41: Digitize your Business with Eric Dickmann

25
May

Eric Dickmann is the CEO of the Five Echelon Group, a virtual CMO and strategic marketing advisory service provider for SMBs looking for growth and profitability. We talk about digital transformation, marketing automation, and how to remove friction in the buyer’s journey.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Digitize your Business with Eric Dickmann

Our guest is Eric Dickmann, who is the CEO of the Five Echelon Group. He’s a seasoned marketing strategist and fractional CMO. He is an expert in digital transformation and marketing automation. He is the former senior director of marketing with Oracle for 18 years. And he’s also the host of the virtual CMO podcast. Welcome to the show, Eric. Steve, thank you for having me on the show.

I’m really excited to be here today. It’s great to have you here today.

So, Eric, tell me, I mean, we don’t have too many Fortune500 experienced entrepreneurs here on this podcast. So after 18 years at Oracle, why do you decide to become an entrepreneur? Oh, that’s a great question.

You know, Oracle was a tremendous experience for me. I actually started out working at this company called Siebel Systems and about seven years into that journey, they were acquired by Oracle. So all told it was about 18 years, but it was a fantastic experience. Got to travel the world, got to do some incredible things with marketing because, you know, they’re a big company, big budgets. But I will tell you that one of the challenges working in a large enterprise company, it’s a bit like being on a hamster wheel. Everything is very repetitive. It just keeps going around and around. Budget cycles happen. You tend to do similar things every year.

You know, we’re going to cut back just a little bit, but do just as much. And, you know, there’s the usual cutting of resources and staff. And after a while, I just got to thinking that there’s got to be something else. There’s got to be some challenges that are more exciting, more fulfilling. And, you know, Steve, I’m a big believer that small and medium-sized businesses are the lifeblood of this economy. They are really what are keeping the lights on for so many people. And those are the businesses that I really wanted to help. And so I thought, what better way to do that than to branch off on my own, take the skills and experience that I had and put that to work helping some of these small and mid-sized businesses.

That’s great to hear. You know, I teach a lot about this idea of these management concepts. I talk about several management concepts in my book that they have all been implemented by the MBAs of fortune companies. And it’s time for small to medium-sized companies to also implement these things. So what are some of the things that you have seen work for Oracle that could be somehow maybe simplified for small to medium-sized enterprises, and they could also apply those concepts or frameworks?

You know, when you are a big company, a big enterprise company, they have spent so much money over time developing their brand that they become fairly militant about it, about maintaining their brand profile, their brand image. And that’s a positive and a negative, but what it has shown me is that there is real value in consistency. Some people may think it’s a little bit picky if you specify to every designer that the red that you use in your logo is hex number, you know, F3, whatever it may be. But there is consistency because there are brands that are out there that you can literally look at the font that they use in their advertisement or the color of something and recognize that it’s that brand without even seeing their name listed.

And so I think for a lot of small and mid-sized companies, one of the things that they can learn from these larger enterprise competitors is that there is value in being consistent, in putting your message out there in a consistent way so that people begin to recognize you. Look, you have a lot less dollars to spend usually, and so you want to make those dollars go as far as they can. And one way to do that is to make sure that people begin to recognize the messages that you’re putting out there by being consistent.

That’s very interesting. So how can small companies be consistent? Maybe that’s a stupid question. But what can we do as small businesses to pay more attention? What are we not doing? What are we missing? Maybe there are some low hanging fruits out there.

So look, you and I are both podcast hosts. One of the ways to be successful as a podcaster is to be consistent in your publishing, right? If you’re gonna do a show and you wanna do a weekly show, then publish something on a weekly basis. If you are a small business and you are going to do social media marketing, run ads consistently. If you’re going to post blogs, post blogs consistently. Pick the topics that you want to focus in on and regularly put new content out there that supports those topics that you want to be known for.

