[E160] Optimizing Lead Generation with Nelson Bruton – Part 1 of 4

My guest for this next 4-part miniseries is Nelson Bruton. I am excited to chat with him about lead generation and optimizing campaigns to ensure that the right profitable strategy is in place. This will be a great series for anyone who is managing a sales team, as well as for salespeople who want insight into the marketing side.

In Part 1, Nelson and I talk about:

• Marketing and Sales have the same objective
• Sometimes “old school” is the best strategy
• Hedgehog Concept
• No one likes chat bots. Instead, use humans!

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Nelson Bruton Bio:

Nelson Bruton, President of Interchanges, a digital marketing agency, has been fascinated with the Internet since AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy used to send out their free trial discs. This led him to pursue a degree in Computer Science at the University of Georgia; until he realized in his first C++ class that his brain was not wired to code nor spend hours in front of a screen working on seemingly endless (and at that time in his life — meaningless) programs. Nelson switched his major to Economics and began studying the impact of the Internet on global economies.

Upon graduation, Nelson moved to Florida to live at the beach and pursue a career in sales to understand more about the fundamental driver of business. After a year or so working in the telecommunications industry, Nelson was introduced by a friend to Interchanges founder and CEO, Chris Patterson and the rest is history.

16 years later, Nelson remains excited as ever about his role to ‘help others reach exceptional levels of success while having fun along the way’. Today, Nelson and his team continue to offer a full suite of digital marketing solutions to many different industries including manufacturers, equipment dealers, home builders, and plastic surgery practices to name a few.

Website: https://www.interchanges.com/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/interchangesfanpage/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelson-bruton/

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E160 – Transcript

Jason: Hi and welcome to the sales experience podcast. My name again is Jason Cutter and today I have Nelson Bruton, so he is the president of interchanges and he focuses on helping companies with their new client acquisition as well as high level strategic planning. While he’s focusing on marketing and lead generation and helping companies in those aspects. He has also done sales for a long time. In my experience really taught successful professionals in marketing are also salespeople because you kind of have to do both and you have to look at both angles and he’s been doing all that for almost 17 years in this role that he’s had specifically. Nelson, welcome to the sales experience podcast

Nelson: Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jason: So a lot of focus that you have is on a marketing and this is of course a sales related podcast, but you know, kind of what we’ve spoken about before is how that’s all interlocked. Like all of it is interrelated. It’s tough to have sales without marketing, even if you’re doing cold calls and outbound at scale. There’s still some marketing, some branding aspects. So let’s just start there with marketing lead generation specifically, like the right leads, the good leads and your thoughts on that or how you approach that with companies that you work with?

Nelson: Yeah, I think the objective for marketing and sales really is the same thing. It’s to communicate the value that you can bring to a customer, to the ideal customer. Right? And that’s pretty much it. You’ve got to communicate your value to your ideal customers so that you can get more of them. You gotta do that in sales and you gotta do that in marketing.

Jason: And there’s two different kinds of marketing s just to be clear, so there’s branded marketing, which is, you know, you just want to promote your brand, you want to get your brand out there and people be aware of it. And then there’s like performance revenue marketing where it’s all about generating those leads, which are going to generate revenue directly tied to the marketing.

Nelson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s a good distinguishing conversation. And there’s a lot behind each one of those. But yeah, I mean, you know, there’s the marketing to drive brand awareness, which is, you know, we don’t get too much involved in that. And then there’s the, how do we make sure that we’re generating very specific types of leads. And for us it’s in the B2B marketplace, you know, because people who do business with other businesses.

Jason: So how do you determine like your strategy, cause you’ve been doing it for someone, how do you determine the right leads or the best people to go after with the marketing?

Nelson: I go to trade shows where I know my customers are going to be and I try to meet them face to face, nothing beats face to face. And you know, the industries that we call on, which are typically manufacturers. So these industrial companies we need to show up, meet him face to face and start conversations that way. Then the other way, you know, is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been very successful for us and then of course picking up the phone and calling people. So yeah, you gotta have that blend of marketing and sales, you know?

Jason: Yeah. So, and then with your customers, what kind of efforts are you putting in for them to help them with their client acquisition?

Nelson: Sure. So we’re a full service digital agency. We’ve been in business for going on 18 years now and uh, there’s really two things that over the past few years we’ve really honed in on as our hedgehog concept. And if you’ve read Jim Collins book, good to great. Yup. Hedgehog concept is, you know, what do you do really well? It’s scalable. And for us, the two things that we provide our 24 seven human live chat, what I mean by that is we pop up a live chat window in the bottom of a website. We provide the people behind the chat 24 seven for our customers. We initiate conversations with every single one of their visitors 24, seven and every time we’ve done that, for the past 16 years, we’ve been offering that service for 16 years. We’ve pretty much doubled sales leads for our customers. So that’s something that we can do repeatedly and we can pretty much guarantee results on. The second thing is we help our customers leverage LinkedIn to reach out through their target specific markets to the people actually within their target markets. So live chat and LinkedIn lead generation are the two primary solutions that we’ve really been having a lot of success with recently

Jason: With the live chat feature because I’ve seen that on websites, I’ve used it a few times, but what have you seen as the evolution of that over time? Because if you had been using that for years and years and years, there was a time where let’s say more people were interacting with the phone or you know, and less on websites and that’s evolved to more people going to websites, maybe less phone calls. How have you seen that change just as like a higher level kind of interaction standpoint and then you know the conversion results. Where are people interested in converting that website visitor into an actual interaction? How does that process let these days?

Nelson: Yeah. Interestingly enough, there hasn’t been too much evolution. As soon as we started doing this 16 years ago, it worked and it still works just as effectively as it did 16 years ago. And you know, you would think things would change the time. Change the ways that people communicate change. Right. That’s certainly true. But the one thing that’s remained constant for that particular service, there’s people on a website engage them in conversation right now there’s some complexities that have entered the market. There’s a lot of chat bots and artificial intelligence that are out there that are trying to enter the market. And especially in the industrial space. I’m not sure if it’s true across all industries, but people like to buy from people. So we’ve tested chatbots for some of our clients and the results were nowhere near what human human interaction producers.

Jason: What is the chat bot missing? I mean obviously in a human human, but like where’s the over-under on, you know, the human engagement,

Nelson: You know, it’s, it’s like when you call into a company, would you rather talk to a person or have to wait and figure out what option you need to push?

Jason: Yeah, just get straight to a person,

Nelson: Straight to a person. And as soon as people have chats with chatbots, I mean I’ve done it myself, where as soon as I have a chat and I ask a question, I realized, Oh, there’s a chat bot close. They’re not gonna be able to help me. You know what I guess I’m