Common Sales & Marketing Misconceptions

With all the information overload surrounding sales and marketing, it is no wonder that there are common misconceptions. Our special guest today is going to break these down and share some of his thoughts on recent trends and developments in the space. You do not want to miss this.

Join Tim Fitzpatrick and David Scott for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

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Common Sales & Marketing Misconceptions

Tim Fitzpatrick

With all the information overload surrounding sales and marketing, it is no wonder that there are common misconceptions. Our special guest today is going to break these down and share some of his thoughts on recent trends and developments in the space. You do not want to miss this. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth, and marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the It's time to tune in. I am super excited to have with me David Scott from Scott Growth Strategies. David, welcome and thanks for being here.

David Scott

Hey, thanks for having me, Tim. I'm excited to be here. This is going to be great.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, I'm looking forward to geeking out with you a little bit on some marketing stuff today. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions. You ready to jump in with both feet?

David Scott

Let's go. Let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick

All right, man. When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

David Scott

Skiing or reading, one of the two.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Okay. Reading anything in particular? Non-fiction, fiction?

David Scott

So I read two types of books. That's either mystery novels by John Sanford. I'm a huge John Sanford fan. Although the last few of his books, I don't even know if they're written by him anymore. And then I'm reading a book by... It's called The Body Keeps the Score, and it's about trauma. I read a ton of self-help books. It's called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, and he is a psychologist and psychiatrist. He's a former New York Times best seller and talks about how the brain and the body keep the score at a cellular level when we go through traumas and hard things in our lives.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Interesting. I'll have to check that one out. And where's your favorite place to ski?

David Scott

Anywhere in the Rockies. Keystone, Vail, Breckenridge, Big Sky.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Okay, cool. I love it. You're speaking my language. What's your hidden talent?

David Scott

I sing. I sing well. Not often, but yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick

That's a cool talent. I sing, but I don't do it well. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

David Scott

Well, I think Benjamin Franklin once said, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, even though he didn't give it to me. It's when I practice. And my grandfather used to say that nothing lasts forever. In other words, this two shall pass, right? And so be patient. This two shall pass. Nothing lasts forever. The season, if you're going through a tough season, it won't last forever.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. You know what's interesting, too? I love that. You this two shall pass. What we often overlook is the good things pass as well. So it's not just the bad stuff is going to pass, the good stuff passes, too. So hold on to it while you can. What's one thing about you that surprises people?

David Scott

Oh, that I have 10 tattoos.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Really?

David Scott

Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Nice.

David Scott

Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick

They say, I don't I do not have tattoos, but they do say that once you get one, for a lot of people, there's this push to get more. Did you find that?

David Scott

They're very addictive. And last week's been quite challenging. So I've had three in just the last six months.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Oh, wow.

David Scott

Yeah. I don't come across as a truck guy, and I don't come across as a tattoo guy, but here I am.

Tim Fitzpatrick

You know what? There's all kinds of people that have tattoos that we would never...

David Scott

Totally.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yes. I love that. What success mean to you, David?

David Scott

One of my first bosses named Dean, I won't share his last name, but Dean used to say, Success is helping other people get to where they want to be in life, and I wholeheartedly believe that today.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Where's your happy place?

David Scott

Man, in the boxing gym or any place with my kids. I have two daughters, they're 20 and 22.

Tim Fitzpatrick

And what qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

David Scott

That's a great question. Any qualities that help me get to where I need to be in life. I want to surround myself with people who are not takers or energy vampires. I want to surround myself with people who can propel me and challenge me and push me. Anybody who's emotionally available who can clearly communicate, talk through their feelings, talk through how they're feeling about things, people who are vulnerable, people who don't mind having difficult conversations, people who don't mind saying, Hey, I really screwed up. I blew it. I'm sorry. You're a friend. You're in my network. I love you. Let's work through this. Those types of people. People of good character.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, I love it. Tell us more before we dig into the heart of this, tell us a little bit more about what you're doing at Scott Growth Strategies.

