70% Inbound at an Outbound Company - Why It Was Both Thrilling and Frustrating

Speaker A: We ran an outbound company, but yet 70 to 80% of our business was inbound. I love that, but I always wish that we could go out and get more through outbound channels because that would have just helped us grow even, even faster.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to another episode of Tech Qualified. My name is Justin Brown and this episode is brought to you by New North. New north helps small scrappy B2B tech marketing teams build real marketing functions through strategy and execution across content, paid ABM and reporting. Today I'm joined by Chris Corcoran. Chris spent more than two decades helping build Memory Blue into one of the most recognizable outsourced SDR firms in probably the world. During that time he had a front row seat and actually led much of the function for nearly every growth challenge a uh, scaling company can face. From founder led sales, to building marketing programs, to experimenting with agencies, content, printing, events, podcasts, and everything in between. So today we're going to talk about what actually worked, what didn't, and what he learned after 24 years of trying to grow a B2B company without a massive marketing organization behind him. So Chris, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Justin, thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to start this interview with the question that I start every interview. What does scrappy marketing mean to you?

Speaker A: Getting everything you possibly can out of all you got.

Speaker B: Love it. So let's talk about that. So when Memory Blue was first getting off the ground and for the audience, I was there actually pretty early on. I uh, started my career as an SDR cold calling for Hitachi Data systems, trying to sell people storage. So I saw the world of marketing or the lack thereof that we had early on at Memory Blue. But what did marketing look like early on?

Speaker A: Well, initially entire marketing philosophy was simply exceed our clients expectations, regardless of how high those expectations might be, by providing remarkable service. And we were doing that because we wanted to keep our clients and we wanted to generate word of mouth and that helped us out probably for the first decade. But you can only scale so much when you're operating with that philosophy. You're going to have to start doing some marketing programs which we eventually started to do.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of our clients, they basically have one of two ways that they're growing when they come to us. One is either that they're heavily sales led organization maybe with like one person in marketing, or it's a split function across founder, head of client services, etc. Or the sales program. So when did you decide that for you, word of mouth was the kind of the approach that you were taking. When did you determine that that wasn't enough and that you needed some form of marketing?

Speaker A: Uh, this was probably seven, eight years in. And we had a meeting with our fractional CFO and we were making the decision on do we want to stay really, really small and manageable and kind of keep all of our profits and really run a lifestyle business, or do we want to try to go and scale the business? Once we made the decision that we wanted to scale the business, we knew that we were going to have to invest in marketing, we were going to have to invest in building out a sales team. And so that was the decision we made.

Speaker B: And what was the first real marketing initiative that you invested in?

Speaker A: Well, as a founder, you're kind of a generalist. M. Right. You know a little bit about a lot of things, but you're not a specialist. And we knew that from a marketing standpoint we would need to find a specialist. And so we could either hire someone full time or we can try an agency. The agency was super attractive because you can turn it on, turn it off. You can get someone who's way more skilled to work with you. And so we started exploring agencies and we ended up finding an agency that we worked with and it worked really well for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, so let's just dig into that a little bit. So I mean it's something that I deal with all the time. The way that we're positioned as an organization and our uh, price essentially is mid to low level marketer is someone that they could hire and then that person would work with the founder and then essentially the founder would have to really be leading marketing strategy because that junior person isn't. Uh, they may have some ideas, but they're not going to have ideas that at that stage of their career, if someone is six to $7,000 a month, it's going to be, hey Chris, so I was in college three years ago, here's how we're going to scale the business. So what led to some of your decisions to go agency route versus that in house route?

Speaker A: The return on investment. You're getting an expert, but you only have to pay for a fraction of the cost. So you can get just a little bit of that, that individual's time and they have a team and they have resources and they have know how versus if you hire somebody, if you hire someone junior, they're going to be looking at you to come up with the strategy. And we needed help with the strategy. And so that's why we decided to go the agency route.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker A: And things changed over time too. Like we, we also brought folks in house and built a team. So we did a variety of different things.