I think that’s where they can do it. And some of these things don’t cost any money. If you want to put something on Instagram, you know, you’re a coffee shop, you want to do things on Instagram, post a picture of, you know, the latte of the day or whatever, just remind people that you’re in business and what product or service you provide, stay top of mind. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, but that consistency over time will begin to make a difference.

For small businesses, being consistent doesn't have to cost a lot. The key is regularity in content creation and marketing efforts. Click To Tweet

It’s easier said than done though, isn’t it? Oh yeah. Because when you have limited resources as a small business, to be there every time with the routine things and plus put out the fires can be a really challenging thing sometimes. So what do you suggest the small businesses do? How do they create that consistency? Maybe that’s a habit that they don’t have. How can they acquire it?

I think that’s a good point. I mean, everything, there’s a trade-off, right? It might not cost dollars, but it costs time. And I think the way that you can do it is not try to do everything. So, if we take the world of online, right, you know, you’ve got your website, you’ve got all the various social media platforms. Where are you going to put your message out? It takes time and effort for each one that you want to invest in. Figure out what is the best channel to reach your target audience and put your effort there. Don’t spend time, you know, creating social media posts in five different sizes to satisfy the needs of five different platforms if really there’s one platform that’s giving you the biggest benefit. Focus all your effort there.

That’s a good advice. So, let’s switch gears here a little bit. And, you know, I hear so much about this idea of digital transformation. It sounds very catchy. But what does it really mean? What are the major concepts behind digital transformation? If I want my business to be a digital business, where do I even begin?

You know, it’s been such a hyped and overused term in many ways. You know, basically it’s the digitalization of your business. It’s taking your processes and sort of codifying them in a digital format. But I kind of take it to the next level. And what I really view digital transformation as is it’s connecting your business digitally. It’s making sure that everything that you’re doing, you know, from your marketing process to your sales process to your service process is all connected digitally.

A consistent foundation of who your customers are, what their relationship is with your organization, and then making sure that everything that you do to grow from there is all growing from this solid digital foundation. It’s moving away from disparate systems that might not have been connected, that may have been siloed, and it’s really pulling everything together in an integrated digital way. That’s how I kind of look at it.

So, can you give me an example? Let’s say I run a professional service business. Let’s say I’m a management consultant like you are. How do I digitize my business? What kind of systems do I implement and what does it look like?

I always like to start with a foundation of your customers are the core of your business, right? So where are you putting information about your customers? Hopefully it’s not in a spreadsheet. Hopefully it’s not in some manual process, but chances are, if you haven’t really thought about this, it’s located in a number of different places. And I think one of the first things to really undergoing a successful digital transformation initiative is to say, okay, this is going to be our repository. This is going to be the single source of truth for our customer information.

Digital transformation is not just about digitalizing processes; it's about connecting the entire business digitally. It involves creating a solid digital foundation that integrates marketing, sales, and service processes. Click To Tweet

And then we’re going to start to build out from there. So do we need a sales system? Okay, great. We can layer on top of that, a sales system. Do we need a marketing system? We can layer on top of that, but their hooks are always back into that core system. And I usually recommend that people are building off a CRM system, that that becomes sort of the core foundation of the knowledge about your customers. And then you start to layer on the sales and marketing and servicing capabilities on top of there. Because once you do that, then those hooks can provide you visibility into exactly what kind of a relationship your customer has with your organization and gives you real power in terms of data and analytics and being able to spot trends and understanding what are the levers you can pull in your business to grow.

That’s a great analogy. So essentially the four basic system elements which I hear is a CRM, a sales system, or maybe a marketing is the next one, then the sales and then servicing your customers. And if you’ve got everything tied up, the data is coming from a common, they call it data lake. Maybe that’s a bit of a big word for a small business, but that’s the digital transformation. So put everything on a digital system.

No, I was just going to say, and it’s a bit of a misnomer in some ways, right? Because we’ve all been using computers and digital tools for a long time. So I don’t think the implication is necessarily that people are still, you know, walking around with paper files and, you know, fax machines and that sort of thing. I think it’s the idea that there are these siloed systems that need to come together.

