How to Think Creatively and Get New Customers in B2B

Regardless of which B2B vertical you find yourself in, acquiring new customers is essential for hitting revenue goals. Many conventional methods and tactics fall short, which means that marketers and sales need to adopt more creative approaches to customer acquisition. How do B2B marketers do that, and what role do they have to play?

That’s why we’re talking to Brook Shepard (Founder & CEO, Mason Interactive), who shared proven strategies on how to think creatively and get new customers in B2B. During our conversation, Brook emphasized the importance of focusing on breaking through the noise rather than just relying on technology. He also highlighted the need to understand churn ratios, set specific customer targets, and advocated for a diversified media strategy. Brook also stressed the importance of case studies and provided some actionable tips on how B2B marketers can think creatively to reach new people.

https://youtu.be/ZfT1_pIKkrc

[1:47] Challenges B2B marketers face in customer acquisition

[4:54] “How to set realistic new customer goals in B2B marketing” is the single most important pitfall that B2B marketers should avoid

[6:18] The role of AI in modern B2B marketing

[12:45] Case studies and creative approaches to customer acquisition

[26:06] Actionable tips for B2B marketers on driving better acquisition

[28:34] How to measure performance with the right B2B marketing metrics

Brook Shepard on LinkedIn 

Mason interactive

ChatGPT 

Christian Klepp  00:00

Regardless of which B2B vertical you find yourself in, we can all agree that getting new customers to hit your financial goals is imperative. That said, we know that many traditional methods and tactics are no longer effective, which means that we need to get more creative about customer acquisition. So how can you go about doing that, and what role do B2B marketers have to play? 

Christian Klepp  00:22

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers, the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Brooke Shepard, who will be answering this question. He’s the founder and CEO of Mason Interactive, where data design and strategy work together. Find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:43

I’m gonna say. Brooke Shepard, welcome to the show, Sir. 

Brook Shepard  00:46

Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me. 

Christian Klepp  00:48

Really looking forward to this conversation, Brook, because, man, this is not just pertinent to B2B marketers. I think this is just highly relevant to businesses everywhere. So if you don’t mind, we’ll just, uh, get started. Hop right to it right. 

Christian Klepp  01:02

So you, Sir, are on a mission to help businesses grow through paid social, paid search, social media, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), email and beyond. But for this conversation, I’m gonna say we need a zero in on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission, and that’s how to think creatively and get new customers in B2B. So you mentioned something just for context for the audience. You mentioned something to me during our pre interview call, and it kind of stuck. It’s less about the technology you have and it’s about how you’re getting new customers to hit your financial goals. So here comes the question, why do you think so many B2B marketers obsess over the shiny object instead of focusing on how they can help reach new customers?

Brook Shepard  01:02

Let’s do it. 

Brook Shepard  01:47

The short answer is, I think it’s easy to focus on a new fun toy. I have another theory about that, which is that if you’re buying a piece of software, you’re saying to yourself, this technology is going to help me and help make me better, whereas if you’re buying a consultant or like hiring me, I think you’re saying to yourself, wow, this person knows something I don’t know. And I think that’s probably harder. I think it’s probably a harder position for myself and for anyone, I think to be in it’s which to say, just to recast that it’s easier to buy the object than it is to have to have to acknowledge that you want to listen to someone else’s advice, because the object is a shiny new toy that may, that may work very, very well, and may transform your business. Certainly, there’s technologies we onboard that work really well, but yes, people definitely get distracted by six months long integrations of shiny objects.

Christian Klepp  02:38

What do you think a lot of these companies, regardless of whether it’s the B2B marketers themselves or the companies they’re in, why do they Why do you think that they resort to I guess I’m not gonna say tried and tested, because they were tried at some point now they’re just like, slowly becoming irrelevant. But why are they still defaulting to these old tactics instead of thinking creatively?

Brook Shepard  03:03

That’s a great question. I was talking yesterday to describe himself as private equity, as a financier who I was, I was really jealous of the situation he was in, because the way he the way his company works is he takes positions in businesses and and he might, he might buy 30% of your company, or 20 or 80% but he buys a piece of your business, and then he owns part of it, and then he’s on the board, and you sort of have to listen to him. Because he owns part of the company. And his joke was, no, they don’t always listen to me at all. And I was, and I was talking about the difference between that and and and working in an agency where people don’t always listen to us and follow our own advice, which is, I think we’re going to get more into this with some of the other questions we have ready. But I don’t always know whether I want to focus on what’s worked before and focus on what’s tried and true and iterate on it and make it better. 

