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.
Listen
Watch
Read
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.
Or the first message you sent out and responded with was not really optimized. You didn’t even and you guys know all about that piece in a very, very optimized kind of way, but that’s important. People are filling stuff out. They’re jumping from one website to another.
They don’t remember what site they were on. A lot of these phantom y, unbranded sites, they don’t recognize the branding or the logo. There’s even a, there’s even a lot of people that’ll just straight up say, I didn’t fill anything out. It’s the answer to 20 question form. I have all your info.
It’s timestamped. I have a video of you futzing around with the submit button at the end. There’s three minutes
Cross: ago,
Andrew: especially those are the question marks. It’s Hey, when you don’t get back to them in time, like it’s been an hour, anything beyond, a couple of minutes, really.
There’s no association between you and that them filling out that form, right? But there’s also a question
Cross: of, is it too easy? So where it may be just built into the cake, right? There’s, it used to be that if you were interested in something, you had to look up the phone number and then when you called them, you were ready to talk to them.
If we’re getting marketed to in all these different channels, maybe it’s just too easy to capture information. It’s too easy to express your interest in something, so that even when you’re not what you’d call like a bottom of the funnel or even a person who’s at their, at a buying stage, that you might still fill out an inquiry form because they caught you at the right time.
Emotional moment.
Andrew: Yeah. That’s a very interesting point. It’s the aspect of, if they’re filling something out, they’ve given you their information. How much work did they have to do to get to that? Because Facebook lead ads are infamous or like I had people don’t even realize their fat thumb hit the button and they gave us some email address.
They signed up for Facebook with like in 2008. Like that, that there’s no, not enough hoops to jump through. There’s a sweet spot between make them work for it, make them aware of the fact that they’ve gone through a process to give you their information. Don’t make it too easy.
Cause you know there’s the kind of a poor, in many cases, a lower quality lead. If it’s just Hey, download my free report, the insider scoop on mortgage marketing in 2024. And just give me your name and email address. Cause I just want a list built, right? That’s a different, like I might get 2000 people to download that.
And then on my thank you page, I say, Hey, do you want a one on one consultation or do you want a one on one mortgage marketing review? No obligation. I present a link to then take you through a more interactive, like I’m going to ask you some questions during this process. Now I’ve asked you 15 or 20 additional questions.
Maybe out of the initial hundreds of downloads that got my e book, 14 of those people that saw the thank you page to get the e book or the report went through my assessment and now they, now I have a, that, those are the leads I want to treat differently and really work on. Those are more of my SQL type versus MQL.
These are the people I look at as a priority. Absolutely. I think the amount of work and effort you put into it will get you a better quality lead. And if you layer on, How you stack the conversion opportunities to work together. You can actually move people further through the pipeline and do it in an automated kind of way.
Cross: Okay, I’m going to shift gears because since we have you on, we want to ask something that would add a lot of value to the people in the mortgage and other industries that may be listening to this. What’s a specific thing that you see on mortgage websites or solar websites that most people get wrong?
So what are businesses doing that they could fix in a short amount of time that would improve their website, whether they use, RebelIQ or Verse or anything else? What’s something that people could do today to improve their websites?
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great one. Call to action language messaging a lot of times it’s either missing altogether or just it’s weak.
It’s not really… It’s almost like it’s a platitude or a statement of some sort. It’s not really a Hey, do this. There’s no direction. The way you present the lead form or the inquiry opportunity on the page should stand out. It should not just blend into the page. Let’s make it pop.
Literally, let’s make it stand out. So color, contrast, things like that make a big difference. We’ve optimized and split test traffic and it’s Hey, is the button being green or orange? Does that really actually make a difference? Hey, there’s a 22 to 3 percent lift when we made the button orange versus kind of a green that blended into the site.
And the green looks nicer, but the orange definitely stands out more. And all of a sudden you can see the number of clicks to that button has increased. And when you’re in a world where you close a deal. You make thousands of dollars, like those small, incremental improvements make a big difference.
