough vision and foresight to say, where are we going to be at three to five years from now? 

[00:23:55] Wendy: Okay. So hang on. You're you jump ahead. So fast, my brains trying to catch up here. Okay. So you're struggling with this right now. So what was the struggle that said, I need to break off the us versus the rest of the world.

[00:24:08] Paul: So right now, what we're I'll give you, I don't know how much of this I'm allowed to share or not share. So I'll just talk in big level numbers. How about this powers? Powers of 10? So without getting too specific, let's say that we have, I don't know, 10,000 key relationships in our CRM right now.

[00:24:26] Right. But there exists a hundred thousand key relationships that we want to get to in the U S we understand that that's the market size of what we're going after. So if I look at the last few years of activity and we say we got to 10, but I set the objective to get to a hundred in the next two years, it means that we have to radically change what we're doing with the sales team to 10 X, our efforts.

[00:24:47] So that's where we're moving from this sales lead marketing led sort of data silo structures, where one operates in an inbound structure, one operates in an outbound structure, and then they sort of help compliment each other to moving into a unified structure where marketing is aware throughout the entire process and is feeding the activities that it wants the sales team to do.

[00:25:11] And that's normally what we would call an account based marketing structure, where marketing sort of leads the front of the engagement says, Hey, we're going to provide coverage through self service tools through our. Email outreach through advertising and partnerships. And what we're going to do is we're going to map the entire a hundred thousand people that we want to reach, and we're going to feed to the sales team and the people that are engaging.

[00:25:36] And so we're pulling all the needles out of the haystack of people that actually have value or pain at that moment and have a design project that they need help with. Maybe you've never considered heating or whatever those things are, and it can change for whatever industry you're you're working for.

[00:25:49] But it's really this idea of in a traditional structure. What we're doing is we're working really hard to define where the handoff. In a, in a new structure and account-based structure. What we're looking for is to defining the ideal fit of who would find value and we're working to eliminate handoffs altogether.

[00:26:09] So that marketing communications remains active and aware and is listening throughout the entire process from awareness all the way to purchase even beyond purchase. Right? And so what we're doing is we're sending great differentiation messaging when they entered the sales channel, right. We're reinforcing the brand's value propositions and how they stack up to the competition.

[00:26:30] So that even when they're considering there's some great data, the gardener has around this when it looks to vendor evaluation, right? Typical customers only spend roughly 20 to 30% of their time actually talking to them. Which, if you break apart, how many vendors they're talking about five or six, right?

[00:26:47] What are you getting three to 5% of a person's time and evaluating you? Right? The whole goal now is to provide all the information to not have the sales team hoard that expertise on specifications, support, product, specification, product, differentiators, where you want to make all of those clear and up front pricing data to price pricing becomes a really great differentiator.

[00:27:08] If in a commercial space, in a B2C transactional space pricing is a terrible differentiator, right? It's the easiest one to erode in a commercial space. It's actually an interesting differentiator because you can price and bundle products completely differently. 

[00:27:22] Wendy: So, okay. And that's a challenge, but that same challenge must be going on in your, in the rest of the world too.

[00:27:30] So you just breaking off the U S to figure it out and then implement it, or are you seeing a difference. 

[00:27:37] Paul: Yeah. So if you look at GDPR, GDPR does not allow you to do outbound research like that or outbound outreach like that. And so we cannot implement a GDPR without an opt-in permission first. So in GDPR, the market there requires us to go through platform sort of advertising models to get that double opt in, to build the relationship in the first place, because we have to document the permission based marketing first.

[00:28:02] And so that requires a different CRM process. Hey, how do I for doc for legal documentation pro perspective, how do I prove compliance to GDPR for my outbound sales research? Because they have, have to have opted in it already. 

[00:28:16] Wendy: Interesting. Okay. So Europe has GDPR. Canada has the canned spam laws and then what, 

[00:28:24] Paul: and Australia's very similar, similar to.

[00:28:28] Now to be honest, those are very loose and fast. I don't know very many organizations. When I look at competitor research, they don't follow the letter of the law, especially when they're, you know, they're based in that country. Same is actually true of GDPR. It's so funny when we were trying to be very, I maintained some of that liability.

[00:28:46] I have my integrity on the line, right. I want to make sure that we're protecting the business and insulate them from this legal liability. Cause it could be. So we tend to be overly conservative in this regard. But when I look at a lot of the in country players, a lot of them play loose and fast with those rules.