Brook Shepard  03:55

I get the I mean, there’s a story once about once when I was selling advertising, I walked into a guy’s office and he had a poster in the wall, and it was, it was a poster of two armies from from medieval times fighting, and a salesman was trying to sell one of the armies of machine gun, a Gatlin gun, and the guy in charge of one of the army said, No, this was a cartoon on his wall. So no, I don’t want to focus on anything. I can’t be distracted by a salesman. I want to focus on the tried and true, which was a silly it’s his pointing. How silly it was, because if only he had a Gatlin gun, this cartoon guy and this cartoon poster on this wall, this office, he would have won the battle. So you need it. You need a mix of both things. Honestly.

Christian Klepp  04:36

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. So on this topic of, you know, thinking of new methods, creatively unconventional, finding ways to get new customers. What are some of these key pitfalls you think marketers should avoid, and what should they be doing instead?

Brook Shepard  04:54

I think the number one thing, and I said this in other places, I think the number one thing that people need to focus on is. Is how many new customers they want, and that’s that’s a little easier for B2B people to understand, but, it’s like, just so far and away is the number one thing. If I ask someone that comes to our agency for help growing their business, and are my sales teams talking to them, one of the questions I’d like to ask, because most people have revenue goals, most people have an idea of they want to be up 30% or they want to get to 5 million, or they want to get to 20 million, or they want to increase. Most people have goals like that. But if you ask someone the follow up question, which is say they want to get from 5 million to $30 million in five years, that’s great. How many of those are going to come from new customers is and if someone could answer that, I know that I’m dealing with someone who’s thought with some diligence and perspicacity about their business. And not everyone can, not everyone can think about that. It’s easier sometimes to talk about upselling existing clients, which is important, or reselling old clients, which is also important. But I think really the key thing for when you’re thinking about growing your business is, how many new customers do you need to get to where you’re where you’re going to want to go.

Christian Klepp  06:04

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. And I’m going to throw this additional like, follow up question in there for you, Brook, it is 2025, but how much of a role do you think AI plays in all of this? 

Brook Shepard  06:18

A lot, the…

Christian Klepp  06:21

Short answer.

Brook Shepard  06:22

So well for B2B, so, so there was an article. There was an article in The Economist, and the article was something along the lines of ChatGPT is an efficiency booster, and if the Gross Domestic Product is a function of how many people there are times how much they’re producing on average. Why haven’t the because we’re all using ChatGPT, why haven’t the adoptions of these technologies increased productivity in the GDP (Gross Domestic Product)? And my answer to that is, I don’t know this. I’m not an economist, but my answer to that is, as follows, part of our business to business plan, not all of it. It’s a slice of our pie is to do RFPs (Request For Proposal). And for people who don’t know if you want to work with the government or a big institution, they usually issue requests for proposals, and they’re very detailed, and you have to fill them out, and it’s time consuming and it’s difficult. 

Brook Shepard  07:16

We used to do fewer RFP responses with more diligence. Now with chat. So let’s say we used to do 10 a year. Now we might do 40 a year using ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else we’re using. So you think, Oh, we’re being, we’re being a lot more productive. We went from 10 to 40. But the issue is, everyone else went from 10 to 40 as well. It’s not, it’s not as though we’re the only ones leveraging these tools. And so we have this competitive advantage. It’s, it’s, it’s, can everyone use them, and how can you use them? We’re recording this time. We’re recording this ChatGPT 4.0 came out a little while ago. It has a verbal tech that everyone, I think, is catching on to with um dash. It’s not the journey dash, it’s the destination you get. So you have to see those things floating around. But so it’s heavily integrated into our process as an agency, in terms of making ourselves more efficient. We use it. We use it all the time. And certainly it’s using certainly it’s helping us produce more creative more quickly. Certainly it’s helping us analyze things more quickly. It’s not giving us ideas yet. So far, the ideas are still coming from us. So that’s my answer about its level. It’s making us more productive, but we’re being product more productive at the same rate everyone else is. So it’s not like a net increase in our output. I don’t think in terms of our economic output as a business. Does that track? 