And then just the lead form process all together is typically busted. Like we just see the way you’re asking for information online versus what like big lead gen companies do, it’s almost the exact opposite. So it’s just this inclination or this jump to Oh, keep it simple.
It’s too many questions. It’s it’s counterintuitive, but asking too few questions and just starting the process out with, give me all of your personal information that nobody wants to just give up when they go onto a website. And that’s the first thing I’m asking you for. A lot of times, they don’t even start the process, but if I can ask you like, okay, what kind of down payment are you looking for?
What kind of house are you interested in? Like how much sun does your yard get? If I can ask you some qualifying questions in the process and then get you invested. You’re more likely to give up your information at the end than you are if I just ask you point blank, give me your name, email, phone number, tell me where you live.
So just a better way of capturing and drawing attention to the capture component is key. Otherwise, we’re just leaving it to chance.
Cross: You were a leader in the gamifying of the funnels, right? Of gamifying, making it more fun. But it just occurred to me when you were saying that one of the things you do in a sales conversation to establish yourself as an authority, establish yourself as an expert.
is to ask really good questions if you’re able to have questions with that, that show that you are a listening B, that you understand what the next steps would be and that you’re not wasting any time that you could demonstrate that through the lead form and almost mimic a qualifying sales conversation and it makes the person who’s filling out the form feel that whatever is going to happen next is going to, It’s going to follow a certain path and make a lot of sense and isn’t going to be a waste of time.
And if you can imagine yourself going onto a website, getting an inquiry form that pops up right away where you just put a name, phone, and email, versus an inquiry form that pops up and asks a question that is directly relative to what you, the information that you’re seeking out, makes total sense that you would be more invested to do that.
And I’ll share a quick anecdote from our time at Verse and what we experienced. In terms of conversation design and putting these campaigns together. The, there’s always, almost with every single customer, there’s a time that they say, we’d like to get this one more piece of information via text. And it might be.
Credit score, or it might be have they already picked an agent to work with or have they already chosen a home and in some ways, you’re having a text conversation. What we’re talking about via the inquiry form almost is an extension of the inquiry form. Sometimes is first you have to we’re switching to a new channel via SMS.
You have to establish some trust. So asking a question or two is actually helpful to keeping the conversation going because if they’ve answered that question now, they’re Willing to take the next step with you, but you also at some point you say, look, we’ve we’ve examined and we’re trying to optimize this campaign.
We see that, 17 percent of people drop off when you ask this 5th or 6th question. What about just throwing that in the lead form? They’re already answering like 14 questions. Why don’t they ask 15 questions and then we don’t have to ask that one and then we can move right on. So Optimizing for how much information can you get on the front end, so that you don’t, you’re not losing people, so that you’re not annoying them, if they’re, and maybe even you can elaborate on this, but not asking the same questions again, like you can confirm some information, but How annoying is it when you answer a question on the form and you get on a call and they ask you the same exact question?
It’s like going to the doctor’s office and filling out your address four times. I
Andrew: really just did that over the weekend with the situation. I’m texting him back, I’m like,
Cross: you should have asked me this. Anyway, yeah. Save money, save time. You’re, honor their time as well. It’s an interesting an interesting problem to solve
Andrew: it’s and it’s interesting because that’s exactly what it’s meant to do. It’s meant to say, okay what would you ask me if I walked into your office?
Here’s 10 minutes worth and I’m not trying to say, okay let’s just remove the need for conversation rapport building. And like that piece of it’s important, but it’s hey let’s jump ahead and move a little bit more quickly. You spending 30 seconds, literally. Flying through this process, answering a bunch of easy questions is going to be a very quick way to get me the information I’m going to need so we can hit the ground running and we can move quicker and then we can spend time, I’ll verify a couple things, as you said this and this, I just want to make sure that’s correct, and now I can ask you some more questions and go further through the process and you feel like you’ve gotten somewhere and I’ve even seen clients kind of couple things, like I’m a proponent obviously, and I’ve already stated, of putting the longer form option right on the website, right in the email campaign, in the blog post, but Some people are latched onto that basic contact form, and it doesn’t mean don’t have one, but if it’s like, hey, you filled out my contact form, maybe my autoresponder or my text message sequence, then says, hey, thanks for filling this out.