So how do you bring them together? Is it a way of kind of integrating them or you just throw them out and you bring in something that can do all of these things?

So we’re living in a great time, right? You know, we’ve gone from sort of mainframe technology, client server technology. Now we’re into cloud technology where a lot of things are located in the cloud. You don’t have to have all of this software installed within your business. And one of the things that’s a key is these various platforms that are out there, these various software packages is their ability to integrate into other packages.

And so, you know, as time goes on, the leaders in the space begin to, you know, make themselves known and vendors will then start to make their software compatible in some way with the leaders in the space. So, you know, if you look at some of the consolidation that’s happened, you know, you’ve got Salesforce, which is CRM. It started as a sales platform, became a CRM platform. They bought Pardot, which is a marketing platform. They bought Einstein, and now they’ve got analytics tools. You know, they continue to grow the capabilities of that. At the same time, they’ve got this whole robust ecosystem that allow partners to create technology that integrates back into that.

And you’ve got the same thing on the HubSpot side, on Oracle with Eloqua and their CRM. And Microsoft is even doing similar things, and Adobe as well. So you see all of these big players opening up their tools so that other smaller players can integrate into them. And anytime I go and work with a client, that’s what I always recommend. I said, don’t buy some tool that’s closed. Buy a tool that the other things that you want to use in your business or need to use will integrate in with.

That’s very good advice. So, Eric, if I want to make it as easy as possible, let’s say I’m a small business. Maybe I have three or four employees. What do I do? How, what’s the simplest approach? I very much like to keep things simple because often the complexity is not, ends up not being necessary. So I like to keep as uncomplicated as possible to hedge my bets. What would you advise me to do?

The very first thing I’d advise you to is not to buy too many tools because each tool comes with a learning curve. There’s a lot that you need to understand to be able to get the most value out of them. So start simply, if you’re going to build that foundation, get a tool like a HubSpot. HubSpot is a free version. Honestly, for a very small business, it does the majority of what you need and it costs you nothing. And begin to build your platform there. Begin to create that repository of data, begin to start to track the things that are gonna make a difference in terms of being able to recognize what’s working and not working in your business.

Start simple when building your business foundation. Don't overwhelm yourself with too many tools; each comes with a learning curve. Click To Tweet

And then figure out the areas that you want to expand into. Do you need better sales tools? What does that look like? Do you need to start sending out more emails or do an email newsletter? Do you need some support around contracting? So maybe you need a tool like a DocuSign to be able to make contracting more easy. What do you need on the service side? Do you need chat tools on your website so that people can interact with you? Or do you need recording software so that you can listen in and record calls to do training?

You just have to figure out what those things are and then slowly layer in those additional capabilities, but only as you’ve got the bandwidth to digest them. Because like I said, each takes time. And even for something simple like a CRM or a marketing automation system, there’s so much capability built into the out of the box package that you will spend literally what seems like a lifetime just figuring out how to leverage what comes in the box.

That’s the scary thing about it. It’s really scary. Is it possible for a small business to cost effectively hire people to do that for them? Or it’s pretty much not the kind of afforded.

So, there are ways that you can hire people to do some of that for you. I mean, look at a piece of software like QuickBooks, right? QuickBooks is something that many small businesses use to maintain their accounting software. Well, now QuickBooks has expanded to have an offering where you can actually go to the QuickBooks website. They will connect you with a bookkeeper who will set up your QuickBooks, and if necessary, run your QuickBooks account remotely. You don’t even have to meet these people or interview these people, it’s all taken care of.

So there are ways that you can bring people into your organization in a cost-effective way that can help you set things up, that have the knowledge of having done this before for other businesses, and can give you a head start. The challenge is that oftentimes, you know, where accounting, there are specific rules in play. You know, we’ve got the IRS, the IRS says you have to do things in a certain way, there are gap accounting principles, et cetera. But in business, every business runs just a little bit differently. And so there are always going to be unique ways that you want to set things up for your particular business. So a consultant or bringing somebody in can get you part of the way, but you’re going to have to be involved.