David Scott

Yeah, it's a great question. So SGS was formed about a necessity. About eight years ago, I left. I was the Chief Marketing Officer at a software. It used to be a software startup. Now they got gobbled up by Kaseya Connect Booster, and they were like the payments processing, integration, darling of the IT channel. And we didn't have any issues. There was no drama. It was always a good product. And so I was there for almost four years, so a little over three and a half years. And I just stayed in the IT industry after I left. And I didn't leave for bad reasons, I left for good reasons. And one of their, they had a minority partner named Joe Cresswell, and Joe had invested a bunch of money. And he was in his late '50s, early '60s, this is back in 2017, and he died of cancer suddenly. And it was a profound, profound thing that impacted me for, even impacts me today. And it's still hard to talk about because I miss him a lot. But we grew quite close during this last year of life. And the conversations change from business conversations to personal ones, right? They changed from, hey, what's the lead gen? What's the sales funnel look like? What's this trade show look like? To, hey, how's your marriage? Hey, how are you? And I was married at the time. I'm not now. But how's your kids? How's your relationship? How's your faith relationship? What are you doing to impact this world? What's your purpose? How are you living intentionally, right? Like, those are the conversations that trade, that changed with Joe. And so when he passed away, it was just really hard for me emotionally. And I just knew I needed to make a change. And we had grown Connect Booster from $20,000 a month in recurring revenue to $800,000 a month in recurring revenue. When I left, it was barely a million and a half in gross annual revenue. And the whole company was owned by BNG Payments, which is the umbrella parent company, to around 10, 11, $12 million, I think somewhere around there when I left. And so we saw a J-curve hockey stick growth, which my Econ College professor would be so happy that I remembered that, right? But it was stressful. It was really hard. We went through a lot of shit in a very short period of time. And there was employee issues, there were lawsuits, there were immigration issues, there were finance issues. In some months, we got a line of credit. We were hiring eight people a week, and some we weren't hiring eight every six months. And so it was just nuts. And in some seasons, we went to six channel trade show was a month. And it was in some way, it was six over the course of a year. And so it was just the growth really took its toll on me from a physical perspective. And so I set sail. We started SGS. I started as independent contractor at first. Now we have a team, and we're remote and here we are.

Tim Fitzpatrick

It's crazy. It's interesting you talk about that hockey stick growth. What a lot of people don't realize about high growth unless they've been in that situation is things are coming at you so quickly. You cannot foresee everything that is going to happen. And so, I mean, it's-

David Scott

Totally, yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick

It's inevitable to be very reactive at times. I mean, you can try to be as proactive as you can, but it's just impossible to see everything.

David Scott

You just can't. And I forget who the person was. Lewis Howe has had a guest, a human psychologist. This is a number of months ago. And she talked about making the right decision or getting the decision right. And she talked about the expediency of which we make choices in life. And she talked about the true one percenters, the people who are uber, uber successful. Make decisions very quickly. They don't think about it. They don't belabor it. Publishing a newsletter ain't no big deal for them. They'll make that decision in a nanosecond every day and Sunday. Those things aren't a concern to them because their focus is growth and their focus is the health of growth and the outcomes that come from growth. And so, yeah, if you're not a quick decision maker and you're not a bit of a risk taker, like one of my tattoos on my left chest area, and it essentially says It's a Latin translation. All my tattoos are Latin phrases and just a couple of pictures. But it says, fortune favors the bold, right? And so I feel like if you're not quick to make decisions and you're not willing to take a risk and make those you're going to fail, and it's going to be more painful than it doesn't have to be that way.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. In business, I always have to tell myself it's the speed of execution is absolutely critical.

David Scott

Yeah, totally.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Because if you don't execute quickly, people are going to pass you by.

