Matt feels he is at his wit’s end. “Just how many fires am I going to have to put out myself? I’ve worked with four or five different marketers, and they just don’t get it. As for canned AI-generated content—it just makes me sound like everybody else.”
Matt is searching for advertising that can quickly pivot. His marketing team needs to be in daily contact with his target market, just like his sales team.
He launched his business when COVID first started—it skyrocketed because of its digital nature—but it took eight months to put out a webinar explaining how his company could actually help customers out.
He gets pitched often because he attends a lot of conferences. He goes to places like the NextGen cloud conference and walks the floor, talks to different vendors, and sits in their presentations.
A sales rep from a marketing company, RoboDopia, reaches out to him. It’s not just any marketing company—it’s a managed service provider (MSP).
The RoboDopia sales rep paints a beautiful picture: “Engagement. Innovation. We’ve been there, done that. We know how to market your business; we’re on top of the latest trends. You’ll get a dedicated account rep. We have automation built in to post things for you on your behalf, blah blah blah.”
Unfortunately for Matt, things didn’t go as expected.
You see, the business model of firms like RoboDopia is to capture people’s information (e.g., mining LinkedIn databases) and send it to Matt’s team as leads.
Much of this data is processed through AI to match what entrepreneurs (like Matt) are looking for.
But, to Matt’s disappointment, these MSPs do little to qualify the leads they send to him.
After around three months, RoboDopia brought in one lead who was a tire-kicker. A month after that, they sent him a prospect who was already in talks with one of his competitors. When Matt complained about it, a pit bull of a RoboDopia executive responded: “That was a qualified lead. I could have closed that sale.”
Matt got one good lead in six months. RoboDopia’s solution was to try to upsell him to a more expensive plan.
The service did provide Matt with plenty of blog posts and newsletters. They also made an effort to not push out the same content they were giving to other clients.
But the content was, vanilla, lacking in personality and devoid of real selling power. As a result, it didn’t spur any desire or even interest in people who would be Matt’s best prospects if they knew the value he could provide them. So it wasn’t moving the needle on sales to justify the cost, that’s for sure.
Matt finally decided to pull the plug on the relationship when he lost his RoboDopia account manager and had to go through a series of flaky, unresponsive salespeople.
Here’s where Matt felt cornered and nauseated in equal measure: when he canceled at the end of his agreement, giving appropriate notice,
RoboDopia terminated all services prior to the contract end.
He could only laugh when they tried to get him to sign an agreement not to tell anyone why he left.
So much money, so little return.
After a series of expensive lessons like this, Matt now realizes he can’t buy certainty by imitating his competitors.
There’s an operational maturity around marketing that Matt has not yet found. He’s always taken investing in the software side of his business with an extreme seriousness. It’s starting to dawn on him that it’s time to do the same for his marketing.
Matt needs a marketer who can not only show him a better way but also do the work and lighten the load on his shoulders.