This week's episode of Automation Unplugged features our host Ron Callis interviewing Kendall Clark, Director of Sales of One Firefly.

About Kendall Clark

Kendall Clark is One Firefly’s pioneering and creative sales leader. As Director of Sales, Kendall is responsible for overseeing the account executives and all sales activities, providing leadership focus and priority guidance for the department. Kendall previously led the Digital Media department, and oversaw the production of hundreds of industry-focused websites for our clients. Kendall has also been instrumental in developing and launching several of One Firefly’s award-winning products, as well as managing One Firefly’s video shoots.

Interview Recap

• Kendall's Role and History at One Firefly
• Sales Strategies and Challenges
• Meeting Challenges of Business Growth
• Balancing work with family life, focusing on children's activities and quality time

SEE ALSO: Show #259 features Joaquin Rivera

Transcript

Ron:

Hello, hello. Ron Callis here with another episode of Automation Unplugged. And would you believe it? I've gone live here and I actually don't have my fancy microphone pulled out. Look at me. It's a Friday. It's a different day. It's not my normal day. So I haven't followed my normal practice, but it's never too late to change. So I'm actually going to do that with you all live.

Ron:

You know what? I am on my audio. But you probably haven't been able to hear me and you probably can hear me better now. Kendall, I see you down there. Give me a thumbs up. Does that sound better? Yes. So see, even though this is my 260th show, I still make silly goofs like that, but that's okay. So today is February 16th. It's Friday.

Ron:

It's a little bit after 12:30 p.m. Eastern time. So I'm gonna say our normal time, but a different day. And that's because I have a lot of travel coming up and a lot going on here at one Firefly. Oh my goodness, is there a lot going on? All sorts of good things. Lots of moving and shaking. But specifically this weekend, I personally am going to be heading out on the road. I'm going to be heading to a conference in San Diego called Social Media Marketing World. It's one of the larger marketing conferences in North America. And I'm going to be heading out there with Jordan Littman on our SEO and product dev team. He and I are going to be taking lots of classes and sessions. And I have been invited to speak at the conference. So that should be a lot of fun. And I get back for like a day or two and then we're right back out to LightaPalooza. And actually, my guest today is going to be joining me at LightaPalooza, along with a few additional members of our team. And one Firefly has a lot going on there at the conference. And so this is an appropriate time to remind you all that this show is brought to you by my day job at One Firefly. And One Firefly proudly sponsors the Automation Unplugged podcast and enables us to do this on a regular basis. So now I know you're not here to hear me, Gab, but you're here to hear our guest. So today's guest is our very own Kendall Clark. That is her maiden name. And that's how she goes to the world. And Kendall is an awesome member of our team here at One Firefly. She's been here for years. We're gonna hear all about that history. She's actually a returning guest. She was last on show 77. And so she's back. We're gonna find out what's been going on in her life, what's been going on here in the sales and marketing space. And our goal is that we talk about tactics and methodologies here on this show, today's show, specifically, that can be directly applied to all of your businesses. So although we are a marketing agency and we work with businesses, B2B, a lot of the ideas that Kendall and I are gonna be talking about today are directly applicable to your business, regardless of the type of business that is. So without further ado, let me bring in one Fireflies, Director of Sales and Marketing. Let's bring in Kendall. Kendall, how are you?

Kendall:

What's up, Ron? How are you?

Ron:

I am good. I notice over your shoulder, you have the colors, just like I have my swatch.

Kendall:

My Pantone color swatch. Don't leave home without it. We did. We ordered those pantone color swatches.

Ron:

You got one, I got one, and Miguel got one. We ordered those back, what in 2020, right at the beginning of 2020.

Kendall:

It was COVID. Yeah.

Ron:

Why did we order those?

Kendall:

We decided over COVID to redo our entire, I wouldn't say redo our branding to refresh our branding. So we did a full branding guide and part of that was making sure we really honed in on our green. May not be something that the everyday person notices, but we noticed it a lot. So we wanted to make sure the three of us were looking at the exact same shade of green when we were making that selection. So it always makes me smile when I see it, honestly, because it was a fun project.

Ron:

This gets super nerdy, but a lot of people, marketing nerdy, but a lot of people may not realize that you have to put in extra effort to make sure that the blue, or in our case, the green on our shirt matches the green on the screen, matches the green on the printed brochure, matches the green on a pop-up display at a trade show.

Kendall:

Yep. Yeah, I know. I think a lot of people have maybe heard of RGB or CMYK, those acronyms, or maybe you have your printer and you see the CMYK ink in your printer. It's just different interpretations of color. So we had to make sure all of those matched.