David Scott

Yeah, and that's just it. I think, yeah, you hit the nail right on the head, beautifully said.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. Anything else you'd like to share with us about your background before we start talking about some common misconceptions?

David Scott

I mean, I've just been in tech my whole life. I've worked in e-commerce. I used to own an e-commerce consultancy firm about 12, 13 years ago, 14 years ago now. Got my start in corporate America, cut my teeth for about the first 10, 12 years of my life, worked for some big brands like California Closets, and Best Buy and Circuit City, and Verizon Corporate, out in Baskin Ridge, New Jersey, and in Schaumburg, Illinois. And yeah, just I just set sail a number of years ago. I'm a tech guy. I love technology. I'm a dork when it comes to automation. If I could automate everything like Tony Stark with Jarvis, I absolutely would. And if I didn't have to drive on a road trip and I could crack a laptop open and write or make money or impact people's lives or do whatever, I absolutely would. So I would have a driver if I could, and someday I will.

Tim Fitzpatrick

I was going to say, I don't think we're too far off from either one of those things. So we'll see.

David Scott

No, exactly. And so, yeah, SGS's goal is really to help IT firms, SaaS firms and other B2B brands understand what's making them fall flat. And then we jump in and we fix that mess and we help them get their spark back.

Common Sales & Marketing Misconceptions

Tim Fitzpatrick

So let's talk about these misconceptions. What are some of the common misconceptions that people have around sales and marketing? And what would you like people to understand?