Speaker B: Yeah. You know, again for the audience. I've worked with Chris in a variety of capacities for 10 years, 15 years we were an agency for Chris where we worked with members of the Memory Blue team. I've worked for Chris. I've kind of seen it. Right. So you had this like director of marketing and the director of marketing actually left. So there's like, you've kind of seen it all. It's one of the reasons why I was thinking about people I wanted to bring onto the show that I wanted to bring you on. You've essentially seen like the three flavors that, that we see with our clients. You were, you had the agency in place. You had director of marketing who I assume was spearheading at a minimum some of the strategy. And then you also had after that director left some junior people mid, mid level to junior people in place who were. Had focus on different areas of your marketing function. I'd be curious to have you take the audience through those three, those three different approaches and maybe some of the pros and cons to each in comparison to each other. And I can prompt you on them if you want at in house leader the agency and then having. I don't know when you had a, uh, handful of junior people. I'll ask you this before I jump into the full question. When you had the handful of people, because I saw it from the outside. We were actually doing the Memory Blue podcast tech sales is for Hustler. So I just knew who I, who I engaged with. And this was after their director of marketing, Kevin had left. Did you have a leader at that point or were they all reporting like basically to you or how did that work?

Speaker A: Yeah, they were essentially reporting into, into me.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: I really like the return on it. It was short lived, but we, we, we were, it was great was when we, we hired, we hired I would say an elite individual right out of undergrad.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And what was great was we got. She was exceptional, super ambitious, driven, made a huge impact. The challenge was, it was only short lived was because she was reporting to me.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And like she wanted to go work for like a marketing superstar. And I'm not that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But she was exceptional. And so I was uh, disappointed that I couldn't have been a better leader for her. But she did an amazing job and you can really get a big bang for the buck if you go and not just hire anyone out of college. You go find the best person you possibly can, come right out of college and give them opportunity, and they will rise to the occasion. And maybe if you can provide a little bit more mentoring than, uh, I was able to provide, you can keep that person longer term. That was an exceptional run. I would do that again in a heartbeat.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's interesting. I actually talk to people about this a lot. I bring this up when I'm on sales calls that are. And I'm pitching our service and I show this slide and it's got this lady and she's like, split. Like, left side is robot and right side is like business, professional woman. And it's got all these different skill sets on there. It's like web dev, design, copywriting strategy, so on and so forth. And I'm like, look, if you find this person, I will hire them tomorrow. The reality is, A, they're incredibly hard to find. Uh, and B, they're incredibly hard to retain because you need to have a great environment for them. And the people who I'm talking to right on most occasions are in your boat, where it's a founder looking for the way to do marketing at their organization. So even if they bring this person in, then that person, are they going to stay, and then when they leave, is marketing off, what happens in that situation? It's funny, I actually bring that up a lot because it's true. It's what I say to people when we still do a lot of podcasts. And, you know, people go to bring their podcast in house, and I try to just talk them off that ledge because I'm like, look, you say you have somebody right now who's going to do your podcast, and are they going to do your podcast? Sure. They'll do it for three months. They'll do it for six months by month, nine of them cutting your face and turning you into a clip video. They're going to be so bored to tears because they're one of two things. They're either a marketer who has other aspirations other than just editing your audio and video every single week, or they're a video person. Uh, and trust me, those people want to go out and do create like, they want to do highly creative work. And so, you know, when you work with an agency that has a system, you have a little bit less risk of that. That superstar up and leaves. And then you're sitting there kind of holding the bag, going like, man, we were doing some great things, but now I have to. Now I have to reset. And so, you know, I think having that, that infrastructure is very key. So, okay, so we talked about having the junior person who's a superstar coming in, but then reporting to you. Maybe they needed some leadership. And then you had your. I think you built up at least a handful of people on a team with a director. What was that like?

Speaker A: Well, with that approach, you have a lot more control over things, and it's just like outsourcing in general. I think once your organization or your company gets big enough, it makes sense to start bringing some functions in house. And you see it with really big companies, right? Like they, they break, they have a lawyer on staff, right? We never got that big. But something becomes strategically important enough to you, you can bring in. In house. We work with agencies throughout for podcasts, through SEO, for all, all sorts of different things. And I will say is one of the things that I learned through the process is, well, maybe m. This is my personality. But the tighter you manage the agency, the better results you're going to get, right? Because some people just feel like they can just write a check every month and like all their problems are going to go away. You have to treat the agency almost like a direct report. Like, you have to be involved. Someone on your team has to be involved to drive that. And if you're not that involved, you're not going to get the results that you want.