That’s what I was afraid that you would say. Moving one level deeper to the marketing. We have the four systems, we’ve got the CRM, marketing, sales, servicing systems. If you want to drill down into the marketing piece, which is where most of the action is these days, how do you, when you say a marketing automation program, what is it like? How do you automate the marketing of a small business?

So what you’re really trying to do is understand how the efforts that you are doing from a marketing perspective are working. And so the automation really are tools to sort of uncover what’s working and what’s not working. So at a very, let’s take an example, email. Email has actually been very hot during the COVID-19 pandemic. People have been sitting at home. They’ve actually been reading a lot of that junk email that they get. And so open rates have gone way up. Well, how do we know this?

Because marketing automation allows us to see when people have opened up an email. And that is just an example of what you can do. You can see through an email, you can have a list. So let’s say we’ll just give a really simple example. You have a hundred people in your contact database and 25 are interested in one product, 25 are interested in a different product. And you know this because you’ve collected their names at various processes. Maybe they downloaded a specific piece of collateral or they responded to some offer on your website. All of this is what marketing automation is helping you track, put them into segmented lists.

And then if you want to reach out to this person through an email outreach campaign, or even through a social media campaign, you can create an automated campaign within these marketing automation tools that will send out emails to this segmented list that you’ve created on a regular basis. And then based on what they do, do they open the email, do they report it as spam, do they opt out of the email list? Based on what they do, you can say, well, this email is working, but this one is not, we need to change the text of this email, or they’ve responded to this email, so they’ve opened it, so now we need to send them a different email.

You can make all of these decisions within the tool based on the data that you’re getting back. So what marketing automation is really doing is it’s collecting data on how your customers are interacting and then giving you the power to make decisions and figure out what are the next steps. You know, we talk about this idea of a buyer’s journey, which is really how do you go from the initial awareness of your product or service all the way through sales and service and what do you need to do to support people along that continuum and that’s what marketing automation can do.

That’s fascinating. So talk about the buyer’s journey. You talk about on your website and in your materials, you talk about friction in the buyer’s journey. So what is that friction and why it is there and how can you remove it?

So, I think a great way to describe the buyer’s journey is to sort of go from a best case to a worst case. So think about if you want to buy something off Amazon. You go, you search for it, the search results come back, chances are it’s going to be on that first page or two. You see it, you push a button that says, you know, buy now, and it’s done. There are literally, you push the button and it’s done. And then since we now have prime shipping, you know it’s going to arrive within two days. And the day that it’s supposed to arrive, you get a notification on your phone that says, your package is 10 stops away.

And then you get another notification that says, it’s sitting on your doorstep and here’s a picture of it. That is a low friction buying experience. You pushed one button, you got lots of communication. And two days later, that package, or you know, now in this day and age, could be five hours later, but it could be sitting on your front doorstep. Now think about like a high friction experience. Think about going to a doctor’s office. Think about what it takes to make an appointment.

The key to a low-friction buyer's journey is eliminating aggravations at every touchpoint. Click To Tweet

So you go to the website, you probably can’t make the appointment directly. You need to request a call back. So they call back, but you are on the phone. So now you’ve got to call them again. So you play a little bit of phone tag, then you get to somebody. They asked you for all this information. So you go to the appointment. The very first thing that you do once you get to the doctor’s office is they hand you a clipboard full of all of these pieces of paper that you need to write down information, much of which is duplicated.

How many times do you write your name and address and marital status and insurance company on these various forms? None of it’s pre-filled, right? Then they collect insurance information and payment information, and then you go sit down and wait another 30 minutes past your appointment deadline. And then the nurse comes in and asks you a whole bunch of questions that you just answered last week when you were there. Nothing’s changed. This is just high friction all over the place. There are all these points of aggravation along the way. And a doctor’s office may not be the best example because you’re purchasing a service from maybe your preferred provider.