Christian Klepp  08:36

Yep, yep. Absolutely, absolutely. I just want to go back to something you said earlier, because you were talking about, like, how you have these conversations with clients, about, like, what are the revenue goals, and where do they want to be? Those that have done their due diligence or have thought this through? Well, they demonstrate that in the way they answer that question. Just digging a little bit deeper, where do you see? A lot of these we can use your company as an example. In these conversations you’re having with clients, where do you see them making the same mistake over and over again in terms of new customer acquisition?

Brook Shepard  09:09

Well, not having one, not having a new customer goal. So I’m going to make up some numbers, because I don’t want to give my business plan away. But as an illustration, right? I know what our client churn ratio is. I know historically, how many of our clients that we have now will leave us by the end of the year. That’s a, that’s a knowable figure. Some years are better, some years are worse, but I have 16 years of data that says that this percentage of our clients are going to leave us. So if I know that going in, I know that to be flat, I need to replace that many customers, right? Let’s use round numbers. Let’s say I have 100 clients, and I know that I’m going to lose 10 of them in a year. That means I need 10 more at my average client value to stay flat. If I want to grow by 30% I need 30. I need 40 more, 10 to break even, and 30 to get to 30% higher. So if I need 40 customers through the year, I have to figure out where I want to get them from, and then I could have a discussion around trade shows, RFPs, referrals, advertising and email outreach. I can go through the different pieces of this, but I wouldn’t if I didn’t have the first part, which is I need 40 new customers in this hypothetical scenario to grow by 30% year over year. I don’t think I could operate the business. I’d be, I’d be doing things like, Should we do a trade show? I don’t know. How’s the pipeline? Weak, yes, strong, no, right? And having these conversations that are about, like, I don’t even know what? 

Brook Shepard  10:33

So it’s not about the revenue for me. It’s about the number of new customers that you need going in, and where are you going to get them from? The other thing, the other flip side of that that we see a lot, is this industry, the digital advertising industry, changes so quickly that skills get outdated very quickly. And my skills, in some places, are outdated. I was, at one point, a hot gun hired hand Google Account Manager. I’m sure I could get back there, but my skills are out of date. I am no longer really super great at that. People that are right, so the company has a whole ecosystem built around that, and they’re better at it, and they spend more time on it, and they think about it more than I do, but a lot of people don’t want to hear that, and so you’ll get people that will come into the ecosystem with outdated ideas about how to be marketing their businesses. The big one lately is they’ll be thinking about niche audiences in meta. 

Brook Shepard  11:31

Because four years ago, you could target, I don’t know, 49 year old dads who live in Brooklyn like me, differently than you could target 42 year old dads who live in lower Manhattan like my friend, and you could have different audiences and different creative and different ideal customer profiles. Go after these people differently, and you don’t anymore. Now they’re all put into broad targeting, and the crate is what drives the results to a large degree. So that’s a big one. Actually, my biggest thing is you have to know how many, not your revenue goals, because everyone has those, but how many new customers you need to get to your new revenue goals. And then the subset answer is, a lot of people are looking at outdated methods of advertising where they’re focusing on things that just aren’t impactful anymore. They don’t want to listen to anyone else’s advice about stuff. 

Christian Klepp  12:18

Yeah, the era of Mad Men, unfortunately, has come to pass. Sorry, Don Draper, he’ll be okay. All right, so break it down for us then. So how can from your experience? How can B2B marketers think creatively to reach new people and walk us through those steps they need to take to help sales generate better, more qualified leads. And you’ve talked to us about some of the stuff already.

Brook Shepard  12:46

Yeah. I mean, I’m gonna, I’m gonna repeat some of it, because I try to keep it simple, and I think it’s worth, worth just going into it. It’s knowing how many being honest about your revenue goals is the first thing most people have those more is not a goal, by the way, but growing by 30% is a goal. Growing by 10% is a goal growing by a million dollars. Having a specific goal is the very first thing. 

