Podcasts about birdeye

Send us a textIn this jam-packed episode of The Near Memo, hosts Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal welcome back Adam Dorfman, VP of Product at BirdEye, for a timely deep dive into the ever-shifting world of local SEO, AI Overviews, and Google's evolving search ecosystem.The trio unpacks the seismic shifts happening in local search, AI-generated results, and the new metrics that matter when “clicks” no longer rule. From how Google is leveraging its own ecosystem to dominate AI outputs, to whether schema markup, directories, or social media still matter, this episode serves up unfiltered takes and battle-tested advice for marketers, SEOs, and local business owners alike.

Send us a textTop 3 Ways To Dominate Google: Discover how to leverage Google reviews, supercharge your website, and tap into AI-driven search to outrank the competition.Google Reviews = Ranking Rocket Fuel: Learn why getting (and keeping) high-quality reviews is more crucial than ever—and what Google's crackdowns on fake reviews mean for your business.Website Health Matters: Understand how a strong site not only boosts organic search but also directly impacts your Google Business Profile visibility.AI is Changing the Game: Get ahead of the curve with insights on Google's new generative search features, AI-based lead generation, and how large language models like ChatGPT might affect local services.Practical Tech Tips: Hear how schema, NAP consistency (Name, Address, Phone), and strategic pricing info could shape the future of automatic AI-driven “calls” and appointment setting.Experts in Your Corner: Aaron Parker chats with Footbridge Media's Chris Lonergan, who's been building contractor-focused websites and SEO strategies since 2004.Actionable Takeaways: Get the inside scoop on why you should integrate review software like BirdEye, maintain consistent brand presence across platforms, and prepare now for an AI-powered future.Tune in to stay one step ahead of Google's ever-evolving algorithms and keep your phone ringing with high-quality local leads.#seo #footbridgemedia #SEOwithAI  Get The "How To Actually Wash Course"Footbridge Media $199 Lean & Mean Deal Pressure Washing Customer Contract Chemicals & Equipment The Pros UseAaron's Instagram

On this episode of RevOps Unboxed, Sandy sits down with Olga Traskova, VP of Revenue Operations at Birdeye.They discuss why attribution can't be used to make life-or-death decisions, navigating Sales Ops challenges, RevOps reporting structure, and more!

*SPONSORED CONTENT* Did you miss out on Breakpoint 2024? In partnership with Solana, Real Vision is releasing the best talks from Breakpoint 2024. In this keynote, Kha Nguyen of trading aggregator Birdeye, shares some major updates. Breakpoint is the annual gathering of the worldwide Solana community, hosted by the Solana Foundation. Breakpoint 2024 was held Sept. 20-21 in Singapore. For more information, go to solana.com/breakpoint. DISCLAIMER The content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives. All opinions expressed herein are the speakers' own personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of any entities.:

In this insightful episode of Mid Mic Crisis, hosts Bunchu and Chamber embark on a candid exploration of the highs and lows of crypto trading, offering listeners an unfiltered glimpse into their experiences navigating the dynamic landscape of the market.The episode begins with Bunchu and Chamber reflecting on their recent crypto trades, delving into the intricacies of their decision-making processes and the outcomes of their maneuvers. As seasoned traders, they provide valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities inherent in the crypto market, offering listeners a window into the strategies that have shaped their trading journeys.Amidst the euphoric atmosphere of the current bull market cycle, Bunchu and Chamber engage in a nuanced discussion about the trajectory of the market, predicting a crescendo in late 2024. They explore the implications of this anticipated surge, highlighting the importance of strategic positioning and portfolio diversification to capitalize on emerging opportunities.A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to trading memecoins on the Solana blockchain, with Bunchu and Chamber sharing their perspectives on navigating this burgeoning sector of the market. They emphasize the need for adaptability and foresight, suggesting that now may be the opportune moment to redistribute positions across various blockchains in anticipation of shifting market dynamics.In a bold departure from conventional trading practices, the hosts explore the concept of trading on a 1-second timeframe – a strategy reserved for the purest of degens seeking to capitalize on microfluctuations in the market. They delve into the intricacies of this high-octane approach, offering insights into its potential risks and rewards.Bunchu and Chamber also shine a spotlight on innovative platforms like pump.fun, where new memecoins can be created on a bonding curve, ushering in a new era of decentralized tokenomics. However, amidst the excitement of this technological innovation, they express disappointment at the proliferation of offensive memecoins, urging listeners to exercise discernment and responsibility in their investment choices.Through candid anecdotes, strategic insights, and thought-provoking reflections, Crypto Trading: Not For Everyone offers listeners a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted world of crypto trading, empowering them to navigate the market with confidence and resilience in the face of its inherent complexities and uncertainties.Check out pump.fun: https://www.pump.fun/boardFollow us on X.com: https://twitter.com/MidMicCrisisPowered by @dGenNetworkWebsite: https://dgen.network/Support the show

In the latest episode of Mid Mic Crisis, hosts Bunchu and Chamber embark on a multifaceted exploration, with a particular focus on Bunchu's recent crypto venture involving the much-anticipated $WEN airdrop.The episode kicks off with an insightful discussion on the art of podcasting. Bunchu and Chamber share their experiences and insights, providing a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into hosting a podcast. As seasoned podcasters, they delve into the intricacies of creating engaging content, managing episodes, and navigating the evolving landscape of the podcasting realm.The spotlight then shifts to Bunchu's crypto play involving the $WEN airdrop. The hosts dissect the strategies and considerations behind participating in a crypto airdrop, shedding light on the potential benefits and risks associated with such endeavors. As they unravel the intricacies of the crypto market, listeners gain valuable insights into optimizing their airdrop experiences.The conversation seamlessly transitions to the upcoming Jupiter Exchange airdrop, a highly anticipated event in the crypto community. Bunchu and Chamber discuss the expectations and implications surrounding this event, offering a glimpse into the dynamic world of blockchain-based giveaways.Adding a relatable touch to the episode, the hosts open up about the challenges of parenting pre-teens. Sharing personal anecdotes and reflections, they navigate the often tumultuous terrain of parenting, providing a candid and authentic perspective on the struggles and joys of raising children in the digital age.As Bunchu's crypto journey unfolds and the hosts share their collective wisdom, this episode of Mid Mic Crisis emerges as a well-rounded and engaging exploration of podcasting, crypto airdrops, and the nuances of modern parenting. Join Bunchu and Chamber as they navigate the intersections of technology, finance, and family life with their signature blend of humor and insight.Follow us on X.com: https://twitter.com/MidMicCrisisPowered by @dGenNetworkWebsite: https://dgen.network/Support the show

In an engaging and interactive episode titled "Shill Your $SOL," hosts Bunchu and Chamber orchestrate an innovative exploration of Solana ($SOL) investments on Mid Mic Crisis. The episode commences with the customary trivia segment, inviting listeners into a conversation that combines financial exploration with interactive participation.Chamber is equipped with $5000 allocated for Solana investments, prompting the hosts to invite listeners onto the virtual stage to pitch and shill their preferred SOL projects. The challenge for participants is to effectively persuade Bunchu and Chamber to invest in their chosen SOL-based coins or NFTs.Listeners enthusiastically present their favored projects, highlighting the potentials of BoDoggos, Kups by Raposa, and DogWifHat token. Each pitch aims to convince the hosts of the project's value, innovation, and potential returns on investment. The hosts carefully weigh the merits of each presentation, considering the persuasive arguments put forth by the audience.Throughout the episode, the hosts direct attention to various platforms such as Magic Eden for NFT exploration, Birdeye.so, and Jup.ag for crypto analysis, adding depth and context to the discussion of Solana-based projects."Shill Your $SOL" on Mid Mic Crisis is an episode that seamlessly combines financial exploration with audience interaction. Bunchu and Chamber lead an interactive and entertaining conversation, allowing listeners to actively participate by advocating for their preferred SOL-based projects. Tune in, join the discussion, and explore the intriguing world of Solana investments alongside engaging presentations and interactive decision-making.Follow us on X.com: https://twitter.com/MidMicCrisisPowered by @dGenNetworkWebsite: https://dgen.network/Support the show

‍‍In this episode of Monday Morning Marketing, we're stepping into a compelling discussion with Dr. Len Tau as he delves into the under-appreciated powers of reputation marketing. Exploring the crucial shift from reputation management to reputation marketing, Dr. Tau shares invaluable insights and techniques to help you grow your dental practice. Learn how to unleash the full value of five-star reviews, the importance of a solid reputation culture, and how to automate the review process for maximum impact. Discover the best response strategies to both cheers and jeers from patients, so you're prepared for anything. This episode is packed with actionable strategies you can immediately implement to transform your reputation game and see a noticeable increase in patient satisfaction!‍What you'll learn in this episode:The distinct differences between reputation management and reputation marketing and why you should transition to the latter.The importance of creating a reputation culture in your dental practice to spur five-star reviews.The best time and methods to encourage patients to leave feedback on review platforms, specifically Google.The role of automation in streamlining the review process, making it easy and convenient for patients to leave feedback.A guide to responding to reviews, both positive and negative, to maintain a strong online reputation.Dive into today's episode and upgrade the way you handle your reputation strategy forever!‍You can reach out to Len Tau here:Website: https://www.drlentau.com/Email: len@drlentau.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrLenTau‍Mentions and Links:Tools/Software:YelpBirdeyeSwellPodiumSolutionreachGoogle My BusinessTerms:NAP - Name, Address and Phone NumberHIPAA - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act‍If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041‍Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)‍Michael: Hey, Lynn. So talk to us about reputation management. How can we utilize this or what advice suggestions or methods can you give us that will actually help attract new patients through this form Len: of management? So first off, thanks for having me. Number one, uh, number two, I will start off by saying, I am not a fan of the term reputation management.Reputation management is in my opinion, an old marketing term. Where you are really worrying about negative reviews and hoping to find a way to get them off the first page of Google. I prefer a term called reputation marketing. So it's a way to generate five star reviews.Whichever way you want to do it. Okay. And then market it to attract more new patients. So if you look at it that way, it's a much more current term. So if you're, if you're out there and you're looking for a company to use for, you know, website design, Google AdWords, and they say, we also do reputation management to me, they're not up in the, current.You want to market your reputation. It's so important. And what does marketing your reputation allow you to do? It allows you to then do other types of marketing and the marketing is going to be so much more successful than it would have been if you didn't have the reviews behind you as kind of the foundational part of your, your Google by business page and stuff.Michael: Okay. So then what can we be doing? What can we utilize or how can we utilize this to, to better effect? our marketing and attract new patients through that process. Len: So in my opinion, the most important thing you have to do is find a way to get your patients to write reviews. And there's a very big difference between a company who says they generate reviews and a company who just sends a link to write a review.Okay, there are many companies out there that you can use, and there's a lot of communication companies that fall into this, this sector that literally, they say they do reputation, but literally, literally, they're just sending a link to the patient to do a review. In that case, the patient has to do all the work.Okay, all the work, they have to log in. They have to remember their password. They have to write everything down. They have to hit post and everything else. It's multiple steps. And that's why those products are not successful. In order to be super successful out there to get these reviews, put where you want them.And you only really want them in two or three places, depending on your geography. Google always. Facebook and then Yelp, depending on where you are. So if you're in California, New York, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, Dallas, any large city like that, Yelp is going to have more clout than if you're in, you know, a town with 12 dentists.I mean, Yelp is not going to be as important there. So you're really looking to get reviews on Google and Facebook. And why? Because everybody uses Google to find a local business. They're going to do dentists near me, dentists in my town, dentists in my zip code. And when someone's searching for a dentist or you, in fact, your Facebook page shows up on the first page of Google.So you want to put these reviews where actually your current patients are looking for you, which is on a Google search. That's how you, you take reputation marketing to the nth degree by just finding a system out there. That automatically will get the reviews, allow the patient to auto log into their, account, and within a couple of seconds, they've got a text message and they can put the review directly on your Google My Business page.That's how to take it to the nth degree, as I like to say. Michael: Gotcha. So then it's kind of like a little bit of a battle when it comes to like the metropolitan areas, when it, like Houston, LA, stuff like that. Would you recommend, hey guys, Yelp, Google, and that like that, or just focus only on Google? Len: No, in those specific cities like LA, San Francisco, you said Houston, Miami, you know, Chicago, it's, it's Google number one by far.You always have to dominate Google. There's, there's no choice out there. Your focus should be on Google. Okay. And then in those specific cities that we just mentioned, Yelp is important. Okay. Now remember someone doesn't go to Yelp and I've interviewed many, uh, local people in these towns you mentioned, and I asked them, how do they find their dentists?They don't go to Yelp to look for a dentist. They go to Google to look for a dentist. They find information about their dentist, and then they look them up on Yelp to see how their reviews are. So in those bigger cities, Yelp is more important for that reason, but people go to Yelp to look for restaurants.They don't go to Yelp to look for a dentist. There's a big difference there in the way people search. If people in California say Yelp is really important, it is. But if you don't dominate Google, people can't even find out who you are. So it's always Google first, then Yelp in those specific cities, and then much below that is Facebook.the only reason you really want to get Facebook reviews is because it shows up on a Google search. When you type a practice name in, you'll see the website's number one, and then usually Facebook is number two or three. It's visibility there. That's why you want to get Facebook reviews. Michael: Gotcha. Okay.So then that's the key. We get on Google, right? Number one, right? Especially if we're in metropolitan areas, we would Google then Yelp, right? And then Facebook. Now what? What's the next step to be like, all right, man, I want to start getting these a couple a day, a couple, maybe 15, 20 a week. You know what I mean?Like, cause we see that in some of these groups. And how, how easy is that Len: really? Reviews are basically a numbers game. So the bigger the practice, the more reviews you're going to get. I mean, that's just, it's just a numbers game. The more review requests you sent out, there's a certain percentage we expect to come back.The more you send out, the more you're going to get. So bigger practices should expect more reviews. Okay. But you have to use an automated service. And don't love self promoting myself. So bird eyes, one of them, you know, swell is a very common one. Podium is another one. Those are the three in the dental industry specifically that are designed to make the process easy for your patients.If it isn't easy, your patients will not take the time to do the review. And a lot of the services out there, they actually have their Own sites they go to. So just as an example, uh, solution reaches the popular communication software. I just had a dentist reach out to me who had 750 reviews on solution reaches page buried where you couldn't find it.And only 18 on Google. that's a shame that they didn't, they got all these great reviews, but nobody sees them. You have to make sure they're actually putting it on Google. That is such a big deal nowadays. If it's not going to Google, it doesn't help you. Michael: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. I remember when we used to have solution reach, that was a.That was a big thing. It just populated there. And then we were like, okay, what happened? Right? And then it's weird asking the patient. Hey, can you write it again on Google? Right? And then that diminishes it big time, big time. Patients are Len: not going to do it twice. It's it's a, it has to be a one step clean process, but I know, and I know you're talking about, we're talking about reputation, but I want to make one other thing clear, especially to the startup groups.One of the missing factors is just generating reviews is not enough. Okay, just having the most reviews is not enough, especially as a newer business, you have to, you have to make sure that Google recognizes and understands your listings and make sure the listing it's called listing management, citation claiming, it's a vital part of local search, because if you only have a ton of reviews and you're listing.These are not consistent or invisible because you're a new startup. Google is, you're not going to be at the maps. And that's why people say, well, I have a thousand reviews. Why can't people find me? And it's usually because your listings are messed up. So that's a very big part for, especially for startup companies, to know that you have to make sure the name, the address, and phone number is called the NAP is consistent.It's an online huge part of local search. Okay, so Michael: that has to be consistent. Google finds you then the reviews come in Len: Yeah, so the purpose the the kind of way it works is when you make your listings consistent Which should be done before you even open your doors technically So if you once you fix the listings and you have a consistent flow of reviews coming in Consistent flow for google is one to two every single week so if you're getting less than 8 to 10 or 8 to 12 a month, you're not getting enough of them, but that factor 12, plus a consistent listing, you will rank higher on the maps than someone who's not doing it that same way we see it all the time.Michael: Okay, so then give us the game plan. Now it's we got the automation down, right? Okay, let's just say we signed up with BirdEye. We're starting to send out the links and that's it. Or do we specifically write something and then, or how does this go? Len: So, so the ideal way to use a product like BirdEye is automate the process.So we integrate into practice management software. You automate the review requests sending out. Okay. Now. It's really important. People say to me, well, I don't want to automate it because patients may write bad reviews. So if there's a filter built into the system, that's really good. It's not gating.Gating is illegal and you can't do it, which would be like thumbs up or thumbs down. So, you can't do that. You can't preempt the question like that. But if you give them a feedback button, that's even better. Where they can provide direct feedback to the practice. But you definitely want to integrate and you want to automate.And then mention to the patients when they leave the office. That they may be getting a communication asking for what I refer to as feedback, not a review, asking for feedback about their experience, and then the patients know they're going to get something. There's a higher conversion when you say something, and then we take it from there and allow the patients to write the review when it goes directly to Google from their phone.So that's the secret sauce is really, you know, having a discussion and being aware. Of what I call rep, you know, making a reputation culture in the office. If the office revolves around reputation, which basically means that you're being. examined or being, you have, you're being, having a report card written about their experiences and just making sure everybody's on their best a game.That's how you work the system and get really great reviews written by the patients other than just asking them. You can ask your patients till the cows come home to write a review on Google. You're lucky if two to three do it of every hundred. Because it's just, there's too many steps involved. So you want to make sure you make it easy for the patients to do it using a system that allows an auto login feature.And it's a simple process. It isn't simple, they won't do it. Like I mentioned that before. Yeah, Michael: that's true. That's true. I love that though, how you mentioned, uh, give us your feedback. Right, it's different. Len: Asking for feedback. Very different. Instead of a review. And it's much more comfortable. You know, it's much more comfortable for someone in the office to discuss it with a patient rather than saying, Can you write us a Google review?That to me sounds like you're begging for it almost versus can you provide some feedback about your experience? We really appreciate it. It's just an easier conversation to have in his work. I've been doing this for, you know, since 2010 now, and it's just an easy way to have a conversation with the patient.That's why we put it in those those words. Michael: Yeah. And then you let them know, like you're going to get a text message or something like in about an hour or like right now or when you leave the office or. Len: So you can certainly do it an hour after their appointment. Okay. The problem, what we found and look, I've been in this space since 2013 in the review space specifically, and I've worked with over 10, 000 dental practices.And the data shows that when you send the review request an hour after the appointment, it opens up more negative reviews coming in versus waiting until the end of the day. Okay. They all go out at once. Patients who do have a problem won't have a problem usually five, six, seven hours later, so they vent back to the practice.They don't go online directly to Google. So, I prefer them going out at the end of the day rather than right after the appointment because it also gives the practice some time to say, well, so and so didn't have a good experience, and they can turn the patient off if they have any concern that the patient may go and write a bad review.Most patients go directly to Google on their own. They don't go to use a service to do that. They will leave the office, they'll be pissed off, and they'll go to Google to write their bad review almost immediately after the appointment. If you wait till the end of the day, it 100 percent changes the results, and that's through years of doing this with, with thousands of offices, like I said.Michael: Okay. So I didn't know that. Would it also help at the end of the day? Like people are at home, relax. Oh yeah. I got to make a review kind of thing Len: versus being during the day they're running around there. If they're working, they're going from your office to back to their job. Then they have to deal with their kids.The kid throws up, you know, they, they don't have time at the end of the day, between usually six or eight o'clock, we see the best results during that timeframe by far and away, not even close to other times during the day. Gotcha. Michael: Okay. So let's just say they left the review. Awesome. Beautiful. We leave it at that or what happens after that?Len: When you say when the patient has written the review? Michael: Yeah. Like they, they're like, okay, yeah. Provide us some feedback. Boom. End of the day, link gets sent. The next morning you wake up, you're like, Oh, they left a review. Cool. Awesome. You know what I mean? And then after that, do we write back on that review?Like, thanks or nothing. Len: So I am a big fan of responding to positive reviews. I'm not a big fan of responding to negative reviews. Negative reviews, I like to take it offline and contact the patient to some extent, you know, whether it's on the phone, whether it's via email, not, you don't want to respond to that review right away.Okay, the reason that you would respond to a negative review online is because you're really responding to the people that are reading it, not to the person who wrote the review. I like to take the conversation offline and have a direct conversation with them. Okay, for positives, you have no, you don't risk anything, you can respond, look technically when you respond to a review, whether it's positive or negative, you really can acknowledge that there are patients, it's a technical HIPAA violation if you do that.Now, if you do it to someone who wrote a positive review, I don't think they're going to make a big deal about it. Okay, if you do it to a person who wrote a negative review, they may find that as a HIPAA concern, and they may report you to what's called the Office of Civil Rights. So I, I don't recommend, I recommend responding to, to positives.I would be very careful about negatives for that reason. Michael: Gotcha, okay. So the positives, we can just say like, Oh, we love you, thank you so much, or something like that, right? Len: Yeah, thanks for your, thanks for your feedback. We're so glad you, you know, love, love being our patient. Technically, that's a HIPAA violation.Okay, because you said we love being our patient by the letter of the law you're violating HIPAA by acknowledgements. Okay, but I do not believe you'll ever see a patient that reports you because they just wrote a positive review about you. If you do the same thing to a negative review.Okay. The patient may say to that, well, they just violated my HIPAA rights and they may decide to report you. It's rare. I've seen it just trying to be very frank with you here. That conversation or that review, the positive one is violation of HIPAA, but I don't think you'll ever see a problem with it. Michael: No.Yeah. That saves your butts, man. I appreciate that. So awesome. Any final words or advice or suggestions that you want to give to our listeners Len: about this? Just reputation has to be something you focus on. It's a foundational part of running your practice. When you open your doors as a startup, you want to make sure you have a consistent presence.You want to want to also want to make sure you have more than just a couple of reviews because then it looks like you're new. Okay. So, but don't be afraid to ask. Use a service that makes it easy on your patients. Don't expect to be able to do it naturally on your own because your focus is doing more as different things in the practice when you're, when you're a new practice.So the main thing is just find a way to get your patients the right reviews. It will pay off in the long run, especially because it will then allow you to spend money on marketing and get results in the marketing because of that, without the reviews, you're going to struggle with your marketing in most cases, in most areas.Michael: Awesome, man. I appreciate you, Len, and I appreciate your time, and if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find them on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group, or where can they reach out to Len: you directly? So lots of ways. I'm always on social, so my social media is very easy, Facebook, Instagram.You can, um, I'll give you my email address and you can email me, um, but it's Len, L E N at DrLentow. com, D R L E N TAU. com. And, um, I also have my own Facebook group, so they can join the Facebook group and contact me through that. I'm very easily got ahold of. So just find, you'll find a way if you want me, you'll get ahold of me.Michael: Nice. Awesome. So guys, that's all going to be in the show notes below. So Lynn, thank you so much for being with me on this Monday morning marketing Len: episode. Thanks very much for having Michael. Appreciate it.‍

Reputation is key when it comes to attracting and retaining clients. Contrary to what you may think, reputation is also a lot more than just 'doing a good job' or 'being polite'. In the age of information, your reputation is as much about managing what is said (or not said) about you as it is about delivering what you promised. Birdeye is one of the world's leading platforms to coordinate and manage your reputation in the digital age and we chat with Tony about word of mouth, using AI and how to take some simple steps so you're ahead of your competitors in the reputation stakes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to another fascinating episode of Adam's Archive! I'm your host, Austin Adams, and today we're diving deep into some of the most compelling and lesser-known stories of political intrigue and historical conspiracies.

