Jessie Lezak:
Welcome to the Deconstructing Data Podcast and live stream. I'm Jessie Lezak, Fractional CMO at BDEX, along with BDEX's founder and CEO, David Finkelstein. What's going on, David? Anything new?
David Finkelstein:
Hey, Jessie. I'm good. You know what's funny is I listened to a podcast today. I'm a member of Perplexity. Have you heard of that one? It's AI platform.
Jessie Lezak:
No.
David Finkelstein:
I don't know. It's just another one of those AI platforms. But what was really cool today is they emailed me and they said that they have a new podcast. It's a 100% AI-generated podcast. And it basically is a bunch of today's news in a podcast. It's like a six- or seven-minute podcast, and they email it to you, and well, they emailed it to me today.
And I got this link and the podcast is 100% AI generated. So, not only is the content AI generated based on whatever news is going on, and it summarized the news in six minutes or seven minutes, and the speakers were both AI-generated speakers and it was pretty good. I have to give them credit. It sounded pretty good.
Jessie Lezak:
That's perfect. So, it sounds like Gina from that episode, what, over a year ago.
David Finkelstein:
Yeah. The interview we did, yeah.
Jessie Lezak:
Yeah, but that was a little bit different, of course. But that's really cool. I'll have to check that out. What did you say it's called, Perplexity?
David Finkelstein:
Yeah, perplexity. It's an AI-chat platform. I don't know. It's pretty good actually. I've used it a lot actually. That and Claude, those are my two favorites that I use.
Jessie Lezak:
Nice. Yeah, I haven't used those. I will have to check them out. But today, we have a really awesome guest to talk to. This episode has been a long time in the making and we're excited to have on Amanda Sherry. She's the director of marketing at Western Computer. I'm going to go ahead and bring her in. Welcome, Amanda.
Amanda Sherry:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Very happy to be here.
David Finkelstein:
Awesome. We're happy to have you here today, Amanda, as well, and we'd love for you to kick it off. So, for any of our listeners that are not familiar with you or Western Computer, we'd love to have you give a little background about yourself, tell our audience about you, and how you came to become director of marketing at Western Computer, and a little bit about what you guys do for your customers.
Amanda Sherry:
Sure, great. So, I'm Amanda Sherry. I'm the director of marketing, as you said, over 15 years of marketing, public relations and communications background. Started off my career more on the advertising side. Really fell in love with design, but knew I was not as proficient in Photoshop as I should be, but really had a strong desire to connect with people and the way the mind works.
Originally was thinking of going to school for psychology, but then geared towards that. So, I wanted to join my creative and that need for human behavior together. So, I went to school, got my master's in public communications, and then fell into marketing to be honest, and I haven't looked back. It's been fantastic. I really love what I do and the people that I work with overall.
I found Western almost 10 years ago, my first time in the Microsoft Channel and the ecosystem, really great place to be. It's small and it's tight-knit, but everyone has your back, and the culture at Western has just been fantastic, and has allowed me to thrive. I started off as marketing manager, then grew to director of marketing and right now I'm also the department lead.
So, leading a team of five total individuals across BDR marketing specialist, and up and coming marketing manager. So, I like to mentor the younger generations, which I think is pretty evident with my team. They're all really strong individuals that are doing a fantastic job.
David Finkelstein:
That's awesome. I'm excited to get into this conversation because even before we went live, we had a really good conversation about data analytics, and marketing, and some of the work that you're doing. So, our first topic, let's have you jump in, and tell us a little bit about your thoughts on the future trends, and data analytics and marketing.
Amanda Sherry:
Yeah. So, I actually forgot to give a little bit about Western overall. So, Western is a Microsoft Cloud solution partner. We specialize in Dynamics 365 and power platform solutions. So, we implement service and support dynamics, ERP and customer engagement applications, as well as the power platform applications, including Power BI.