Brook Shepard  13:06

Then, being honest with yourself about what’s going to happen to your business if you don’t get any new customers, if you only focus on existing customers, you’re going to be more profitable in the short term. You’re going to not have to worry about sales outreach. You’re not going to spend your time doing that, but you’re not, you’re probably not going to be growing as much over time if you’re only focusing on existing customers. Probably so set a revenue goal that’s specific back into in an honest way, how many of your existing clients are going to leave over the next year? And your business might be a business where 100% of the people leave, or might be a business where 90% of the people where 10% of the people leave, and you’ve got a very sticky business, but whatever the number is, know it and then, and then, and then find out how many new customers you need to grow to hit your targets based on your churn ratio. 

Brook Shepard  13:54

And then I listened to a bunch of your episodes. Listen to most of the ones I could recently. And you had a guy on a few weeks ago talking about HubSpot. You need some way to track things, and HubSpot is a great way to do it. You can do it in Salesforce. If you’re smaller. You can do it with a spreadsheet, but at some point you need some CRM software to track so in my hypothetical example of I have 100 clients, I know I’m going to lose 10. I want to grow by 30% that means I need 10 to get back to zero, and I need 30 more to grow to 30% then I need to know my closing ratio. So let’s say, if I want 40 customers, that my closing ratio is 10%. I’m using these round numbers to make it easy. Okay, that means I need 40 customers. That means I need 400 sales qualified leads to get and just saying that out loud, and having consensus across the organization, with your sales team and the marketing team and the operation team, and how that’s going to work. How are you going to staff up when you get these new clients in over the course of the year, and just develop a consensus around that, and everyone being on the same page, and so Okay, now I need 400 sales qualified leads this year. Where am I going to get them? And then taking a look at HubSpot, where you got. Of last year, and that’s probably a good starting a good starting point. I don’t think there’s some issues with the attribution and HubSpot and triple whale and glue and all these things, but so I think there’s some buzz in the way you can get to those numbers. But it’s set a financial goal. Find how many new customers you need. Once you’re honest with yourself about your churn ratio, find out your closing ratio, so you can back into how many leads you need, and decide where you’re going to get them from. And it’s not everyone does that. There’s a lot I’m going to, I’m hoping for growth this year. So anyway, that’s my, that’s my really, that’s sort of didactic, but I, but I believe that I’ve been doing this for 17 years, and it’s the path we follow. 

Christian Klepp  15:40

Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, all of the things you just said, like, like, really resonated with me. And it’s that it’s that whole and I find this to be true, not just for smaller companies, even larger ones too. They get really busy, and because they’re busy, they’re like, Okay, let’s just park the whole new client acquisition, right? And it’s such a dangerous thing to do, right?

Brook Shepard  16:04

Yeah, and they on the, we’re talking about B2B, but on the, on the, on the, on the, I do, I deal with B2B because I’m in sales for my agency, and I need new customers. And then one of the things that the customers we get in are doing, and I think this is a function of interest rates, and it might not be, but it certainly correlates interest rates going up. Is focusing on efficiency, and what people mean by efficiency, generally, in digital advertising is selling new products to existing customers, as opposed to getting new customers in. And if you don’t get new customers in, you’re just gonna die. You’re just gonna efficient yourself right out of business. Woman named Erica, who we work with, talks about it being a death spiral, and I’m not sure I can talk to a client directly and tell them they’re in a death spiral. That she can as the investor, and she’s and she’s right about it,

Christian Klepp  16:51

Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s for sure. That’s for sure, just because we’re talking about this topic, about, like, okay, thinking creatively on getting new clients. Can you give us an example, ideally like, maybe from your own company, how you did that?

Brook Shepard  17:05

Well, for our business case studies work well, because people want to see that the things they’ve done that you’ve done things for other people that are like them, that can be a little bit of a double edged sword, because sometimes people want exclusivity, right? And then you get, look, I only want to deal with people that sell pens. Do you have a selling pen case study? Case study? Yes. And then that’s great. Or someone could say, well, do I only want to be the only pen company you have? I don’t want anyone’s ever sold them before. 

Brook Shepard  17:29

But case studies work, work really, really well in terms of business to business. Work, it really, it really is. The number one thing that I found that works over time is being able to say to someone who’s going to hire you for, you know, for $10,000 a month, or $100,000 a month, or a half a million dollars a month, or $2,000 a month for the next couple of years, being able to say to them, we’ve done this before. We’ve done it several times. Here are the results that we’ve generated for some other people. I think it’s going to work for you, too, if we follow the same playbook. Let’s take some shots here and see it. See how many goals we can score together. That really is the number one. It’s the number one thing for me. 