[00:29:03] So a lot of this is figuring out how do I gain a foothold to get some market demand? You don't ever get in trouble unless someone complains, meaning if you're delivering great content, you're delivering great value. You're kind you're, you're standing behind your product. Very rarely do you get in trouble.

[00:29:20] If you're doing stuff that shady, if you have a bad product, if your customer experience is terrible, their user experience is terrible. You're bearing all of the key data behind one of those like submit and Hey, you want to get pricing information, then opt into our, you know, us to spam you. Then of course people get ticked off.

[00:29:37] So a lot of this is how do I, how do I balance the two? How do I match what the intent is of the law? And the letter of the law is with, with the right sort of user experience, expectation that this customer wants. 

[00:29:52] Wendy: Okay, so you're breaking it off because us has different rules and then you'll have to go around the world and make sure you're following.

[00:30:03] Yeah. Doing that balance. The intent of the law and the user experience in every country could be. 

[00:30:09] Paul: Yeah, you're , speaking my love language on how complex this is not only do I have to manage the legal requirements. Now I have to also manage the weather, which is not in my realm of control.

[00:30:19] Then 

[00:30:20] Wendy: you've got to handle the languages 

[00:30:21] Paul: too. And then you got to handle the languages and it's not just languages. Right? I think you you've spoke to this as we were talking earlier, right. It's localization right in Germany. It's so it's so funny to me, how many of words are translated and how many of them are not, and we translated like outdoor heater.

[00:30:40] And so there's a specific term for that. And they're like, yeah, we don't say it that way. We have a completely different term. It's not the literal translation of what outdoor heater would be. And so some language, an outdoor heater or a patio heater, whereas in Europe, a garden heater versus a strip heater, there's so many different terms that are localized in the common vernacular.

[00:30:58] That isn't just a language translation problem. 

[00:31:02] Wendy: Yeah. So now machine translation for your website's done. 

[00:31:06] Paul: It's not even machine translation. It's you have to have market awareness. You have to have somebody that's in the market that, that understands the space a little bit. Right? Because even the common citizen may not be aware of what this thing is.

[00:31:21] It seems so commonplace to the U S right. But we are we're. So we're from many respects. We tend to be a little bit further ahead than the rest of the world. 

[00:31:31] Wendy: Right. But that's, we've had translators that are working on products like that. And they'll actually go out to the market and look at the shelves, or do the research online to figure out what is most commonly used.

[00:31:44] So if you're hiring a good translator, they're going to ha they're going to do that research to make sure that you've got the right term. Right. So how did you end up getting it done to make sure it was done at. 

[00:31:58] Paul: We've had some fits and starts. We, one of our big initiatives last year was to low roll out a new global web infrastructure.

[00:32:06] And so we had an internal marketing manager. We had an external agency that was leading that project. We, we kind of built the site out to have a central a central CMS, a headless CMS that sat at the front end that functioned as a PIM product information management system. Okay, good. Good, good, good.

[00:32:22] Wendy: Okay. You've got it. You've got to define these terms because I now know what had listenings and I knew what Pimms were before, because we have worked with Kimberly who does Pimm's or, you know, has a great PIM if you're looking for one. So first define a PIM and then headless, because we'll go in that. 

[00:32:44] Paul: So I'll take a few steps.

[00:32:46] So Pam is a product information management system and what it's intended to be as a single source of truth, the central place where all of your product information lips, and that normally includes like descriptions pricing data. It can also include content that goes along with the product. So product manuals, installation guides it'll also include media.

[00:33:10] So like videos, installation, videos, product 360 views, a bunch of physical like photo gallery or assets that go along with the product. We'll evaluate a lot of Pimms, but one of the things that we were facing and also language translation can go along with that too. We were sort of facing this a little bit more technical problem, and that we were under a single domain from a.com and then we use subdivision sub-directories for all of the sites.

[00:33:38] So it would be brahmic.com/us bromack.com/ca for Canada, meramec.com. And that, that helped us to some degree in that the website, all of those countrysides rolled up to a single domain for domain authority, right? They all benefited from each other from a SEO perspective. They also created a massive headache for us in that there wasn't a clean way.

