Join us in this episode as we sit down with Andrew Pawlak, CEO and co-founder of Rebel IQ. With nearly two decades in the lead generation and marketing space, Andrew delves into the intricacies of online inquiries, the human element behind every lead, and the challenges of capturing consumer attention in the digital age. As they discuss the evolution from Lead Pops to Rebel IQ, Andrew emphasizes the importance of understanding the customer journey beyond just generating leads. Tune in to uncover the mystery behind online form submissions and the art of effective follow-up in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.
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Cross: Hello and welcome to 73 and Sunny, the podcast about the journey of getting things just right. We talk to tech sales and marketing leaders about how they’re growing, dialing in best practices, and getting closer to that sweet spot. With us today is an entrepreneur and a lead generation in marketing expert. This person has helped to build and successfully market thousands of websites for mortgage, real estate, home services, and other businesses. He’s a content creator, a family man, and he wakes up at a ridiculously early hour, the CEO and co founder of Rebel IQ, Andrew Pollock. Andrew, welcome on. Andrew: Daniel thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Interesting times. Been sharpening my skills as a result, but always fun to share kind of the ups and downs of the journey, because I know everybody’s in a different spot, and sometimes these types of conversations definitely help people. I know I’ve gotten a lot out of these. Just You know, tuning into other entrepreneurs and love what you guys are doing at verse as well. So thanks for having me. Cross: Thank you. Yeah. So to give some context to everyone, you’ve been in the lead generation and marketing space for almost 20 years. Can you go through your background and how you got to start rebel IQ? Andrew: Yeah, so I got into really digital marketing in 2004 was my first real job selling websites to real estate agents and quickly occurred to me that driving traffic and doing marketing and like SEO and pay per click and all this stuff that was pretty new back in 2004. If you’re not converting leads what’s the point of driving the traffic, right? So you’ve got to have a, you’ve got to burn both ends of that candle, because if you just spend all your time and effort on getting the clicks, and you’re not actually converting people, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good, and you end up wasting a lot of money and opportunities. So I’ve been on this mission just to… Unravel. How do you engage consumers? No matter what the channel is, there’s a way to ask for information in a way to get people to engage and a lot of people miss that and they don’t think about it. And so it’s just me and my team on a mission to solve the gap between the provider, the service provider, the expert and the consumer and bridging that gap in a way that hopefully doesn’t require like a middleman in that, can we connect the vendor or the service provider to the consumer directly without saying, Hey, buy a lead for me. And that is a common kind of situation or scenario. So can’t you do it for yourself and learn from what these big lead gen companies are doing? And there’s a strategy and there’s a method to the madness. And if you can unlock that, all of a sudden, you find that doesn’t mean you don’t need to buy leads anymore, but maybe you’re generating more quality on your own as well. And you can just supplement a bit. Cross: So when we met, Okay. You were heading up Lead Pops, and there’s been a transition from Lead Pops to Rebel IQ. Do you want to talk Andrew: about that? Yeah, that’s Critical kind of decision, right? To rebrand and rename the business that can go a couple of different ways. And you guys know a lot about that. We do. Yeah, absolutely. And you guys did a great job with it, cause there’s you can blunder it and for us, it’s been a kind of a slower move and not just getting away from lead pops entirely, but it’s turning lead pops into the product and the SAS. Sass component of the bigger vision and just really trying to get ourselves outside of a conversation of just leads because leads are important. If you’re a salesperson, obviously you live and die by them. But we also get boxed out of conversations and opportunities, I think, simply because the word lead was in the business name and there’s just so much more to having success online and with marketing than just getting you leads, right? So we wanted to look at a bigger picture, a bigger vision and helping clients solve more of the customer journey. Then just talk to some of these people who have at one point in time expressed interest and something that you offer. It’s okay, so what happened? How do you get the leads? What bucket do you put them in? How do you score them? How do you qualify? How do you follow up? Which is such a huge missing piece for so many people is you get in the leads and they drop the ball there. So it’s like you gotta tackle and really look at multiple angles to be successful online. And if we’re just talking about leads, then we’re. Not addressing other key areas. So it was just it’s been an ongoing kind of move towards a bigger vision, but I’m still working through that. Cross: I wonder about the way that people think about that word. We’ve talked about this before, about why the word