Effectively aligningyour focus and resources with what your company aims to achieve is essential, but is also a common pain point. It's crucial for revenue growth, but it's hard to find the right balance in generating a sufficient pipeline for the sales team without overwhelming them. Olga Traskova, VP of Revenue Operations at Birdeye, shares how to master the art of revenue growth through proper resource allocation. In this episode, you'll learn:  How to prioritize resource allocation based on upcoming projects. By aligning priorities with company goals, you ensure that the right resources are dedicated to the most impactful projects or events. Through smart data analysis and an understanding of upcoming opportunities, you can make informed decisions on allocating resources effectively. Why collaborative governance in Revenue Operations is key. While collaboration is important, too much freedom can hinder scalability and consistency. Implementing a governance framework leads to standardize processes, quality control, and scalability, while still fostering collaboration and flexibility. Unified data structure and standardization in Revenue Operations is essential. This ensures consistency, accuracy, and effective communication on all levels of the business. By aligning the data structure and reporting metrics, you can have a comprehensive view of the revenue process and make informed decisions based on reliable data. Grab this week's Checklist Check out RunRevenue.Pro for tips, playbooks, and advice for stopping revenue leaks and achieving revenue precision.  See how Clari's Revenue Platform can help you win more deals, protect your customer base, and achieve revenue precision—even in a downturn.  → Clari.com

Birdeye's Dr. Len Tau joins Gary to talk about why dentists will struggle to succeed without enough Google reviews, why incentivizing your team is the best way to get more, and Google vs. Yelp.Connect with our Guest:Website: https://birdeye.com/

Meet Dr. Len Tau, DMD, a man on a mission to revolutionize the realm of dentistry. Today's episode takes you on an intriguing journey, from Dr. Tau's earliest entrepreneurial endeavors at 13, through to his current role as the general manager for the dental vertical division of BirdEye. Listen in as he unveils his unique approach to dentistry, and the creation of his groundbreaking software, 'I Social Reviews'.Next, we venture into the world of dental marketing strategies. Dr. Tau shares invaluable insights on understanding your locale and target audience, and warns of potential pitfalls when dealing with certain marketing firms. Also on the menu is a discussion about the Raving Patients Podcast, crafted to assist dentists in growing their practice, plus the significant influence of Steve Anderson and Michael Anderson on the podcast.We wrap up with a deep dive into the world of fee-for-service dentistry and the challenges that can deter dentists from this transition. Expert Steve Anderson shares his experience, suggesting that at most, a dental practice may lose up to 20% of their patient base during this shift. Tune in to understand the importance of nurturing patient relationships and tailoring your marketing strategy. Also, catch a glimpse of Len Tau's consulting business and her upcoming event, Supercharger, set to make dentistry more accessible. Join us for a captivating conversation brimming with practical insights and innovative strategies that promise to transform your dental practice.LindedIn.com/in/Leonard(Len) Tau DMDhttps://www.drlentau.comhttps://www.SuperChargeYourDentalPractice.comFearlessDentistryPodcast.comlinkedin.com/in/drjohnrgordonhttps://www.facebook.com/cosmeticdentist?mibextid=LQQJ4d

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Chiara DiFede from Birdeye join us. Chiara, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Chiara DiFede: Hello, and thank you for having me. I am a sales enablement manager with a focus on partner sales at Birdeye. Birdeye is an all-in-one reputation management platform, and I currently support and focus on enabling our internal sales reps how to effectively sell to our channel partners. Sales ultimately found me like it does most people, and when I found success, I wanted everyone around me to find similar success. I had an opportunity to dive into the enablement world, and I haven’t looked back since. I’m so happy I took that chance. I constantly seek to expand my own education and I have a multitude of certifications in product management, instructional design, customer success, and leadership development. I really crave to learn and I put myself in situations to learn new things as I find it important to understand what it feels like starting from the beginning and being in a new situation so I can bring that understanding to the programs I create. SS: We’re excited to have you here. Now, one of the things that I loved about your profile and your background is that you refer to yourself as a behavior and process-focused sales leader. How do you balance both behavior and process in your approach to your enablement programs? CD: Yeah, good catch. Personally, I find this is where the balance of equality and equity is important to achieve this approach. I recognize that individuals have different learning styles and needs when learning and retaining information in training programs, even if it is aimed at one unified common goal. With the training sessions and content I deliver, I always aim to tailor enablement programs to accommodate these diverse learning preferences by providing a variety of resources such as interactive workshops, eLearning modules, job aids, coaching sessions, and more. I find when you offer a multitude of different platforms to learn in your programs, you get to see the reps retain their individuality which helps them sell, while still inciting the behaviors needed to succeed in their role. They can still follow that process roadmap needed for them to graduate and prosper at the company. SS: Now, in your current role, you focus on enabling sales reps to sell to channel partners. What are some of the unique considerations for selling to channel partners? CD: That is a great question, as it is a very unique role. In short, channel enablement is sales enablement, both for account executives and also for our partner sales teams. When I focus on our internal sales reps, and those account executives, it’s important to enable our AEs to understand the dynamics of the partner, their current operations, where products fit, and align our onboarding team with that structure. This ensures smooth implementation, partner training, and end-client adoption. Ultimately, what makes it unique is having to go through that extra layer of teaching the AE how to sell and aiming to control the controllable. Not only are we ensuring our internal AEs understand our platform and best practices, but we also have to make sure they’re sharing the best practices with the partner just as we share and train our direct sales reps. SS: From your perspective, what does good channel sales enablement look like? In other words, what are some of your best practices for enabling reps to sell the channel partners? CD: To answer that simply, it comes from having a good solid framework and roadmap on what the AEs need to learn. As an enablement manager that comes from ensuring you have constant communication and cross-collaboration internally to set our sales teams up for success, especially when it comes to creating those training programs so that you don’t replicate our process from a direct selling. Partner sales are selling the idea of incorporating your company structure into their agency, not just the idea of products. The more that understanding can be fortified, the more successful AEs will be. SS: That’s fantastic. Now on LinkedIn, another thing that I had seen that was really cool is that your ultimate goal as an enablement practitioner is to create a sales environment that values learning. How do you motivate reps to engage in learning programs focused on channel sales? CD: That’s a great question. One thing I found in my career is that everyone I’ve come across is eager to learn, but it’s one thing to teach and provide resources and it’s another thing to have the attention and buy-in from the sales reps themselves. Most importantly, for reps selling into channel sales, the value prop of the training programs needs to be specifically tied to that target audience. When the rep feels and understands the programs have value and impact on their role, specifically towards partners, and helps them sell to partners, the more engaged they will be. Plus, when reps find success in these calls with these training programs, it gives them a success story to speak to in further calls as well as enablement to utilize in trainings. That way we continue to gain that buy-in, that motivation, and participation from reps. SS: I think that’s fantastic. What are some of your best practices for creating effective learning programs for sales reps so that they can also maximize their effectiveness with channel sales? CD: Great question, and I’ll continue to reinforce how important it is for our sales reps to understand the partners they sell to and their business model. Throughout the sales cycle, it is important to encourage reps to get to know the partners, the size of their business, and the unique challenges they face. Understanding the characteristics and personas of the end customer is so crucial to ensure you have the proper information and are therefore offering the right solutions. An effective way to encourage this, beyond regular scheduled trainings and resources, is by reinforcing this directly by providing feedback on the calls AEs will have with partners throughout the sales cycle. It is made even more helpful to use a call analytics tool that will allow it to be linked to the call directly for the AE to easily refer back to the feedback and that prospect that is exactly tied to it. This allows doors to open up for the AE and the company because, in addition to the coaching provided by enablement, these tools allow sales leaders and managers access to feedback, allowing AEs to have different avenues and perspectives for approaching certain calls. Furthermore, when calls have feedback attached to them, especially those good calls, those could be used as examples for new AEs entering the company to have an idea of how to apply the knowledge from trainings on an actual call. SS: Fantastic. Last question for you. What business impact have you seen from effective channel sales enablement? CD: You will see reps establish more credibility in the sales process and ultimately more closed deals for the company. This really gives them success stories to speak on and use as examples in tandem with the training programs. Not only will you be able to continually add to training programs that you create, but you’ll be able to see the ultimate success, which is an increase in retention, upsell, and overall satisfaction from partners. SS: Fantastic. Well, Chiara, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. CD: Thank you so much for having me. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Just how important is a dentist office's online presence and Google reviews? To answer this in depth, Malika and Michelle bring on an expert. Dr. Len Tau is a retired dentist, dental consultant, speaker, podcaster, author, and the General Manager of Dental Vertical at BirdEye, a patient experience platform. His private Facebook group “Raving Patients,” is a place for dentists to discuss marketing and social media to make their offices more visible and credible. Today, Len shares how to handle a bad review, what the ideal rating is, how to ask for a review, and how to respond to reviews without violating HIPAA. 0:22 Introducing Ken 2:50 Online presence importance 4:40 SEO 8:12 How to ask for review 9:38 Negative feedback 12:55 Involving the team 14:50 Incentivizing reviews 16:10 Responding 21:00 Fake reviews 24:10 Employee reviews 27:25 Raving Patients 30:28 Yelp 31:40 BirdEye 37:52 Get in touch Dr. Len Tau drlentau.com (215) 292 2100 len@drlentau.com https://www.facebook.com/groups/ravingpatient/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlentau/ https://www.facebook.com/DrLenTau/ https://open.spotify.com/show/1RDCn77A9Bmoy7e9ffbtgd?si=3be8f9b3122748ac Malika Azargoon ZarDentalConsulting.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/zardentalconsulting/ malika@ZarDentalConsulting.com Michelle Affanato affinitymanagement.co New To Dental Bootcamp https://www.facebook.com/michelle.affinitymanagement/ michelle@affinitymanagement.co

10 years ago, MK was winning awards and caffeinating the greater Boston area as a Manager at Starbucks. Today, just a decade later, MK is the CMO of Loop &Tie, a gifting platform that is disrupting the traditional industry of putting your logo on a coffee mug and calling it a gift by focusing on sourcing gifts from small, artisan makers to create a marketplace full of unique actual gifts like handcrafted nesting bowls or a cowboy firepit grill. And every gift comes with the story of how it came to be, enabling connection with the artist while maintaining their ethos of being the first carbon regenerative platform of its kind.MK came up through the performance marketing ranks, with stops at HubSpot, Birdeye, and Alyce before taking the reigns at Loop &Tie and we talk about some really hard topics like balancing the responsibility of ethics and the bottom line while being a marketer and how to ensure that everyone from the consumer to the creator receives the value they're expecting.We discuss the importance of storytelling as an amplifier for your brand no matter what tactics you choose to tell it, and how being a facilitator is not only a superpower but also a skill to master in your career in pursuit of solving meaningful problems.Connect with MK on LinkedIn here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkgetler/And be sure to check out the amazing gifts at Loop &Tie here:https://www.loopandtie.com/Do you have napkin sketches and big ideas that you want to bring to life for a brand? If so, you should head over to tryadscout.com Expedite procurement with verified & responsive companies who turn napkin sketches into reality. TryAdScout.com Is Simplified Discovery For Marketing In The Real World.

We are joined by Dr. Len Tau to discuss How a Negative Review Can Be Good For Business and much more!Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for both patients and other dentists. After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellencein Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while consulting to other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular, Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and 100+ Tips to 100 5 Star Reviews in 100 Days released in March 2022.In 2018, Len cut down to practicing dentistry two days per week to focus additional time and attention to helping other dentists build broad and compelling online footprints that attract hundreds of new patients to their practices.  In October 2021 he sold his dental practice but continues to provide his patients dental care 2 days per week while commuting from Parkland , Florida where he has resided since October 2020. In July 2022 Len announced his retirement from clinical practice effective December 2022 .Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance.Learn more:drlentau.com ***** SPONSOR: – Omni Premier Marketing: https://omnipremier.com/dental-marketing/ CONNECT: – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedentalbrief/ – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedentalbriefpodcast/ – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dental-brief-podcast-564267217 – Patrick's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pchavoustie/– Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd08JzybKfNH0v12Q9jf50w WEBSITE: – https://dentalbrief.com/

Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for patients and other dentists. After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while consulting with other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and 100+ Tips to 100 5-Star Reviews in 100 Days released in March 2022. Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance.

Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for patients and other dentists. After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while consulting with other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and 100+ Tips to 100 5-Star Reviews in 100 Days released in March 2022. Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance.  Dr. Tau and Dr. Segal discuss reputation marketing best practices specific to dentists - but the take-home points resonate with all healthcare professionals. Join us.

On today's episode, we delve into the top applications we use to manage marketing, operations, customers, and the team for our 30 self storage facilities. From Adobe Creative Suite to Google and Monday.com, discover the benefits of these programs and how they help us streamline processes and improve operations. Plus, we give a shout out to our new at-home bartender. Hosts: Josh Huff & Melissa Huff Featured Applications: Adobe Creative Suite, Monday.com, Google (Ads, Analytics, Business Suite, etc.), Birdeye, Envato, and more...

How do you make charts, numbers, and stats available for crypto users? In this episode of The Next Billion podcast, George Harrap is joined by Kha, Co-founder of Birdeye, a Solana trade data aggregator, and a chart tool that collects crypto trade data across various chains into a one-stop-shop dashboard. George and Kha discuss how on-chain trading can be made more friendly and easy to get into, especially for people coming from TradFi. Kha identifies how Birdeye meets the key needs of information transparency & multi-chain trading data for new crypto users. They talk about how token performance can be simplified, what growth means in this ecosystem, and how numbers & colors are a universal language, and also how they can onboard the next billion crypto users. The Next Billion podcast talks to Solana builders that are helping onboard The Next Billion people into crypto. Listen to George and Kha's unfiltered, and raw perspectives here and on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/2ELv0CtYJYwcsqb9CdUMJi. Crypto is so much more than just numbers and nodes. It's about onboarding The Next Billion users. The Next Billion podcast is a direct, and unfiltered dive into the stories of the builders that are making this happen. Host George Harrap has wide-ranging conversations to help people better understand the future of crypto adoption and uses around the world. Subscribe to join us on the journey of onboarding The Next Billion.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT - Why is it so important and how can you improve it?  Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for both patients and other dentists. After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellencein Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while consulting to other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular, Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and the soon to be released 100 Tips to 100 Reviews in 100 Days In 2018, Len cut down to practicing dentistry two days per week to focus additional time and attention to helping other dentists build broad and compelling online footprints that attract hundreds of new patients to their practices.  In October 2021 he sold his dental practice but continues to provide his patients dental care 2 days per week while commuting from Parkland , Florida where he has resided since October 2020.  Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance. 

Myra is the Principal Product Designer at Birdeye, where she has spent the last 5+ years helping local businesses manage their customer experience. In her time here, she had the pleasure of mentoring multiple designers, leading the creation and maintenance of their design systems, and creating and improving upon their product offerings. Outside work, Myra enjoys spending time on different creative outlets, such as watercolor, brush lettering, or origami.

Dr. Len is back with us today to talk about what dental practices should be doing for more visibility and credibility. Dr. Len shares advice on why you should stop your marketing spend until you have a steady flow of reviews for your practice. This is one of the biggest mistakes that Dr. Len sees with practices, that practice owners are spending tons on marketing without the reviews to back it up. Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for both patients and other dentists.  After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while consulting to other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular, Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and the soon to be released 100 Tips to 100 Reviews in 100 Days  In 2018, Len cut down to practicing dentistry two days per week to focus additional time and attention to helping other dentists build broad and compelling online footprints that attract hundreds of new patients to their practices.  In October 2021 he sold his dental practice but continues to provide his patients dental care 2 days per week while commuting from Parkland , Florida where he has resided since October 2020.   Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance. 

Nate Henry is the VP of Channel Resellers at Birdeye, an all-in-one reputation and customer experience platform for local businesses and brands to manage their digital presence. In this episode, host Jenna Sacks and Nate chat about the importance of challenging yourself and your team.. They also discuss the right ways to be involved in a deal as a leader, as well as the value of feedback after a sales call. Visit Salesloft.com for show notes and insights from this episode.

BlueCollar.CEO –Nate Henry is the Vice President of Channel Resellers for BirdEye, a customer experience platform that enables businesses to acquire and retain customers. He has held leadership roles in sales and business development departments for various digital marketing software and services companies. In this episode, Ryan and Nate talk about the importance of customer experience and the customer's journey. They discuss how these are some of the crucial elements most companies ignore but have a massive impact on their bottom line.

Martin and Kara Smith, residents of Birdeye, Arkansas, share their vision of revitalizing the Arkansas Delta through a network of gravel bike routes along Crowley's Ridge and throughout the delta region. Cultural immersion by bicycles and backroads.

In this week's episode of the How I Built my Tribe podcast, we speak with Dr. Len Tau, General Manager of Dental Vertical at BirdEye, dentist in Northeast Philly, speaker, consultant, podcaster and author. Dr. Len is passionate about assisting practices in optimizing their online reputation, marketing, and social media strategies. With 4.9 stars out of over 1,600 evaluations for his own dentistry business, he teaches tactics he personally employs to expand his practice. In today's conversation, Dr. Len shares his entrepreneurial career and the lessons and experiences he gained along the road. [18:05] Journey – Dr. Len describes his journey by detailing his beginnings and progress as he explores different entrepreneurial avenues. [28:12] Time Management – Dr. Len gives his opinion on the significance of effective time management in his life. [32:03] Setting Goals – Dr. Len shares about his 10-year plan in which he began establishing goals for himself as a child. He further mentions how he admires giving people the impetus or clarity they need to achieve their goals. [37:51] Relationships – Dr. Len discusses his connections in his life while highlighting the support he gets from his wife. [42:16] The Steps – Dr. Len explains how to find the guts to move out of the comfort zone and try something new. Resources: Connect with Dr. Len Tau: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drlentau/ Website: drlentau.com/

Dr. Len Tau is with us today to talk about his journey in dentistry and how he was able to get off of the dental treadmill. You won't want to miss his story! Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for both patients and other dentists. After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while consulting to other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular, Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and the soon to be released 100 Tips to 100 Reviews in 100 Days In 2018, Len cut down to practicing dentistry two days per week to focus additional time and attention to helping other dentists build broad and compelling online footprints that attract hundreds of new patients to their practices.  In October 2021 he sold his dental practice but continues to provide his patients dental care 2 days per week while commuting from Parkland, Florida where he has resided since October 2020.  Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance.

Luke is the co-founder of Birdeye. Luke has since sold his company and is working towards his next venture. We spoke about routine, self-improvement, and his process of being creative. Find Luke on Instagram. Find Birdeye on their Website.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lcm1835/Website: https://www.birdeye.co/SponsorSweet Fire Sugar Bushhttps://sweetfiresugarbush.com/shopUse the code CREATE for 5% off on all purchases.

Malika and Michelle talk about the advantages of automating systems in your dental office on the second episode of "Accelerating Your Dental Practice". It's important to streamline as much as possible during this staffing shortage.  Scheduling, treatment planning, payments, appointment reminders and review processes can all be automated to save valuable time and money.  Another bonus- most patients prefer automated systems over phone calls and physical mail! 0:22     Today's Topic 1:38     Scheduling 6:50     Treatment Planning 11:45   Patient Reminders 19:26   Online Payments 26:56   Reviews 29:40   Money and time savings 32:20   Closing words Companies mentioned: Online Scheduling: LocalMed (www.localmed.com) Flex Book (flex.dental/flexschedule) Treatment Planning: OrthoFi (www.orthofi.com) Dentrix (www.dentrix.com) Appointment and Payment Reminders: Modento (www.modento.io) Flex (flex.dental) NexHealth (www.nexhealth.com) Curve (www.curvedental.com) Yapi (www.yapiapp.com) Swell (www.swellcx.com) Birdeye (www.birdeye.com)   Malika Azargoon ZarDentalConsulting.com   Michelle Affanato AffinityManagement.co  

Dr. Leonard Tau, General Manager of Dental at Birdeye, talks with Gary about why he's happier after selling his practice, why dentists should use apps to get more reviews, and how many reviews YOUR practice really needs in order to stand out from the competition. Website: https://www.drlentau.com/ Birdeye: https://birdeye.com/ Get a FREE copy of Dr. Len's book, Raving Patients by simply e-mailing len @ drlentau.com

Monday is Memorial Day, and this week, hundreds of volunteers are placing an American flag in front of every gravestone in each of Arkansas's five military cemeteries. We observe Memorial Day, which began shortly after the end of the Civil War, to honor the memory of those who died in service to the United States. The flags honor everyone who served in one of the five branches of our military – the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Marines, and the Navy. The three national cemeteries are in Little Rock, Fort Smith, and Fayetteville. The state's Veterans Cemeteries are in North Little Rock and Birdeye. On Wednesday, just five days before Memorial Day, the commander of all U.S. military special operations asked to visit the Fort Smith National Cemetery. It was General Richard Clarke, who is the 12th commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, and he wanted to visit the grave of General William O. Darby. General Darby is a native of Fort Smith, and a graduate of Fort Smith Senior High and West Point. In 1942, the commander of the 34th Infantry Division promoted William Darby from captain to major and assigned him to organize an elite commando unit taken from all branches of the military. This was the start of the United States Army Ranger Battalion, sometimes called Darby's Rangers. Major Darby fulfilled several assignments in the theater of war and at the Pentagon. He returned to Europe in early 1945, and volunteered to take command of the Tenth Mountain Division. On April 30, 1945, as he outlined strategy for the next day, a German shell exploded in the midst of his meeting and killed him. He was 33. So on May 25, seventy-seven years and 25 days after General Darby died in World War II, General Clarke visited General Darby's grave in Fort Smith. Marshall Murphy, director of the national cemeteries in Fort Smith and Little Rock, stood by as General Clarke and Representative Womack visited the grave. Mr. Murphy, a veteran who served in the Marines, says that General Darby is a patron saint for Army Rangers. He also noted that General Clarke carries on the tradition of General Darby with a quiet dignity. You would never guess by his words or manner that he commands all U.S. special forces, which perform the most dangerous, sensitive, and secret missions around the world. This week in Fort Smith, General Clarke did what he always does – he led the way with his visit to honor General Darby. The volunteers who work in the cemeteries to place a flag at each gravestone share in the General's mission to remember our fallen warriors.