[00:34:02] We were actually the previous build, which I didn't have anything to do with was using a language plugin and they were using the language plugin to do country specific. And they were using a different sort of redirect script that says, Hey, you landed on the Canadian side, let's push you over to the Canadian side, which wasn't really a Canadian site.

[00:34:23] It was an English translation site that said, this is the English translation site for Canada. Or the Spanish site was intended to read that the user's browser was in Spanish, but it directed them to a site that was geared to Spain. So if you were a Mexican user just provides confusion all over the place.

[00:34:40] And not only does it provide end user confusion. Oh wait. Um, it, it confuses the sales team because when they fill out a form, it gets routed to the Spanish or the European site. So they 

[00:34:49] Wendy: just put the wrong tags then when they were redirecting, 

[00:34:53] Paul: no, it's the wrong strategy. Right. Cause it 

[00:34:56] Wendy: wasn't the wrong strategy, but it's also, they built it incorrectly.

[00:35:00] If you were in Mexico, you couldn't. Yeah. Okay. 

[00:35:04] Paul: And so what we had to do was to actually build out country-specific sites that included multiple language options that had H ref Lang. Google meta-tags Google snippet of code that sits on the backend that says, Hey, this site. Is for people that have English, but their English is for great Britain in the UK versus I have the same exact page.

[00:35:31] And if they're in the U S and they're using an English us English version in their browser, then redirect them to this page. And so normally duplicate content is a big, hot mess that penalizes you in goo in search, because it, if views you, as you know, you're spamming, you're putting out all this fake content and it's not really your content.

[00:35:50] It's not unique. It's not driving unique value, but because we're operating in similar content, you know, w we have similar products, actually, not the same. They have different voltages. They have different applications, wiring standards, that kind of thing. But most of the descriptive copy, most of the images are the same.

[00:36:07] Most of the application or gallery images are the same. It has the same form factor. If you didn't know, you would never know they would all be. The on that end, but they have different install guides. They have different product manuals cause they have different specifications. And so what we did is we used, what's called a headless CMS and a headless CMS is a website that's basically built to store all of your data, but doesn't have all of the code that's required for a front facing user experience.

[00:36:36] Right. It's lacking that it been because of that, it's significantly faster and it's built to exchange data, your content really fast. And so we built a headless CMS, WordPress backend that functioned as a Pam that served out, you know, these 14 different countries sites in, you know, a bunch of different languages.

[00:36:54] I think it's 11 country sites in 14 different languages. And so that. Kind of the architecture that we settle that because we could leverage some sophisticated caching mechanisms to push data to all of the sites in a significantly faster way that benefited the SEO and Google now knows, you know, and this was sort of our problem before someone would Google, if an outdoor heater and Brunswick would show up, unfortunately the U S had significantly more traffic.

[00:37:20] And so the domain authority for that page lived on a us specific site and we'd have Australian hits to the U S website, which seemed fine until they filled out a form. And the sales team got notified in the us. And now we're trying to route all that data back to the Australian team and we have a time zone difference.

[00:37:35] And so now we got a day delay between them, that that person getting a connection to the sales team. Right. And so that, that gap in time is significant, right? Like even now we've, we've found that someone from our advertising models, if we have a sales person that reaches out within an hour, right, we have an 80% chance of closing that deal.

[00:37:52] Whereas if they wait until. Oh, no, wait a day. Right. Typically what happens is 80% of leads say, I didn't fill out a form. I didn't do that on Facebook or Instagram. Like I have no idea what you're talking about. And then you start pressing them a little bit. Like, do you actually have an outdoor project? Oh yeah.

[00:38:07] We're remodeling our backyard. Like, okay. You just lack the awareness that you were browsing late last night and had an interest in this. 

[00:38:16] Wendy: Right? Right. Well, you think of all the information that we're taking in. Okay. So let me repeat this back and make sure that I got this. You built a headless PIM to serve as your website that nobody's actually using because you don't have a front end user face on it.

[00:38:32] And all the countries have their own front end to it that has the appropriate coding into it. The H ref country tag and language tag, that was somebody from that country. Searches, they search into a front end that is connected to the headless PIM in the background that quickly pushes the information up to what 

[00:39:00] Paul: they want to say.

[00:39:01] It's a little bit more complex than that, but simpler than what you're describing. So the ha the headless CMS functions as a PIM, the design of it is to serve content and to have a single source of truth for all of our product content. Okay. The headless CMS is 

[00:39:18] Wendy: called a headless 

[00:39:20] Paul: PIM PIM, a PIM product information system, right?