David Scott

You ask such a great question. So first of all, it takes money and it takes a lot of time and it takes consistency. And if you're not patient and you think that executing sales and marketing strategy is going to be done in six months or three months or a year, you're just fooling yourself. So don't do it. Don't invest in outsource CMO, don't invest in a fractional CMO. I know you and I had this conversation last week. Don't do that. Just save your money and go do something else because you're going to get frustrated and you're going to frustrate a lot of other people in the process. So I would say that's the biggest misconception. If you think it's a win situation, if you think this is like hockey, just don't do it. This isn't like hockey at all. And hockey fans, there's not a lot of them, but they're rapid, right? That's like a very incessuous sport. Everybody knows each other and goes to games. And I think the biggest hockey stadium in the US seats 25 or 26,000 people, where if you compare it to FIFA or a World Cup stadium, 150, 200,000 people, right? Or like the Rose Bowl with the 110, 120,000 people that can fit in the Rose Bowl stadium. So at the end of the day, It's a very small, minute portion of the sporting industries. Hockey is a very cool sport. It's one of my favorite sports. But it's very instant gratification. You're taking shots with that buck all day long. You're shooting at a good size net, a little dinky buck, and it's fast. And it's the only sport that supports beating the shit out of another human being, right? You don't get kicked out of a game. If I swing at a football guy's helmet, either with my fist or try to kick or whatever, I'm going to get thrown out of the game and I'm going to get fined and I'll probably get suspended in another game. If I do the same thing in soccer, if I punch a dude in the face, you're done. You're a red card and you're going to get ejected and you're going to get a suspension at least one or two games after that. Hockey, they just sit you on a time out for five minutes. It's great. And so I feel like a lot of people look at, it's very synonymous. People look at hockey like they do or sales and marketing like they do hockey. It's instant gratification. And there's this guy I follow on Instagram. His name is Jefferson, and he's an attorney, and he has four or five million followers, and he owns a small law firm down in Texas. And Jefferson had this recent Instagram post talking about words. And all he does is ask people to follow him. That's just it. And he gives wisdom and insights every day on how you can utilize utilize the phrases that attorneys use to better be a better communicator, right? His name is Jefferson Fisher. So go follow him at Jefferson Fisher, Jefferson_fisher on Instagram. But Jefferson did this post recently. I think it was like even just the last few days or last week, and he's tying a tie in his SUV and he's going to some event. And he talks about the value of words. And he said, words are one of our most important tools that we can use, and it can either build somebody up or can cut them down so fast. And I'm a big fan of action over words. But at the end of the day, I feel like people struggle to communicate. They struggle to share how they're feeling. They struggle with their romantic partner, whether you have, whether you're heterosexual, homosexual, it doesn't matter. But they struggle to just communicate in their partnership, in their marriage relationship. They struggle to communicate with their business partner. They struggle to say how I'm feeling. They struggle to... Just the basic tenets of communication, using right words and grammar is really, really I feel like we've lost that as a country, right? I feel like we're almost borderline illiterate, which is sad to say. But I'm 46 and my grandfather used to beat the crap out of my brother and I if we would say things like me and T. J, my brother's name is TJ. Me and TJ are going to go out and play. He'd be like, You and who? Me and TJ. You and who? Tj and I, right? Getting those little things right is really important. Not because it makes you look smart or pretentious or arrogant, and I've been accused of that even recently, which is It's so sad. It just makes you smarter than the average bear. It just makes you look like you know what you're talking about, right? And so I feel like as we go back to what are some common misconceptions about marketing, especially in the IT industry, so many of us, and I fall in this trap, too, we'll use these canned approaches. We'll use the boot camps. We'll use the syndicated contents. We'll use the tribes or the whatever, and it's low quality, just crappy social content or email marketing content. And the words are just junk. And the subject lines are horrible. And they don't use the basic tenets of modern day psychology and buying psychology, and sales and marketing to get people's attention in order to serve them. And not that we're trying to trick them with marketing, because that's not it. People will accuse marketers or salespeople of that. It's not it at all. But it is using words to get something, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. And so I feel like there's another common misconception. You have to use words in the right way, and you have to build a brand, and your brand should have a soul to it, right? It should mean something to other people. And there's this woman I dated a while back, and she has a local brand here in the area that I live in, and it's all built by herself. It's in the fashion industry and salon industry. And I feel like she's done such an amazing job of crafting a soul that goes along with her website. Every word is synonymous, every social post is synonymous. It all is consistent across the board. And when you go in there to get taken care of, you get treated like a queen or like a king if you go in there and you're a dude, which there's nothing wrong with a guy going to a high-end salon or a high-end fashion studio. But my point is, your brand as an IT firm shouldn't be built with syndicated content from some low quality, crappy, cheap website development firm. We tell our clients, Hey, you need to have a BDR plan or you need to have a cyber security strategy. Okay, well, are you comfortable with that cyber security strategy being written on the back of a bar napkin that you did on a golf course? No. Why? Because it's low quality. Okay, then why would you be okay with having a website that cost 250 bucks a month for two years versus spending 5, 10, 15, $20,000 to get it done the right way? You know what I mean? So I feel like the common misconception also with just sales and marketing is you have to be a good copywriter, and you have to invest in the right words, and your brand needs to have a soul to it, right? And it needs to have enthusiasm and passion. And I get that some people are boring and analytical, and that's okay. It is not sexy. But at the end of the day, like Every IT person has a unique selling proposition, a USP, right? So tap into that, right? Find out what that is. Find out what the enthusiasm is around what you offer and talk about it, because there are people who do want to hear it.

Tim Fitzpatrick

David, I want to pull out some things here because you just dropped a ton of good stuff here. First, I want to reiterate this short term versus long term thinking with marketing. We as humans are wired for short term instant gratification, right?

David Scott

Totally.

Tim Fitzpatrick

And I know you've seen this. I've seen it. Too many people give up on marketing efforts far too quickly. And then they It's like, Oh, I did that. It didn't work. No, it's not that it didn't work, right? You didn't give it long enough. A lot of times they're jumping right into tactics without having strategy behind it. And the way I think about it, strategy is fuel for the marketing tactics, which are the vehicles. So short term versus long term. You got to be long term. And I actually said, I said almost word for the word, what you said on a guest podcast earlier today, where I was like... Because he was asking me, he's like, Well, what do you say to people when they're like, I need to generate leads today, tomorrow? And I'm like, You either need to shift your mindset or don't do it at all because you're not going to be happy.