You may know Dr. Leonard Tau from BirdEye or his podcast, Raving Patients. But he's also well known for helping dentists everywhere make more money, improve their online reviews, increase case acceptance, and overall be better than they were the day before. Listen in as Dr. Tau shares with us his unique approach to having an impressive patient experience and how to master the art of case acceptance.Here's what we cover:Proactively engaging with patients to skyrocket case acceptance Recognizing faults and taking constructive criticism Time blocking your schedule for success How to go above and beyond and blow your patient experience out of the waterThe importance of online reviews and welcoming feedback with open armsYou can reach Dr. Leonard Tau by visiting drlentau.com or you can call or email him at: (215) 292 2100 len@drlentau.com

When Peter Roget was faced with tragedy he did what all of us hope to do—he turned it into triumph. When life gave him lemons he didn't just make lemonade. Instead, he invented a water filtration system to make all of London's lemonade more hygienic. From mastering medicine to inventing a pocket chessboard Peter was one of the original “jack of all trades”. But one of his biggest accomplishments, successes, and achievements was creating the first ever thesaurus. When it comes to creating opportunity out of adversity, Peter did it more than anyone. A company doing the same today is Birdeye. David Lehman, the President and COO of Birdeye, joins us to talk about how your biggest struggles can become your company's greatest successes. And how CX is the first step in that journey, expedition, and endeavor. --------“Happy customers are so much better at promoting my brand than anybody else can be. ” - David Lehman--------Time Stamps* (0:00) History of the thesaurus, wordfinder, wordbook* (7:19) What is Birdeye?* (9:07) Utilizing bad reviews* (11:09) The secret to referrals --------SponsorThis podcast is presented by Oracle CX. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives--------LinksConnect with David on LinkedInCheck out Birdeye

A positive customer experience is critical to any business... and payments often play a crucial role in that experience. In an increasingly digital world, seamless payments have become even more important. Dave Lehman, COO and President of Birdeye, joins the show to discuss keys to quality customer experiences, digital payments, and Birdeye Payments, a new pay-by-text solution. Read show notes and more: https://www.soarpay.com/2022/02/birdeye/

What unscalable things are you doing, but none of your competitors are doing, to scale your property management business? Do the unscalable things because that's the strategy that scales companies. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about doing the unscalable to help your business grow. If you want to scale your business, do the unscalable things that nobody else is willing to do but what the customers want. You'll Learn... [02:25] Secret to Scale: Grow your business by doing the unscalable things. [03:00] Real World Examples: Blanketing adverstising strategies, such as PPC, SEO. [04:06] Top Strategies: Do unscalable things to grow and add doors via referrals. [06:25] What is unscalable? Personal one-on-one interactions to make more money. [06:50] Referral Results: Online reviews grow your business, reputation, retention rates. [08:25] Opposite Direction: Build relationships and scale systems to get revenue results. [13:15] Unscalable Things: What's the least scalable thing you can do to add doors? Tweetables “The problem is that everybody is looking for the scalable solution.” “It's all about creating more depth and connection on a one-on-one individual basis with potential referral partners.” “If you do warm, personal outreach, you're going to create a lot more reviews.” “Do the unscalable things, and that's what scales companies.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive GatherKudos BirdEye Mailchimp Calendly Grant Cardone Transcript Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. For today's topic, what I wanted to talk with you about is doing the unscalable. A lot of times in businesses, everybody's looking for what's the scalable option, which means what's the shortcut? What's the hack? What's the fast way to do this so we can just do as little work as possible? How can we just hit a whole bunch of people? Here's how that tends to look. We do that in our advertising, we do that in marketing a lot of times. A lot of people are trying to figure out, how can they create some sort of shortcut? Let's direct mail everybody. Let's see if we can just blanket text message everybody. Let's set up automation. A lot of people come to me and they're like, what's the secret? How are you helping your clients add 100, 200, or more doors in a year? How are they growing right now because our company is down about 200 doors over previous years because all the owners are selling because the market's hot right now? They want to get out of these properties and cash out of their investment. But the problem is that everybody's looking for a scalable solution, and here's the secret. If you want to scale your business, do the unscalable things that nobody is doing. If you want to stand out in the marketplace, do what nobody else is willing to do that the customers really want. If you want to scale your business in sales and improve sales, do the unscalable things that nobody else is willing to do. Instead of automation, go in the complete opposite direction. How can we have more depth and connection? Let's throw out some practical, real-world examples of this. One example that I refer to a lot is a lot of people will try to grow their business through these blanketing strategies of advertising. They want to blanket the world and just spray and pray. So they'll use strategies like let's focus on pay per click, content marketing, or SEO. Why? Because these are the things they can throw money at and have somebody else maybe do for them, they hope. The challenge is when you try and create a system where you think you're going to have a lot of leverage, hey, we'll just throw money at this problem, the challenge is, usually, you get more work in exchange. For example, those are all cold leads. Cold leads take a lot more time to deal with. They take more nurture, they take more follow up time, there's less trust involved. If there's less trust involved and there's more follow-up time involved, then it's actually going to take more work. It's going to take more time. Advertising is expensive, so it costs more money. One of the things that our clients do, our top strategies for growing and adding doors is to do the unscalable things. For example, something that usually people try to do to grow the business is they go and get referrals from other people, from real estate agents, for example. They try and just say, hey, if you ever run into somebody that needs property management, refer them to me. Here's the problem. The best prospects, the people that actually might need property management, most of them are not looking for property management. They're not going to go up to a real estate agent and say, hey, I need a property manager. That just doesn't happen. Usually, by the time they do think they need a property manager, they're in a world of hurt, they're in a crappy situation, something you won't even want to take on. Then you're getting the garbage, so then they're connecting you to the garbage that exists in the marketplace and the biggest problems. The best clients are people that don't even yet know they need property management, capturing them way earlier in the sales cycle before they become price-sensitive, and you're the first person they've heard of or talked to related to property management. Maybe that's a better idea. You're closer, it's going to be a lot higher. There's a lot more trust in that relationship, and that's going to be more effective than doing cold leads and spending time prospecting directly to potential investors, for example, where the close rate is typically really low like maybe 1 out of 10 or worse. Why not create an outbound prospecting program towards real estate agents? This is one of the things that we share in our program of how to make that really effective and how to create the right incentives so that people are actually referring business to you. Without going into too much detail, it's all about creating more depth and connection on a one-on-one individual basis with potential referral partners. Other people are like, hey, I'm going to go present to a whole real estate morning office meeting, high leverage, lots of people, and you're going to talk to all these people in pitch, and then guess what happens? They're all looking at their phones, nobody thinks about you, and you never get a referral. But hey, you got to talk to a lot of people. It sounds very scalable, high leverage. We want to focus on what is unscalable. That would be the personal one-on-one interactions with each of those agents. That would be the goal. I would love to meet with each of you individually, let's set up a time, and connect with them and create a deep, personal, and more intimate relationship and connection, that's where you make more money because it's the thing people are not willing to do. Let's talk about online reviews, for example, a great strategy for growing your business. A lot of people will just use something like tools like our GatherKudos tool, they'll use something like Birdeye, or some sort of system where their goal is like, hey, we'll just send out emails, text messages, or whatever. What I teach in our program, in our Training Reputation Secrets is if you do warm personal outreach, you're going to create a lot more reviews. It's not scalable, but you get a much bigger result. Is it worth the time investment? Is it worth the additional staff and resources you might need to implement that strategy? Absolutely. And you will crush your competition. There's a lot of other stuff that I talk about in Referral Secrets of how to make that really effective, how you can set it up so it increases retention rates with your clients, et cetera. The general principle in each of our most effective growth strategies is to do the unscalable things, and that's what scales companies. If you want to grow your business right now, take a look at what are you trying to do right now that is a scalable version, a scalable solution? Like you're trying to hit a lot of people through some sort of email newsletter where you got a list of thousands of people. Or are you trying to just go and throw out an advertisement on Facebook or Google ads where you're trying to just hit tons and tons of people and get lots of eyeballs? What if you went in the complete opposite direction and you did something that was the most personal, the most intimate, the most connecting way of reaching out and creating relationships with people in order to achieve the same result? What if you went the complete opposite direction and then you started to build and scale your systems related to doing more of that? Which means hiring more people instead of more technology and automation. I have a friend, one of my mentors. He has a business that does a lot in revenue—really, really big company. I believe they do like $100 million a year in their business. It's ridiculous. He has really savvy skills, is a really great marketer, great with technology, and yet, he could automate his whole sales process. He can't have a funnel, have videos, and all this stuff, yet he has a really large sales team. Why? Because that's what's most effective to get to that level of revenue. He has a large sales team of setters and a large sales team of closers because it's the most effective. It's more effective than having a funnel, a video webinar, and trying to automate all this stuff. And you'll hear lots of people saying you're just one funnel away, you just need this marketing piece, if you just do a newsletter, or just do social media. These are all scalable solutions. They're scalable. You can get people in place, you can hit a lot of people really quickly. Scalable solutions can be effective. Some of them can be effective. But in general, if your business isn't growing, I'm guessing you're already doing some of these "scalable things", but you're not doing the unscalable things. What are the unscalable things that none of your competitors are doing? Are they doing warm personal outreach with every new tenant and every new owner to get a review? Are you doing warm personal outreach with every real estate agent, lender, handyman, attorney, lawyer, anyone that helps investors in your market to create a referral relationship and partnership with them? Probably not. That's not scalable. We don't want to do that. Let's go do advertising. And yet the companies that are doing advertising right now, they're usually spending about $300–-$5000 a month, and they're probably down about 200 doors over previous years. If you have between 600–1000 doors, my guess is you've lost maybe about 200 over the last year because you're not doing the unscalable actions that are more intimate. So focus on greater depth and greater connection. That's really what property management is. It's a business of connection, depth, and relationships. People are trying to turn it into a business of automation, technology, and tools. I do like technology, don't get me wrong. I do recommend that you use and create leverage where you can technologically, however, if you want the biggest result when it comes to getting referrals, with getting reviews, with getting on more deals, the more personal approach and the more depth is going to be the most effective strategy, and nobody else is doing it. This allows you to create market share while everybody else is fighting over this red bloody water where everybody's trying to spray and pray and hope they're going to get some sort of return on their advertising dollars. Stop falling prey to marketers that are just selling advertising. What I teach is to do the right actions and you will spend less time than you would dealing with cold leads, and it costs you $0. I had a client today on our coaching call, a really cool guy, Michael Sullivan. He was talking about how he added eight properties in the last 24 hours. His phone is ringing, he said, constantly. And I said, how are you doing? He's just doing the strategy that I told him to do and doing this outbound method. I said, how many thousands of dollars in marketing have you spent to get on all these doors that you're adding right now? He looked really confused because it was a loaded question. But he looked really confused and he was like, I don't understand what you're saying. And I said, you've spent $0 in advertising, correct? And he said, oh, yeah, $0. How many of you are spending $0 and you've added eight properties just in the last 24 hours and your business is growing really fast? Another client showed up, he had added 13 doors. Another client showed up and said he added eight doors on that call. This is a weekly call, weekly check-in. How many doors have you added this week? If you're not adding doors as quickly as you want to, and you don't trust me enough to come into my program and let us help you, that's cool, but start just focusing on what's the least scalable thing I could do. It's probably that thing you're avoiding. Maybe it's too personal, maybe it's uncomfortable, go do that thing. What you'll find is your business will start to grow really rapidly. Anyway, if I can help you go faster, focus on the unscalable things in business. The reason I want to talk about this today is it keeps coming up for me. I get questions all the time. Even a client today is like, how do I leverage this list I have of 4000 emails. I've got this other list of this. Again, what I taught him was to figure out what's the least scalable thing you could do. What everybody else would do is do a newsletter. He says, I'm doing a newsletter. How often? Every week. Cool, are you using a system to do that? Yes, MailChimp. Okay, cool. In MailChimp, what are your stats on the open rate? 10%. That's email, right? It's scalable, but it's really [...] results, 10% open rate? That means 90% are not even opening the email. The challenge there is I said, cool, what if you took all of those email addresses of different either investors or real estate agents on your list and you send out a personal email to each individual one? You did like maybe 50 a day or whatever your email system, but you do it from your personal email account, not from an email system, and just reached out to them and said, hey, how are things going with your rental properties? Hey, do you need anything from me today? Or hey, would you be interested in getting a call to find out how I could get you some more real estate commission because I have this cool new program? These kinds of things, like if it was to a potential referral partner. Give them a Calendly link or something to schedule with you and that sort of thing. That's the kind of conversation. How can you take this thing you're trying to do that's not really working, but it's very scalable and do the unscalable thing? Even if it's a little bit of that, you're going to get a much bigger return on that time investment, and you don't have to spend a whole bunch of time drafting up a big newsletter. Just do a little bit of outreach with a really short one-sentence email and you may start getting some real responses and initiate some conversations. It keeps going back to this. My own mentors, every method that I tend to hear or see that works, it's always going back to what's the least scalable thing. It's not, how can I do this with less people? It's, how can I do this with more? You can sometimes double your close rate like I talked about on a previous podcast episode, just by getting a setter involved. That's adding more people. Having a setter and a closer increases the conversion rates and increases the close rates, even though it's more people and you're spending more money on staff. But a lot of people are looking for a way, how can I decrease the need to talk to people or how can I systemize this or how can I automate it or leverage technology? I hope this was a helpful conversation. Do the unscalable things. The unscalable things are where you show care. It's where you invest in people. It's where you're human. It's where you love people. This is where you build relationships. I think it was Grant Cardone, he said, "The difference between a contract and a contact is the R, and that's relationships." Focus on making relationships and you're going to get a lot more contracts. This is what most business owners and businesses are unwilling to do. If you do it, you're going to have results that other businesses are unable to achieve. That's my message for today. I hope this is helpful for those of you. If you want a little bit more help, if you want some accountability, if you want some new ideas, if you want to inject some life into your business, reach out to DoorGrow. We'd be glad to help you. This is my passion. This is what I love to do. I love coaching and supporting clients and helping them grow their companies. My goal is to turn you into the entrepreneur that can have the business of your dreams. If you don't have the business of your dreams right now, one of my mentors would say, you're not yet the person that can run it yet. So let's turn you into that person. Reach out to us, check us out at doorgrow.com, or join our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. We'll get you to our community and that's it. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

When customers leave negative reviews or complain about a brand or business on the internet, they just want to be heard, express their frustration, and want some sort of resolution. Businesses that take the time to reach out to unsatisfied customers can make things right. But how can they do that consistently and at scale?  Today's guest is Dave Lehman, President and COO at Birdeye, a platform that allows local businesses to collect reviews, run surveys, and get referrals to better engage with customers. Dave talks about how businesses should make online reputation management a top priority and do it the right way.   Some of the highlights of the show include: Birdeye Survey Guide - 2021 State of Experience Marketing: 57% view reputation management as more important than advertisements 88% believe there's a direct connection between reputation and revenue Birdeye: Helps businesses grow, attract, and convert new/existing customers Buyer Behavior: Shift from content to trusting shared customer experiences Reputation Management: Ignoring it is missing out on customer opportunities What are you looking/searching for? Relevancy, distance, and prominence Automation and Democratization: Make it easy for everybody to leave a review Digital Connection: Engage, respond, and listen to people on preferred platforms Indicators: Set goals, select metrics, and measure progress to drive improvement Mistakes: Marketers avoid responding to reviews and don't ask all for reviews   Links: Dave Lehman on LinkedIn Dave Lehman's Email Birdeye Survey Finds 57% of Marketers Now Emphasize Online Reputation Management Over Advertising HubSpot Blaze Pizza Ben Sailer on LinkedIn CoSchedule   Quotes from Dave Lehman: “Most people will skip the first three ads or whatever. It's almost become default behavior.” “When somebody lands on your site, again, what are the conversion rates like? Are they getting that first taste of a real good experience themself when they start engaging your brand?” “If you're looking for that prominence as a business, it's all about two things - review count and review score.” “It's got to be super easy to engage with you as a business.”

A sweet overview on how you can read unusual options activity from a BIRDEYE perspective!

The Harris & Ward team sits down with Dr. Len Tau of Birdeye to discuss review marketing, and its pivotal impact in small business marketing strategy. Learn how to channel your consumer audience to do the marketing for you. Birdeye helps businesses grow through happy customers. Over 60,000 businesses use Birdeye everyday to attract new leads with Listings, Reviews and Referrals, convert them into customers with Webchat and Appointments, and delight those customers with Surveys, Ticketing, and Insights - all in one place.

NOTES:   This week, Dr. Glenn Vo met with Dr. Leonard Tau. They talked about his upcoming course—“The Art of Dental Financing” and “The Art of the Sale.”Both workshops are very important to do live. There are only 12 spots available—you can keep the videos afterward, but they're essentially highly interactive mini-masterminds.Len is often referred to as “The Birdeye Guy” because he's the man behind Birdeye, a very popular reputation management software. But Len's more than just a practice owner or “The Birdeye Guy”—he's a long-time friend of Dr. Vo and a fellow dentist.Vo knows Len's a modest man, so he was sure to point out his tips and tricks of business success and talk of how his experience has turned him into a force to be reckoned with in the dental community.As a fellow practice owner, Len knows the importance of getting patients to confidently say yes. For the past 12 years, Len has been presenting both treatment and financial options to his patients with terrific success (Glenn also couldn't help but put him on the spot and point out 30+ years in sales and more).For Len (and many of us, for that matter), it's about more than just getting reviews: it's about helping your practice to thrive and helping patients to choose your practice so they can get the dental care they deserve.Learn more about:What's Len's story?What does Len do “a little differently” than most dental practitioners to make his case acceptance rates so impressive?What does Len talk about, specifically, in his events? When do they happen? Where do they take place? And how much do they cost?What are the two fears every patient needs to overcome? How can you “disarm” a patient?And more!   NIFTY DEAL:   If a doctor signs up, he can bring 1 additional person FREE of charge.  Just visit https://workshops.drlentau.com/nifty-thrifty

In a rapidly changing industry like SEO and digital marketing, finding tools that bring efficiency and productivity are critical to streamlining your efforts to succeed. In today's episode of the MORE podcast, Ricardo is joined by the co-founder of GoBeyond SEO, Trish Saemann, to discuss one tool she uses to streamline her business and increase productivity. The tool? Bird Eye. Many of Trish's clients are attorneys, and their biggest sales and marketing complaint is they can't always answer the phone. Particularly with B2C lawyers, an unanswered call leads to a lost client. One of Bird Eye's offerings is a virtual receptionist that sends a text alert with information about the caller to avoid this problem. Bird Eye also has a review platform that will automatically send and request reviews from customers, and there is a referral component that can be utilized. Bird Eye has a universal inbox, which you can connect your different response areas like social media to create an easy and manageable workflow. There are many types of business professionals who can find use with Bird Eye. Because it has multiple features, there is a broad audience.  A great audience is people who rely on social proof and reviews to generate a client base, like restaurants. It is also great for people who don't have the staff to manage these aspects of a business. Conversely, it's great for teams because they have a higher overhead and can develop a robust strategy that can lead to more success. Bird Eye sets itself apart from the competition.  Vendasta is a platform that makes sure listings are correct and working appropriately. However, Bird Eye makes the process a lot easier. You can manually go to listings and get the same information you need. However, it is incredibly time-consuming. And as you scale your business, you'll find it will reach a point where it is no longer sustainable. What can people do with this tool in a practical sense? First, figure out what marketing activities you are doing that take too much time. Look through the list of solutions they have, and figure out which features are most interesting to you. Bird Eye integrates with popular project management tools (and other software), so you can get as much use out of it as possible. If there isn't a direct integration, you can use platforms like Zapier to third-party your way to a connection. Trish's book and podcast recommendation: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Goal Digger: The Podcast by Jenna Kutcher Trish's parting advice? Know your strengths and weaknesses. Understand what you can do yourself and what areas you'll need help. Before you make a decision, know who your audience is. Know what their pain points are and how you can solve them. And know what message you need to give them. Go to Birdeye.com to see what the platform can do for you and how you can take advantage of all that it offers.

Here's a contrarian thought: buying ads doesn't win you customers. What does win is when previous customers are happy and willing to tell everybody else just how great you are. Now think about this, before you buy a product, what's the first thing you do? You read the reviews. From influencers, to friends, to referral codes and trade magazines, the way consumers decide what product or service is perfect for them is dependent on who they trust. David Lehman is the President and Chief Operating Officer at Birdeye, and he knows this more than most.“It's all about what research people are doing and who do they trust? Do people trust the brands? Do they trust the articles that they're getting from them? No, they trust their community, They trust their friends. They trust their network. They trust the crowdsourced reviews of both the business, a product. As a marketer, experience marketing is so critical because you've got to fulfill all of those needs for everybody.”So how are marketers flipping the funnel and tying their success to customer success? On Marketing Trends, David answers that question while also providing an in-depth look at how brands such as Blaze Pizza have used Birdeye's experience marketing platform to put brand advocates front and center. He also provides a unique look at how marketers can supercharge their SEO strategies on Google, Facebook, and more. Enjoy this episode. Main Takeaways:Did You Leave a Review?: Customers leave reviews to help them advocate for a product or service, but they also read those same reviews to help them make an informed buying decision. Customers no longer trust a brand's messaging to make their decisions, they trust their peers. This is why it's important to seize control of reviews and aggregate them all into a single place. When you have everything in one place, you can identify and resolve common problems as you see them come through and you can also gather and display top reviews easier. Just Call My Mobile: Customers need to be met on the channels where they are most active, which is mobile. In order to have an effective mobile strategy, you must have an always-on mentality. This means that prospective consumers should always be able to get answers to questions in real-time and you can facilitate that through chat, FAQs, or aggregated reviews.Stand-Up, Stand Out: An well-structured and optimized SEO strategy is a great way to make sure that a company does not get buried on the search pages, but it also is integral when it comes to making sure consumers can find you at a moment's notice.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world's number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Kyber Digital gives you an expert analysis of Synup, Birdeye, Podium and Yext – fourhttps://g.page/kyberdigital/ (review generation and listing correction) tools that can help you skyrocket your company's digital presence in 2021! Go to https://www.kyberdigital.com/post/synup-vs-birdeye-vs-podium-vs-yext (https://www.kyberdigital.com/post/synup-vs-birdeye-vs-podium-vs-yext) to find out more!

Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for both patients and other dentists. After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while consulting to other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular, Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and the soon to be released 100 Tips to 100 Reviews in 100 Days.  In 2018, Len cut down to practicing dentistry two days per week to focus additional time and attention to helping other dentists build broad and compelling online footprints that attract hundreds of new patients to their practices. Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance. --- Thank you to Designs for Vision for sponsoring today's extra special episode! The brand new LED DayLite NanoCam HDi incorporates all of the comfort and ease of Designs for Vision products into a hands-free 1080p camera which clips directly onto your loupes. With the option to broadcast live video, the HIPAA compliant NanoCam comes equipped with your choice of 2.5x, 3.5x or wide angle lens, a mutable microphone all in a .8 oz profile. The camera is optically calibrated to match Designs for Vision telescopes. The best part is that Designs for Vision offers 24/7 support for the camera, meaning you'll always have the technical assistance you need. Options for a shielded foot pedal and light make this a no-brainer for surgical recording technology. Get set up today with the LED DayLite NanoCam HDi by contacting Designs for Vision at this link: --- In today's conversation we talk about the power of the online review, groupon deals, Canadian marketing laws, google AdWords disasters and much more! Dr. Len is a great resource with clear ways of addressing the new landscape of online marketing. We cover some of these topics: How do you rebrand a dental practice? What types of marketing are a waste of time for a dental practice? What marketing barriers do Canadian dental offices face? Can you ethically solicit online reviews from patients? Find Dr. Len Tau online: IG: @DrLenTau  Website: https://www.drlentau.com/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ravingpatient/  --- Find more of our episodes at https://www.toothordare.ca/ Follow us on Instagram! Podcast IG: @toothordare.podcast Irene: @toothlife.irene Katrina: @thedentalwinegenist

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt is joined by Branden Baldwin, Sr. Director of Revenue Operations at Birdeye. They discuss simplifying rev ops, improving the efficiency of reporting processes, and the importance of having all teams aligned with rev ops as the single source of accountability.

Today In the Pink Seat, Dr. Len Tau is sitting down to discuss dental marketing in the new world!    Owner of the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence and the general manager of the dental vertical marketing department of Birdeye, Dr. Tau brings first-hand expertise and a wealth of conversation to this podcast's dental marketing topic.   So please tune in now. There is sure to be something for any practice owner to take notes on! 

Several actions proved key as Waifa Chau advanced from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) roles to chief financial officer positions. Collaborating with other functions, gaining an in-depth understanding of the overall business, and helping his colleagues understand how FP&A benefits an organization have driven his success, says Chau, currently CFO with Nylas, Inc., a provider of productivity infrastructure solutions for software.  Cross-functional collaboration helps in gaining an understanding of a company's overall business, Chau says. While working at Gap Inc., the company behind Gap, Banana Republic, and other apparel brands, Chau focused on driving higher gross margins—key in the retail industry. Chau's curiosity about the business also helped him propel his career forward, he says. He spent about two years in a merchandising role at Gap, during which he gained a better understanding of the intricacies of operations. Often, employees in other parts of an organization assume FP&A's primary role is to tell them when they're over or under budget, Chau says. He tried to show how a strong FP&A partner tries to understand their performance so the business can better prepare for the future. After about seven years at Gap, Inc., Chau moved to an FP&A role at Walmart.com. In an ecommerce organization, there were “different levers to pull,” he says. For instance, along with analyzing gross margins, he reviewed margins on grocery delivery apps. Building on his success in FP&A, Chau set a new goal: establishing a finance team from the ground up. He joined BirdEye, a marketing platform, as vice president, finance, and advanced to CFO. Among other accomplishments, he structured the accounting and FP&A functions and determined how finance would interact with other functions. At Nylas, Chau again is leveraging his experience to propel himself forward and establish the finance function, this time for a slightly younger and small company.

The Fast Casual Nation podcast offers exclusive interviews with experts ranging from top chefs and brand makers to executives and restaurateurs who work in one of the fastest-growing segments of the restaurant industry. In this episode, host Paul Barron sits down with Travis Bickham, the vice president of marketing for Birdeye, to explore how restaurant operators can grow their businesses online in 2021.This content brought to you by Birdeye.Birdeye is an all-in-one customer experience platform that provides 60,000+ businesses with tools to deliver great experiences at every step of the customer journey. Businesses use Birdeye to be found online, chosen through listings and reviews, be connected with customers, and deliver the best end-to-end experience with surveys and insights tools.

Birdeye is all about reviews.  Everything your dental office needs to be found and connected with patients.   Go to DealsforDentists.com and find Birdeye's promo offer: Get $300 off the professional plan, paid annually or $25 off if paid monthly. 

Such a fantastic conversation on this episode of the Dental Tech Chat podcast! I spoke with Dr. Len Tau, DMD, who brings such great knowledge to the dental community! He has such a wonderful perspective on dentistry technology and how more dentists should start thinking of their technology more as a marketing tool! He is General Manager of Dental Vertical at Birdeye, Dentist in Northeast Philly, Speaker, Consultant, Podcaster, and Author. I mean talk about a dentist who wears many hats. Dr. Len Tau enjoys helping dentists build a strong online reputation to help practices maximize growth! Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Len Tau, DMD, has dedicated his professional life to improving dentistry for patients and other dentists. After purchasing his practice, the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Len practiced full-time while offering consulting to other dental practices, training thousands of dentists about reputation marketing, leading the dental division of BirdEye, a reputation marketing platform, and hosting the popular, Raving Patients podcast. He recently authored the book Raving Patients and the soon to be released 100 Tips to 100 Reviews in 100 Days. He is also the founder of Tau Dental Consulting, a firm that builds comprehensive marketing plans for dentist. In 2018, Len cut down to practicing dentistry two days per week to focus additional time and attention to helping other dentists build broad and compelling online footprints that attract hundreds of new patients to their practices. Len lectures nationally and internationally on using internet marketing, social media, and reputation marketing to make dental offices more visible and credible as well as how to increase their case acceptance. *Key Questions* 1. Diamond in the Ruff: what product did you use most in practice that's been a major advantage to helping with productivity and efficiency. Dr. Len highly recommends a UVC cleaning system light. Perfect for dental practices, as he mention. https://www.uvccleaningsystems.com/uvc-products/safezone.html His favorite piece of technology is the iTero. https://itero.com/ 2.No-Risk | No-Reward: What was your big investment of time or money in technology that paid off. Dr. Len Tau explains his perspective. He looks at technology as a marketing expense, not as an expense for his office purchasing technology. He uses state-of-the-art technology in his practice. 3. The Flop: What did you buy into that was a waste of time and money? Philips Zoom whitening light Dr. Len Highly recommends KöR Whitening. https://www.korwhitening.com/ 4. What are some tips for integrating new technology into your office? Dr. Len explained his three key points. 5. Clara Mask Connect with Dr. Len Tau on Socials. Thanks for supporting Dental Tech Chat! His website www.drlentau.com Check out his podcast: The Raving Patients Podcast --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dentaltechchat/message

We’re happy to announce the return of your favorite podcast, Constant Smiles, featuring co-hosts Dr. Rich Constantine and Elijah Desmond. Since the start of COVID-19, our world as dental professionals has turned upside down, and we’ve had to adapt to changes that none of us saw coming. Something else that Rich didn’t see coming was the success of his viral rendition of the ‘In My Feelings’ video challenge. The video skyrocketed not only his natural talent, but it also ignited the growth of his dental practice.  In this episode, Rich shares the apps, tools, and software that has helped him deal with his practice's sudden growth and reveals how he has maintained that rapid growth since the launch of his viral video. Rich and Elijah also take time to talk about how the dental industry has coped with the outbreak of COVID-19 and offer some words of encouragement to dental professionals worldwide.  If you are a dental professional and you want the inside scoop of how a dental practice works and grows, this is the episode for you! In this episode, find out: How Rich’s dental practice grew following the success of his viral video The importance of blocking time in your schedule for potential new patient growth What tools, apps, and services Rich uses in his practice How Weave helps to improve patient communication Why Rich uses Legend Networking to help eliminate IT challenges How Dental Intel helps Rich keep track of his practice’s revenue and growth Why it is so important to log correct information and numbers into your dental practice’s system How Stream DentalHR helped Rich prepare his practice for rapid growth Why your front office team is so vital to the success of your practice and how Front Office Rocks has helped to train Rich’s new hires How to generate more reviews for your practice with Birdeye Why Rich uses Driven Dental Implant Marketing to generate dental implant leads and welcome new patients   Mentions & Links https://try.getweave.com/constant-smiles/ (Weave) https://legendnt.com/ (Legend Networking) https://www.dentalintel.com/ (Dental Intelligence) https://www.localmed.com/ (LocalMed) https://streamdentalhr.com/ (Stream DentalHR) https://frontofficerocks.com/ (Front Office Rocks) https://birdeye.com/dental/ (Birdeye) https://drivendentalmarketing.com/ (Driven Dental Implant Marketing) http://youtube.com/letsplaythru (Let'sPlayThru) For more information and to explore other episodes https://constantsmiles.com/ (click here.)

Jeff is the digital marketing expert of the Business Growth Insiders team. In this episode he focuses on leveraging the power of the Google Maps 3-pack strategy. Join Jeff and Lisa as they discuss an evergreen strategy using the Google Map Pack. Episode HighlightsWhen people go to search, the majority of people are skipping past the paid ads and are often reaching a business via the 3-pack listing68% of the click-throughs are found on a local service listingYour business is classified as category. It’s important to connect the content in your website to the categories. This means you will have more credibility when you have a service page.Research from Google: 76% of people who conduct a local search will contact a business within 24 hours28% of those searches result in a purchaseStudy by SearchEnginewatch.com68% of searcher prefer the local 3 pack27% prefer the organic resultsOnly 10% trust the paid search adsA “maps-first” approach is an evergreen strategy. It will continue to work when you discontinue paid ads.Once visitors come to your website, you need an ad strategy to bring them back.Visitors are looking for directions and reviews on Google My Business. They will only go to your website if they need more information.Reviews are important to have. People are making choices to work with you based on reviews. It factors into your ranking.Software is available to ask people to give you reviews. If the review is 3-star rating, there is a software to bypass the posting and have the information come directly to you to address first. Birdeye.com the software to improve business reputation and customer experienceJeff’s Webinar Referenced in the show is currently rescheduled for June 23. Register here: About Your HostsJeff Evans and Lisa McGuire each own their own small business, specializing in different areas of marketing. Jeff brings the experienced knowledge of digital marketing and technology while Lisa brings the insights of marketing strategy combined with messaging through story. Jeff’s Contact Info: jeff@jvincentcreative.com To learn more about Jeff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffevans78/Lisa’s Contact Info: lisa@openwindmarketing.comTo learn more about Lisa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-mcguire/

Your host of Amplified, Ken Rochon, The Umbrella Syndicate, & Founder of the Keep Smiling Movement, with Executive Producer Andrea Adams-Miller, CEO, The RED Carpet Connection & Executive Director of the Keep Smiling Movement interview Dr. Len Tau, noted by Dentistry Today as a top leading consultant, Author of Raving Patients, Owner, Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence, Dr. Tau used the Internet's power to grow his new patient base going against traditional dental office marketing. As an International Lecturer, he shares Internet Marketing, Social Media and Reputation Management Marketing to make your office more visible and credible. Also, he is the General Manager of the Dental Division for BirdEye, a reputation management platform. Additionally, he is the founder of iSocial Digital, a consulting firm that helps dentists develop a comprehensive online marketing plan. His content rich, engaging seminars allow him to bring his first hand experience straight to his audience.

Your host of Amplified, Ken Rochon, The Umbrella Syndicate, & Founder of the Keep Smiling Movement, with Executive Producer Andrea Adams-Miller, CEO, The RED Carpet Connection & Executive Director of the Keep Smiling Movement interview Dr. Len Tau, noted by Dentistry Today as a top leading consultant, Author of Raving Patients, Owner, Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence, Dr. Tau used the Internet's power to grow his new patient base going against traditional dental office marketing. As an International Lecturer, he shares Internet Marketing, Social Media and Reputation Management Marketing to make your office more visible and credible. Also, he is the General Manager of the Dental Division for BirdEye, a reputation management platform. Additionally, he is the founder of iSocial Digital, a consulting firm that helps dentists develop a comprehensive online marketing plan. His content rich, engaging seminars allow him to bring his first hand experience straight to his audience.

In the first of our "Between Two Marketers" interview series, Paul sits down with Harry Hawk from Birdeye. Harry explains how he improved revenue by 4x by switching Facebook and Google AI to run off of Salesforce deep funnel conversions. Harry gets into the nitty gritty and shows you why AI should be your best friend. Listen now! Learn more in Harry's blog post: https://birdeye.com/blog/why-performance-marketers-need-to-embrace-machine-learning-optimization/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-ppc-show-podcast/message

Frederik Hermann is the Sr. Director of Marketing & Growth at BirdEye, an online reputation management system that helps businesses utilize the power of online reviews to attract new customers. He works with external agencies, develops data-driven growth marketing initiatives, supervises product development and brand building, and provides complex business analyses.  Harry Hawk is BirdEye’s Digital Advertising Manager. He has extensive experience in helping clients who are into robotics, marketing technology, logistics, retail, baking, accounting and event marketing grow and connect with their customers. In this episode, we talked about relationship marketing (paid social), online reputation, coaching...

Frederik Hermann is the Sr. Director of Marketing & Growth at BirdEye, an online reputation management system that helps businesses utilize the power of online reviews to attract new customers. He works with external agencies, develops data-driven growth marketing initiatives, supervises product development and brand building, and provides complex business analyses.  Harry Hawk is BirdEye’s Digital Advertising Manager. He has extensive experience in helping clients who are into robotics, marketing technology, logistics, retail, baking, accounting and event marketing grow and connect with their customers. In this episode, we talked about relationship marketing (paid social), online reputation, coaching...

The Dentistry Live Summit is aimed to bring together social media groups from all aspects of dentistry. We will have speakers on insurance, group practice ownership, marketing and more. Aaron Boone of MVP Mailhouse uses data to change the way you think about direct mail. By mapping out your current patients, you can target similar demographics. Look for a deal at the Summit. Kinzie Hess Broxson of PK Performance Solutions will be speaking about insurance and how to improve claims acceptance. She will be addressing specific questions and claims to learn together. Send the EOBs to kinzie@dentallogic.io. Carlos Rodriguez, RDH is the King of Dental Comedy. Hygienist by day, comedian by night. Sandy Lee of Lighthearted RDH is excited to bring the joy and connection to other hygienists who can sometimes feel isolated. Dr. Anissa Holmes of Delivering Wow will be at the Summit sharing framework for delegations in your practice.   Heather Kirby of RDH Rant started the group because she wanted to find a group of real people who can share their struggles. The group has over 10,000 hygienists only. She feels that it's important to network and break away from the keyboard warrior mentality. They also love to pursue charity work in destistry or helping children. Nathan Ho is from the Dental Win Win group. He is speaking at the event as well as hosting his own Summit in Dallas this spring. Dr. Len Tau of Birdeye will speak on reviews and improving your local image. His group and podcast, Raving Patients is designed to help you get great reviews and how to handle a negative review and turn it around. It's important to educate your entire team if you want to implement what you learn at an event. Dr. Robert Pick will be showing the Purple Cow Wow way to the Dentistry Live Summit. Distinguishing yourself from your competition is the way to set yourself apart. Dr. Janice Doan is an entrepreneur panelist who runs her three dental practices. She is bringing her expertise and innovative ideas for growing your business as a team. Summit deal: Buy 1 get one free ticket Deal 2: Pay for 3 team members and the doctor goes free

Today David & Linda had a conversation with Landscape Architect Martin Smith about the Streetscape Improvement project in Downtown Wynne. Martin is a native of Arkansas and currently resides in the small community of Birdeye raising his family in a home built by his Great Great Grandfather in 1901. His passion and commitment to his local community runs deep in the Arkansas Delta much like his family history. Martin has led design teams throughout the state with a focus on innovative award winning low impact development for urban and rural environments. Martin uses stormwater to initiate his designs while placing an emphasis on the integration of public spaces with the founding principles of ecology. Martin and his wife Kara are active throughout the Delta promoting the importance of Healthy Living lifestyles while also promoting locally grown regional sustainability.

William Andrus Senior Director of Sales Development at BirdEye is interviewed in this episode. Over 50,000+ businesses across all industries trust BirdEye to give them visibility and control over their customer feedback from all channels, and use this feedback to better understand their customers, improve their operations, and influence purchase decisions. Follow Adam on Instagram at Ask Adam Torres for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to become a featured co-author in one of Adam's upcoming books: https://www.moneymatterstoptips.com/coauthor --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneymatters/support

Show Notes Dr. Leonard Tau, Dental Director of Birdeye, Host of Raving Patients Podcast, and dental marketing consultant. As a marketing strategist, he helps design marketing plans in a step wise process. By using the proceeds of the previous step to fund your marketing plan, you compound your investment. The process involves a zoom conference about your goals and objectives. Dr. Tau has a one time fee for the service plan you can implement. How do we get the best reviews? The cheapest way is to ask, but is often not as effective. Automated systems that you can turn on and off for specific patients can help you find patients who are willing to share. Dr. Tau prefers to call the review a request for feedback. He also recommends that a hybrid approach to requests is the most effective. By letting them know you are sending the feedback request, they are looking for the request and more likely to complete it. What do we do about bad reviews? Google does not take down reviews without the presence or inappropriate language or other glaring issues. Yelp will remove a review only if it states that the reviewer is not a patient. For negative reviews, the best response is to have it outweighed with positive reviews. If you want to reach out to the patient, do it offline and address the patient directly. You have a better opportunity resolving the issue and turning the situation around. Birdeye has released web chat, which converts patients at a higher rate. Normal price is $100/ month for the webchat, Birdyeye is usually $250/ month or $2400/yr. One aspect that makes Birdeye different is that review Generation, review marketing, map citation to improve your map search ranking. His book “Raving Patients” is due out later this year, and has another book “100 ways to get 100 Reviews in 100 Days” coming out in the future. www.leonardtau.com Birdeye Nifty Deal -$200/month or $2000/year without webchat. Webchat is an additional $50/ month- that's half price. Current customers can add the webchat at the Nifty Price prorated to their contract. To get the Nifty Deal- contact Len Silver package for consulting $3000, that's $1000 off and a book when it comes out FREE- Dr. Tau will do a free consult call if you put in a request on his website with any Birdeye subscription A $500 discount on consulting if you are not a Birdeye user. Cell -215-292-2100 Email: drlentau@birdeye.com Consultation: www.drlentau/dymo