[00:39:24] It's it's, it's 

[00:39:26] Wendy: never be headless because of Tim 

[00:39:29] Paul: headless lists are headless website that doesn't have a front end face to it is the headless. CMS is a thing. A headless PIM is not a thing is built to function as a PIM. Now, what that means is the PIM actually is the one that's kicking out the H ref LinkedIn.

[00:39:50] It's it's saying, cause it's the only thing that knows I have all of these other markets that have the same pages, same content, the individual sites don't know that they're getting fed that information from the central PIM architecture. So that's easy for things like skews, right? Like when I have a product, those all get shared.

[00:40:10] Now, if I have a blog that I want to push out to every market, it'll push that out and it'll add in, Hey, these other markets have the same content in the blog, but a market like Germany may say, Hey, we have a unique case study or a unique blog that we only pushed there. And that content doesn't live in the rest of the websites.

[00:40:28] Wendy: That's not that. 

[00:40:31] Paul: So that doesn't go into the headless CMS. Each market can now have unique content or it could have shared content. And so Google doesn't actually index anything in the PIM. What we do with the PIM is that we push out all of the content so that it lives in is cashed inside each local market site so that the user experience is super fast, right?

[00:40:53] They're not going out to the server and then to a different server to get the content and then come back. It just lives on one server with one server request. And once it hits that browser it's saved in that end user's browser. So now they don't even have to reload that content it's preloaded it's super fast.

[00:41:09] So site speed is such an important factor of SEO. Google never sees the PIM Google just sees, Hey, Germany has this content. Oh, wait. So does UK. So does Netherlands, so does Belgium, so does Germany, so does New Zealand? Great. I'll just push. If somebody in Germany searches, I'll push them to the German. So Google is Ark.

[00:41:28] That's what the ATF link text does is it says, Hey, we have all these other sites using the same content. Don't penalize them for it. Benefit them by serving the like let's index that for Germany. Now, Google doesn't actually search the internet. When I search, did you know that Google, Google searches their servers index of my website.

[00:41:51] They don't search my website. My website is anywhere from, you know, a few days old, a few weeks old. Right. And I have to dictate how often they index my site based upon content that I feed them. And that's normally felt from an XML site site map. So I have to feed them this content of here's what I want you to index.

[00:42:10] So that's what the PIM is doing is it's feeding them that XML sitemap, in addition to the localized content that exists. 

[00:42:18] Wendy: Oh, I th I just think it's absolutely brilliant. I want to put, I want you to put it in a bottle and let us sell it because I see all these companies that are doing their countrysides and their translations are all done.

[00:42:32] The messaging is different. The organization is different. They've lost that corporate branding. Yet, if you do one global site you don't have that, you know, unique content that the country managers want to have. So I just, I just think this is so brilliant. 

[00:42:48] Paul: Thank you. Yeah, it was a, I'm not going to lie. It was a huge headache days, a weeks and days of strategic means.

[00:42:57] And like, how do we solve this problem? I think in fairness, I think we've solved. This is kind of our 20 our Pareto principle solution. Right? We realized that there wasn't a solution in the marketplace that existed the complexity level that we wanted to achieve this at. Right. Cause just enough just to have translation, right?

[00:43:14] Like there's unique forms that exist that route differently to salespeople based upon each market. And some will get handed off to a channel partner. Some will get serviced by internal team, some just skip us directly and go directly to fulfillment. Right. And so what we needed was enough flexibility that we could manage this centrally, but have a different market strategy for each market.

[00:43:35] If we wanted it to, you know, we don't sell direct in any market right now, but we wanted the option to do that in a year or two. So a lot of this is built around. Like I can turn on e-commerce in any market, I'm going to be conservative right in a week just to test out all of the workflows and make sure that everything is set up, but all of the functionality exists there and is pre-built right.

[00:43:58] We're actually serving all of our products in an e-commerce system. Now we just don't have a buy button. If, if, if, and when we want to launch in a new market, let's say we want to roll out an Indian sub site. It can have that Cindy and sub-site rolled out in probably a day that exists in a staging environment so that you could provide translation support.