You don’t have a lot of options, at least you don’t believe you do, in terms of where you get it, but you don’t leave that feeling really good about the encounter. And when other opportunities arise for you to make different decisions, you might, because you said that’s just an awful experience going into this doctor’s office or dentist’s office. So what I try to talk about when I talk about this buyer’s journey is from the very point that people become aware of your product or service until they actually make that purchase.

And then even beyond that, through the servicing of it, what are you doing to make that process as easy as possible? What barriers are you removing that make people regret that they’re trying to do business with your company or worse yet on the web? You know, sometimes there’s that moment where people are ready to buy. And if they experience friction, they say, ah, forget it. Not going to do it. I mean, have you ever gone to a website to make a purchase? You’re all set, you found something, and then they ask you to create an account. I don’t want to create an account, I just want to buy this thing. And so you leave. That’s friction.

Of course, I experienced that too, and I get really frustrated when that happens, and they send me here and there, and then they cannot process the transaction, it falls apart, and then it throws me back to the beginning, and I have to input everything.

I mean, one of the reasons that Amazon has been so successful is they look at every opportunity to reduce those points of friction. And I think what sometimes businesses get conflicted about is that there are sort of these dueling priorities and one is to have that good customer experience, but the other is to improve efficiency. And oftentimes efficiency adds friction, it doesn’t reduce it. Like if you think about calling into a call center, you’re calling into your bank, you’ve got a question for them, right?

The very first thing you’re gonna hear is please listen carefully as our menu options have changed. And then they’re gonna go through this litany of things. And what they’re really saying is, please, please, please don’t press zero. If you’ve got a question about your balance or something like this, figure out what option to push so that you don’t have to talk to anybody. Well, think about that. If 10% of the people calling into that call center have a question about their balance, then you’ve just introduced friction for the sake of efficiency for 90% of your customers. I don’t think that’s a good trade-off. You’re basically pissing off 90% of your customers to save a little bit of hassle about telling 10% of the customers what their balance is.

I agree with you. It’s refreshing when you encounter a business where actually you have a live person picking up the phone.

Yes.

It’s very refreshing. So, okay, so that’s the friction. Is there a process for removing this friction? Is there like something, a repeat of process that you have seen, which gives us some kind of a mental framework of how to go about, you know, systematically removing the friction.

Well, one of the reasons that I think we’ve got the McKinsey’s and the Accenture’s and the Deloitte’s of this world is because oftentimes outsiders look at things with a different lens than people who are very close to the process. People can get very ingrained in how they do business, thinking that that’s just how it has to be done, as opposed to a choice that they’ve chosen to do business in that way. And oftentimes, they try to address symptoms rather than the root causes.

And so one of the reasons that consulting is often very effective for companies is because it brings people into an organization that don’t have any of that baggage. They don’t have any preconceived notions about how you’ve done business in the past or why you’ve done it. They just see problems. They just see things that aren’t working right and begin to look at them in a more neutral way and say, you need to look at this in a different way. One of the examples that I give is, you know, I live here in Orlando, Florida. Obviously, we’re well known for our theme parks down here.

Well, when the executives come to check out a new ride, they don’t have a special VIP event where they walk to the front of the line, walk on an empty roller coaster car, you know, get the full treatment, applause at the end or whatnot. No, what they do is they book a trip with their family. They go through the park, they wait in the same lines, they get to experience what it’s like to sit in that line for two hours with your screaming kids and what it’s like, you know, once you get to the front and what’s it like going through the gift shop at the end? Because only then can you really see what the full experience is. You’ve got to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. And it’s amazing how many businesses never do that.