Brook Shepard  18:03

But I think what people are buying is the benefit of growing their business and the experience of having worked with us. I think focusing on the benefit is always works for us, as opposed to the I can talk about our tenure, and I can talk about that we have a billion dollars managed, and these are all these are true, and I can talk about our tech stack, and it’s great. It’s great, it’s expensive, and it works well for clients. But I think those are, those are not as important as the overall putting them together and saying, This is our history of driving results. The benefit of hiring us is that you’re going to get these results, as opposed to, as opposed to listing the features that we have three offices a tech stack this much experience. I think people care much more about the benefit of hiring us than the individual. Hiring us in the individual components. Generally, there are certainly people that want to focus in on the on the on the products of hiring us or anyone else. But generally, it’s about the benefits.

Brook Shepard  18:03

It comes down to creativity. We run meta ads for ourselves, right? And we have all these suppositions about what’s going to work in our meta ads, and we have text based ones, and we’re constantly doing doing tests text based, versus image based, versus hook based, but, but it’s really always about self assessing and proving to people that you can do what they want them to what they want you to do. If you walk in the door with a case, if you’re a makeup company and you call mace interactive, we can send you five makeup case studies, which I presume they’ve read on our website before, they call us. That lets them know, hey, these guys, these guys could do this. They’ve been in business for 16 or 17 years, and they’ve got a lot of track record for this. And it’s less about focusing on the the widgets and the offering. So we have a tech stack, right? Like we’ve invested in our tech stack at Mason, and we talk about it during the sales process. But I fundamentally believe that people, and it’s part of it, people like it. We have things that we do hire us, you can get that would cost you 20 times as much if you got them on your own. You get that for free, or it’s built in. That’s all true. 

Christian Klepp  19:06

That’s right there. What you’ve described, that’s the perfect example of like you’re looking at it from the customer’s lens, right? Like, if I’m the potential customer. They are looking at you, and are you the right service provider or company or whatnot, you know, the right fit for us, versus flipping it the other way around? And, like, look how awesome we are. Look how many awards we want. 

Brook Shepard  20:13

Yeah, yeah. And the corollary to that is what we talk about is the brand prison. So, like, so we’ll look, we have a lot of fashion client but about half of our clients are schools and about half of our clients are fashion brands. And people say, why? And it’s probably because those are two things. I like education is a unifying force and an edifying force in this country and others. Our education systems, our higher education system, is a thing to be proud of, and makes us a source of light for people around the globe. And I like nice clothes. And both those things can happen at the same time, but so clients come to us for help with those things, and sometimes they’ll say, I don’t want to try new approaches. I don’t want to try new creative because it’s not on brand. And I understand that. I understand want to be on brand, but if you’re focusing so much on your brand that you can’t get the word out, it’s no one’s seeing you, and you’re in your own brand prison. We have a client that sells, how do I say this? We have a subscription based client that sells a unique feature. Let’s call it mopeds and, and. And they have a great feature, a great way to buy a moped for cheap. And their ads don’t say, get a good moped for cheap. Their ads say something about, like, the nature of the company and how it was founded. And I understand their desire to do that. I really do, and I’m not against it, but I’ve really got to push them to get out of their own brand prison. Because they’re in, they are in a brand prison, this client of their own making, of focusing on on the brand of their scooters, and how they and their mopeds, and how they how they function. And once, I’m convinced that, once I get them to break out of their own brand prison and focus instead on the benefit of the consumer, which is great moped electric for cheap, that they’re going to the sales are going to go through the roof. So breaking out of brand prison is, or is a new way we talk about that with people. 

Christian Klepp  22:03

There seem to be a lot of companies, at least, also, in my experience, that are trapped in that prison. And it’s, it’s a steep hill to climb with them that they just, they just somehow can’t break out of it, even if they wanted to, right?