[00:44:16] And the only thing limiting us is to make sure that it's translated, right? All the images are ready. All of the product descriptions are ready. The only thing that's there is the translation part that needs to get, you know, double check triple checked, and we feel good about that from a sales perspective.

[00:44:31] And we move on that the technical limitations of rolling out and scaling we've built out a really effective model for. Right. And so 

[00:44:39] Wendy: you've got the architecture, you've got everything there. You've got the product pictures, you've built the picture. So you don't have text in it. And all you have is the text boxes that you need to fill in with the appropriate language.

[00:44:49] And you can open 

[00:44:51] Paul: up unconsciously it's structure. Right? If you want Google to index that you can't bury your important copy onto images, right. It's got to be readable. 

[00:44:59] Wendy: Yeah. Well, we still have a lot that, that is something I train people a lot in is don't build your images with text. We'll put a text box on top of it or, you know, put it to the side or something.

[00:45:09] So, yeah. That's another good reminder. Yeah, this is, this is, this, this almost hour has almost has flown by so quickly. So how hard would it be to recreate something like this for different reasons? 

[00:45:25] Paul: I mean, we didn't, we didn't build this as a product. We built this as a solution for this particular client's application.

[00:45:30] This, to be honest, this was a hefty investment. It was a six-figure investment for them. But it's. Honestly, it's I think that we can measure ROI in terms of return in the first half of this year, already a bit clipping far more than we've invested into that. So the, the growth by market, right? And you can see the exponential growth by market in terms of leads in the growth trajectory.

[00:45:55] What we're looking at as an organic trajectory versus, you know, us adding on extra elements that improve that organic growth trajectory. We had a huge bump during COVID to end user consumer. That's all dropped off. You can see the tail on that. And so now we have to kind of really muscle up and build a different go to market strategy that existed two years ago that we pivoted away from in COVID.

[00:46:16] Now we're pivoting back. And so, yeah, I mean, the answer is this is probably a six to nine month investment for any company that wanted to put. In terms of architecting their plan. So I think everyone's going to have a little bit of nuance to what they need to do. It's probably on the shorter end, if they're using the same, like go to market strategy in every market versus if you had unique go to market strategies and a sales team that needs to get brought on board unique workflows, it'll probably take, you know, closer to that nine months or a little bit longer sort of mark.

[00:46:45] And that's really around. You're probably going to spend, you know, the first part of it, roadmapping, making sure you're not missing details on how this is built. There has to be a good architecture plan on how to move from your existing web structure to a new one, right? How are we not going to lose domain authority?

[00:47:01] How are we going to boost our traffic profile? There's always a kind of a drop in SEO value as Google re indexes your site. We supplement that with a lot of ad spend to make sure that we don't lose the traction that we built over time. So there's, there's a fair amount of planning that goes into it.

[00:47:15] And then it's honestly, the hardest part is always kind of. Right. The client always underestimates the amount of work that goes into building the right content strategy. They just assume, Hey, just copy over what we had while you're building a new thing, because what you had doesn't work anymore, or it doesn't work as effectively as what you want.

[00:47:33] And so architecting a new content plan takes some significant time. Honestly, what threw us this time around was language translation. It took way longer than we anticipated. We had three or four road bumps that we did not anticipate. And so that delayed this process. So this is a good nod to you, right?

[00:47:50] Like if we had thought through that effectively and started that planning process earlier, we probably could have launched, you know, 45 days earlier that that pushed us off significantly. We had a vendor that disappeared halfway through. 

[00:48:05] Wendy: Oh, my continent. Well, that's, I can't tell you how many people have come to us because they've worked with somebody that did machine translation with post-human editing, or they just put random people on and they don't get that consistency of voice or they use machine translation.

[00:48:19] And then it got out to the marketplace and their salespeople threw a fit. So it is it's key to finding that right vendor that matches exactly what you're trying to do. 

[00:48:29] Paul: You mentioned tone of voice. You also threw out differentiation with my two favorite sort of topics. When we talk about brand messaging we built a model around how we do brand messaging.

[00:48:38] And so we try to build out three to five value propositions that what I'm affectionately calling my de C3 model, differentiated, clear, compelling, and customer centric, right? It's the way we say things that kind of cements in our value. And you may take one. Unique right. Two or three other people could say the same, but when you stack three or four of them together, it should be something that only you can say about yourself.