Ron:

And we've, you know, COVID happened. We didn't know whether we'd have anything else to do. We actually became the busiest of our whole lives during that period, but we didn't know that was true. And so we took on that project. And you're right, that was a lot of fun. That was like a six or nine month project, a lot of invention. All right, so folks are tuned in. People know you, people are listening and they know you. Maybe even way back in the day you designed their website, because that's how you started with us many moons ago. But I'm going to, let's, first of all, in the present right now, you are our Director of Sales and Marketing. What does that mean? What is your day-to-day responsibilities at one Firefly?

Kendall:

Yeah, so my day-to-day is overseeing exactly those two teams. We have a set of our sales team now and we have a dedicated corporate marketing that sole job is to market ourselves, market one Firefly. So I'm overseeing those two wonderful teams and it's a lot of fun. It's competitive, it's creative, it's all the things I love wrapped up in one.

Kendall:

Now, what I'm going to put on the screen, this is the part where I'm gonna say embarrass you, but this isn't embarrassing. I would say something to be very proud of. But you were last on the show. So this is show 260. And so I actually wrote down in my notes, this was what, June of 2000, actually it's right here, June 5th. 2019. 2019. So almost five years ago, and at that point, you had been with one Firefly five years. And so now you're 10 years with us. But for anyone that wants to go back and hear kind of about your life up until that point, Show 77's a great backstory. But what I would love if you are game is, let's go back and I'll let you start, whether it's before 2019, but bring us to the present. What does your career trajectory look like?

Kendall:

Sure. Yeah, I guess back in 2019, I was completely different role and two less kids. I mean, it's crazy how time changes. But back then, I was overseeing our web team. So in that show, we talked a lot about my career within design and development. And I've always loved that. That's been my passion growing up and went on to oversee that team as one Firefly grew and grew and grew. We sort of consolidated all of our creative teams together. So graphics, video, web. I was also went on to oversee our live chat team for a little while. That was all under the umbrella of digital media is what we called it at the time, a few years ago, and we continued to grow and grow and grow like we've been doing. And there was the opportunity. We grew to the size where there was a need for a dedicated sales leader and an opportunity for someone, me, that was interested in it. And I love doing it. That is awesome.

Ron:

Now, you and I and Jessica Weiss and Kat Wheeler, we are gonna be at, I'm actually gonna share my screen. I'm gonna cheat again. I'm gonna put it up on the screen. You and I are gonna be at the Lighapalooza event in a week.

Kendall:

We are, we are.

Ron:

And to maybe at a high level, tell folks that are coming to that particular event. Why should they go to that event and maybe what we're doing over there?

Kendall:

Yeah, I mean, this event has exploded over the last couple of years. I mean, even last year, when I attended, I was an additional ad, a late ad because registration had gotten so high. So this year, I don't know if you know registration numbers off the top of your head.

Ron:

They're over 1, 200. So it's almost a 100% growth over the year before.

Kendall:

That's wild. So I know, I mean, this, I think what it makes this event so special is that it leads with education and lighting, education in particular. And we're lucky enough to be contributors of that too. I think we have four classes. We're doing an SEO related class, a marketing your lighting business blueprint class, a landscape lighting panel, I think that you're helping host and then an AI for your business class, which will be pretty exciting too. So if anyone's out there attending, I'd love for you to register for one of our classes and if you're already all booked up, come visit us. We have a booth. We could probably drop our booth number in the notes. I don't know that off the top of my head.

Ron:

I don't know that off the top of my head either. The event has grown, but it's not too huge to find us. So if you walk around the event, you'll definitely find one Firefly and we'll have to grab a member of our team to drop an official booth number, a booth number down there for sure.

Kendall:

It's going to be a great time. I'm excited to get out there. I think I get in Monday night. So just in time for all the festivities to get going. Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of fun. And even one of our good clients has a nice home there and is going to be hosting a party that is Lee Travis at WiPliance. He's going to be hosting an event. And I know Jessica, who manages our corporate program. She's already told us she's gonna be buzzing around to all sorts of events. And so it's gonna be, it's gonna be a lot of fun. All right, let me remove that from the screen. So Kendall, what I wanted to jump into here, there we go. So one of our team just dropped. So we are in Booth 409 at Leita Palooza. So there you go. So booth 409. Thank you, team, for dropping that into the show notes. I wanna talk big picture, at least for a little bit, about sales and really some of the science behind selling and just gather your perspective. So I'm gonna say, and it's gonna be a bit interesting or weird, but I hope the audience can relate to this. You've been a longtime Firefly here. And so you've been able to observe the benefits and the challenges with what, you know, the fancy term for it is founder led sales. I'm the founder of One Firefly, and so I've been out there selling, you know, folks tuned in. You know, they may have purchased something from me in the past. What's your, from your perspective? Because you've been on the product side, delivering the product, and now you're on the management side. What are the challenges with that, that approach? And what are the benefits of that approach?