So, some of those hopefully sound a little bit familiar, and we have just announced very excited to have joined Microsoft's Elite Inner Circle for 2024 and 2025. So, kudos to my entire team for that. Okay. So, marketing trends, something I am seeing a lot of and is really getting me excited is account intelligence overall.
There's a lot of programs out there where you can look at buyer behavior and buyer intelligence to see what people are searching for, and really hone in on your marketing and your BDR outreach according to that. So, what's really interesting is with data compliance that's been around since GDPR back in 2018, but is now in over a dozen states in some form.
In effect, I think there's five or six, but it's been signed more than that. So, marketers should really be aware of data compliance, and you should also understand your metrics and when people are converting. So, I very early learned that someone came to our website at Western, and if they didn't convert that first day, they were coming back 45 days and then converting.
So, you need enough content and enough thought leadership out there to keep top of mind, but also among that time, you can really use account intelligence to understand what people are searching and how they're searching to not only affect your content, but your outreach. Under GDPR, the buyer intelligence has a little bit of a gray area if you reach out to them from a marketing team.
But if you have a BDR and a salesperson, you're more inclined to have some direct outreach. So, it can give you net new names in your system, but account intelligence can also help you stop customer churn. If you're seeing that your customers are searching, in my case, for other ERP solutions, you can really hone in and do some... The word is escaping me, but hopefully you get what I'm saying that you can recon.
So, you can go in there and say, "Hey, is everything okay? How's your account going? Are you satisfied with everything that's going on?" And then, that's when they may come and present to you an issue of, "No, I'm actually really not happy because of this. I was thinking of going to a different ERP solution," and you can stop it before it becomes a larger issue.
So, account intelligence is something that we're using at Western today, and I'm in the beginning stages of it, and I'm really excited to see the potential where it goes.
Jessie Lezak:
That's really exciting.
David Finkelstein:
Yeah, absolutely. That's great. So, let's talk a little bit about the data. So, Deconstructing Data being the podcast, let's dig in a little deeper. Talk to us about how you go about obtaining the data, tracking the data. The reality is if you're doing that, talking about tracking data across multiple touch points of customers.
And so, there's a lot that goes into that. And collecting that data, and tracking it across multiple touch points, and then being able to track that back to the customer. So, can we dig a little deeper into that for our listeners?
Amanda Sherry:
Yeah. Marketing attribution is key. You really need to have the stats to show what is successful and not only that connected to lead quality. So, what we've done here at Western is we've had built an entire marketing measurement project. There are marketing attribution programs out there that you could have as part of your martech stack, but when looking at them, there wasn't really one that fit us the way that we wanted to move forward.
We're really big into video on-demand webinars. And some of them just didn't facilitate views. So, we worked with a freelance consultant and built our own marketing measurement report. That's been extremely beneficial for us. We connect our anonymous data with GA4, with our known data from our marketing attribution platform with our account data and Dynamics 365 Sales.
Push all of that data into Power BI and analyze it there. So, I could see my cost per lead across all of my marketing initiatives. I can see what campaigns by using UTMs really drive the most traffic for not only are my anonymous, but then what is converting into that known. So, what I said, I'm able to see what's affect that 30- to 45-day marker.
I can track all of the anonymous activity, and use that, and then understand what piece of content or what initiative they converted on. So, we have several marketing sources, the unknown and the known, super important. A lot of companies sometimes focus on just the converting, this is what they converted on a Google Ads campaign or they converted on a webinar.
But all of the steps leading up to that are so important, probably much more so than what is converting because people are self-guiding themselves through the sales cycle before they ever fill out a form and get information. Just think about all the research you do on your own right now. You're guiding yourself through some sales cycle, you're looking at reviews.
When you purchase something on Amazon, you're looking to see if it's sponsored, if it's not sponsored, how many reviews does it have, where does it sit? And then, you could go look at that same product on Target to see how it is on Target, and then you could go directly maybe Walmart. So, I looked at all of these other areas before I actually purchased that product.