[00:49:03] Right? So when I talk about brown Mick, and it's like, we focus on both form and function, I can pick up our competitors and say, Hey, they have a beautiful product. Doesn't work very well, right. Or they have a really great functional product, but this doesn't work. And so we have some differentiators that we work with on our end too.

[00:49:17] But the other one that we've worked on in brand messaging is totally. It's how do you speak? And that's something that's really important. Especially if you have external partners, you have an agency that you work with, a PR firm, a sales team, a marketing team, right? How do you speak with one voice? And so you have to give examples of like, this is, this is what we used to say.

[00:49:37] This is how this fits into the new brand messaging for. Right. And here's the difference between a and B. And so you apply characteristics of what we want to be. We want to be, you know, professional, confident we want to have an air of playfulness, but not enough to be cheeky, right? There's probably some sort of like phrase that you're trying guiding principles that you go after.

[00:49:57] But then what you have to do is you have to break apart what we used to say and how we say it now, so that people get a good feel of what that tone of voice is. And it's funny because I have a great sense of how to do this in the markets where I understand this, right? If you asked me to do this for Australia, for Canada, for us, I've spent enough time in those markets that I can map the differences between those.

[00:50:16] I have no idea how to do this. Right. I have no speak 

[00:50:20] Wendy: the language and you don't know the culture, but that's where you lean on your translation server, your language services company to say, this is the tone that we're capturing here. This is the messaging that we're trying to do. And a good translator is going to call out.

[00:50:35] Paul: She would do is you would, you would probably do the exact same thing. You would take that brand messaging deck and you would say here's the applications, right? And so, as you build out those, those value propositions, you're also going to build a set of what I would call pitches. And it's where the rubber hits the road.

[00:50:50] When I need to spin up a Google ads campaign, once I've done really good work with my translation. Or my agency partner that's in market. Now I can just grab all of those and spin up an ad campaign in a day, as opposed to going back and forth and doing this a ton of time. 

[00:51:04] Wendy: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I it's for our tone of voice we use edutaining so it's educational yet.

[00:51:10] It's entertaining and that's what the podcast, it comes across on there. I want to have fun, but it's got to be educational. So this has certainly been educational. We only have a couple of minutes left and I haven't learned anything about you. How much global marketing have you done before working with

[00:51:27] Paul: None romaine is my they're my baby, or I'm their baby. Uh, I've been with Brunswick probably. I don't know, five, four or five years now at this point. And so we've started kind of expanding out. This has been a lot of growth for me as well. Yes. 

[00:51:42] Wendy: And so it's a good reminder that here this company is coming into the U S cause it's a huge market, but they're not blindsiding themselves or, you know, putting blindfolds on to the rest of the world.

[00:51:52] And you're somebody that just has a go for it. 

[00:51:53] Paul: Attitude. And in fairness, I just want to throw this out there. I'm not the global rockstar, bro has so many amazing. People that I work with where I'm getting their insight. Like Josh, who's sort of my, my counterpart, my, my partner in terms of he leads product and brand for Brahmic right.

[00:52:10] We have weekly conversations. We're talking about all this stuff. Part of this is getting like a great team together that thinks outside of you, you have to be willing to learn. You have to be willing to like, Hey, here's how we're doing this. Is there a different way to do this? And like, oh, this actually works really well.

[00:52:26] But you know, some of the learning that we have, we tend to think, oh, U S is that the big dog? Right. We implemented an ad structure from our UK partner that 10 X, our leads in the U S. At a lower cost. Like you, you have to be willing to just take off the, Hey, I know what I'm doing here. And to be actively willing, to be humble and learn from other people, even if it means the junior partner in a like small market where we're getting very little traction, does it, would this work?

[00:52:53] And then, whoa, that really works. We're rolling this out everywhere. Oh 

[00:52:57] Wendy: my gosh. All the research from the department of commerce from the federal government in the U S says that global companies grow faster, more profitable or more stable. And this is a perfect example. You take, you know, you build that diversity into it.

[00:53:13] You get that diversity of ideas, you try implementing it. And then you've got 10 times growth in the U S but if they had only said, we're going into the U S because it's a big market they'd missed out. 

[00:53:24] Paul: Right. And that's, that's the fun part. We, so when I bring on an agency partner, and for example, we just rolled one out in Germany.