David Scott

No.

Tim Fitzpatrick

It's never going to work. So thank you for bringing that one up. That is a huge one. The other thing that you touched on, and I see this a lot in the IT MSP space with templates, frameworks right there. A lot of MSPs are looking for an easy button with marketing, and it just doesn't exist.

David Scott

No.

Tim Fitzpatrick

But so they're like, Oh, I'm going to get all this stuff, and it's going to make it really easy for me to implement on my marketing. And it got me thinking about, it's not that that stuff is bad.

David Scott

No.

Tim Fitzpatrick

But they're not taking it and making it their own. They're copying it, not modeling the fundamentals of what's there.

David Scott

That's exactly it.

Tim Fitzpatrick

And I think that's the big problem. The other thing you touched on, too, was consistency. Marketing is not a switch we turn on and off. It's like investing in our 401k every month. We have to do it consistently. And it's that consistency over time that helps us build that momentum.

David Scott

Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think consistency is the biggest thing. If I would preach one thing from the rooftop, it would absolutely be consistency. You got to be consistent at it. We own our IT companies for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and it takes us that long to build a successful IT business. But what makes you think that sales and marketing won't take as long? And so we have to look at it that same way. But I think there's a lot of misconceptions, that's the name of this show today, around what that should look like, right? And they think by going to a producers club event or whatever and paying 500 or a thousand bucks or 1500 bucks a month, that they're going to get all this. But you're not going to get anything. And all those organizations are interested in keeping you as a customer, so they pay their bills. That's it. They could give two craps less about the success of your sales and marketing. All they care about is retention, right? So of course they want you to keep billing. And of course, they're not going to say something like, hey, Tim Fitzpatrick, you have five employees now at your MSP or your SaaS firm. Great. This producer users club kit, this tribe of stuff that you pay 50 bucks, around a bucks a month for this low quality social content, you're only supposed to use this for a year or two. And then you got to cut the cord and you got to grow and then you got to sell stuff and you got to hire somebody to do this for you and go from there. And that's going to cost a lot more than a thousand bucks a month or 1,500 bucks a month or whatever it is nowadays. But they're not told this. And so it's just a bummer because they're just led down this path of, hey, I can pay 1,500 bucks a month, be part of this cool kids club with this cool lady or cool guy running around on stage in all these different themes. But at the end of the day, there's not going to be any value to it unless they execute it almost perfectly on their end, which is impossible because they're IT guys. They're not sales and marketing guys.

Tim Fitzpatrick

It sets them up for unrealistic expectations, which is a huge problem. And then that's when we run into people, and I've talked to them. I know you have where they're like, I did marketing. Marketing doesn't work. It's like, no, it works. There was just some things that were out of alignment. I mean, we can all point to plenty of examples of companies that have successfully marketed and it's grown their business. But we have to go into it with realistic expectations.

David Scott

We do. Yeah. And that's where content creation is so big. You have to have a content creation engine. If you don't, you're not going to get the results that you want. If you do, you're going to succeed.

Tim Fitzpatrick

You know what people overlook, too, with content is one piece of content can drive multiple channels. You're leveraging it, right? Some of the people that I follow I mean, they're generating content that they're leveraging through their email marketing, their social, on their website. I mean, that's the beauty of content is you can leverage it and maximize it across multiple channels. In your marketing. And a lot of people overlook that.

David Scott

Yeah, they absolutely do. It's like we were on a call a bit ago with one of our SaaS clients, they're an accounting firm down in Louisiana. And they have... We're talking about creating some video case studies for them. Essentially it's like a testimonial, but it's two or three minutes in length. Now you can take this video and you chop it up and use it for four or five different ways. And that's the benefit of having a content creation plan, because now you've got one piece of content, you can curate it for LinkedIn, you can curate it for an email campaign, you can curate it for YouTube, you can cut it up and make it shorter for different types of mediums, you can make it longer for other types of mediums like TikTok and whatever. And so there's a lot of value, but it starts with creating the content first. And it starts with having a plan and a strategy. If you don't got that, the rest of it is going to fall apart.