leads seems to turn people off. I have a theory that it’s related to it’s almost dehumanizing, right? It takes a someone who’s an inquiry or someone who has Interest in a product and is filling out a form to learn more and it turns it into Kind of a file within the database that’s moving through some trans through some journey any thoughts on feedback that you’ve gotten post change? Is it does it is it working that moving away from the word leads? Andrew: I want to touch on something you said there because I think it’s really important before you answer that question It’s that that human factor It’s like you put them in the leads bucket, all of a sudden, like the hopes and aspirations of this human are not even really I think it greatly benefit salespeople to tap into more of the human behind the lead, right? And to really think about this person in a lot of these cases, they just filled out like a 20 question lead form, right? So it’s not like they just opened up the phone book and found Susie Renter and called her up. They like, they saw something that compelled them to take action. Enough that they’ve gone through a process. They’ve answered a bunch of questions. Told you a lot about themselves. Some of these things are personal. And kind of things people don’t openly share. Like income and credit. Things like that. So they’ve gone through all these kind of like obstacles and hoops. They’ve given you an accurate, a real name, email, phone number. Holy moly. Like we got to work with that. Hey, and if not now, then maybe later Hey, if the, this next 90 days to six month window is not realistic because of your, current financial situation or whatever, like how can I like go on this journey with you and think about it from the longer, from a, like a longer term perspective versus just, Hey, what’s going to close now on anything else? I don’t even want to, I don’t care about it. And that’s, those are leads, right? From a kind of ethos or how do we think about, like, how do we treat the customer and the lead opportunity? I think it’s really that’s an important thing you tapped into. I’ve actually just, in the last month or so, wrote out a whole mindset and strategy, and that tapping into exactly that, the human aspect of these relationships that you’re trying to build with people. Because even if they can’t do a loan, they’ve got friends, they’ve got family, they know people, maybe not now, maybe later. These are opportunities. We don’t want to just squander them and kick them to the curb because I can’t get paid off you in the next 90 days, and if I can’t get paid off of you, then I don’t really want to help you or talk to you. That’s not, and it feels like there’s a lot of that kind of mindset, and it’s not to judge the industry by any means, it’s just, can we look at a longer term play and be smarter about these opportunities and not… Just treat them like a lead or a name in a file, right? So that’s important. Overall, I think the messaging strategy and kind of how we’re present positioning ourself has definitely opened up more conversations. It’s more of a, tell me about that. What does that even mean? Like a curiosity around the name and what is it, what are you trying to imply with that? Cause I think that there, there’s a strategy in the name itself that I was trying to tap into that lead pops just didn’t really give me pops is a throwaway word and lead it’s most of the time it’s a negative connotation. And so I’m. Almost spending my 20, 30 seconds of pitching, if you will, or explaining, like trying to undo the conclusions you probably have already drawn about what my company is and does. Whereas rebel, like you doesn’t put me in a bucket. It allows me to open up the conversation with an open open minded person who’s more curious about what does that mean? What are you guys all about? What are you doing? Outsmart the machine what’s that all about has been cool. Cross: That. That leads me to another interesting question that I thought you might have insight on and I think it’s interesting anyway is the reason that the consumer experience isn’t being focused on as much because of the way that the, let’s say the nomenclature leads or just in general the mindset around how people deal with inquiries, is that the cause of why so many People fill out inquiries, but then don’t respond. It’s one of the biggest mysteries of the online inquiry world. And I’ve got Andrew Pollack the, you’ve got almost 20 years of experience in the world. You, this is like all you’ve thought about for however many years how to capture attention and how to make the most out of the traffic that people are generating. Why is it that people go to websites, fill out forms, and then ghost and never respond? Andrew: That’s the that’s it. Multi billion dollar question. It’s interesting. The time of the inquiry matters, right? So many times these things are coming in and during off hours. So unless you’ve got a system in place to make sure you’re working 24 seven when these people are up and looking at stuff like this and it’s not just, Hey, they better be inquiring between eight and five, 8 a.- And 5 p. m. Otherwise I’m not there. So I, there’s an element to the followup And, is it, are they truly just not responsive or is it like your time, your timing’s bad? You, they filled out the form and yeah, they’re not responding because, you didn’t have anything even kick out to them until the next day.
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