Helpful links from the episode: MozCon ticket giveaway Whitespark's new Local Search Service FULL SHOW NOTES:[music]00:10 Aaron: Episode six. Competitors, obsessed or don't care?00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:45 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:48 Darren: I'm Darren.00:49 Aaron: And today, we are going to dive into the topic of competitors. But before we get into the main course of this episode, Darren, I'm excited to hear about all the prep you had to go into the Brighton conference and your travels over to England. I'd love to hear how both the conference went for you and did you get a chance to do some touristy and fun things? How did all that go? 01:16 S2: Yeah. Totally, yeah. So, it a was pretty great trip. It was grueling trying to get ready for it, actually, because prior to giving my presentation, the day before, I was giving a full day of local search training which I had never done before, just everything up to... You could imagine with local search, so covering the full gamut and...01:39 Aaron: Did they get a certificate that says "Darren Certified," when they were done? 01:44 Darren: No, no.[laughter]01:46 Darren: I should have that though. I should have a nice stamp to give everybody. Yeah. But it was seven hours of training, so my slide deck ended up been 530 slides of just trying to get everything I could think of. It's basically, "Darren does local search brain in one massive presentation." It was crazy. Also, my flights got messed up. So, I was supposed to fly in the morning on Tuesday and then, I basically fly all day and arrive on Wednesday at 10:00 AM. But then, they bumped my flight from Edmonton to Toronto to leave at midnight. So, I left at midnight, Edmonton time, arrived in Toronto at 6:00 AM, and then, I ended up getting a hotel, so I stayed in Toronto in the hotel so I could get some sleep from 6:00 AM until about 1:00 PM. And then, I was just working in the airport waiting for my flight to leave at around 10:00 PM. While I'm working at this local pub, this pub in the airport, I dumped a beer on my laptop.02:44 Aaron: No.02:45 Darren: I totally fried my laptop and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm getting on my flight in two hours and I still have so many slides to make." So, I raced to the little electronic store, I buy a new laptop, I'm trying to get everything loaded on to the laptop before my flight takes off. They're calling my name and I'm watching the ton download of PowerPoint probably has to get a load on my laptop. They're like, "Last call for Darren Shaw to board flight to London." And it's like, I got 1% left and I'm holding the laptop, ready to close it, and ready to run into the gate. It was insane. So I finally got on my plane, worked a little bit on the plane, slept a little bit on the plane. It all worked out in the end, but man, it was stressful.03:28 Aaron: Oh my gosh, that sounds one of my worst nightmares like, "Holy cow."03:33 Darren: Yeah, it was really bad. But yeah, the presentation was great. I thought it was fun, and it's a cool case study I'm doing. I'm just taking a business that had zero local search presence and then, slowly stepping through each sort of thing that you would do in a local search, and measuring the impact of that like, "Okay, they got five new reviews. What impact did that have on local search?" We did other citation building, then we did a whole bunch of citation indexing. So, each step, I was like, "What impact did that have on the rankings?" And so, it was cool to do the study and I'm gonna continue that study as I go to MozCon in July.04:09 Aaron: Yeah, I'm super excited to hear about that. That sounds like such a great piece of research and everything you put into it. And also, if you and I, when we hang out next, if we're gonna have beers, I'm keeping my computer away from you.04:23 Darren: Seriously, keep it in your backpack. Do not get that anywhere near the table.04:28 Aaron: Oh, man.04:29 Darren: Yeah. I did a little touristy stuff, too. In Brighton, they have this i360 thing which goes... It looks like a UFO that goes up on a big stick, "Bzzzzz". Goes like way up high so you can see all the way out to the ocean, all of Brighton, which is kind of touristy and interesting. It was alright. And then, I went to visit a friend. I went up to London, ate some great meals. Yeah, Brighton's a beautiful spot, and London, of course, is awesome. I did a couple of days there. After that grueling work, I just wished I had gone home instead of taking a couple of days in London, actually. I felt like I'd rather be with my family than trudging around London by myself.05:11 Aaron: Yeah, I can see that but I almost always get like this. I don't know if it's like a high or just relief after when you have something that big and then, it's off your plate. It is such a... There's a lot of decompressing that you have to do. That was something for a long time that I think even my wife struggled with when I would come home from certain conferences or events where you had big talks and things like that, where I was like, I just need to check out for a few days and I feel really great about it but I have no... I don't have any purpose to accomplish big things right now, professionally or personally, so I'm just gonna be happy, have a beer, and walk around without a care in the world for a couple of days because I just had way too many.05:58 Darren: I totally get that. I feel the exact same. I love it when I go to a conference, say, something like MozCon, and I speak on the first day, because then, I got the next two days to just like, "Yey, I'm having the best time hanging out with all my industry friends and having some drinks and learning some new topics." And I'm just like, "I'm not checking my email for two days." Yeah.06:16 Aaron: That's awesome. Well, good. I'm glad it went well even though you threw the biggest curve ball at yourself ever, but way to overcome.06:25 Darren: Yeah, sucked. What's up with you? 06:28 Aaron: Well, on company-wise, I'm really excited. We just hired a new VP of Customer Success.06:35 Darren: Awesome.06:36 Aaron: Yeah. It's someone that I've known for a long time, has a great background and really, we already have a great customer success team. We have three direct reps, and we have had one that served as a lead. But I was directly managing or overseeing our lead customer success rep, and in the 100 ways I'm at, like I'm not giving him enough support. I'm not giving enough guidance to the team. And it just really became aware to me that, even though this wasn't like our number one need, that I knew the right person for this job, and that would be a great fit culturally for us and within our mission and a bunch of other things, and it would really help this team have more experience to draw from and more time with somebody to help both what we do and them individually grow.07:27 Aaron: I'm really excited about that. One of the things... We already have for, especially our multi-location clients, five locations to into the thousands, we have a really great onboarding process that we've developed and put together and communicate and everything else, but we almost like, Launch is like the finish line. And once they're up and running, then we kinda turn reactive again, and then we're like, "Okay, if you need something, let us know," where we should be...07:54 Darren: Not checking in on them. Yeah.07:55 Aaron: Yeah, we should be hands-on. What's their week one look like, what's month one, what's the first 90 days? How are we ensuring they're getting off to the right start, to really be successful? That's kind of one of our main high-level goals to get going, and I'm excited with how this hire is gonna plug in and help make that happen for us.08:13 Darren: How big is your customer support team? 08:16 Aaron: So total of four now with this hire. So we have three direct reps that those guys are handling everything from email tickets, phone calls. We do a live chat during normal business hours, on-boarding, all of those different things. We have four in total dedicated to that now.08:36 Darren: Right. And so, this made me think about one thing you could do is measuring engagement and then if you see a client fall off of engagement, they're not logging in, they're not sending out requests, then you could algorithmically send an alert to your customer service team and say, "Hey, you should check in with this customer."08:55 Aaron: Totally... Maybe that's another podcast. We talk about that, but we're definitely looking at a combination. We're just starting to do a deeper install with the product called Heap Analytics. We're gonna do a lot more event tracking in the app and things like that. So yeah, definitely a combination of we wanna be proactive and digging into accounts and looking for things. We wanna develop some systems that are kinda giving us those warning signs or being able to really high level kind of spot check where they're at.09:25 Darren: Yeah, totally. And I say that as just suggestion for you, but it's like, "Damn, we should do that too."09:30 Aaron: No, totally. And it's a great thing to talk about. And as we get further down, I'd love to talk about where we're getting with it, but it really is like, How do you have this prescriptive path that you know that they need to achieve and we know certain things based on how often they're logging in, often they're engaging with the feature, and then some of the metrics that are coming out. Those are key performance indicators that we really need to ratchet down on.09:58 Darren: For sure. What else is going on? Anything new? 10:01 Aaron: Excited that we landed our first customer from... If you remember back a couple of months ago, we did that IFA conference.10:07 Darren: Yeah, we talked all about ROI on that. So you got a good customer? 10:11 Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got a good customer that basically, zeroed out our investment, right? We'll make money back on this customer in under a year from our investment on that. We signed them to a two-year deal. And then I still have a number of other conversations in addition to the exposure we got and everything else. I feel really, really good about that. Yeah, that's all I wanted out of our... Again, our first time. You have to understand these things that you're not gonna go in and shock and awe people first time in a giant conference like that, so it's like, "Can you just get a little traction? A lot of visibility, a lot of conversations." We're already signed up for the next one, next year, so excited about that.10:50 Darren: Yeah, and I think it's a good point. You definitely zeroed out. So you know you've got that exact measurable impact from the conference, but you did better than zeroing out because there was all that exposure of people that are coming to you because they saw you at the conference and you have no idea that you have a new customer, you didn't know that it was because of IFA.11:09 Aaron: Yeah.11:10 Darren: So you're definitely getting more than just this one big client, for sure.11:13 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely, but it's great to be able to go to the team just because some of my partners weren't always on board with doing these types of events and conferences and be able to say like, "Hey yeah, dollar-to-dollar. We got our money back and now here's all these other intangibles that continue to pay off, right? It's like anything in marketing. You have to look at it as an investment and some investments, they are short-term payoffs and some are more mid and long-term and you need to keep going back on it to get where you need to go.11:42 Darren: Yeah, and then you also get the lifetime value of that customer so it's more than just whatever the contract is that you sign, it's into the future. And then, a new customer and all the referrals that can potentially come from that customer.11:54 Aaron: Yeah, you just hope it's... You planted a seed with it and then it starts to grow and branch out and everything else, and you reap all those rewards.12:03 Darren: Totally, great. And I saw you guys were sponsoring MozCon.12:04 Aaron: Yeah.12:05 Darren: And I got to see all the tweets. Everyone's excited about giving away tickets.12:08 Aaron: Yeah, yeah, giving away a ticket, which is awesome, 'cause a MozCon ticket is expensive, like face value.12:15 Darren: And it's a great conference.12:17 Aaron: Yeah. Of like 1700 bucks and great speakers like yourself and Will Reynolds and Cindy Krum and things like that, where it really is awesome. And interesting enough, I saw in one of those side benefits, right? I was just on site a couple of days ago with a new customer that we're onboarding and kicking off with, that has hundreds of locations. And our main contact there was like... She's like, "Hey, can I ask you a question? I'm like, Yeah, totally she's like... Well, I was just looking into 'cause I need to get out to some conferences, and whatever. And lo and behold, I came across MozCon kinda looks great. And then I saw you guys are sponsor. So I thought you'd be able to give me really good insight on the... Is this a good conference and should I go to it? 12:58 Aaron: And to me, it was like one of those, it reinforced in other reasons why to sponsor conferences and things like that, 'cause even your customer see like, "Oh these guys are active in the space and they're part of these things and whatever else. So, that was kind of a cool full-circle moment there.13:10 Darren: There is no conference I've ever been to, I've never seen a better opportunity for vendors than the MozCon setup because at MozCon, they only take on eight to 10 exhibitors really, and they have these nice little, they call them partner hubs, and they're right as you walk into the conference. It's not like in a separate room like an exhibit hall that you have to go to. They're right there so your visibility is amazing and when people come out from the conference sessions to go and get a coffee or a snack, or they go off for lunch, they have to walk right past you. And so, all these people are mingling about and the snacks are right next to where all the vendors are. It's amazing. It's the best visibility I've ever seen at a conference. It's a good one.13:52 Aaron: Nice. I hope we can capitalize on that. Maybe we can even book like, Darren Shaw's in our booth for an hour and you can get photos and autographs.14:01 Darren: [chuckle] It's not just me, there's some great local people coming so Joy is gonna be there too, and Greg Gifford got a community spot. Oh, maybe I'm supposed to keep that on the down low. Well, it's out there now. [chuckle] It's definitely out there now.14:14 Aaron: Well, we'll have a handful of our team. Mike Blumenthal will be there as well, so we'll have a good crew.14:21 Darren: Yeah, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be fun. Can't wait.14:23 Aaron: I think maybe we do a thing where, for an hour, you will dump beers on people's laptops.[chuckle]14:29 Darren: You would get so many people lined up for that. Yeah. [laughter]14:33 Aaron: Oh, see I love these ideas. And other than that, man, I just... I know you know what this is like, too, but I've been on a plane every week the last five weeks. Monday, I leave for a local U in Austin. I go directly from there to North Carolina to one of our new clients and their internal conference for franchisees, so it's just been really hard to get time at my desk and to keep the other things moving forward when you don't have that focus time gap.15:02 Darren: And that's where this new hire comes in, right. Someone that can just... "Okay, you manage the customer support initiatives that we wanna run with? Like all this stuff that I don't have time to stay on top of."15:12 Aaron: Yeah, totally. Anyway, that's a normal struggle. You know what that's like, but man, it's crazy sometimes when it is. I'm going on week five of a trip, of multiple days every single week, and it's like I need a week just no calls, no emails, get caught up, get directions set on some things.15:32 Darren: I do not envy that. I know that feeling of just feeling like you're getting further and further behind with all the traveling and speaking, and all that kind of stuff. It takes a lot of time and I am really looking forward to this next stretch I have where I don't have anything until Moz... Oh, have a little one, a local U, in June and then MozCon so... But yeah, I'm basically free and clear for a while and I love it and I'm not gonna book anything. I've got so many initiatives that we have on the go here, I'm really excited about, and I'm so happy to be involved with.16:03 Aaron: No, that feels so good.16:05 Darren: One other new item for me, actually, is we launched a new service so I'm excited about that. It's called the local search service and we basically... You can kind of think of it like a Google My Business management service. We really tried to build a great productized service that we can scale, and I'm really excited about it and getting a lot of interest from it and I think there's great potential. We have so many customers that come to us that are like, "Okay, I don't even know what a citation is. What am I supposed to do? Can you help me?" And we're like, "Yes." Now, we can say, "Yes, we can help you. Sign up for this. We will basically manage all of the local pieces of search for you and so we can now meet the needs of all those clients, so I'm excited about that.16:47 Aaron: Yeah, you should be. That's really cool. And once again, it's usually when we talk, that totally sounds like an episode I'd love to do a deep dive on because I have some ideas around some productized services that we can bolt on top of what we're doing, especially with some of the features we have coming out in the next three to six months. So, that's really interesting. And yeah, let's put that on or our dock of notes on something 'cause I'd love to hear how all that unfolds for you more and what you understand as this rolls out and the success...17:17 Darren: For sure, yeah. There will be lots to talk about. Yeah, I'll be interested to hear more about your productized services. But now, let's get into the meat of it. We're gonna talk about competitors, right? 17:24 Aaron: Good old competitors.[chuckle]17:26 Darren: Yeah.17:27 Aaron: It's like an opinion, everybody has one, right? 17:30 Darren: Yeah, totally. Totally. You have lots, actually. Your space is pretty saturated and I suppose I have even more because we do everything so, yeah. How do you deal with your competitors? Are you like... Do you have alerts set up? Do you have a team member that's, it's their job to watch what the competitor is doing all the time? How do you deal with it? 17:51 Aaron: Yeah. I definitely fall into the camp where I pay attention and I think about them. I'm not as far... I know people who obsess about it and things like that. I think that's really unhealthy 'cause it derails the direction you're going.18:07 Darren: Yep.18:07 Aaron: But, especially when you're young, when you're a start-up and... Alright, I've been with GatherUp for just a couple of months shy of four years now, but in the earlier stages when I was there, especially when you haven't carved out where you are and you're not as secure in where you are, or confident, then you pay a lot of attention to it, right? And I think that can be a really hard evolution in just figuring out what the right balance is for you because it's smart to pay attention to them and understand what they're doing but when you obsess, then you start going backwards and the other way with it and that becomes really, really dangerous.18:47 Darren: How do you deal with feature parity? So one of your customers will be like, "Hey we used to be with this... We're currently with this competitor. We're thinking about switching to you. Do you also do this thing that my competitor does? Like is that something that you're like, "Ooh, we should really get that on a roadmap," or you're like, "No, we have our roadmap. We're staying the course. We don't care if this other competitor has this feature that this one customer wants."19:13 Aaron: It depends so much. I think if you go back to my first statement, I'm like knowing who you are and where you're going. A lot of times we're really easily able to say, "Does that feature even fit in with our vision and our direction or doesn't it?" And there are certain features, though, that you consider these are standard things that are needed in what we're doing, and that becomes the really tricky part in kind of parsing that out sometimes.19:41 Darren: Yeah.19:41 Aaron: We have certain competitors that I call  "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" competitor where no matter who builds what in the space, they have enough of an engineering team where they will basically copycat everyone's feature. And they really don't ever innovate anything or bring out something that's really strategic. They're just gonna say, "Hey, we have 250 features. We're never gonna lose a deal on a feature," and as a bootstrap company, we can't afford to do that. We have to align very tightly with our strategy and our vision with it. So that's the big thing that we always use is like, "Does this align with what those are?" And then we have to give the consideration like, "Is this an expected across the board?" So an easy example in our space would be like if we didn't have review monitoring, right, people would be like, "That's great that you helped me get more reviews and all these other things, but you're not letting me know when new reviews happen when I get them and giving me a notification about it."20:40 Aaron: That would be an issue no matter how our focus of like, "Well, we wanna help you connect with your customer and that's a reactive thing, and we only wanna do proactive things." So, definitely pieces like that. How do you look at it just as you talked about... You have this feature set that's so broad that you then hit all kinds of people that just focus on one of your features, but that's all they do is that one? What does that look like for you and your competitive landscape? 21:09 Darren: Yeah. So for us, I feel frustrated about competitors often because it's like I have this broad vision about what we wanna do. But we're kinda small, actually. Our company is not huge, and then competitors seem to always be a step ahead of us. We're like, "Damn it, we were gonna launch that." And then they put it out like a month before us. Things like that often come up that are frustrating. So there is, obviously, in my space, one major competitor which is BrightLocal, and it was funny because at Brighton SEO, that training I did, there were ten attendees for my full training session, and five of them were employees with BrightLocal 'cause apparently they're based out of Brighton. And so, I basically was training Myles and [21:56] ____ how to do local search, which was good times. [chuckle] And...22:00 Aaron: That's so crazy... Like did part of you just kind of feel like... Asking them to walk out of the room like, "This is not for you." [chuckle]22:07 Darren: Well no, 'cause it wasn't really like... We weren't really talking about our software and our services. We were just talking about local search in general, so it was totally fine. And I did my best to try and train them up as well as I could. And then the next day I actually went for lunch with my top competitor, Miles Anderson, from BrightLocal. And yeah, we had a great, great lunch, we chatted about things. I feel like we were both pretty open and it was interesting to hear about their business and what they're working on and tell him a little bit about what we're up to. And it's funny because you have some competitors that totally seem like assholes and you're like, "I would never go for lunch with that guy, [chuckle] but then I have BrightLocal and Whitespark, we're friendly competitors.22:51 Darren: I feel the same way about Moz, Moz has their Moz local product, but I love them all over there. It's a great group and so I don't really... I don't worry about the competitors, and I don't, I don't hate my competitors, but sometimes I'm frustrated about their ability to release faster than us. But other times, I just don't obsess about it either because, like you said, we have our road map, we have our style, people choose us because of who we are and what we do and how we do things because they just... It feels like more of a fit for them than this other product. And so, we just have to be clear on who we are and what we're doing, and I think that there's room in the industry for lots of competitors. If you think about how many email marketing systems are there? You got Mail Chimp, you got... I'm drawing a blank [chuckle], what are some of the other ones? Campaign Monitor.23:47 Aaron: Campaign Monitor, AWeber, Constant Contact. [chuckle]23:48 Darren: There's probably 30 of them and they are all making money. So it's like, to some degree, spaces will eventually merge to like a top winner but... And I would love for that to be Whitespark in my space. And you would love for that to be GatherUp in your space. But I don't worry too much about the competition. I'm not worried about my business... My business continues to grow, your business continues to grow and so.24:16 Aaron: And you have to look at it that way. If you're in a space you can see there's enough business for all kinds of people. And there's just so many different... It becomes interesting to me, based on who we're selling into, we might have a different set of two or three competitors. And that always becomes really interesting as you get into those. And I can kind of, like, for the three main segments we work in, there's kinda two competitors in each of those segments, that that's who we bump into in a comparison process, more often than not with it.24:51 Darren: I was just gonna say, speaking of comparison like, how do you handle all those questions where people are like, "Well what makes you better than competitor X?"25:01 Aaron: Yeah. I think, going back to the other things I hit upon, the thing that we always look at is, strategically, right, we really rely on like, "Hey, you have some of the people who have cared a long time about local search, people who care about business and reputation and communication. We understand all those angles, and we're not giving you... We're not the Walmart of SaaS products, where every feature's on the shelf and you grab what you want. We are this honed experience, that if you come in, we have the right things that you need, and we also can help you with the right ways to use them.25:34 Aaron: And I think that's really important coming from that angle, we point that out all the time as a difference, and we also use the fact that like, "Hey, we are hard-core focused on helping connect you to your customers." So at the end of the day, we're not gonna be creating a bunch of other things around local listings or some of these other things. And I get customers want... When they find like, "Alright, I can get one bill and one provider and there's some overlap." I get all of those are wins, but we really look at it as like we wanna be the best option with what we're trying to do, more so than, we have more things to sell you and, all across the board, we can make it so you don't have to need three people, you just need one. But we have our own ways that we make that happen.26:22 Darren: Yeah, that's interesting, our approach is a little bit different. We are kitchen sink for sure, and we continue to expand, and add new things like, "Oh, customers need this, we're gonna build it." So, I don't know, I feel like we're kinda stuck there now because we already offer so many different products and services around the whole range of local search that we can never get out of that, but I do think your approach is really smart, from a competitor perspective. And I think there's a service behind it too. It's like, "Hey, we are subject matter experts on customer experience, customer feedback, reviews, you come to us and we're not just like a software you're gonna sign up for, we're gonna actually help you get the best results that you can from that review process, and feedback process." So, I think it's smart to... The way you have honed in on that.27:10 Aaron: Well, hopefully, 'cause... But it's also you have to make the most of what you have to offer too. I don't have 100 engineers building every last feature, so I can't be in that arms race, I'm not gonna win that. So, we have to build really great, well-thought-out strategical features that align with things we understand. SEO, and local SEO, and communications between business and customer, and really dial those in so that we can show them like, "Hey, here's a really great repeatable process that your business can prosper with." Rather than, "Hey, spread yourself super thin trying to do all these things." And more and more, I'm hearing customers come back to that just because I think there is such an explosion in the ebbs and flows of software, and SaaS and that explosion where there is that feeling of adding more features, adding more features, adding more features. And I've actually had some clients say, "What I like about you is you are laser focused on this, and that other stuff is just kind of fluff to me, or thrown in or whatever else. And we don't need it, we're likely not gonna use it, we need to put our focus here."28:19 Darren: Yeah, and you also end up with feature bloat, where someone logs in to the system and they're like, "Wow, this is insane. I don't know how to do anything. Do you have a two-day training course for me to figure out how your software works?" And so staying focused and not building every damn feature can really help to make your customer experience of using the software better too.28:40 Aaron: Yeah, you always wanna find it. And this is something we are constantly battling 'cause sometimes I think we're getting that, as we offer so many customizations and configurations, or whatever else where, to me, it's always figuring out this top-down approach of how can I do the easiest things up front and right away, and then I have easy pass to go into second, third, fourth level advanced type settings, and I can dig deeper if I want to, but I don't have all that depth thrown in my face right away, and that's something I'm...29:08 Darren: Yep.29:09 Aaron: Really trying to philosophically work into our user experience. Let's not expose everything right up front, I get that makes sense when we're creating it 'cause we understand everything. But when the first time user comes in, that's the last thing you want them to be, it's like, "Where do I even start?" You don't want that.29:25 Darren: Yeah, totally. You got a dropdown with 30 different options and it's too much.29:30 Aaron: I'm interested, Darren in yours, how often do you see customers switching from one provider or another, and how hard is that switch for someone to pick up and leave BrightLocal, and come to Whitespark or something like that? 29:43 Darren: Yeah, interestingly it depends on what they want. So, BrightLocal has a couple of things that we don't have and so, but there are a lot of people that have a Brightlocal account, and they're paying for all this extra stuff that they don't actually use. And so we did recently make it pretty easy to switch to us. We've added some features that make it easy to switch, and we will support people that wanna switch too. So, if they wanna switch, we're gonna do all the work to try and make it as easy as possible for them. And that's been pretty successful for us, and we find that our customers that do switch are like, "Wow, this is a whole new world, we really love it." And that gives us some confidence in what we're doing. But we also see people go the other way too. When people cancel, one of the options they can choose is moving to a competitor. And then, of course, we ask for more details. Yeah, we do see people switch over to BrightLocal, and they list their reasons, and we think about those reasons, and we figure out whether or not we need to make any changes based off of what the feedback we're getting. And then there's so many people that are switching one way or the other, you never hear from. You don't know if they're switching.30:51 Aaron: Would you ever consider... Do you market that switching process? I think about, I've seen this for a long time with banks, they will actively put out content on their website saying like, "Hey, here's how you switch to our bank and we make it easy. And here's what's involved." Do you do any of that or would you consider doing that? So people know like, "Hey, it's not super painful, and we actually will guide you through it, and make it easy."31:14 Darren: Yeah, we've recently built these features to make it easy to switch. And we are going to definitely market them. We're just putting it on the landing page and saying, "Hey listen, if you're currently with this competitor, it's so dead simple for you to switch. We move everything over for you, contact us today." So we definitely wanna market it, we're not gonna do a blog post and tweet about it, and be like, "Hey, anyone that's with BrightLocal definitely come to us." [chuckle] We're not gonna do that, it just feels kind of douchey. But we will let... We wanna let people know that it's easy to switch. And we're putting it into our welcome email. So, someone signs up for that, we're like, "Oh hey, are you with BrightLocal? If you are... " Just a line that says, "Hey, it's easy to switch."31:56 Aaron: Nice, very, very smart.31:58 Darren: And it's not just BrightLocal, we've made it easy to switch from other providers too.32:01 Aaron: Yeah, so in your space, and I can't remember if BrightLocal has taken any funding at any point or not, but do you have...32:10 Darren: They have not.32:10 Aaron: Okay, so are most of your competitors in your space bootstrapped or do you have... Are there certain ones that are big VC-funded, and on a different trajectory? 32:21 Darren: It depends on what you're looking at. For someone that is pretty close to almost exactly what we do, it's BrightLocal. But then we have competitors in different areas like business listing management. You've got Moz Local, and then you have Yext. So Yext, of course, massive funding, Moz Local, massive funding, and so they are different. And then we have some that are a little bit more agency, but also a little focused on business listings, and that would be, Advice Local is one that comes up here and there. And I think they might be funded too. It's an interesting thing like that, bootstrapped versus funding.32:57 Aaron: Yep.32:58 Darren: I feel like I don't know why, but we have a market advantage and maybe it's just because of the speaking and stuff that I do, but I feel like people look to us as experts and that helps drive business for sure, for us.33:10 Aaron: Yeah. As you know, we're in that same boat where we wanna be thought leaders in the space, especially when it comes to search. We're the only one of our competitors that are at a MozCon or talking at search conferences where our competitors especially like BirdEye or Podium, that these guys have taken $30 million rounds of funding those guys are talking at SaaS conferences and VC conferences and things like that, and we definitely use that to our advantage on how well we understand the space and what Google is doing and what they're up to, and that we even have relationships there that are productive strategic ones. But there's such a gap in our space, 'cause we really have a competitor that's just, "Hey, they got a couple of million dollars in funding and it's allowed them to accelerate." We have these behemoths that have taken on tens of millions of dollars or you have us, that have not taken on any money. And so, that discrepancy that divide is so large and you see it in size of engineering teams and size of sales teams. It's like...34:18 Darren: Yeah. For sure. Yeah.34:19 Aaron:  I'm the only one that does outbound sales. I'm hoping that changes in the coming months, It's been top of my priority list for a while. We still haven't found the right fit. But I wanna grow an outbound sales team because our product is good enough for it now, and we're doing very well just through inbound marketing and all the things we do there, but it's really time for us to scale up those efforts. And those guys already have sales teams of 50, 100, and every last...34:45 Darren: That's insane, I know.34:47 Aaron: Yeah.34:47 Darren: Yeah, it's totally insane. So what kind of outbound sales do you do? Who are you talking to you? 34:51 Aaron: Yeah, I focus all on multi-locations. So I wanna talk if your... For me, I'm probably targeting anyone like 50 locations, and up. So yesterday, I saw one of my contacts is friends with the COO of a 200 location coffee shop. So I asked for an introduction.35:08 Darren: Right. That's smart.35:09 Aaron: I'm looking at brands that have size, continue to grow. And I can usually pretty easily see from even their own website. Are they using something to streamline feedback and reviews, are they displaying reviews on their site or location pages. So it's like this, three to four item checklist where I can see like, okay, they're either doing one of the five things we offer or two of the five, or none or I see they're using two different services, where I know we could help them consolidate.  I'm reaching out and try to start a conversation. I'm gonna put some of our case studies in front of them or some thought leadership articles from our blog or, "Hey, are you gonna be at this event that we're speaking at or we're sponsoring." And try to spark that up that way. And I would love to have one, two, three, four, five people duplicating my efforts there, just because those relationships are so much demand... It's one thing to get the conversation started, but then it's the calls, the demos, the meetings staying on top of it, keeping it moving, all of those things that you gotta have a team for.36:10 Darren: Absolutely, I find like... Sales are great, I can do the sales, but it's all the work that comes after that. Great, I've started a conversation I have a client that's interested, and then it's like managing that relationship is really time-consuming. You definitely need to build a team or it'll end up taking up all your time.36:27 Aaron: Yup, absolutely, I'm with you. Anything in closing, Darren I think we've ran our course, but do you have any final takeaways or a statement that you'd offer advice to anyone when... How they're thinking about or watching their competitors, researching them, what would you put out there to our listeners? 36:45 Darren: Yeah, I think it is important to keep an eye on them. You wanna have... I do have [36:51] ____ what they do and I keep tabs on it and I keep looking at what they're doing, but also, having that mentality that you touched on which is making sure that you understand what you're about and what your mission is, and not getting pulled off course for this feature, or that feature, 'cause competitors are always gonna be doing things slightly different from you but understanding what value you're bringing, and if that feature contributes to that value, then it's something that you might wanna include or if whatever marketing thing they're doing makes sense that it might be something you wanna do. But knowing who you are and what you're providing, and what your value differentiator is against that competitor is really important to get nailed down, so that you're not always just chasing every little thing that the competitors are doing.37:36 Aaron: Totally agree with you, self-awareness of your product and your company, is so important for people to be as soon as you can find that way, to be secure with that. You can't be over confident where you bury your head in the sand, you still need to be aware, but you need that self-confidence so that you can build your own path. And the cautionary tale, I tell people all the time, is if you build yourself to be so alike a competitor. Now there isn't just as you hit about there isn't this unique distinction on why someone would choose you or the other one.38:08 Darren: Yeah totally.38:09 Aaron: And it's like, Oh, you're both the same. Alright, well, which one's cheaper, now? Which is the last comparison that you want.38:16 Darren: Exactly.38:16 Aaron: I never wanna win, because I'm the cheap option, I wanna win because I'm the best value that's there. So I'd tell people to really be thinking about that. When you are paying attention to your competitors, you're not obsessing but how do you carve out the value that you have in comparison? 38:31 Darren: Yeah, and I would add one little thing. It's very valuable to hear, as customers are coming in when they do switch over, to touch base with them and find out what was happening over with your competitor that you had problems with? And then being able to speak to some of those things and trying to amplify your benefits against those perceived problems over there. That's one thing that we try to do over here.38:54 Aaron: Yes, yep. Now we have that going on in our reseller space right now, and we have a number of resellers, coming to us from our biggest competitor there that are like your feature set is better, your interface is better, your customer service is way better, and those are all things that we need to just be a little bit more touting and put out there so the people understand that there is that difference and that makes up for, "We are a little bit more expensive than they are." But as everyone that switches said, "You're 10X the value because of those things." And we need to do a better job of bringing that...39:29 Darren: Yeah laying that out for them. When you're onboarding new clients or when you're prospecting in the sales process, that's where that stuff should come out, where you can speak to those things. So yeah, that's where I really think the greatest value of keeping your eyes on your competitors is in that, in the sales process.39:44 Aaron: Yep. Nope, you're completely correct, I agree. Alright, well...39:47 Darren: Alright.39:47 Aaron: Thanks everybody. That concludes another episode. Hopefully, we've had about three, four weeks between our last one, just because of, as we touched upon travels and conferences and everything else, hopefully Darren and I, in the next couple of weeks will be sinking again to get you out another episode of the SaaS venture. Please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter. We've had some questions in the past we love to answer listener questions, or topic ideas and if you have the time, leaving us a review in iTunes is super helpful, helps with the visibility of our podcast, as we continue to reach more 100 people and have more listeners interact with us. Love doing that.40:26 Darren: Alright, yeah, what Aaron said.40:29 Aaron: Have a good one, until we talk again, Darren.40:30 Darren: Yeah, we'll schedule another one and we'll talk again soon, thanks Aaron.40:34 Aaron: Alright. You bet. Keep your beer away from your laptop and we'll talk soon.40:38 Darren: I will. Okay bye.40:39 Aaron: Alright. See you everybody.