[00:53:29] I gave him view access to all the other markets for all the other camps. No, he can't edit them. He has the ability to learn from all of them. And we'll say, Hey, we built out this great creative. Do you want to use this? And so every, I dunno, every two weeks, when we sync up with DJJ agency partner, we're looking for wins and we're sharing other market wins with them.

[00:53:50] We want everyone to grow faster based upon what the other markets are doing. 

[00:53:55] Wendy: That's that's fantastic. Uh, okay. I got to get into what's your favorite foreign word? We're running out of time. 

[00:54:04] Paul: That's my favorite word. I'm not sure I have a good favor for but I'll give you my favorite forward. I think right now is chicken rolls.

[00:54:11] So in Australia, We were talking about what the equivalent is of like what, and they, you know, what we would call construction workers or trades people. And in Australia, they're affectionately known as tradies. And so in the U S a tra tradie, right? Like how do you win there? What's their love language, right?

[00:54:29] It's probably like a red bull and probably right. Like they're drinking red bulls driving around, like working all day in Australia. It's strawberry milk and a chicken roll, which is sort of like this mystery meat, egg roll that no one knows what's inside of. And when I was out there, they like kept egging me on trying to get me to try one.

[00:54:48] And we never did, but th there's some fun nuances. You start to learn out how they go to market Australians, th the tradies do sausage sizzles. And so they'll have a supplier. Grill sausage is outside and they do, you know, sausage sizzles to introduce product, the product rollouts, which we do not do anything even remotely similar here.

[00:55:11] Wendy: That sounds fantastic. Sausage sizzles with the strawberry milkshake, but I'm not sure 

[00:55:18] Paul: about the chicken roll, not even a strawberry milkshake. It's literally strawberry milk. We're traveling. We all consume 1500 calories in a truck it's just sugar, right? It's the same thing, but they're like turning into five-year-olds drinking chocolate milk.

[00:55:33] Well, we do the same thing with caffeine, right? They're just doing it with shit. 

[00:55:38] Wendy: Right? So the red bull is the caffeine. Although they have a lot of sugar in them too. Don't they? 

[00:55:44] Paul: I don't know. I don't drink anymore. I don't 

[00:55:47] Wendy: either, but I think I read, read the label once when I had a child who was younger, who wanted to drink that, I'm like, it's like, it's got like 10 times the amount of caffeine from a cup of coffee and it's got more sugar in it than Coke, but I'm not sure.

[00:56:01] Sorry, red bull. I'm sure you're not going to be a sponsor. 

[00:56:06] Paul: We'll reverse this for sure. 

[00:56:07] Wendy: Okay. And so favorite vacation. 

[00:56:11] Paul: Oh, see dude, do honeymoons count as vacation. Oh, absolutely. There's there. See, that's the one thing that'll never like be beat my mind, going to, going into heli with my wife is a lifelong sort of like happy place in my head.

[00:56:24] When, when my wife's wife gave birth to our three children, I remember like we did this hypno babies class and it was like basically just pain management, but you're, you're supposed to go to your happy place. And I think both of us just like, it was very much like we're going back to Bora Bora. 

[00:56:38] Wendy: Oh, that's great.

[00:56:41] That's so exciting. Okay. And then how about a memorable cultural experience? 

[00:56:49] Paul: A memorable cultural experience. What's yours. Give me some context. 

[00:56:52] Wendy: Okay. No, no, we're almost out of time. I got a 

[00:56:55] Paul: memorable cultural experience. So 

[00:56:57] Wendy: something that was embarrassing or really funny that maybe you were talking to somebody while you were doing the marketing, you just started rolling. With laughter or something that you go dang. I can't believe we did that. We're never going to do that again in marketing.

[00:57:11] Paul: I mean, I've got a lot of embarrassing. Well, my favorite one is my creative director and I went to Australia to go meet with Brahmic. We did all of our strategic planning, but Chad who's on my team. Didn't want to stay at the normal like corporate hotel where they put you up out. So he negotiated for an Airbnb and we were staying in downtown Sydney.

[00:57:30] What we didn't realize is that we're staying in an Airbnb right below this really, really famous gay bar. And so every day is we're walking down our street. There's these big burly men wearing very, very tight leather shorts. Just kind of cat calling us as we walked by. But the, the tip of the iceberg there, like we had no idea that the week that we were staying there was there like LGBTQ Mardi Gras.