Now take this quick 30 second, or answer this quick 30 second questionnaire to, to move the process further along, or to keep things moving, so you can like, now I text you a link to the survey or the questionnaire that gets me the basic information in a really quick and easy kind of way, so we’re not just Going through a more, more difficult or slow question and answer process to get me the information I’m going to be looking for.
Cross: Okay, I’m going to shift again, Andrew, and I’m going to quote you. This is a post on LinkedIn. You said, Short term thinking has plagued the mortgage industry, treating loans like one time transactions, shunning future opportunities unless they fit into a perfect box. I have two questions for you. Is this still true in the mortgage industry?
So are they still treating our mortgage loan officers still treating loans like one time transactions? And are you seeing the same issues in the other industries that you work in? I know you’re in solar and home services and insurance and real estate and a bunch of other places. Do you see them treating it the same way?
Or is this something specific to the mortgage industry?
Andrew: Yeah, I’ll be, I’ll speak to what I know best, which is, that’s where we butter our bread, I guess you could say. It’s been a, it’s been a working on the mindset shift that we’re trying. It’s there’s You know, love our mortgage clients.
They’re the reason we’re here, but it’s, I think it’s when you’ve been doing things a certain way for a long time and it’s all, it’s hard, especially then you got spoiled the last couple of years with, with the state of the market. So I don’t know about the other verticals and industries as much as I do with mortgage, but that it’s been a challenge.
It’s like focusing on only seeing value in loans or opportunities that are going to close in the next 90 days to six months is, That’s definitely a problem. And I think that it, it doesn’t seem to exist at least in our world, right? We sell software. We’re, we’re, there’s a much more dialed in kind of process and expectations in other sales verticals and industries than there, there appears to be in mortgage.
So I do think it’s still, there’s a lot of room for improvement and just coming to terms with the reality of the fact that, anybody that’s in a mortgage, that’s less than a four, 4 percent rate, they’re. Probably going to be not making any decisions on, on, a voluntary kind of wouldn’t it be nice to just, live in a different part of town and some of that stuff is just not really happening, the market opportunities that exist are what they are and you’ve got to be willing and able to work with people and those that are building their database, that are building their conversations, that are creating relationships in a meaningful kind of way, even if it’s not dollar signs and closed loans in the immediate are going to be the winners on the other side of it.
I, it’s still a challenge. It’s still something we try to work on with our clients, but I definitely see it as a big issue in the mortgage world of just, only caring about the stuff that seems to like, there’s going to be a payout and pretty quickly and otherwise screw that.
Like, why would I waste my time?
Cross: Yeah, that, that’s that’s what I thought, but at least there’s attention being paid. I see through all, through most of your content and. Content around you is trying to help people transition from caring about a single transaction and caring more about the people involved.
So I love that push forward. I’m going to shift now to one of our favorite topics, which is AI. We’ve recently gone through a brand change, as behind our brand change, just so that it’s clear. Verse we bought the domain verse. ai when we transitioned four years ago from. to, to being versed at IO.
And we bought the domain but were scared and we had already, we’d spent the last, we’d been a company for about 10 years, but we’d spent the last… Seven years essentially building the AI that we use internally and the automation that we use. And it was just a matter of people us thinking that people weren’t ready.
That if we had changed to first thought AI, that it would have scared people. The public sentiment about AI has changed a lot in the last four years, and we thought it was time to to label ourselves properly, that the time was right. So it is one of our favorite topics. If at all, how are you seeing AI being used in your world?