Speaker B: And can I chime in on that, actually, as an agency owner?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: I agree. So funny. It's like, I think that sometimes our clients, either purposefully or thinking that they're doing us a service, they're less involved. We're sitting here like, no, we need your buy in. I mean, we need to know that this is what you want to do. We need you to review this work. Because the last thing I want to have happen is something goes out on your behalf and it had some faux pas that I don't know about. I don't work there. No matter how I could go and do marketing for another marketing agency, and they're going to have unique things about their organization that I don't know about. That, yes, I want your buy in on it. Or, Chris, in your situation, if I'm your marketing agency, after 20 years, the amount of just inherent knowledge that you have about your icp, about the way you like to position your organization, what, like those are valuable ads for my team to know that. It's not that we don't have a certain skill set that we like, we just know and we don't know everything. And we know marketing strategies, we know approaches, we know how to connect things from HubSpot to every tool on earth to be able to report on it. But getting those insights from you, Our clients that are the most successful are the clients who have somebody who is intimately involved with the things that we're doing. And I think a lot of our, uh, challenges stem from situations where a founder thinks, I am just going to bring on a marketing agency and then they need to drive leads, and that's probably like the most common one that we see. And I'm just like, if it was that easy. And sometimes I say this and have to watch myself, but I'm like, always say to me, they're like, and I'm sure you heard the same things, Justin, if we can find a way where we can get ROI on the marketing we're doing, we'll increase spend tomorrow. I'm like, if I could promise that I would be a billionaire. Like, we need your inputs. We need to learn, we need to evolve, we need to grow. So I think that's just an interesting nugget that I, I, as an agency owner, I agree. The, the more involved you are, the better, not the worst. Which is, I think, the opposite of what people think an agency would want.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally. So growing up, my dad used to always say, chris, don't blame the barber for your. For a bad haircut. The barber's doing exactly what you tell them to do. Yeah, right. And so it's with the agencies. Right. And think back of kind of like the people I've worked with, the absolute best people I've ever worked with, wanted to work with me all the time. Like, they didn't want me not working with it. Like, they were always outside my office, knocking on my door, wanting to get me involved. And those were like the most talented people. They wanted involvement, to collaborate, to work together. And I think you have to have that same sort of relationship with your agency or whoever you're working with, your director of marketing, but you need to be hand in glove with, with your marketing resources to really drive the outcome that you're looking for.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I want to ask you about, because coming from, for you, you came from a sales background, as did I, and marketing strategy means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I certainly have my take on what marketing strategy is. How did you set strategy for Memory Blue when it came specifically to your Marketing function.

Speaker A: Well, so we're probably like a lot of your clients, we're a professional services company. And so. Well, what differentiates one services company from another? Well, typically it's to be around your people. So we tried to very clearly differentiate ourselves from other providers by number one, we wanted to prioritize our service. I think we did a pretty good job of that. And we really differentiated ourselves from all of our competitors by really letting our clients hire our people if they wanted to. And most of our competitors would say if you hired one of our employees it would be like $100,000. And so we leaned into that and said, hey, listen, we're going to completely differentiate ourselves. We're going to let our clients hire our people if they want to and we're going to try to go and hire the best people. And we're going to do that by hiring people right out of college as opposed to getting these lifers or squatters who are in their 40s and they're still doing an entry level job. Mhm. So from a strategy standpoint, that differentiation is in my opinion, super important. Like what makes your firm different than others? And most people struggle to answer that question. They'll say something vague like, oh, it's our people. But that's what your, that's what your competition is going to say. If your competition is going to say they're differentiators, the same thing that you're saying, then you're probably not all that different.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I actually use something like that.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: All the time actually in my sales process. I might have learned it from you, but I think this might have been a uh, Tom Gasman special, which was. So when I, when I go to sell, I actually refuse to sell retainers to people who don't have a CMO in place. Okay, you have a CMO in place and they know exactly what they want and they're coming to us for execution. They want us to stand up, landing pages, they want us to build blog posts, website copy, ad copy, whatever. They know exactly what they want. Sure, I'll sell you a retainer. Here's how much it costs. But I have people, you know, uh, who come to me and it's founder and they're either trying to level up their marketing, but they don't fully know how, or they're leaving an agency. Marketing roadmap. Here's what marketing for you needs to look like over the next 12 months. Here's what the we're going to go after and they're like, well, you know, I had four other proposals and they all have, you know, the retainer, it's a six month engagement here, the things that we're going to do. And I'm like, that's impossible. It's impossible after a 30 minute call to be able to tell you that this is what your ROI is going to be. I haven't had a chance to look in your HubSpot. I haven't had a chance to look into any past performance. I don't know who you're in the marketplace. So if that's what you're looking for, we're not a fit for what you're doing because like, there's no way that I could say that I can do those things and actually stand behind my word. And I. So I think that's, then that's part of my marketing strategy for my organization is the way that we set up our service is to go in and actually do an evaluation first. Um, which is something I'm curious about you, um, on, on some of the things that you have had return on or lack thereof. What would you say is, you know, is a channel that you were maybe bullish on that you went after and didn't work?