Brook Shepard  22:17

Yeah, and it’s an interesting thing. And again, I’m not, I’m not complaining about this. I’m sure I did this in my own life, in my own in my own ways, so I don’t want to sound studio about this. But like when you hire an agency, if the agency is credible, the people probably found that it came from a consultancy or another agency. My senior team, my Vice President of Operations, our head of SEO, our Senior strategists, our client directors, client facing directors and down. Those people have all seen more budgets and more media plans and more of what works across our client portfolio. About 60 clients across our 60 client portfolio with billions of dollars, they have just seen more of these plans and budgets and strategy documents than really any one client has, you know, and maybe our analysts aren’t, aren’t, aren’t, aren’t used to looking at that the same way a vice president is. But they’ve all seen it. We’ve all talked about it. And then, and then clients will come in and they’ll say, here’s my plan. What do you think? And it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to talk to clients and find a way to convey to them that you should listen to us more. We see more plans than you. And here’s what, this isn’t going to work. 

Brook Shepard  23:25

I’ll give you an example. One client came in, our client, that guy went to Wharton, raised, raised money, started a product was taking off, and he had a he had a financial model going through it forward four years. And his conversion rate, the rate at which his model, the rate at which people landed on his website and then bought the product with a make up the number. Let’s say it was at 1% it wasn’t it says 1% he had a fixed formula for his conversion rate increasing each quarter. Let’s say it would increase 10% a quarter, which is a great call. It’s a great goal to be optimizing your website and your creative and your pricing structure and all these things to focus on getting an increase in conversion rate. That’s a big win. He’s right to focus on it, but your conversion rate is not going to compound at 10% better each quarter in perpetuities. It’s not going to happen because eventually, if you do that math, you’re going to have a 400,000,000% conversion rate, which is not how math works. So I said to the guy when I was talking to him, I said, I really like your plan. There are parts of it that are so sophisticated I’ve never seen before. Thank you. I’ve learned something from this is really great. You asked me what I thought about it all. That’s true. 

Brook Shepard  24:28

Also, here’s one thing as a point of sort of developmental criticism that I might that I might offer for you, sort of forward looking at looking ideas. Having been through the Springer a bunch of times, I think maybe we should take a look at the conversion rate that you have hard coded as increasing by 10% a quarter, and look maybe historically, what some other benchmarks are across the portfolio. And that Christian is as delicate way as I can say that. And the guy’s like, no. We’re gonna, we’re gonna go with our math. Okay, you know. So like, I find, I find it interesting when, like, like, if you hire an architect, maybe you give them an opinion on where you want the stairs. But ultimately the architect tells you you need to improve the foundation. You could probably listen to the architect and not decide you’re gonna do it. Probably listen to the dentist when they tell you need your teeth cleaned, not say, I’ve got teeth and I don’t agree with you, so such as life.

Christian Klepp  25:23

Yeah, I mean, that formula in theory, that sounds wonderful, but, but to your point, in application, there’s just no way that that is gonna work.

Brook Shepard  25:34

That is correct. That is totally correct, but it’s fun, and that guy’s very successful, and he and he’s doing great. So, yeah, I mean.

Christian Klepp  25:40

Ok, fantastic, fantastic. All right, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and man, you’ve given us plenty already, but let’s just assume there’s somebody out there that’s listening to this interview between you and I and you you want them to A – take your advice. B – act on it right now, not in 12 months like right now. What are three to five things you would tell them to do?

Brook Shepard  26:07

The first thing is, and I realize it sounds self serving coming from an agency guy, the first thing I would do is, I would ask my agency what they would do if they were my shoes, and listen to them not do whatever they say. I wouldn’t do whatever I say. But I really would sit down and say, Hey, I’ve hired you for a fee. You’ve seen a lot of stuff. What would you do if you were in my chair and you had full control? That’s the first thing I would do. 

Brook Shepard  26:29

The second thing, and these aren’t the next thing I would do if, in terms of actionable steps, is, again, figure out your churn ratio, right? Figure out your turn ratio. Figure out how many customers are going to lose this. And it might be. You might be. You might have a very sticky product. You might have a not sticky product, but there’s some number. 

Brook Shepard  26:45

Find out what that number is for your planning and then set new customer goals. That’s the third one, right? It’s New Customer goals. 