And do you have any tips or thoughts on AI adoption in the mortgage world or in the mortgage marketing world?
Andrew: Yeah I’m a user myself of, I use ChatGPT and recently Clod. I’m a fan of Anthropx tool, it’s pretty neat. It’s just, and this isn’t, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said, but I agree with it, which is why I say it’s like the people that know how to use it and leverage this tool are going to be way ahead of people who aren’t because it can not meant to replace you and do your work for the lazy person, but it’s just, I think it just accelerates someone who’s creative, someone who’s good who’s not wanting to get bogged down by minutia type stuff.
You can definitely leverage AI in a lot of really interesting ways from, Creating marketing campaigns to follow up sequences, to messaging. Like I’ve just used it a lot in terms of just writing and automating that kind of content aspect of just like templates, things like that. Not my own content, even though I’ve tried to play with loading up a bunch of my own stuff to say teach it, learn from me, how would you in my, I’m like, when it spits out, it’s always like two.
Salesy cheesy sounding. I’m like, man, is that really shit? The AI thinks I’m way too I don’t know. So for that, I haven’t been able to use it. Cause I love this idea of uploading everything I’ve ever posted to LinkedIn. And then maybe I’ll try it with Claude. Cause I just got on the clock two weeks ago.
So maybe I’ll try it cause I’ve opened the AI has not been anything I’ve been happy with, but just like template creation questions, give me a list of the top 150 like verticals that a mortgage professional should be tapping into as a potential referral partner. Yeah, 30 seconds later is a massive list.
It’s just like, all right there’s so much that you can do with it. I think it’s amazing. I started a little side project called sidekick GPT, which I just put on the back burner. I almost got it live, actually built it using open AI. So it coded the entire base of the product. It created a Chrome extension for me.
And it was just like a prompt generator where I would say, write me an X insert type of prompt from a dropdown menu about this using a target audience and it would spit the thing out. There’s just so much you can do with it. I think it’s interesting. I’d love to layer it into our product in some sort of way.
I’m I get excited with it because I think there’s just, obviously we’re at the very imagine where we’re going to be at if it’s doing what it’s doing now in five years, holy crap, it’s crazy. But just trying to think of ways we can use it in our own product from content creation, filling in content blocks, dynamic, could the question and answer sequence of the form actually change dynamically based on learnings of people don’t like that question or maybe it would be better to drop that question towards the end.
A lot of cool stuff. I’m not doing these things yet, but it’s all definitely rattling around in my head.
Cross: Yeah, I wonder about one of The kind of repeated tropes that we keep hearing is AI is not going to replace you. People who can use AI effectively might, and
Andrew: maybe that’s what I was.
That’s exactly the trope I said. So there you go. Whether you like it or not I agree with that sentiment. I feel like you, if you’re good with it, you’re going to be ahead of people who are not like someone sitting here writing the about us section on a template when I just had fricking open AI spit that out in 10 seconds for me and I’ve done I don’t know.
Cross: It, it directly mirrors the pain that we were solving when we were, when we started as a business, because verse, before we were versed when I first started, we were a glorified contact center. We had young, cool, good looking kids making phone calls and texting people in a big office and they had cubicles and they were drinking Red Bulls.
And it was like that it was a really great environment. We had a ton of really talented. Cool people and they went crazy because they were repeating the same they were copy pasting the same Responses to the same questions all day and you were like and they were happy Where they were but not you know, you can only do that for a few weeks of copy pasting the same responses to text messages before you go I just want to have a regular conversation, and so what we set out to do was can we automate the stuff that they’re repeating over and over again and only put humans on the conversations that require the empathy and the human experience And that are complicated, and that’s that was the birth of what we, of what Verse is and so that, and that’s still what we’re trying to do today.