Speaker A: Man. Uh, SEO, it just, we tried multiple times and it, we never got it to work. And so I, maybe it was strategy, maybe it was the agency. We tried different agencies, maybe it doesn't work for services companies, I don't know. But we spent a ton of money and we never saw the return.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so how long did you have that running and what led you to decide to maybe pivot dollars away? I'll tell you why I'm curious is I, I think that, you know, people many times are looking for the silver bullet and the reality is, is that you're going to have to try a lot of things and some of them aren't going to work. And it may not even be anybody's fault. It may just be that you have 10 competitors who started doing SEO years before you did. And no matter, we had a client who we had to tell them. We're like, I mean you're going to be, to compete in your space. They're in the uh, like the telecom space m more so like for business. So they compete with like I think like nextiva and other uh, other companies like that. And I'm like you'll, you will never get there. Like you will simply never get there. But if I hadn't said that, they may have spent years trying or, or what have you. So I'm curious. When it came to channels that you found not working, how long did you let them run before pivoting? Kind of. What was your approach to evaluating whether different experiments were worth your time and energy?

Speaker A: Oh, I would say we wanted to give it some Runway. So I would say we let it go for six, six to nine months before pulling the plug, but we just won't be able to see anywhere near the return. And I'm a big believer in experimenting and trying things. And I know. I know things aren't going to work. I know things aren't going to work, but you have to try things to see what will work and what won't. Because you. You don't know which ones will work and which ones won't, but you have to try things. The worst thing you can do is not do anything. Yep. You got. Well, that's my. I have a bias for taking action, so I want to try things. And sometimes things will work, sometimes they won't. They won't. And you find out which ones are, uh, working, and then you get behind those. Yeah.

Speaker B: So that leads me to my next question is, were there any channels that either you initially dismissed or you weren't as high on that you tried, and they ended up becoming surprisingly effective?

Speaker A: Well, some of this stuff is hard to measure in attribution. Right. Like, what was the.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker A: Like, what was the R Y. And I. I was always surprised by the number of people who actually listened to it. And for Mark and I, we had a lot of fun doing it, which was. Was important. And it allowed us to keep connected with the alumni who used to work at the firm. And that helped us recruit better, stronger people that helped us bring in business. But we weren't looking at it with an Excel spreadsheet on, like, well, so we're paying this much per month, and how much are we. How much is it? How much return are we getting? Yeah. Immeasurable. Yep. Right. But what Mark and I were big believers in, like, go build the company that you wish you worked at. Right. Like, that was super important to us, and it was a lot of fun, and it was important, and that's why we did it for as long as we did.

Speaker B: Um, one of the things I wanted to ask you about, that you always did, that I've never done. You released press releases. What led to the press release system? I feel like it was still part of, like, we want to talk about our people, and so we have this big focus on our people. And even if kind of similar to the podcast, nobody really reads the press release. It's a, ah, it's a thing we're putting out there. But of all the companies that I've worked with over the years, very few of them have been into press releases or having kind of a PR push. But that was something that you did. And I'm curious what led to that decision.

Speaker A: Uh, maybe, um, more old school. We were hoping to get picked up by magazines or get featured in different publications. This was like before blogs were a thing. Then you wanted to get featured in the newspaper back when those things were a thing. Yeah. So that's why we were doing, um,

Speaker B: might have also been. What was the competitor back in the day for people? They had a huge sales, uh, team up in Maryland. They were the press release software.

Speaker A: Uh. Oh, vocus, vocus.

Speaker B: There you go. Also might just be that our, our biggest competitor, uh, people back then was doing that.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, I had a question about. So your core Service was outsourced SDRs. Did that shape how you thought about growth?

Speaker A: What do you mean by that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so what I mean is, like, you defaulted to building a sales team, so that led with SDRs. For companies of your size. It was very, it would be very atypical, like early on when you had maybe one or two offices, but, but you invested into an SDR function for yourself. And I'm curious if that. I think I know some of the answer here, but hear it in your words, is when it came to driving new business, you leaned heavily into an SDR function, probably investing in that more than a professional services company of your size would have.