After purchasing his practice the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Dr. Leonard Tau solely used the power of the internet to help grow his new patient base and went against the traditional way of marketing one's dental office . He lectures nationally and internationally on internet marketing, social media and reputation marketing and its ability to make your dental office more visible and credible. He is also the General Manager of the Dental Division for Birdeye a reputation marketing platform and founder of iSocial Digital a consulting firm that helps dentists develop a comprehensive online marketing plan. His content rich, engaging seminars allow him to bring his first hand experiences to his audiences. Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Dr. Leonard Tau DMD is a Dentist, Consultant, Speaker and Practice owner. Few professionals within the dental industry have the level of expertise, knowledge, and passion for the field. He has traveled the country educating dental professionals to help them succeed in growing their practice, reigniting their passion for dentistry and navigating the fast-changing nature of the job.

There are several ways to gather client feedback and testimonials. In this episode, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of each way. We’ll talk about the best tools to use, and the optimal form questions for getting great feedback answers AND testimonials in a single survey. Links to resources mentioned Book: The Ultimate Question 2.0, by Fred Reichheld: Outline of Discussion (PDF) Survey Monkey form I discussed Birdeye (online review service) Podium (online review service) Our Sponsor: Ruby Receptionists Ruby is a virtual receptionist service that provides all of your law firm's callers with first-class service. I used them for my solo practice and they were phenomenal in helping me surprise and delight my callers. I've been enthusiastically recommending Ruby to hundreds of lawyers and they also have been amazed by the quality of service and its affordability. To learn more about Ruby Receptionists’ exceptional services (and get a special discount for podcast listeners only) click here. Want My Guidance? Here are some ways I can help your practice: My flagship course: LawFirm Autopilot: A Simple Guide For Creating a Profitable & Fulfilling Practice That Virtually Runs Itself. My Co-Pilot program —ongoing guidance from me and other key consultants that I completely trust (and also from similarly-situated attorneys with solo & small firm practices). My VIP Fast-Track program —personalized, one-on-one coaching from me.  

Dr. Leonard Tau is a practicing Dentist, renown speaker, and heads up the Dental Division of Birdeye. Did we mention that he's an expert on Online Reviews and how to manage the digital minefield we call Online Reputation? Dr. Leonard Tau jumped into the online review world by creating his own platform (iSocial Reviews) and now with Birdeye (the leader in online review acquisition). Join Glenn and Vinh as they talk to Dr. Tau about topics ranging from being mistaken for a Chinese guy and his for Pat's Cheesesteaks. Notes of Interest *Dr. Leonard Tau has a FFS practice in Philadelphia *His office is haunted by the spirit of the previous Dentist owner *The presence of the spirit was confirmed by Ghost Hunters *Dr. Tau created iSocial Reviews an Online Review Platform *iSocial Reviews was bought out by Birdeye *Birdeye is the leader in Online Review Acqusition *Dr. Tau is in charge of the Dental Division of Birdeye *He is a renown speaker on the topic of Online Reviews *Due to his unique name, he is commonly mistaken for a Chinese guy *Nifty Thrifty Deal for Birdeye – $2,000 annually which translates to $167 per month!! *(Must sign up for Birdeye through Dr. Tau to get the Nifty Deal!) *Mango voice VOIP – Ask for the Nifty Thrifty Deal (20% off ALL phones, Free Fax, Free Mobile App) Links Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence – http://philadelphiapa.dentist/ Birdeye – https://birdeye.com/ Dr. Leonard Tau Speaker Profile- https://www.dentalspeakersbureau.com/speaker/leonard-tau/ Mango Voice – https://mangovoice.com/ Pat's Cheeesteak Sandwiches – http://www.patskingofsteaks.com/ Acknowledgements The Tonight Show is property of NBC The Ellen Show is property of Sony Pictures Television What Happened to That Boy is property of Birdman

Sam Mallikarjunan is Head of Marketing at BirdEye.com, a SaaS startup enabling small businesses to win at online marketing by leverage their most powerful content of all -- their happy customers. Sam is the former Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs and has taught Advanced Digital Marketing at Harvard University as well as Innovation Management and Marketing Analytics right here at the University of South Florida. With his energetic approach as a digital marketing instructor for multiple universities, Sam strives to provide students with a curriculum focused on frameworks for building modern growth engines. As a consultant, he brings an outsider's fresh perspective to guide seasoned teams to identify areas of opportunity and develop specific plans with attainable goals. Sam is also co-author of the book How To Sell Better Than Amazon which is, thanks to the publisher, ironically available for purchase on Amazon. What you'll learn about in this episode: How Sam's career path led him to his current position as the head of marketing at BirdEye Sam shares the amazing story of his unconventional application to his previous employer, HubSpot Why Sam chose to leave his great job with HubSpot because he felt he "had it way too easy" What defining moments in Sam's life shaped his career path and his personal drive to succeed Sam's thoughts on the controversial Nike marketing campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick How hunger and desperation caused Sam to buy a "$36 burrito" before he found financial freedom Why Sam wrote and shares an article, "A Horrendous Record of Failures You Won't Find on My Resume" Why Sam values the mistakes he's made throughout his career and the lessons he learned because of them How Sam began helping Syrian refugees go into business selling their own handmade crafts Why Sam attributes his successful career to developing the skills of simplification and focus Additional resources: Website: www.mallikarjunan.com Website: www.birdeye.com Twitter: @Mallikarjunan LinkedIn:www.linkedin.com/in/mallikarjunan/  

On this episode, I speak with Sam Mallikarjunan about online reputation management and how healthcare patients have more choice when it comes to who will be treating them than ever before. We touch on consumerism in healthcare, medical practices as feedback systems and the power of voice online.   Produced by Dennis Yoo and Daniel Kivatinos. Hosted by Oleg Koujikov.

Dr. Leonard Tau is the founder of the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence. He is also the General Manager of the Dental Division for Birdeye, a reputation marketing platform, and founder of iSocial Digital, a consulting firm that helps dentists develop a comprehensive online marketing plan. Dr. Tau is a consultant, speaker, practice owner and podcaster.  

In this episode, we hear from the CMO of BirdEye, former marketing genius at HubSpot and cigar & scotch aficionado… this guy has quite a story. Lucky for me, I've been a part of his story for about 7 years now. Today, Sam Mallikarjunan shares with The Storytellers Network his storytelling craft, his passion for story and more… in other words, HIS story.Sam's story include world travel as a professional speaker, traveling the United States in a van with his bride, and experimental marketing at sales giant HubSpot. The power of Sam's story is the impact of the stories he's had the privilege of hearing. Sometimes the pwoer of story is all in the perspective.“I was in Pakistan at a conference, talking to an entrepreneur. He told me ‘I used to leave the house everyday not knowing if I would make it home to my wife. I think I can handle the stress of pitching to investors.' That's a short story… but wow.” - Sam Mallikarjunan on the power of perspective