[00:57:54] We could not get to our hotel without walking through this massive parade of mostly naked people. And there, it was just like, yeah, you're staying at Mardi Gras. Isn't that great? And we're like, oh my gosh, this is so much work just to get to where we're staying. Chad, you really screwed this one up. So that's one of my favorite ones 

[00:58:13] Wendy: that counts.

[00:58:14] That's fantastic. You never know where you're going to be. 

[00:58:19] Paul: Just little things you forget to research. Yes, yes, yes. And they're just like, you didn't want to stay at the hotel. Well that one's on you. 

[00:58:26] Wendy: But you know, what is fantastic.

[00:58:35] now a final recommendations for people that are thinking about expanding global or want to learn. 

[00:58:42] Paul: I think the most, most projects like this should start, I dunno, you should be considering marketing automation. That's the only real way to understand what marketing attribution looks like. We tend to look at attribution as a single source, who was the, what was the last touch point that made you consider us or reach out to us?

[00:58:59] And usually it's not one, right? The average number of touch points in a purchase. Right. We only measure one. And so how do you properly allocate budget? How do you allocate time investment to all of those other 10 touch points that you didn't track or measure? So that's what multiple attribution modeling looks like in a marketing automation system.

[00:59:19] The end user doesn't even remember that they saw an ad for this. They don't remember that they had a friend that recommended, or they looked at a restaurant. They just tell you the last thing, right? Oh, my wife told me to call. She saw an ad or I Googled it. No, you didn't. You did 12 other things. You may tell me you Googled it, but you got 12 emails from us as well.

[00:59:36] Right? So what do I allocate the value to those things? So marketing, marketing automation systems are built to measure all of that attribution modeling so that you know how to expand appropriately. And you know how to say no to the things that are aren't working without cutting your limbs off that are right.

[00:59:53] Because if you're only measuring the last touch, you're missing a huge part of the equation. Then that's sitting below the surface. So that's one. The other thing I would say is most of this has to start with a good understanding of what to do. And that's normally a roadmap process where you're getting feedback internally, externally stakeholders, your end customers, you're kind of building this, this sort of map where you're saying, this is what we know now, how do we, what are the, how might we use that?

[01:00:19] We don't know how to solve, how do they impact it? And then what's the first version of this to step into it, without having to commit enough risk that if this fails we're, you know, sinking the organization, we tend to operate in an MVP model to say, okay, what's the biggest meaningful, like big jump.

[01:00:36] What's the 20% investment that solves 80% of the problem. And so we prioritize that because if you do that three or four times in a year, you'll probably land at a significantly better outcome, right? A 10 X outcome, I would say than if you just. Right. All of the effort to build a 90% solution or 50% solution, right.

[01:00:57] Instead of the 20% solution, you try to get closer to perfect. What I would say is there's no perfect in what we do. You don't know enough to build. Perfect. And what's perfect today. Isn't perfect tomorrow. So start with a good roadmap. Start with a good strategic plan and say, how do we actually reach this in a few iterations?

[01:01:13] Because we're going to learn as we grow. 

[01:01:16] Wendy: That is fantastic advice. So I think I am going to have to go back and listen to this episode again, because there's some valuable information in here. So Paul, I really, really appreciate it. Where can people find you if they want to reach you? 

[01:01:31] Paul: Ah, you can reach me on LinkedIn.

[01:01:33] P P R E S E N D E N. It's probably easiest way to reach me. Or, you know, you can hit up our website for 54 creative. I mean, you could probably even send an email messages through Brahmic they'll know how to route it to me from.com. 

[01:01:46] Wendy: There you go. So bro.com website or LinkedIn, Paul breads den. So thank you.

[01:01:52] Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here. 

[01:01:57] Paul: This was a joy. Thank you very much. 

[01:01:59] Wendy: So listeners, there was a ton of great information on here. If you don't know what a PIM is or a headless CRM, CMS, CMS, I'm looking for my notes. I know it started with a C then you certainly can learn it here.

[01:02:16] And if you know somebody who's in marketing or is managing marketing content, please share this along to them. Love to hear your comments particularly about this episode. So you can go to the Facebook group it's called global marketing and growth where we're engaging with each other to talk about the different episodes, or if you have questions about global growth and as always, you can reach out to me your host

[01:02:39] hostess with the mostess, Wendy PS at Rapport International. Happy to answer any questions or connect you to any guests. So look forward to having you listen in next time.

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