So, that's valuable information for the company that's selling, and they need to know exactly what enticed me to purchase on Walmart outside of Amazon and Target, for example. So, using UTMs is a huge, it's I would say a huge reward for little effort. You're already storing that information in Google Analytics, hopefully.
By connecting it to your account data and Dynamics 365 Sales, you're able to see whether those conversions are of quality and what you need to double down on in terms of your time, effort and budget.
David Finkelstein:
I think you hit on a really important point there, which is a lot of times people are only looking at the last touch and they're giving credit to that last touch for the conversion. But the reality is you've touched that person maybe eight other times in maybe eight different ways. And had you not done that, they would not have learned about you and educated themselves.
To your point, people are putting themselves through the sales process in many ways, and that last touch may never have happened if it wasn't for the first seven. So, I think it's really important that you're tracking all of them and understanding all of the times they've touched the prospect.
Jessie Lezak:
Yeah, exactly.
Amanda Sherry:
Businesses don't even realize they've got people coming to their website, and reading stuff, and they haven't filled out the form and they're just on your website. So, having the data, that's another example of getting that first touch attribution data.
Jessie Lezak:
Yeah. I think one of the unfortunate trends of... So, you did mention the digital world. It's so hard to clearly state how someone first found you sometimes because it's such a digital world that we live in, and there's so many different ways in which we can reach out to people now. It's not as cut and dry as it was before in terms of direct mail or email or cold calling.
There's so many other ways in which someone can come across your brand. So, one of the unfortunate trends, which is a little bit disheartening sometimes, but there are ways around it, if you have the right integration between a lot of the programs is that attribution is going to get harder. Social media impressions and views, they're hard to relate to.
If someone's looking at a YouTube video, and they see you on the side, and something remains top of mind, they may come to your website days later. That may look like direct to you, but it's really YouTube. Social media impressions, throughout the scroll, if people are scrolling and look at something that they really like, they may stop for a few seconds, but not necessarily engage with your post.
AI, AI is changing the game across the board. If you look at Google now, Google is really trying to become a destination more than a search engine. So, Google is answering questions, they're showing you things that you can buy directly from Google without even going to other pages. They're trying to answer all the questions to keep you on Google.
That is partly because they are trying to sell ads too. So, they're looking for an impression they are a business. But with AI making things a destination, it's really important that you're tracking everything you do holistically and that you're not siloing your own campaigns yourself and just saying, "Oh, this email campaign to that blog article, that's really what did the mark."
Well, where else were you promoting that blog article? Where else were you just socializing your brand? Did you go to any events? Events have always been pretty cut and dry with an ROI in the past. Sometimes it's not always about the leads you get from events. Sometimes it's more about net new names from an event. Sometimes it's about progressing the leads that you already have.
So, it's really important within all of your data and the deconstructing of the data is that you understand where people are coming and how they're converting, but that information is not always as black and white because data attribution is getting harder now than it ever was before.
Jessie Lezak:
100%. I couldn't agree more.
David Finkelstein:
Yeah. I love that you use deconstructing data in that description too.
Amanda Sherry:
You would?
Jessie Lezak:
Market it, right? Yeah, like dark social is the term I think of. We've got people who might scroll and watch this live, and maybe they'll watch it live maybe 37 times before they actually go search for BDEX's website or search for the podcast, or they see just different glimpses from different other places. And attribution data isn't going to track that, same with the podcast.
We'll see, oh, particular episodes had hundreds, maybe thousands of views. Well, we don't know who those people are and we only have that data if they download it. So, then there's people in the cloud just... So, it's like, yeah, that's a great example of exactly what you're saying is it's so hard to get that attribution data, and I just find that it's helpful to ask customers open-ended, how did you hear about us?
David Finkelstein:
Yeah. I've absolutely had conversations with people that became customers and just in passing, they happened to mention that they saw our podcast a long time ago and it's like, "Oh, wait a second. I thought that they came in through this channel, but now he's telling me he saw th