What is the single most effective - and least expensive marketing channel - available to all businesses? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, BirdEye Head of Marketing Sam Mallikarjunan shares why your customers are your best marketing channel and how BirdEye is developing a platform designed to help businesses leverage trust - via customer evangelism - at scale.  From his year's spent as "the face of HubSpot" to teaching marketing at Harvard to taking over marketing for BirdEye, a martech SaaS startup, Sam has gathered fascinating insights into what it takes to build a high growth business and the role that marketing plays in that process. Listen to the podcast to hear Sam's thoughts on leveraging customers for your marketing and to learn more about his plans for marketing BirdEye. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and today, my guest is Sam Mallikarjunan, who is the Head of Marketing for BirdEye. Welcome, Sam. Sam Mallikarjunan (guest): Thanks for having me. Sam and I recording this episode Kathleen: I'm excited to speak with you. You told me that this is going to be your first podcast since joining BirdEye, so I'm really excited to dig in and learn a little bit more about it and share that with the audience, but also talk about some of the things you've learned throughout your career because you have a really interesting background with many years at HubSpot, and you're doing some teaching now. I have a lot of questions that I want to ask you! Sam: I'm looking forward to it. It's been a weird ride, so we can go in whatever direction you want. Kathleen: Great. Well, why don't we start by having you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and your background, and how you wound up where you are today. Sam: Sure. So my name is Sam Mallikarjunan. If you can't pronounce it, you can Google anything even close to it and you'll generally find me. For seven years, I worked at HubSpot, which if your listeners don't know, is a software company based out of Boston. For the last three or so years, I was teaching the advanced digital marketing course at Harvard University. And then for all of last year, as we discussed before we started recording, I lived in a van, both teaching at Harvard, and then also I was HubSpot's full time speaker. So I spoke in 49 US states and about eight other countries last year on a range of topics: innovation, and innovation marketing management, et cetera, marketing strategy. (to learn more about Sam's adventures traveling the world and living in a van, check out the "Sam from the Van" Facebook page) So now, however, what people thought would never happen is happening. They used to joke that we could change my name to "Sam from HubSpot," so that people didn't have to say Mallikarjunan. But no, I have left. I have left and taken over as Head of Marketing at birdeye.com, which is based in Dallas. So I'm moving from Tampa to Dallas, and I'm really, really, really excited because it feels ... First of all, we share some board members with HubSpot, so it's kind of similar in that way. But second of all, it feels like HubSpot did back in the early days. So I'm very, very excited. Kathleen: Oh that's great. So true confession, both times I've heard you say, "I lived in a van," in my head what comes up is Chris Farley. And I want to say, "Was it down by the river?" Sam: Many times it was down by a river. We posted on Instagram, everybody got their joke, ha ha ha, very funny. Kathleen: I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard someone say that. I'm not super original in that. Sam: In fact, if you bust out, "Do you like green eggs and ham," based on my name, between those two jokes, you'll have hit about 50% of the recurring jokes that I've heard in my life. Kathleen: Oh, I didn't even think of that. Sam: Yeah. Kathleen: Alright. Well, fascinating kind of journey to where you are. Can you share what was it that prompted you to leave HubSpot after so many years? Because you were there for a long time, and I mean, when I hear what you've been doing - you were Head of Experimental Marketing, you were the full time speaker - I mean some of those gigs sound like dream jobs. What got you to move on? Sam: So here's the weird thing about dream jobs, is that once you do it long enough, it becomes work again. And then also, I had an enormous privilege being at HubSpot and getting to work with and under some incredible people. HubSpot was the same size when I joined it as BirdEye is now, but I always had Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders. I had Mike Volpe, the former CMO, Kipp Bodnar, the current CMO ... I always had them to fall back on, right? It was never ... There was always a limit to how much damage I could actually do to the long term success of the company. HubSpot's huge now. I think it crossed the five billion dollar market cap rate, 2300 employees and something like seven or eight global offices. It's absolutely huge and to be honest, I could have spent the rest of my life at HubSpot and been absolutely happy. But what I wanted to see is if I could do it if I didn't have Volpe, and Kipp, and everybody else to fall back on. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: So now I'm the Head of Marketing for a company that's the size that HubSpot was when I joined it, and if I fail I have nobody to blame but myself. HubSpot's always had this role where if you have good trust with your manager you should be able to tell your manager when you think it's time to move on. So Kipp, and Dharmesh, and everybody always said that to me, "If you eventually want to leave the company, let us know and we'll help you find something awesome." And so I did, about six months ago I told them that, "Hey, I really want to try and do this on my own." So I had a freelancer make me a list of 144 different start-ups in the U.S., post-Series-B, pre-IPO, either MarTech SaaS, blockchain or AI. I shortlisted those into three categories of pretty cool, really cool, and insanely cool. And then I got introductions, and feedback, and everything else from my bosses, from the people on the Executive Team. From those 144, I chose BirdEye. Kathleen: That's amazing actually. I mean, it says a lot, first of all, for HubSpot's culture that they've created an environment where you can go and feel safe saying basically, "I'm mentally getting ready to leave." That's a scary proposition for anybody, but I think it's wonderful that that environment exists there.  Sam: It's good both ways, right? Because it's a good retention mechanism. So I have turned down two formal CMO offers in the last several years, and many, many more opportunities and it's because they've made me really snobby. I would look at it and I would be like, "I bet Brian, and Dharmesh, and Kipp, between us we could find something even better." So it was never a surprise to them, it always gave them an opportunity to move me internally. Almost every time you see a job in the last five years that I've moved internally at HubSpot on my LinkedIn profile it's because Sam was thinking about leaving, and we figured out a way to make it better for me to stay. And, obviously, it's good for the employee, right? Probably the most interesting opportunities in my professional career was a couple months ago. I'm literally sitting at breakfast with my boss, texting back and forth with my new boss negotiating comp. Most people hide the fact that they're looking for a new job from their boss? My boss helped me negotiate comp. Which is good, because I had never heard of things like single option triggers and stuff like that. Kathleen: Yeah. That's amazing and it's also really smart on the part of the employer because, especially if you're talking about key personnel. I mean, really in the technology space any personnel it seems like is key, but particularly someone like yourself who's been there so long. You're the kind of person who's hard to replace, and so having that ramp or that runway to know that you're ready for that departure as an employer is really great as well. Such an interesting process that you went through. What an incredible opportunity to get introductions - warm introductions - to all those companies. Now you have me dying to learn more about BirdEye because I want to know what it is about this company that made it the one, right? I feel like you were on The Bachelor and there are all these companies handing you roses and you chose this one. Sam: Yeah. So first off, you're right. They functionally got six month's notice, so it was a little sad actually, by the time I left they no longer needed me because they had a replacement. So I didn't have that ... you know. I don't know, it was both good and bad. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Yeah, so BirdEye. There was a couple of things I was looking for, right? One was I wanted to work for a company where solving the problem was meaningful. What I loved about HubSpot in the early days was inbound marketing felt right. You know? The way the world was was that you made money by pissing people off. I used to train ... Those annoying people in the mall who try and sell you cell phones? I used to train them, so that was my background. But it felt wrong. I was never happy about it, the work that I was doing. Inbound marketing felt right. You should be able to build a big, profitable business off of creating an experience that people love on the internet and in all of your market. What I love about BirdEye was that it felt right too, which is - the website we're still working on, clarifying our value propositions - but the way that I think about it is if you're a world class dentist, or a lawyer, or autobody repair shop, or whatever, you should not also have to be a world class internet marketing professional. You should be able to just be good at your job and empower your customers with a framework that's going to help you grow your business. Obviously the opposite is true, which is that if you ask your local mechanic how they feel about the local big dealerships, they're going to say the work is subpar and overpriced. Same thing if you asked most dentists, or lawyers, or whatever the small business is. So I loved that bit of it, where every day I come into work, my team comes into work, the better we do our jobs, the closer we are towards shifting the world of business the way that it should be. I also just like it too because I love things that are unfair advantages that really irritate large entrenched companies. So for a hundred years functionally, the business growth has been about, "Can my Sales and Marketing team beat up your Sales and Marketing team? Can we just sell better than you?" In this day and age, I think as we've seen with companies like United, right - great Sales and Marketing team at United - but if you piss off the customers there's no defense from that anymore. Kathleen: Oh yeah. Sam: Right? So it's not this marginal battle anymore. Companies like BirdEye came and flipped the table over and it says that, "My community of empowered community fans can just obliterate your Sales and Marketing team." That's what I loved about it. So it was the mission, it was the brand. I mean, it's a MarTech SaaS company with executives that I love and it's a very comfortable fit. But for me, I wanted to do what Brian and Dharmesh and Mike did for inbound marketing, which is create that movement. I wanted to do that for what I honestly think ... We haven't finished defining it yet, but this has got to be the next wave in growth, right? The only thing that matters about you is how empowered customers are that like you. Because you don't want the only empowered customers to be the ones that don't like you. Kathleen: You know, it really resonated because you talk about doctors, and dentists, and lawyers, and people like that. I owned an agency for 11 years and I had many of them as clients, and the best campaigns we did - in fact we won HubSpot's first ever Client Campaign of the Year award back in 2015 for work we did for a LASIK eye surgeon. The reason it was so successful is, it was kind of like what you're talking about mixed with a little dash of influencer marketing. We found a guy that happened to have a really strong Facebook presence, and out of nothing but dumb luck figured out that he wore glasses, would love to have LASIK. We paired him up with a doctor, they agreed to do the surgery at no cost if he would just blog and talk about his experience, good, bad, or otherwise, there was no requirement that it could only be positive. He had a great experience; he went and vlogged, and blogged, and just spoke to his audience about it and that campaign far and away crushed anything else we've ever done. Especially with things like healthcare and attorneys, you really trust your friends and those people in your network so much more than you trust an e-book, because we did plenty of those too. But it wasn't the e-book that killed it for us, it was this guy telling his story and personally endorsing the doctor and the procedure that was the lightening in a bottle. So I can totally see how that's so important. Sam: Yeah, now the question is, can you do that 100,000 times, right? Kathleen: Right? Sam: Especially for local marketing, there's not always local influencers who you go to to determine what dentist you go to. For dentists it's funny, it's the old joke, it's a cliché. It's, "What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? You call them doctor." Kathleen: Right. Sam: So the only way that I, as a patient, or whatever, can tell the difference between Dr. A and Dr. B is what their patients say about them online. And yeah, we trust them way more than what people say about themselves. I think the other thing that's changed is the passionate relationship we have with certain brands. It feels new. I don't have data on this, but it feels super new. I love using Uber as an example, because Uber in 2011 was banned by the state of Massachusetts for 23 hours. It's the fastest I've ever seen government move. And it's not because Uber had a bunch of lobbyists then like they do now, it's because ... We literally got a phone call from the mayor of Boston's office at the HubSpot office asking us to stop slamming them on Twitter. It was a decision by the governor's office, not the mayor's office, and we just didn't know that. Uber got hundreds of people to show up to the Cambridge City Council meeting, which is used to a dozen or so people showing up. When I see that and I see things like what happened with United, or I see things both good and bad, communities of customers rising to your defense, or communities of customers tearing you down, there's something there. Kathleen: Oh, it's incredibly powerful. I was going to say Uber is a study in and of itself of both dynamics, like how it can go well and how it can go not so well. You said a word that I think is so important, which is trust. You know, one of my colleagues at IMPACT is Marcus Sheridan. I've seen him speak numerous times and he has this one thing he always says that I find so powerful, which is that, "Every company is in the same business, whether you're Uber selling rides, or you're McDonald's selling hamburgers, or whether you're HubSpot selling software." When you boil it down, they're really selling trust, because if somebody can't trust you they're not going to buy from you. Just like my campaign, even though we had an influencer, it's really no different than if I go on Facebook and ask my friends. It's about who do I trust, who's opinion do I trust? So it sounds like what you're building is something that helps you leverage trust at scale. Sam: I like that, "Leverage trust at scale." Kathleen: There you go, you can put that on the website. Sam: When I teach at Harvard there's a metaphor I like to use, which is about how all economists, of which business is a subset, of which marketing is a subset, have physics envy, right? In physics, I can drop this pen a hundred times out of a hundred, and it's going to fall and hit the ground. I can stand in Harvard Square handing out a hundred $1 bills and at least 20 people will make the irrational decision, they'll call me a "chowda head" and keep walking, right? We work in a profession where it's not this simple, "If this, then that, zero in one binary value," marketing is a social science, economics and all of business is a social science and the definition of social science is, "A science about which we are very uncertain." Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: The most important variable, by far, is exactly what you said, which is that trust. That's what separates us from all of the other professional disciplines, is our dentists, or lawyers, right? Whatever, they know there's something objectively true that they can work against. We have to work in an environment where that's never the case, things are always changing. The one constant is it doesn't matter how compelling the argument is, or how cheap it is, or how cool it is, whatever, if there's no trust that's the deal breaker. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Fell out of your hand while I'm standing in the square. Kathleen: Yeah. So, I would love it if you could talk a little bit about how you see this playing out for companies, whether these are dental practices, law firms, any other type of company in terms of trying to leverage trust at scale. What does that really look like and how does that manifest in terms of a company's marketing? And you using that at all with BirdEye or planning to use it at all? Sam: Yeah, well first of all, you should always drink your own champagne, eat your own dog food, whatever metaphor you want to use, so we definitely are ... That's really important to us because people want to buy from a company that sells to people like them. So we're not done with this yet, but you'll notice that soon, if you come to the BirdEye website from one of our dental ad campaigns it's all going to show you reviews and stories of dentists versus lawyers, right? That would be very different. I will say one of the cool things, again, about how this is like HubSpot was in the early days is you remember how easy blogging was back in 2011? 2010? Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: I mean, it was great. If you had a blog, you were light years ahead of the curve, right? If you were blogging frequently, you would win your market, right? I had a toenail fungus remover company, I had knee scooters, I had mortgage companies, if you just did the work, you'd be fine and absolutely crush it. Now that's really hard, growing your traffic, your acquisition engine off of blogging is really, really hard because it's a very crowded space. The good thing about reputation marketing, reviews, and leveraging your customer base like that is almost universally everyone is really bad at it.  The large companies, like T-Mobile sends me an NPS survey, right, which is one way to begin the conversation about leaving a review, and whenever a company does it I always give them a zero because I know I'm not going to mess with their data that bad. I want to see if there's follow up. If I send you a zero ... If I send you a 10, right, yes, I'm absolutely going to recommend you, you should send me a link. Say, "Hey, here's an easy way to do that." Kathleen: Right. Sam: If I send you a zero, I would expect that a company would have that mentality of following up with me to find out way. Almost no one does. T-Mobile, Verizon... you know, as much as I hate to admit, even at HubSpot it was still a very basic implementation of no, somebody gave you a bad NPS score whether or not they'd get a follow up. You know, if you do it at all, you're going to be in good shape. Asking your customers for reviews is still innovative as weird as that sounds. We don't feel that way because we see everybody moving in this direction. You and I see lots of people are talking about this sort of thing, but the vast majority of businesses and the vast majority of markets don't even ask their customers for reviews. If their customers say something negative, they don't follow up, and if their customers say something positive they don't use that in any way. They don't put it in their email. They don't put it on their website, they don't put it in their ads, so the- Kathleen: Why do you think that is? Sam: Well, you know, the bell curve of adoption, right? So you've always got the people who are the innovators and the early adopters who are going to try everything just because it's new, and they're worried about being second place, and you know, we just haven't got there with some of the technologies and behaviors that are new. Stuff like Bird Eye is new. How important reviews are may not feel new, but it's relatively new to the world of business. It's not been around for 30 years. The underlying concepts have, but the websites - Yelp hasn't been around for 30 years sort of thing. The other thing is that, you know, if you've read 'The Innovator's Dilemma' by Clayton Christensen it's a really great book. I have a different concept of the innovator's dilemma, which is that it's really, really easy to be innovative when things are going well, because you have lots of breathing room. It's really, really easy to be innovative when things are going really poorly. So like, when I first applied to HubSpot I didn't apply. I built hiremeHubSpot.com and ran ads targeting people who worked at HubSpot to register for the free webinar on why you should hire me. It's because I was a college drop out with no previous experience, so you know, when you have no chance of success it's easy to be innovative. It's the middle area where things are going okay, but if you mess up they could go off the rails really quickly where it's hard to be innovative, and that's where most of the world of small business is right now. You know, if you're a dentist or a lawyer, auto repair shop, whatever, you're running on pretty thin margins. You're having to fight pretty hard to get your customers. You're already behind the curve, because you don't know the highly technical things, like local SEO and PPC. You generally don't have a sophisticated understanding of the marketing engine behind that, and you don't have the luxury to be innovative, so that's, again, one of the things I loved about Bird Eye was we try and take some of the hard work out of that and make it a little more attainable. Kathleen: So focusing on reviews for a second, because that seems like it's a big part of this, you know, you want to get a customer to review you, and I've worked with different companies and talked to them about this, and you know, some of the times it seems like they don't do it because they're just afraid to ask. Other times, they don't know how to ask, so can you talk about what is the right way to ask for a review? How do you navigate that process in a way that doesn't seem too pushy and doesn't seem like you're placing too much of a burden on the customer? Sam: I mean, so NPS, the net promoter score, is sort of an easy cheat, because it asks on a scale of zero to 10 how likely are you to refer us to a friend or colleague. If they give you a zero through six you should follow up immediately, right? Sevens and eights are passives, and nines and 10s are promoters. You would really only tell the people who would give you a nine or a 10, "Hey, that's awesome. I'm glad you were happy. Can you share your story with the world?" Then, everybody who's less than that you would put them into a service remediation process, right? Just send a text message to the business owner or whatever you want to do to follow up with this customer because they're unhappy. I definitely think you're right, which is that people are somewhat afraid of the answer, because it is, especially for small businesses, highly personal. This is ... I put my blood, my sweat, and my money, and my risk and everything into this business that I built, and then to actively solicit anybody to say anything negative about it is hard. It's a hard thing to do emotionally. There's a humility in that, which is that you've got to know that you're never going to be perfect, and as we say here it's not about being the best. It's about being the best at getting better. We have a tool that tells you all of the things that your customers hate in a market. You can look at it just by your company or you can look at it by your entire industry. Kathleen: Oh, that's really interesting. Like if you're a dentist, is it the anonymized aggregate feedback from all the dental- Sam: Yeah. Cool thing about our industry is most of the data set we're working with is public, so I call it our blue ocean finder for the business strategy nerds who are listening to the podcast, because you can literally plot what's important to my customers and which competitors are bad at that? You can adjust your strategy accordingly. Also, on the more micro level you can say what's important to my customers that I'm bad at? What's important to my customers that I'm good at? Then, you make the decision. Do I fix the things that I'm bad at or do I stop doing those things entirely, or what, right? The exact same process you'd follow going through a blue ocean strategy canvas. Yeah, it's about listening but not just about hearing, right? It's actually listening and making change based on that. Kathleen: And what industries do you currently have that for? Sam: So the really good ones for us so far, the people who have been willing to take a risk, are people like dentists and lawyers and auto body repair shops. We're working on our own buyer persona exercise right now, so you'll forgive me. I don't have a nice "Marketing Mary" to show you like we had at HubSpot. The key variables for us are people who their customers don't want to be their customer, so like divorce lawyer, collision repair shops, etc. People for whom differentiation is very difficult, like dentists. And then people for whom the consequences of the decision are extremely severe, right? Kathleen: Surgeons. Sam: Surgeons. Well, wedding venues, that sort of thing, right? You mess that up you can't get that back, right? Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: So those are generally the three psychographic categories of businesses that we're looking at right now. Kathleen: Interesting. So for example, if I were to go on and I wanted to get that industry-wide view of what customers are and are not happy with, could I get that right now for marketing agencies for example or is there a certain pick list I need to choose from? Sam: I don't know if we have marketing agency ... We should. We have advertising and media as one of our categories in our database, but we're a startup, so you know exactly what that means- Kathleen: Oh yeah. Sam: -which is that odds are all of the data exists. It's just a question of if anybody has asked that question before. That'd be a fun follow up to do for the podcast.  Kathleen: I mean, I have a feeling I know the answer, but you know, you can't assume. It would be interesting to look. I'd love to play around with that at some point, so if you ever want a beta tester for agencies, you know who to call. Sam: Absolutely. Yeah. Kathleen: I think that kind of competitive intelligence is really interesting, and one of the things you said really struck me, which is that it's not just about understanding how to change your messaging and your marketing. You could truly use that to make very fundamental decisions about your product offering, your service offering, what you want to do as a company, you know? Do we cut certain services because we're just never going to be great at it and it's a huge pain point? There are some really interesting potential in terms of how that data can be used. Sam: We haven't even begun to tap into this, but you're right. It's the lipstick on a pig. If you're changing your sales and marketing but not changing who you really are, in 2018 you're going to be found out, and you're going to be found out because your customers are going to sell you out hard. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: They're going to hop on Google, Facebook, and everything else like that and tell people that your marketing does not match up with the customer experience. I will say man, you're getting me excited here, because it is super fascinating. You know, when we think about the world of disruptive innovation and - forgive me for the Harvard jargon terms here, right - but you think about things like the extendable core, which is what's the thing that a business should lean on to survive the disruption of its market? The classic example here is, like, hotels, right? Have you ever stayed in an Airbnb? Kathleen: Oh yeah. Sam: Yeah, have you ever attended a conference in an Airbnb? Kathleen: No. Sam: Yeah, right? So there's some things that Airbnb simply can't do without adopting the same cost structure. Turns out they're really important. So business travelers, there's a reason Airbnb's never really nailed business travel. It's because of the standardization. You can look at what is important to the customers who are leaving me and what is important to the customers who are staying around? You can look at some of those mappings, and you know, if I'm Marriott hotel group right now, I'm not actually worried about spending too much time solving for the destination vacation traveler, right? I'm really focused on events. I'm focused on business travel. I landed here in Palo Alto at 12:30 in the morning, didn't matter. I walked into the Sheraton. I know exactly what the lobby looks like even though I've never been to this hotel. That's what I value. I don't have to think about it. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. Sam: So yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a lot of interesting data that can come from the fact that we now have the ability to listen to our customers at scale and make decisions. Kathleen: I'm always struck by how many companies have that information - like have it in their hands, not just have access to it, but have been given it - and don't do anything with it. Sam: Most of them. Kathleen: Yeah, it's kind of shocking actually. Sam: So this is going to sound super weird I guess, but I don't work at HubSpot anymore, so I'm allowed to say nice things about them. HubSpot was so humble by the way that we never felt comfortable bragging about ourselves. You know, in DC they have the beltway syndrome, right? Everybody in DC thinks everybody else in the world sees things the way people in DC do. At HubSpot we had "sprocket syndrome," which is we thought everybody in the world was just as sophisticated in their concepts of economics and growth and business as we were, which isn't true, right? You know, things are changing so fast. What was the Deloitte research? The average life span of a knowledge stock, a competitive piece of information like a knowledge that you own, is down to like five years. Whatever it is you own that you're basing your business on, much less your career on, you can expect to be a differentiator for something like five years as opposed to we literally used to name our families after what we did. You were Smith, you were a Wainright, you made wagons, whatever. Now, it's like you can't even name your company after what you do, right? Like you know, it's hard to even have a job title after what you do, because everything changes so fast. The mechanisms for perpetual learning and keeping up with all of that, I just don't think most professionals and definitely most businesses haven't figured out. Kathleen: Yeah, you know, it's so funny that you just said that about the pace of change, because as I was telling you before we started, I just came back from a two week vacation, and I'm going to fly my geek flag now. On vacation, I decided to read 'Becoming Steve Jobs'. There's probably a lot I could have read, but for some reason I was really into that. And you know, I lived through the whole evolution of Apple. I'm old enough that I was working pre-Apple, but yet I had forgotten how quickly all of that happened - how we went from we didn't even have personal computers to "wow, we have a laptop," to "oh my gosh, now we have a little music player and iTunes," and then "we have phones that are full screen and tablets." I mean, rereading it was really both exciting but also kind of frightening. I have an 11 year old, and all I could think was "wow, I just have no idea what the future holds for him when I read this book." It's true. When I think about any business, you know, my company that I used to own, we were EOS practitioners, the entrepreneurial operating system, and they talk about having your long term plan. I don't know how you could ever have more than a ... You could have a three year plan, but it's going to change dramatically, right? I don't even know how you could have a five year plan anymore. It used to be when I graduated from business school it was all about the rolling five year plan. I just think that would be a piece of fiction today if I created it. Sam: Yeah. There's somebody ... I don't remember who it is. They had this great graphic of the pace of change, and if you went back to 10,000 BC you could bring somebody forward in time to 5,000 BC before they saw something that fundamentally challenged their world view, and then 5,000 BC, okay, to 2,000 BC and then 2,000 BC to zero BC. You're starting to see some innovation. Zero BC to like 1,000 BC, very different world. 1000 BC to 1500 - hugely different world, and now if you brought somebody from the early 1900s to just 100 years later it's nuts. If you brought somebody even just from the 60s or the 70s- Kathleen: Totally. Sam: -right just with no context, they saw everything new, this is dark magic, right? It's incredible. That pace of change is accelerating, and the virtue of planning is being replaced by the virtue of adaptability. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: It is not nearly as important to me. When I'm interviewing people, for example, it's not nearly as important to me for most roles whether or not you have deep domain experience. What matters to me is your ability to comprehend new concepts that you've never studied before and your ability to adapt to change, because you know, it's a cliché that the only constant is change, but that used to be true, and now it is not only true, it is the defining characteristic of what life is for all of us. If you can't be adaptable, if you can't wrap your mind around concepts that you've never even been presented with before, you're not going to survive - definitely not in the world of business. Kathleen: Yeah, and the other fascinating thing that came out of me reading that book was Steve Jobs talked about how there's a difference between people who are focused on improving what already exists - which he kind of looked at as the Microsoft model - and seeing what doesn't exist but what is fundamentally needed. That's what obviously he saw as the Apple model. It's a really interesting construct if you think about it, because if you're only working off of the existing reality and looking to improve it, you can only experience change so quickly, whereas if you kind of forget about the reality and are able to think about what's not here that should be, all of a sudden you get these leaps and bounds that start to happen. That's a tough ask for a lot of people though. I don't think there's a large percentage of people that are comfortable in that realm. Sam: Yeah, I mean, if you do what everyone else does you get what everyone else gets sort of thing, right? Again, it's one of the reasons I loved this company is, for a century it's sales and marketing versus sales and marketing team, and now it's we're flipping the table and doing something new. I think part of that is the way that we grow up, right? We grow up not learning how to think but learning what to think. It's this graded progression, right? It's still amazing to me when people come out of college and they come into their first role and there's all these stereotypes about them needing positive feedback. That's because that's how they were raised, right? Like "I do the thing, and then I get this" - it's an "If this then that" sort of world. Kathleen: Everyone gets a trophy. Sam: Yeah, I study ... Not everybody just getting a trophy, but it's even the high performers, the exceptionally good people were told that the way to be exceptionally good, okay, you study, you take the test, you get an A, and then the assumption was you get a job, which everybody who's graduated college in the last five years knows that's not true. You know, and now we live in a fundamentally different world where we have to take everybody who grew up in that universe and teach them something new. We also need to start teaching our kids and future generations it is not about knowing the thing. It's about knowing the way to think and knowing new ways to think and processing it that way. When I'm in an argument at a bar, it's not a question of whether or not I can figure out who was batting for the Red Sox in the 1986 World Cup or something like that. I can just ask my phone that. What matters way more is that I know that I should ask that question and why that question's important. Some of the stuff, it's not as clear. It's not this logical, linear progression. Kathleen: Yeah, man, that makes parenting sound more intimidating. Sam: It is. I don't have kids, but good luck, right? Kathleen: I'm not convinced I'm doing a great job, so ... No. It's a lot to think about, and it's pretty overwhelming, but love the philosophical bent that this conversation took, because this is all really important stuff, and it's easy to sink into just talking about tactics, because marketers love that, and it's easy to say, “Oh, give me a 10 point checklist of the things I should do to be successful,” but a lot of times the reality really is it's not a 10 point checklist, it's take a step back and think differently. Sam: For everyone listening to this, if you ever come across a blog article that says "here's exactly what you need to do," that means that it has been codified to the point, like "10 steps to do whatever," it has been codified to the point that everybody else in your industry knows it too. Right? This is why it's valuable, because it's hard. It's because it's not clearly defined. I can't just write a roadmap for you, I don't even have a name for this movement, yet. Right? What's my inbound marketing? We haven't figured that out yet, but I can tell you it's important, and you and I know intuitively we believe that it's important, and the people who are going to grow by leaps and bounds, 10-X, 100-X, are going to be people who work with people like you and me to figure that out, not the people who wait to, you know, AOL still makes what, 20 million a year, or something like that off of their dial up internet subscription? Those sorts of people are not going to be the ones who are going to figure this stuff out, and are going to make that big change. Kathleen: Unless everything old is new again, and dial up comes back just like record players did. Kidding. You have all these years of really interesting experience at HubSpot. I mean, you were with other companies before that. You've been in marketing roles for a very long time, you taught marketing at Harvard. You're coming into this role at BirdEye, I would love to just hear a little bit about what are you planning to do with BirdEye, what's in your roadmap that you think is going to really help you achieve the goals that you set out? BirdEye's Marketing Roadmap Sam: Yeah. This isn't like the cool thing to say, but what matters most is the fundamental mechanics, right? We have to execute consistently over time. We have to build a team that's aligned very closely with an inside sales team. That's why I'm moving to Dallas, by the way, that's where most of the sales team is, even though we have a Palo Alto office. I'm building the marketing team where the sales team is. We've got to measure the right things. We've got to train and empower folks. We got to build just the disciplined cadence. That sounds easy. That is not easy, right? Making sure that people are aligned. Making sure that people can execute. Making sure that the right people are on the bus, because there are some people at this company, and at all companies who help them get from zero dollars to the run rate they're at now. But the people who are going to help you get from $30 million dollars to $300 million dollars are not necessarily the same people, and the people who are going to help you get from $30 million to $300 billion dollars, are not necessarily the same people. Making that transition smooth, making sure that you're recruiting people who are good fits, that's all the basics, right? The next thing that I wanted to do is this is a community play. We have to build a movement here. We have to build something like inbound marketing. It was such a moment of pride for me, it was actually 2015 on Google Trends the phrase inbound marketing exceeded the phrase cold calling. Kathleen: Oh, that's awesome. Sam: We won. It was great. We need to figure that out. What that is on our end, and we need to... Again this is the innovators, the real innovator's dilemma, is things aren't going bad, but they're also, we're not like 10-Xing for no reason, so it's how do we make the time, and make sure that everybody on my team is carving out that bandwidth to do the things that for lack of a better term are end plus one, they're innovative. Right? How do we have a podcast that tells the story of peoples' favorite customers? So I used to host an AM talk radio show, AM/FM talk radio show about cigars, right? Kathleen: I was sniffing around online, and I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you once worked for a company called cheaphumidors.com, is that right? Do I have that right? Sam: Yeah. This was before that, but yeah. Kathleen: I totally wanted to ask you about that, but we'll do that in a separate conversation. Sam: This was before that, but every cigar lounge, like Cheap Humidors is another good example, but every cigar lounge in the country, I joke, has somebody named Rex who remembers Cuba before the revolution. He's usually a great guy to talk to, you can sit down and have great conversation, and what we are selling is that kernel, that relationship between the business owner and their favorite customer. That is just storytelling gold. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Right? We've really got to nail that. We've got to know the strategy better than everything else. On Cheap Humidors, by the way, don't judge me, because back then exact match domains were really important, so if you googled cheap humidors ... Kathleen: I was going to say it's probably a domain a lot of people would like to own. Sam: Yeah. Now, I mean, with RankBrain and everything it's more about the conceptual topic extraction from the search engines- Kathleen: Right. Sam: And stuff like that. You could call yourselves reallylowcosthumidors.com and somebody googles really low cost humidors they're not necessarily going to find you. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Marketing - it's hard. It used to be easy. Well, it used to be way easier. The problem is, is now we've got brilliant people, who their minds are working against yours, and you're really fighting, you know, at least if you're following the old sales and marketing team versus sales and marketing team you're following this optimization, this game of inches, sort of thing, and it's hard. I can't do seven eCommerce applications of LOLcats any more - it's one of my favorite articles I wrote. Kathleen: It's hard, but I've got to tell you, in some ways I think it's great for smaller businesses, because when it wasn't so hard, when you could game the search engines, you could basically buy your way to the top, and that favors people with deeper pockets. You could never compete against them. I feel like now, if you're willing to put in the elbow grease and really create awesome content, you have a shot, and that's a matter of time. Granted, time is always at a premium for everybody, but in some funny ways there's a little more of an even playing field than before, but I could be wrong about that. Sam: Not to sound too self promotional, but again there was a reason I chose to work for this company, all of the arch of history has bent - business history at least - has bent towards doing the right thing, being more profitable, right? You could never run a business model now based off of the horrible things that people used to do back in the day. The way they treated their workers, for example, much less the way they treated their customers, or their competitors. The cool thing is companies like Google - whether we like to admit it or not - have forced us to do better marketing. Doing the right thing is now good business. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: And that feels great, right? Because when I talk about T-Mobile, I could do that sales pitch in Spanish, even though I don't speak Spanish, right? Because it didn't matter. I didn't care what you were going to say back to me, you were either going to sign it or you're going to walk away, so it didn't matter to me that I understood what I was saying. I didn't feel good about that, right? It was just the best way to make money at the time. Now, like creating a good value-added inbound experience is the best way to make money, and that's again what I love about this company, which is the best way to make money should be being good at your job, like serving customers well, and I think all of the weight and inertia of the history of business is driving us towards this point, where whether it's Google, whether it's Yelp, whether it's Facebook, or whatever, you're going to have to solve that bit, or you're never going to succeed in business. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I want to ask you my favorite two questions that I ask everybody, because I think you've given me the perfect segue into it, and we've talked about how to be successful in business these days you have to right by your customers. When you think about the world of companies, and brands, and even individual marketers out there, my usual question is, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well, but I'm going to put a little twist on that, and say, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well by virtue of how they are kind of nurturing, and building, and leveraging that trust with the customer? Sam: Yeah. HubSpot does a good job, that's way to softball of an answer. You know what I really love, and this is one of my favorite business models in the world, is Netflix, because Netflix has scaled the relationship. I've rented more than 900 movies through Netflix, and I do that because I know that every time I give them that information, they're going to listen and use that to make my experience better. If the internet is about bringing together some of these groups of people with similar interests, Netflix does that beautifully, because it figures out, "Hey, listen, like you like Star Trek, I like Star Trek - people may not put the two of us next together on a demographics sheet, but Netflix will put us back together." The more information we give it, the more valuable that relationship becomes. I actually couldn't leave Netflix now, like let's say you launched your own streaming service for a $1.00 a month, I still wouldn't leave Netflix, because there's so much value in the history of that relationship that I have. They're probably my favorite from the customer delight, and customer retention perspective. From the actual using your customers to grow, Apple is still amazing, because there's three things you can never talk about at a party or at an office. Right? Politics, religion, and PC versus MAC, because no one can have a rational conversation about that, and - Kathleen: Or jiffy versus giffy, at least in our office. Sam: Whoa, that's true. You start talking about MAC, and the MAC fans will just like, they're so passionate, they're so ravenous. Right? And Apple actually does a pretty good job of leveraging those evangelists. So do companies like Uber. You know Uber grew enormously fast, because I told everybody to take Uber, you know, companies that did not have that like Lyft, Lyft started about the same time, if not slightly before Uber, but what they never nailed was that customer evangelism piece, and so that's why Uber managed to outgrow them. Those are some companies that I think do it right. Kathleen: Yeah. Those are great recommendations. You also touched on the fact that marketing is changing so quickly, and that you look for people who are able to keep pace with that change, and are able to embrace, and quickly learn and understand new concepts. Given that pace of change, how do you personally stay up to date, and educate yourself on everything that's happening in the world of digital marketing? Sam: Yeah. That is a difficult question, which unfortunately has a difficult answer, which is that we are, especially in this day and age, like our own businesses. My fathers generation, my grandfathers generation, could expect to work for one company their entire life, get a pension, and move on. We have to think about ourselves as businesses. We're generally not going to stay with the same company for our entire lives and then get a pension, and whatever, which we define ourselves that way. We have to start thinking about disruptive innovation the same way they do. There's a few core characteristics of that. One, is get ridiculously good at defining the value you bring. We call this the "jobs to be done framework." Henry Ford had the most famous quote, if he'd ask his customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.. Obviously he didn't found the Ford Horse Breeding Corporation. He founded the Ford Motor Company. Kathleen: That goes back to the Steve Job's thing- Sam: Yeah. Kathleen: Find the thing that's missing. Sam: Right now, if I asked my boss what he wants me to do, he's going to say, “Drive more leads for the sales team.” That's not really what it is. Right? That's not the value that I bring. The value that I bring is the coaching, and unique perspective, et cetera, so I have focused not on the tactics of marketing, but I'm focusing, and I'm ridiculously good at coaching, and ridiculously good at strategy, not, and that's sort of self disruption. That self disruption is the next piece, so you define your value, you need to be really, really paranoid. The best companies, like HubSpot Labs, for example, are those who are continually investing in testing whether or not they can provide more value for their customers than the core model. So the free version of HubSpot, right? For example, we knew somebody was going to do that eventually, and it might as well be us and not some random nerd out of MIT's basement who does it, don't fight, it's uncomfortable, but don't fight the change. Lean into that change, and be very, very, like... get comfortable with change. The value that I'm adding to business right now is probably not going to be, as you said, the value that I'm adding to five years, it's going to be something different. We have to be comfortable with that. Now, the flip side of that is adopting this mindset of continuous learning, which is, I hate when people ask me for book recommendations, because very rarely do I feel you have to read the entire book to get the point. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: And it's way more interesting to me to see specific blog articles, like send me the three most interesting blog articles that you've read in the last six months on recruiting marketers. You could probably do that, and that would take a shorter amount of my time, and add more value than you telling me to read random books on hiring. That self selection comes from joining communities, not from going and getting a degree, not from trying to read a book a day, or something like that, but from joining communities and asking those hard questions, and never being afraid to ask stupid questions. That is my greatest pet peeve. We saw this on inbound.org, so I ran Labs, which built inbound.org, HubSpot's community site, people never wanted to use our "Quora for Marketers" that we built because they were terrified of looking like they didn't already know the answer, those are the people who are going to find it very hard to have long successful careers. The fear of asking stupid questions is how company's are killed, the fear of asking stupid questions is also how careers are killed. Where to Find Sam (and BirdEye) Online Kathleen: Yeah. That's great advice. Wow. There is so much to think about, and this was really fun. I'm so glad I got to be the first person to talk to you about BirdEye, and excited to check it out myself, and hopefully learn a little bit more about what people do and do not like about marketing agencies. If somebody has a question, wants to followup with you, and learn more, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Sam: Again, if you Google anything close to my name you will find my website, my Twitter, my LinkedIn. I answer every website inquiry, every tweet, every LinkedIn message. Before you do that, if you're going to ask me for an opinion on something my one favor that I would ask you go check out the BirdEye website, and try to do something. I'm not trying to get you to buy here, what I want you to do, though, is play around with it, see what things break, see what things are interesting to you, and then let's talk about that, too. We're a startup just like HubSpot was back in the day. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a repeatable business model, so I want feedback from you all now that I don't have Kip and Volpe and Dharmesh and Halligan, and everybody else to hide behind. Yeah. Definitely, please do that, and reach out to me if you want. I'd love to talk. Kathleen: All right. Awesome. I'm going to put all those links in the show notes, so that if people don't know how to spell your name they can just go to the show notes, click the link, and find it, but we'll also of course put links into BirdEye, so that they can go and try to find all the bugs, and expose the weaknesses, and then make that the platform for their conversation with you. Great. Thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate it. If you are listening, and you found some value in today's conversation, I would really appreciate it if you consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes, or Stitcher, or whatever platform you chose to listen on, and if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks again, Sam. Sam: Thanks.