Tim Fitzpatrick

It's like throwing spaghetti up against a wall hoping something's going to stick.

David Scott

Yeah, it's like Sisyphus, right? The guy pushing the rock up the hill. You're always going to be stuck behind that rock, like good old Sisyphus, unless you change something.

Sales and Marketing Trends You Need to Know

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah. So, David, let's talk about trends. Well, the fundamentals of marketing don't change. The fundamentals of any discipline don't change. But the trends, the tactics, the channels are constantly evolving. What are some of the recent trends, developments that you're seeing with sales and marketing? And how do you see things shaping up?

David Scott

Oh, gosh, that's such a good question. And I've been thinking about this a lot before we got on today's call. You're right, the basic tenets never change. You have to identify who your target market is. You have to know what you're selling and who you're selling it to. If you don't have a goal to shoot for, you're shooting at nothing. And a lot of IT guys don't take that basic step. So they'll talk to their operation to delivery team and they're like, oh, we're selling managed services. Oh, no, we're not. We're selling assessments or discovery calls or cyber security solutions or whatever when they're really not. And so there's obviously a disconnect there, if that's the case. And they oftentimes sales doesn't know what they're selling and operations doesn't know what they're delivering on. And so there's a huge chasm that you have to go through. And oftentimes it's one of the most painful things that we take our clients through. It's the exercise of identifying what the heck it is we're actually selling and why. And I will push hard to the point where owners will be like, I'm just done with this. Like the You're not listening.

Tim Fitzpatrick

I don't like you, David.