Speaker A: Right. Well, we, we really wanted to scale the business and try to get as big as we possibly could. And if you're going to do that, then you're going to have to invest in, uh, a clc. You're going to have to do that. You don't want to have everything dependent upon a founder. You want, you want to be able to have a salesperson go out and bring in business. And since we were selling somewhat of a sophisticated service, the SDR function just was a natural fit for us in that that was our business. And so we could take the best SDRs and help them or have them help us find more, more projects, more, more clients. And we were able to let them do that. And then they can move up and become a full cycle salesperson. And that worked really well for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's something we've, we've had great SEO for years, and it's something that I'm now Beginning to invest in is actually a sales team here for exactly what you said, which is not only is it important to get the founder out of doing all of the sales for the sake of a growing business. For that founder to go do other things also increases the value of your enterprise. And so there's a lot of reasons to do it. So I, uh, wanted to ask a question just about that relationship. So how did you look at outbound sales in relation to marketing? Was it for you a unified function where the SDRs were providing leads that would be classified as marketing leads? Were those separated differently? How did you classify and think about the SDR function internally versus the sales function of people who are closing deals in business?

Speaker A: Well, there's a couple things there. So marketing, you do, everything you do transmits a signal. Right. And so our best salesperson and our best recruiter was our website. So we wanted to invest heavily in that website. Because typically, if you call someone, you send them an email, the first thing you're gonna do is go to your website and they're gonna. And instantaneously, they're gonna, like, make a decision on, um, is this somewhere I want to be or not? And so you want to make sure you. You pass that test. So you gotta have good marketing ear cover for your salespeople. And then for our SDRs, I guess what was interesting for us is 70 to 80% of all of our clients were inbound.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: We ran an outbound company, but yet 70 to 80% of our business was inbound. And I loved that. I loved it. And I hated it. I loved it that we had a good reputation and we had a lot of people who were returning clients. Good word of mouth. I loved that. But I always wish that we could go out and get more through outbound channels, because that would have just helped us grow even. Even faster.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, but our. The SDRs that were working with us to help us bring in deals, they had good relationships with their field reps that they were supporting, and they were driven on bringing in deals that closed as opposed to just meetings that went down. Right. So I think we had good alignment with those SDRs. And so I'm not sure if that answers the question.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. All right, last question here. Before I let you go, if you could go back to year one at, uh, Memory Blue and give yourself some marketing advice. Hey, Chris, one day you're going to be spearheading this rather large enterprise. Here's a piece of advice that I learned along the way. What would you tell Yourself.

Speaker A: Start earlier and invest more.

Speaker B: All right.

Speaker A: I mean, no. And function is one thing that I don't think we ever nailed it. We're sniffing around the hen house and we did some good things, but we never like, crushed it. Yeah, we never, we never crushed it, but proud that we tried a bunch of different things. I wish we would have started a lot earlier. I ah, wish we would have invested more because jealous of firms that have amazing marketing. Like, like, oh man, like, why, why can't I have that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a little more challenging than maybe you're giving yourself credit for. I, uh, run a marketing agency.

Speaker A: It is challenging.

Speaker B: We go through our ups and downs where cobbler's kids don't have shoes. Right. It's like you spent, you spent. Sometimes you get, as a founder, you get bogged down, especially at a service based company, dealing with your clients. You're sitting here, you know, we're very similar in that, like, I'm driving leads and marketing for my clients. You're driving literally leads and opportunities for, for your clients. Then we look under the hood and you're like, I wish I had more outbounds, more outbound sales. And I'm sitting here saying, I wish we did more marketing. I mean, I'm relaunching my podcast after, uh, taking a hiatus and understanding, hey, I got to get back to some of the fundamentals. I got to do this stuff for myself. I think it's very challenging and I think at the end of it, everybody kind of wishes that their marketing had been a little bit better. And a lot of times when people focus on the things on the outside that look really good, there may be things that are not being taken care of on the back end, like work with a client that has incredible outward facing marketing. And then I go look at their HubSpot Salesforce integration and it is a complete disaster. Sales reps don't know where leads are supposed to get assigned. And so I think it's one of those things where we're all kind of comparing ourselves to each other. But as founders, it is m really challenging to have good marketing that you're constantly proud of. That's driving results that you can track well. So anyway, Chris, I really appreciate you coming on today. Where can people go to find you and what you're up to?

Speaker A: Now they can go, just find me on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: All right, cool. We'll put that into the show notes. Chris. Thanks for jumping on with me, Justin.

Speaker A: This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you having me as a guest.

Speaker B: Absolutely. We'll see you on the next episode.

Speaker A: Great. Thanks. Thanks for checking out Tech Qualified. This show is brought to you by New North, a, uh, marketing agency that helps turn your small, scrappy marketing team into a growth engine.

Speaker B: To find out more about New north

Speaker A: or check out more episodes of this show, go to newnorth.com techqualified.