I read about Lee Iacocca, who was the CEO of Chrysler in the late 80s, 90s, that he, every night he took a different car home. He can personally experiment the cars and can spot things that could be improved. Yeah, I wonder, I’m sure that Steve Jobs did the same thing with the iPhone and iPad and stuff like that.

I’m sure, yeah, to get that first-hand experience.

Exactly. So talking about marketing automation, so what’s a good technology that you would recommend people if they wanted to start with their marketing automation that they would look at? Is it also HubSpot or is it something else?

So I’m a huge fan of HubSpot. I make no qualms about that. That’s what I use for my own business. I think they’ve got a very flexible range of pricing options. Like I said, all the way from free to more enterprise level but they were specifically built, you know to support SMBs. And so I think a lot of their technology is very friendly to small and medium sized businesses. You know, if you’re more in the enterprise level space, obviously Salesforce.com dominates there.

And, you know, Microsoft has their dynamic CRM, Oracle has their CRM. Uh, but a lot of those are, are Microsoft is, is applicable for the SMB space. Oracle is more for the enterprise space, but yeah, I’m a huge believer in something like a HubSpot just because it’s so easy to get started, especially when you have a free offering, which is a great thing for many businesses to offer up to customers if they can, because it allows people to start experimenting. And look, let’s be real, if you’re entering data into a system, you’re pretty quickly becoming connected to it in such a way that you’re not going to want to disconnect from it.

It’s going to be really hard to jump ship.

That’s right. And so it’s a very low risk thing to do to be able to give people that kind of capability. But yeah, I really love the tool and I love the company. I’m a big believer in corporate culture, and that’s a huge advocacy point for HubSpot.

So, looking more broadly about the topic that we discussed today, you know, systemizing your business with digital transformation, investing in a good marketing platform, maybe other platforms or scaling or using cloud services. Is there a blueprint for this digital transformation that people can access, that maybe there’s a book that you would recommend they read, or maybe there’s a white paper that you have on this, that people could access and learn a little bit more about the whole mental map of this.

So there’s a book called Duct Tape Marketing which has been very popular. There are a lot of people who follow the methodology that’s in there for small and mid-sized businesses. Oh, there’s another one that I can’t think of right off the top of my head, but there are a number of very popular ones out there. What I would say is it’s not necessarily that there is a blueprint. There are things that you can do, but what I would say you need to do is have a strategy. What are you trying to do?

And I think this is often what is missing so much from people in their marketing activities, especially for SMBs. Many times in small and medium-sized businesses, they don’t have a dedicated person who’s responsible for marketing. And so what happens is marketing tends to be an on-again, off-again thing done by generalists. And so they just do marketing kinds of things without necessarily having a specific goal in mind for why you’re doing them. For example, if you’re going to be on social media, why?

What is the goal that you’re hoping to achieve by being on social media? I see some of these companies that, you know, their social media posts are happy Halloween and, you know, it’s Veterans Day, you know, say hi to a veteran. Great. That’s nice, feel good stuff. But what’s it doing? What is the point of your social media outreach? If you’re paying somebody to do social media, you should have some real goals behind that. What are you trying to achieve? We’re podcast hosts. There’s a reason that we do podcasting.

If you’re gonna send out an email newsletter, what’s the call to action? You’re sending out some information, hopefully that’s a value to your audience, but what do you want them to do with it? Do you want them just to read the email newsletter? Do you want them to come back to your website? Is there an offer that you’re making them? If so, what is the offer going to incentivize them to do? And I think that putting together that strategy is the first step because then once you have the strategy, you can begin to look at these books and consultants and websites and podcasts and whatever it may be to start to say, okay, if I’m gonna do a social media marketing strategy, these are the kinds of things that I should do. If I’m gonna do SEO and start writing blogs on my website, this is a good strategy for doing that.

If I’m gonna launch a podcast, here’s what I should be doing then. But you won’t know that because not all pieces are applicable to all businesses. You’ve got to have a strategy in place first to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and what may be the best tools in the toolbox to use to get there.