What’s, the only difference or change is that we’re able to do a lot more of it, and so the humans are still in the loop, but they’re only being brought in for things that are, next level conversations. And, I think it’s interesting that if you apply that to the rest of, What’s happening in the world, all the things you do, like that you have to manually go search through Gmail to find good examples of, an email that you, that was effective or something rather than saying, analyze my Gmail, find me the most effective email or the highest open rate I’ve ever had with our marketing and then create a craft another email that’s similar, but speaks to this point that it’s all stuff that we would do, but it would just take us forever.
So applying the AI to all of those things and then how that would work in the mortgage world is interesting because there seems to be a lot of things that could be done a lot better, particularly in the mortgage, but also in the underwriting and also the other aspects of mortgages that
Andrew: Yeah. It’s it’s going to be interesting to see who comes out at the top because it’s been messed with in the mortgage space for a while. So there’s this like balance of automate it to a certain point, but don’t automate the loan officer out of the process entirely. But then there’s a conflicting battle between don’t automate it.
Wouldn’t you really want to automate the LO out of it if you could, to be honest, right? Yeah. And then guys like me are like, wait, don’t you dare do that? Holding on to my kerosene fricking my lantern, my kerosene lantern. But who knows? It’s definitely stuff.
And it’s funny. I just on Friday, I literally had this new sales deck of a new product we’re launching and it’s like a big old too long deck. It’s 42 slides. It’s not ready yet, but I uploaded it to Claude. So Claude summarized this whole thing and create a quiz for a sales trip. And dude, 30 seconds later, it’s a beautiful summary of the whole thing.
I uploaded from a deck to a PDF and there’s 20 quiz questions for anyone who wants to participate and to get certified in this new product that it just spit out for me. It’s just so that would have probably taken, there’s no way that wouldn’t have taken two or three hours and the level of quality is just, it’s hard to match.
Cross: Okay I’ll, this is the, be the last segment and I’ll let you go. This is the segment of our podcast that we call if I were you and it’s where you give advice to CMOs or business leaders on something they should be doing. You have a lot of experience, you have run businesses. You’ve created and helped businesses build websites that, that are crushing.
And if you are, were having lunch with a CMO what advice would you give that, that CMO or business leader on anything that you’re an expert in?
Andrew: That’s a good question.
Cross: You can start with, if I were you.
Andrew: If I were you. I would immerse myself and just take in as much info as I can, but move quickly because you don’t have all the time in the world, and the guys that come in that are expensive, that takes three months, six months of work, drinking from the fire hose, just to you gotta do this quick, but learn, get the download, find ways that you can add value as quickly as possible.
Don’t try to find the biggest home run where you swing once and it’s in the upper deck like literally Look for some quick wins and low hanging fruit stuff that makes sense that nobody’s tapping into you know learn before you start making recommendations because there’s a Probably a reason and maybe several that things maybe are the way they are because it’s really easy to just point stuff out And be like that’s dumb It’s probably been a process and it’s probably known potentially that or maybe not but just measure your feedback in a way and be smart about it before you just come in and point things out.
I think it’s important because like sometimes you come in and like you don’t understand or know what and it’s just more of a it’s more difficult to explain and talk people through like the reason and the why and the logic behind some of the things that are in place versus others. Yeah.
Take it in, chip away, document, show a plan as quickly as you can. Here’s what I think the biggest priorities are. Get alignment with the team, with the CEO about what you’re going to do, what impact it’s going to make, how it’s going to impact revenue, and get in there and frickin roll up your sleeves and do the work, right?
I’m in a different world because I’m in a startup y kind of land still, so you don’t get lost in the the different departments where you’re just in there. You’ve got to be pulling your weight and you’ve got to be making a difference because The team is small enough where one week link definitely you see it and you smell it and everybody knows it and you can’t hide.
So make an impact, do it
Cross: quick. Andrew, thank you so much. That’s great advice. We appreciate you having you on here and look forward to seeing what rebel IQ does. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks, man. Bye.