David Scott

Yes, this is painful. And I'm a nice Midwest guy, but I also have an edge to me. Let's fucking get this done. You got to figure this out. You got to tell me why. If you can't tell me why, this doesn't make any sense to keep moving forward. And so we want to do a deep dive and uncover the why behind the why. It's almost like working with a trauma victim. I hate to equate it to that, but it is because you have to go that level of deep to uncover, hey, why are you even in business? And so I think just taking a guy, no, or step back, and not necessarily a trend, but I think covering a recap of the foundational basics is really important. Understand your target market. If you're like, oh, I service anybody with a plug, just go get a job, go get a job. Do not continue to run your IT company. You are a fool if you run your IT company because you're going to wreck your life. You're going to stress yourself out. If you're married, you won't be for long. You can destroy the relationship with your kids. You're going to stress everybody out around you. Don't. Figure out who you service. Come up with, ideally, one or two verticals you're really great at. If you can pick one vertical, do it. If you can hyper verticalize, do it. If you can't, pick two or three or four, figure out who that audience is, craft a message that makes sense to them with a unique selling proposition, meaning what makes us different from any other company? Why would they choose to do business with us? And what's life look like afterwards? And then just rinse and repeat and be consistent at it. In terms of the trends, there's a couple of things. So AI is all buzz, right? People are going to continue to leverage it. People are obviously looking at tools like ChatGPT and other freemium tools like that, although now there's a cost to them, shocker. And there will be going forward. It's only going to get more expensive. We use Jasper a lot here at SGS. It's a AI platform just for copywriters. It's great. The misnomer is you have to do a lot of editing when you create AI copy. You just do. Otherwise, it sounds like a freaking robot. And I don't want to read stuff that comes from a robot, not to mention the search engines hate AI generated content. They want to generate it through the proper tools and the proper channels, but they will absolutely devalue you from an SEO perspective if all you're writing and publishing is AI content. If I'm taking it, ripping it right from ChatGPT, putting it on my WordPress website, putting it in my email newsletter and rocking it out, you're going to get penalized. Well, you're not going to get penalized. The search engine's AI doesn't penalize you. It just won't get you the value and the domain authority that you ultimately should be looking for from an SEO perspective when you publish content. So that being said, AI is still going to be the way of the future. You have to learn to leverage it inside of your content creation process, though, to do it the right way. And you have to understand that when you publish content, there's going to be a fair bit of editing that you do to it to make sure it fits your brand and fits your soul, and it doesn't come across as really bad. I think going a step further than that, scalability is really important. Marketing sales and marketing automation is really, really critical. If you really want to scale and grow your IT firm, you have to automate as many processes as you can. And I'm not talking about delivery or onboarding processes for new managed services customers or whatever, or project-based customers. It's automating tasks like your sales and marketing. It's automated emails through sequencing through Mailchimp. It's creating journeys in the back end of HubSpot. It's creating these things that are just going to constantly drip on your prospects without you having to lift a finger, right? And there's always going to be a little bit of human element involved. You can never truly automate your sales and marketing. That's just foolish to think that way because that's not And I've been doing this a long time. I'm a freaking crusty marketer. But I will tell you that you can automate a lot of those things. It's just there's an investment that you have to make to it. It's not a cost. We need to get that mindset out of the back of our heads, that limiting self-belief that says, oh, God, this is so expensive. It's not. It's an investment. You need to invest in this, otherwise you're going to fail or it's going to equal pain, right? And so the goal in that whole process is marketing automation. There's a great new tool I'll share with your audience here. Give me a second. It came from Owen Video, Owen Hempsath. Owen runs Owen Video, and they use a tool called highLevel. Gohighlevel Go high levels. Go high levels. It's another marketing automation platform. It's HubSpot, just cheaper, and it's great. Otherwise, HubSpot is the name of the game, right? So if you're above a million, a million and a half dollars, you need to pay and have a CRM in place, a sales CRM, that's And that's going to plug into your sales funnel, and that's going to allow you to create content freely to attract new buyers and prospects. And so that's just another trend that I'm seeing. And anybody who knows me knows that I love email marketing. I love, love, love email. And if you do it the right way, you'll have success at it. If you don't have success at it, that means you're doing it the wrong way, call us. We can help you. But at the end of the day, email is still trendy, and it always will be. It's never, ever going to go away.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, it's not sexy, and it's It's not cool, but it's still incredibly effective.

David Scott

It is.

Tim Fitzpatrick

I think it's super low-hanging fruit for a lot of businesses because they're not taking advantage of it.

David Scott

No.

Tim Fitzpatrick

It's not very expensive to do.

David Scott

No, it's not.

Tim Fitzpatrick

Absolutely need to take advantage of it. I want to ask you, have you heard of Perplexity? No. Perplexity is a super interesting AI tool. Definitely worth checking out. Because one of the things that I'm curious about, I don't know enough to start pontificating about it, but Perplexity is a super cool AI tool that you can go into in You're going to use perplexity instead of going to Google search. So rather than typing in a search term in Google search and having to look through all the listings, you go into perplexity and perplexity answers it. But unlike ChatGPT, currently at least, they give you references in there throughout the response as to where the information came from. So if you want to go get more information, you can go do it. The thing that I find fascinating about this tool is I think it is the direction that search could go. And when you start to think about that, my questions become, What's going to happen to SEO paid ads if things start to trend this way? Because there's a lot of people, a lot of companies making a ton of money from search and paid ads. If that shifts, where are things going to go? I don't have the answers to those questions. I'm just asking them.