That’s very good. It’s good words of wisdom. So is this something that you can help people to come up with a strategy?

So one of the things that I did and the reason that I started my consulting business, the Five Echelon Group, was that I offer a service called a virtual CMO or a fractional CMO. And what that is, is that for businesses that don’t have marketing leadership, you can basically engage with somebody like myself as a fractional leader who comes in once a week, twice a week, and builds out that strategy and then pulls together the resources, whether they’re internal or external, to be able to get that strategy executed.

You know, we live in a very different time than just a few years ago. The gig economy, the amount of freelance work that’s being done out there, and the specialization that exists is really at new levels. And so if you think about it, if you’re going to hire somebody full-time as maybe a junior person on your marketing team, what skillset would you want them to have? If, just think about your website, for example. Well, you need somebody who understands, you know, HTML and coding and be able to build the pages and the website, that’s one skill.

You would need a graphic designer, somebody who can create the visual aspect of the website, or you’d need a writer, somebody who can write the content that goes along with that. Are you going to have video? You’re going to need somebody to create the videos, edit the videos, and put those on there. And the list sort of goes on and on. Is there one person that you’re going to find that’s going to have all of those skills, maybe generally, but probably not specifically. And that’s the beauty of this gig economy, where you have access to so many people with specialized skills, you can bring them in on a project basis and say, hey, we’re redoing the website.

I need you to create some graphics. Hey, can you write some copy? We need some branding work done. And then coordinate all those. And then when the project’s done, you know, you can let them go and bring them back in next time a similar project comes along. And that’s one of the things that somebody that does what I do, kind of this fractional CMO model, you know, we can help wrangle that, we can help organize that.

So, if you were to come into a company as a fractional CMO, then you would go on Upwork and you would hire the people and manage them and make sure that they deliver whatever they needed, or you just give, create the strategy and kind of coach the CEO on how to do that and you would leave, what does it look like? Maybe it’s too much in the weeds, but I’d like to know.

I think that’s a good question and the answer is, you know, all of the above. It just depends on the company and what they have. If it’s a company and they have a number of internal resources, they have an established marketing department, some established marketing programs, then maybe what you’re looking at is somebody to come in and really refine that strategy, figure out a better direction to go, figure out how to link things together in a more organized way to be more effective, but that the actual execution of the changes or the new parts of the strategy would be done by that internal team.

Maybe it’s a small team or almost no team, and in that case, what you’d want to do is you’d want to build out the strategy and then bring in those outsiders to be able to help execute that strategy, whether they’re freelancers or agencies or other kinds of vendor partners that you’d want to bring in to do that. Or maybe there’s a team in place and they just need coaching. Maybe they’re a junior level team and they just, they don’t have everything working the way that it should and they just need to be coached. The elements are there, but it’s just not being executed on the way that it should. And so then it’s more of a coaching engagement. So it can go a number of different ways. It just sort of depends on what’s in place.

Okay, so it’s really tailored. The service is tailored to the company. You meet companies where they are and you help them get to the next level. That’s great. Exactly right. So Eric, really interesting information. Thanks for coming and sharing with my listeners. If they would like to learn more about you, but you do reach out to you Maybe get access to your resources or to yourself. Where should they go?

The best place is just to look me up on the on my website. It’s fiveechelon.com and all the information about the services and me is located on that website Be happy to connect with anybody and talk if they have some specific marketing questions or challenges.

And five, it’s a number five.

Spelled out. F-I-V-E-E-C-H-E-L-E-O-N.com.

All right, that’s good. That’s good to know. Well, Eric, thank you very much to come and to share your wisdom with the listeners and to you, the listeners, stay tuned. Please, if you like this podcast, please like and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and to give us an honest review. And stay tuned because next week, we’re gonna come again with another episode, another interesting entrepreneur that’s gonna bring their ideas and wisdom to you. that’s gonna bring their ideas and wisdom to you. Thank you for listening.

 

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