Brook Shepard  26:52

The fourth one would be to look at your last three or four deals that you closed and ask yourself, in an honest way why they closed and what the real trigger was. I think it’s worth, we, all, most of us, use otter or fireflies in our notes. Now. It’s worth it’s worth listening to those things again, or using AI to look at those things and parse it through and and say, like, what do you it might just have been price. It might have been the way you smiled that day, but it might have been the sophisticated way you package the clients responses the clients needs. But it’s worth really thinking about that and then. 

Brook Shepard  27:26

And then, the last thing is, when you’re focusing on creative, make sure you’re focusing on the customer, on the benefit of the customer. Get new customer goals. Figure your turn ratio out. Listen to your agency. Don’t have to do anything. They say, but listen to them focus on creative that that focuses on the on the on the feature of your on the on the on the benefit of your product. Nothing. Features are the main ones. I think I forgot one when I recap that, but I think, I think we got it.

Christian Klepp  27:54

Looking at the last three to four deals.

Brook Shepard  27:57

Yes, thank you. Yeah, in an honest way, yeah.

Christian Klepp  28:01

So, why did they close or Yeah. And then what was it? What was it that helped close that deal? Right? What was the, what was the, was the no brainer? There? Okay, okay, fantastic, fantastic, fantastic advice. Now here comes the next question, which I always called the Love it or hate it question. But at some point, man, at some point, you’re gonna have to show somebody that this stuff is working. We are making progress. So metrics, right? So are there any particular metrics that you think beauty we marketers should be paying attention to?

Brook Shepard  28:34

Yeah, sales, the the I had a conversation with a very sophisticated woman who worked at Expedia and now is a CMO, one of our clients, and she and I learned something from her. This isn’t groundbreaking, but the way she talked about it was so sophisticated and smart, and she packaged it in the way that made me think about it differently, which she talked about was de averaging your metrics. Because a lot of times, if you’re if you’re in house, and I think from your listenership. I think maybe there’s some people listening that work in house for in the marketing team, or maybe they’re starting their careers and they’re reporting to a marketing director. If that’s true, and you’re listening to this, I’m sure that your boss is going to ask you a question, like, say something like, I’ll do more if it works, if the ROI is there, I’ll keep spending what should I do next? And that that’s not really, it’s not really fair for you or anyone at any point in their career, because that’s a little bit like saying, if I, if I, if I, if I look like Daniel Craig in James Bond, I’m built like that. If I go to the gym one day and I look like Daniel Craig, I’ll go back again to the gym the second day. Just not how it works. You have to, you have to eat nothing but chicken for six months and go to the gym every day to begin to approach that. It’s worth sort of thinking about that and the way this person who was the CMO worked with Expedia, and is now a CMO of our client talked about was de averaging your metrics. The top of the funnel ads are not supposed to have the same ROI as the bottom. The funnel ads, you’re allowed. Your boss is allowed. You are allowed, I’m allowed. We’re all allowed to say, I need to operate at a certain row ads or ROI or efficiency metric. That’s great. 

Brook Shepard  30:08

But there’s things in that funnel that in your advertising stack, that might not be held to those same metrics, as long as the aggregate is still there, that should be judgment different ways. So let’s just look at that. Let’s say you have two campaigns that are live. One is about reach for new customers, and one is about remarketing. I’m making these numbers up. The Reach Customer has zero or has one ROI, and the remarketing has a five ROI. And your boss says, I want to be at a four ROI. Anything, anything below four cut. It might be an easy temptation to say, well, let’s cut the reach campaign. Is it one roi i boss wanted before doing marketing? Is it five? If I turn that one off, my numbers are better. My boss would like it. I think it’s the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at is to average those two things together and see together, are they still averaging to the four of the boss or the marketing team or me wants to be at, or the client wants to be at, and then judge those top of the funnel campaigns by different metrics. You shouldn’t judge an introduction campaign by the same last touch. Did they buy it as a meta remarketing? You should be looking at reach. You should look at frequency. You’re looking at CPM (Cost Per Mille). You should be looking at the percentage of new users. There’s all sorts of things that you can look at there that are different. To get mad at a reach campaign for not producing return on investment immediately is like getting mad at a squirrel for not swimming as far as a fish can swim. It doesn’t track. They do different things. 

Christian Klepp  31:32

Absolutely.

Brook Shepard  31:32

Sorry, I got on my high horse a little bit, but that’s it.