If Trick Daddy listens to this sugar-water, mayonnaise sandwich inspired episode he would make conch fritters for hosts, Eric Readinger and Law Smith. If Trick Daddy was opening his own conch fritter fast food concept, he'd appreciate the local SEO and SEM knowledge dropped on a loose and Facebook live and Mevo livestreamed Sweat Equity recorded in the Sweat Lodge Podcast Studio in Ybor City in Tampa, FL (gotta get SEO points).  Grasshopper TryGrasshopper.com/Sweat Freshbooks GoFreshBooks.com/Sweat Warby Parker WarbyParkerTrial.com/sweat   Helpful links Scan you business' online listing using our reputation partner Birdeye https://birdeye.com/scan-business/   Subscribe, 5 ⭐ And Please Write A Review! The funniest or biggest hater reviews are likely to get a shout out on the show.   Where To Listen, Watch, Review, and Share With A Friend! Spotify http://bit.ly/swequity iTunes http://bit.ly/se-it Laughable http://bit.ly/2k7y6Ff Facebook: http://bit.ly/se-fbp   Law Smith is an SMB Consultant, Digital Strategist, Stand Up Comedian and President of Tocobaga Consulting. Eric Readinger is a Website Producer, Video Editor, and Partner at Tocobaga Consulting.

After purchasing his practice the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence in Philadelphia in 2007, Dr. Leonard Tau solely used the power of the internet to help grow his new patient base and went against the traditional way of marketing one’s dental office .  He lectures nationally and internationally on internet marketing, social media and reputation marketing and its ability to make your dental office more visible and credible.  He is also the General Manager of the Dental Division for Birdeye a reputation marketing platform and founder of iSocial Digital a consulting firm that helps dentists develop a comprehensive online marketing plan.  His content rich, engaging seminars allow him to bring his first hand experiences to his audiences.   Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Dr. Leonard Tau DMD is a Dentist, Consultant, Speaker, Practice owner and Podcaster. Few professionals within the dental industry have the level of expertise, knowledge, and passion for the field. He has traveled the country educating dental professionals to help them succeed in growing their practice, reigniting their passion for dentistry and navigating the fast-changing nature of the job. Be sure to check out his podcast, The Raving Patients Podcast available on iTunes.   http://philadelphiapa.dentist/ https://birdeye.com/

Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Dr. Leonard Tau DMD is a Dentist, Consultant, Speaker and Practice owner. Few professionals within the dental industry have the level of expertise, knowledge and passion for the field. He has traveled the country educating dental professionals to help them succeed in growing their practice, reigniting their passion for dentistry and navigating the fast-changing nature of the job. Bird Eye Affiliation https://www.dentalspeakersbureau.com/speaker/leonard-tau/ Website- DentalUP.xyz  

Chosen as one of the top leaders in dental consulting by Dentistry Today, Dr. Leonard Tau DMD is a Dentist, Consultant, Speaker and Practice owner. Few professionals within the dental industry have the level of expertise, knowledge and passion for the field. He has traveled the country educating dental professionals to help them succeed in growing their practice, reigniting their passion for dentistry and navigating the fast-changing nature of the job. Bird Eye Affiliation https://www.dentalspeakersbureau.com/speaker/leonard-tau/ Website- DentalUP.xyz  

Starting his 15th year of dentistry, Dr. Amit Patel originally graduated from Mercer School of Engineering and later graduated from Tufts University- School of Dental Medicine. As an engineer, Dr. Patel designed and build his own practice from the ground up. Focused primarily on general and family dentistry, he utilizes the latest digital scanning technology enabling him to accurately and efficiently send cases to his laboratory for predictable and long-lasting results. He shares his affordable scanning set up along with the benefits of precision, data storage, and time savings. Dr. Patel was able to rack up over 200 online ratings with an overall 5-star rating in just 1 year! Learn how digital dentistry has radically improved Dr. Patel's dentistry and how you can accumulate online ratings even without social media experience.  http://westcarydental.com/ Digital Dentistry Google Reviews    

Starting his 15th year of dentistry, Dr. Amit Patel originally graduated from Mercer School of Engineering and later graduated from Tufts University- School of Dental Medicine. As an engineer, Dr. Patel designed and build his own practice from the ground up. Focused primarily on general and family dentistry, he utilizes the latest digital scanning technology enabling him to accurately and efficiently send cases to his laboratory for predictable and long-lasting results. He shares his affordable scanning set up along with the benefits of precision, data storage, and time savings. Dr. Patel was able to rack up over 200 online ratings with an overall 5-star rating in just 1 year! Learn how digital dentistry has radically improved Dr. Patel’s dentistry and how you can accumulate online ratings even without social media experience.  http://westcarydental.com/ Digital Dentistry Google Reviews    

Today’s show is sponsored by LeadSimple and Fourandahalf. Together, they’ve come up with one of the best conferences for property managers, called the PM Grow Summit. This event is laser-focused on growth strategies and brings together some remarkable thought leaders from around the country. I attended last year and was thoroughly impressed all around -- and that was just their first year! The next conference will be in San Diego in 2018, and I’ve already booked my spot. Go to pmgrowsummit.com to learn more, and enter promo code “Brad” to get a $100 discount on your ticket! We’re also sponsored by Marc Cunningham of Grace Property Management. Marc has created some amazing products for property management companies, which we can say firsthand as we’ve implemented his systems here. Visit their website and try out their products! To get a 10% discount on any of Marc’s products, use the promo code “Brad”! As property managers, we know the ins and outs of the rental industry. In fact, we’re so familiar with it that sometimes it’s helpful to step back and look at things from the tenants’ point of view instead. These people are likely moving from one rental property to another. They’re dealing with all the hassle of moving, which is exhausting whether it’s across the country or just across town. They’re also dealing with a heavy onslaught of expenses: renting a moving van, hiring people to help, paying rent and a deposit on a new place, and much more. When your tenants are already overwhelmed with too much to do and lots of money going out the door, the last thing they want to deal with is setting up the utilities at the new place. This can be doubly true if the utility companies require large deposits, as some do. Going back to our side of things as property managers, we also don’t want to constantly field calls from tenants about which companies they should use, whether they can install a satellite in the roof, and how to set up a security system. Fortunately, there’s an amazing company that makes things easier for property managers and tenants alike. My guest today is Wes Owens from Citizen Home Solutions, a concierge service for utilities. Wes will explain what his company does, and why it’s a win-win-win for tenants, his company, and the property managers alike. Best of all, he offers a commission that’s a quarterly share of 20% if you use the promo code “Brad” when you sign up! Right now, Citizen Home Solutions operates in Texas and 13 other states. Don’t worry if you’re outside of their current coverage range, though! They’re happy to expand to new locations, and the process of setting up somewhere new generally takes a week or less.   Here’s where you can find Wes: Citizen Home Solutions wowens@citizenhomesolutions.com (214) 493-2010 Wes Owens on LinkedIn   Show Notes [02:56] - Wes gives us an intro to himself and his company, explaining what Citizen Home Solutions does. Brad then points out some of the reasons for why setting up utilities is a difficult part of moving for tenants. [03:54] - Wes walks us through the process of how his company works in more detail. He also addresses the topic of deposits in recommending providers to tenants. [06:33] - Brad gives listeners the background on his use of Wes’ group, which goes back about two years. [07:13] - The management company gets a quarterly commission for every service that makes Wes’ company money. In other words, Citizen Home Solutions shares their commission with the property management companies that use them. [08:46] - Implementation is very easy, Wes explains, and walks us through the five-minute process involved in getting things set up. [10:25] - Citizen Home Solutions is currently all over Texas and in thirteen other states, but they can get up and running in a new location within about a week. [13:57] - Does Wes have any good examples of specific discounts? [15:25] - Wes elaborates on the satellites he mentioned previously. They refuse to allow satellites on the roof, instead putting them on pole mounts in the back yard. [17:23] - Wes moves on to talking about security systems. The system he uses is wireless and doesn’t damage the property, he explains. [19:16] - Brad returns to the point that Wes can get his service set up in a new area in a week or less. [21:44] - We learn more about how Brad has implemented Wes’ service into the backend of the system. [23:40] - Wes talks about reviews. Lots of places ask their customers or clients to go to Google to review their company. Instead of making the customer do this work, Wes uses BirdEye. [26:27] - BirdEye flags your reviews, Wes explains, and allows you to respond when you get a review below the limit you chose. [27:42] - How can someone get started with Wes’ company, or get in touch with him? His phone number is (214) 493-2010 and his email address is wowens@citizenhomesolutions.com. [29:49] - Wes talks about the promo he’s currently offering for listeners! If you get in touch with him soon using the promo code “Brad,” you’ll get 20% back, which is higher than their norm.   Links and Resources: Citizen Home Solutions wowens@citizenhomesolutions.com (214) 493-2010 Wes Owens on LinkedIn BirdEye

Naveen Gupta. He’s an entrepreneur with experience building startups and growing a hundred million dollar profit and loss statements. Before cofounding BirdEye, which is his current company, he held executive positions at RingCentral, Monster and Yahoo. He’s launched industry-leading products across advertising, consumer search, social media and monetization. He lives in Sunnyvale, California with his wife and two kids. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Predictable Revenue What CEO do you follow? – Brian Halligan Favorite online tool? — Outreach and ZoomInfo How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4-5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Naveen wished he would have taken more risks and pursued his dreams of starting a company   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:40 – Nathan introduces Naveen to the show 02:19 – BirdEye is the leading SaaS product that helps businesses on their customer journey 02:54 – The two things that drive purchases are customer experience and business ratings 03:20 – BirdEye grows 160%, year-over-year in revenue 03:33 – BirdEye has 25K paying customers 04:40 – Business model is based on location and not per seat 05:20 – On average, a business would have 2-3 locations 05:47 – BirdEye caters from SMBs to enterprise businesses 06:07 – BirdEye has a broad platform which has different functionalities 07:42 – Pricing on SMBs start at $3K and $100K for enterprise per year 08:12 – ACV is around $5K 08:33 – 50% of the revenue is SMB, 30% mid-market enterprise and 20% for channels 09:00 – ACV is per location 09:24 – MRR is close to $2M 10:43 – BirdEye was launched in 2012 10:55 – They came up with the idea after looking for a surgeon with great reviews to take care of their mother 12:07 – BirdEye was initially bootstrapped 12:33 – BirdEye has raised a total of $33M 13:16 – Team size is 170 globally 13:48 – Around 60 are on engineering, 70 on the sales sides and the rest are in different departments 14:30 – BirdEye is investing heavily on hiring the best people 14:45 – CAC is around $1K for a new business 15:05 – Payback period is 3-4 months 15:21 – 60-70% of their contracts are paid up-front, annually 16:00 – Revenue churn 16:11 – Net churn is close to 0.5% 16:28 – BirdEye is still too young to calculate LTV 16:48 – Naveen’s estimate is 3-5 years 17:05 – Paid ads spent annually is $200K 17:55 – Gross margin is 85-90% 18:43 – To acquire new customers, they email potential clients and ask them if they want to know their competitors’ reputations and how they compare to them 19:24 – 2016 ARR was close to $13M and 2017 will be close to $30M 19:37 – 2015 ARR was $5M and 2014 was $1.5M 21:10 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Have a business model that will benefit not just your own company but your customers as well. Most people rely on business reviews before trying out a product or service. Hire the best people and you’ll have the best product and provide the best customer experience.   Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

BirdEye General Manager, Leonard Tau, sits down with Justin to talk about not only what BirdEye's services can do for your practice but also how important it is to actively manage and analyze your online reputation— both for your practice, business ventures and yourself. About BirdEye: BirdEye closes the loop on customer experience and business reputation. Customer feedback is monitored in real-time across review sites, social media, customer surveys Customer issues are fixed in real-time, transforming poor experiences into great ones Natural language processing runs on all feedback to provide business insights and competitor analysis Root causes of negative sentiment are revealed, allowing large-scale improvements Customer experiences are propelled through referrals and reviews SEO is boosted by relevant review content and rich snippets SEM conversion rates are accelerated with Google seller ratings BirdEye turns customer feedback into the next-generation marketing engine. Customer experience drives ratings. Ratings drive revenue. BirdEye gives businesses complete control of both, to hardwire every business decision around the customer and scale revenue and growth. We built a comprehensive platform that turns feedback into insights, insights into action, and customer happiness into revenue.