David Scott

Yeah. If anybody cares about traffic to their website, they need to follow Rand Fishkin's new company, which is called SparkToro. Sparktoro is an amazing tool. And for those of you who don't know Rand, he's a friend of mine, and I've known him for a long time. He was the founder and CEO of SEO Maz, the single greatest SEO software tool ever in the whole universe. It's amazing. And he was forced out a few years ago and it was an unfortunate story. And he actually talked about mental health care and how that impacts CEOs and Silicon Valley CEOs. And it's stressful a lot. Taking a lot of the money is hard. So I digress. But when we talk about SEO, I heard this last week on an IT podcast and I'm just going to keep my mouth shut because they had two so-called SEO gurus. One kid couldn't have been older than 24, 25, 26 years He didn't know. He didn't know anything he was talking about. And the other dude was older than Moses. And they were so boring, and they had so much bad information to him. So the search engines don't have algorithms anymore. There's no algorithm algorithm. It's an AI tool, which is like thousands of algorithms, right? And they're like, oh, you got to trick the tool and put this in this place for this keyword and this algorithm. I'm like, no, that's such baloney. And I just wanted to just come through my freaking monitor and choke both of them because they're giving it guys bad information. There's no goddamn algorithm. There's like a whole bunch of algorithms, which is AI. So Google's algorithm, their SEO algorithm is an AI tool. It is Yahoo's, Bing. That's all It's all an AI tool, right? And so they're now measuring content based on our preferences and based on the things that they know about us. And it's scary what they know about us. And Tim Cuts, the former director of search at Google, left there many, many years ago. He now works for some think tank in Washington, DC. He was scared then when he left. That was brilliant, right? And so I just default to what happens to SEO, what happens to copywriting, nothing. There's always going to be a room for copywriters. People are always going to have to write copy, and that's just the way it's going to be. For SEO, it's still going to be about content creation. You still have to do the basic framework and the basic tenets of modern day SEO. Each landing page should have 500 2000 words on it. You should have half a dozen internal and external links on every page. You should have a header image that is optimized for search with the right anchor text, which is in the background of your HTML5 site, or if it's built in Wix or whatever. These are just common things that every business owner, SEO person should be doing for you. And if they're not, fire them. And if they are, good. Keep doing it.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, I love it. Any last minute thoughts, words of wisdom you want to share with us, David? I've enjoyed chatting with you.

David Scott

Yeah, we could just go on for hours. I would just tell people to be kind. And just to reiterate something that Gary Vee said at DadoCon a couple of years ago, he was the keynote speaker. And as you know, he's been in this big emotionally connected mental health kick for the last few years and making sure people feel like they're lovable and important and valuable and heard and seen. And he got up on stage within the first 30 seconds. He said, 80 % of you guys today in the audience shouldn't even be in business. You're destroying your lives. You're stressing yourselves out. You're wrecking your marriages. You got into owning your IT firm for the wrong reasons. And it's not profitable. It's not making money. Shut it down. Go do something else and be happy, right? Choose a life well-lived, live with intentionality and purpose, because it's a short time here on Earth, and someday you're going to be dead. And so I'll just echo with what he said, too, right? Like, not only be kind to each other, but most IT guys shouldn't be in business for themselves. They should be working where somebody is a W2 employee because our lives are short and we don't have a lot of time on this Earth, and do the things that we find satisfaction, and gratification, and fulfillment in.

Tim Fitzpatrick

I love it. Where can people learn How about you?

David Scott

Yeah, you can check us out on the web at scottgrowthstrategies.com. At scottgrowthstrategies. Com. You can just do a Google search on Instagram or Dave C. Scott. I'm on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. If you search David Scott Fargo or David Scott, Minneapolis. I'm the first and only guy that comes up.

Tim Fitzpatrick

I love it. David, thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Like you said, you and I could chat about this forever.

David Scott

You're welcome.

Tim Fitzpatrick

And I know folks got some value from it. If you want to connect with David, please do so. Reach out to him at Scott Growth Strategies. Find him online. Thank you for taking the time. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you doing so. You can always connect with us over at realtomarketing.com, or you can head on over to revenueroadblockscorecard.com and find out which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth. Takes less than five minutes, so go check it out. Thank you again, David. Thank you. Till next time. Take care.

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Links From The Episode

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