Christian Klepp  31:36

All good. All good. No, and they should be treated differently. They should be measured differently, absolutely. Oh, by the way, I caught that like you the way you pronounce. Daniel Craig, right? Because I think he was on the Stephen Colbert show, and he roasted Stephen Colbert for saying, Daniel Craig.

Brook Shepard  31:53

I remember that, actually, yes, I remember that. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m just doing it the way that’s a little outdated as a reference. But I do, I do use it with people still. It’s like, it’s like, if the ROI is there, I’ll do it. Well, that’s not how this works. Like, I mean, like, you think Coca Cola has an immediate ROI on Super Bowl commercials. That’s not, that’s not looking at us. How many people they get, anyway.

Christian Klepp  32:14

Exactly, um, it kind of sounds like you’re on your sole box. But just stay up there a little bit longer. Just, just, just, just for this next question. All right, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with. And why?

Brook Shepard  32:29

I think the status quo that I disagree with is the over reliance on too few media platforms. And by that, I mean most people that come into our ecosystem come in wanting to do if you’re a school client, I mentioned half our clients or schools have from our fashion brands. And that’s not exactly correct, but it’s about, about correct. The school clients are gonna do more Google. 70 cents of every dollar is gonna be in Google, on average, the direct to consumer brands, the fashion brands that we’re selling to on our business to business way those guys are going to do 8,70, cents of every dollar on matter, really, on Instagram, and that is the status quo. And they walk in and they and people come in matters and mature industry. People come in with ideas about it, and they have ideas about campaigns and influencers and campaign setup. And although there might be great ideas the status quo I have a problem with there is when you think about your own media consumption, how much, how much, how much of your own media consumption is Instagram in your life? Like of all the media you consume, what percentage of it is Instagram?

Christian Klepp  33:33

20% maybe.

Christian Klepp  33:35

That’s what it’s there for. Man, it’s, um, it’s getting people to, like, I hate to say, think out of the box, but just, just think differently, right? Um. All right, here comes the bonus question, and I kind of prepared you for this already. All right, warden the street, is that you’re kind of handy with a guitar. So the question is, the question is, if you were given the opportunity to either play a set at a club or go on tour with a guitarist, who would it be? And why?

Brook Shepard  33:35

Maybe part, maybe, maybe a lot more of it. For me, it is watching TV. Was watching Hulu with my wife with a glass of wine, right? That’s hours of time. And maybe Instagram is in the elevator between meetings. Maybe from the power user, it’s half an hour in the morning catching up, but it’s not 80% and yet. And yet, the status quo in the industry is, I’m going to spend somewhere between 70 to 80% of my dollars in Instagram and try to hack that and make it work better, which is, I understand it, but I don’t love it. Because if you think about your own media consumptions, you don’t spend 80% of your time on Instagram. So why would you spend 80% of your budget on Instagram hoping to go so that’s a status quo that I don’t that I don’t love it. Yeah, great question. I had to really, had to really dig for that one. I appreciate it.

Brook Shepard  34:51

Today? What would I do? 

Christian Klepp  34:55

If this person called you, like right after this interview and said, Hey, Brook, I’ve seen your video of you practicing your guitar.

Brook Shepard  35:01

What would make me leave my wife and family and job and either do as one set or a small tour? So if the darkness called out of the UK, if the darkness called and they needed, I can’t play as well as that guy, but if they needed someone to play back up on some of those songs, or carry the amps around or or restring the guitars, but maybe I could play back up on a few songs. I would absolutely do that. Plus they don’t tour for that long. They tour for a couple of weeks at a time at the most. So I would, I would, I would, that would be awesome.

Christian Klepp  35:38

Fantastic. Awesome. Brook, this has been an awesome conversation. Man, thanks for your time and for sharing all these insights with the listeners. So please, quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you. 

Brook Shepard  36:01

You can find us at https://masoninteractive.com.  Anything you fill out in that website, we’ll go to a strategist and also me. You can find me on LinkedIn. Brook Llewellyn Shepard, but our website, https://masoninteractive.com is the best way to find us. Thanks so much.

Christian Klepp  36:14

Fantastic. Fantastic once again. Brook, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Brook Shepard  36:19

Thank you.

Christian Klepp  36:20

All right. Bye, for now.