Kendall:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's something we see and hear every day, talking to our customers, small businesses, that's how it goes. We all, you know, even now still, even as a smaller business of 80 people, we're all still wearing a lot of hats. And, you know, I think one of the things that really resonated with me, you know, when I joined, we were eight people. So I got to see the benefits of it. I got to train one-on-one with you. I got to hear how you spoke to our customers. I got to see the passion that you brought in selling to all of our customers and the passion you brought about our products and our services and helping our customers to those conversations. But on the other side of it, I saw how much it impacted you. You know, we've spent 10 years together. I've seen that, you know, and I think a lot of business owners can relate to this, that you have to make this really tough choice between, you know, am I going and hunting and looking for new business, or am I focusing on running the business? And both of those are equally important. And I'm sure it felt like a scale up and down of you, you know, focusing on one and the other one kind of, you know, having to go back and forth between those two aspects and and it's challenging and it's it's not a scalable solution, especially as we got up to now 80 people. And I know it impacted you. You know, there were times, not times there were years where I even know you never could step away from the business because you were so worried then about, you know, if we miss a week of sales, that's 25% of this and, you know, it was just always on your mind. So the, and I agree with empathize everything you just said. It's, you know, it's limiting. People from the outside can look at the owner of a business, and this is for anyone listening and can say, oh, it must be great. They make so much money. They have so much control and freedom. They can do whatever they want. It's, I know so many folks that are owners are going, that is so not true. And, you know, if you have the weight of this whole payroll and this whole team, and there's a responsibility of the business to particularly bringing in the new business, and if you don't bring in the business, the penalties to the business and the impact that has on others that your teammates, it's a very real weight. And so there's an evolution, which is you move into a scalable sales structure. And we, when Firefly started embarking on that project, I'm trying to think of exactly when we started. I wanna say a year and a half ago, maybe a couple of years ago, we started going down that path. So can you kind of, from your perspective, talk, 'cause you, even though you even were still running digital media, you were right ten toes down in the development of sales process and structure and maybe take the audience through some of the steps that we've taken that might be even something that they could think about doing if the time was right for them.

Kendall:

I think one of the biggest critical first steps, like thinking of taking that plunge, because, you know, again, I think back 10 years ago, you were the only salesperson. Not only were you a founder-led sales, you were like team of one selling. And, you know, I think that big first step is finding that first person and being able to successfully train that person in, you know, not necessarily the style that you sell, but with the same principles that you sell. You know, I think here at one Firefly, we pride ourselves on being educational and consultative, and we want to make sure that the conversations that we're having with our customer kind of abide to those values. So a first step was, you know, really bringing one into the door. And then now you're going from 100%. Now we split you to 50 and you know that process is repeated and repeated and repeated. And you haven't been fully 100% pulled out, but now you're helping to instill those values, but we're not relying on those because those are taught to the broader team. So I think that was obviously the first step. And then as you know, when we really started going down this path of having just a more directed and dedicated management towards a sales team, we also wanted to document things. And that was something that really was actually something we kind of did broadly across the team. When I was on the production side, you know we spent months documenting all of our processes because we wanted to make sure we could be scalable and bring people on quicker and faster. And, you know, we started to do that on the sales side of things as well.

Ron:

So we did that. So let's go deeper into that. So we have developed something called a sales playbook. What is that for those listening and what's its role or purpose?

Kendall:

Yeah, I mean, a lot of effort was put towards that. I have to give credit to the team. Hopefully that they're listening in a little bit. But, you know, everybody put a lot of effort towards that. And really, we broke it down into a couple of components. You know, we want everybody to be able to talk about us and talk about our values. And anybody knew, especially that was learning about us, to understand who we are, where we've come from, where we're going. But then we really broke into each of our products. So we took all of our products and the goal of this playbook is really to have somewhere to reference, somewhere to train from that talks about our products, how we talk about our products, how we sell our products, you know, any sort of pushback we have on our products. And, you know, I want our sales team. We all want our sales team to always insert their own personalities into any of our sales conversations or any conversations with our customers, but we want to make sure that we're delivering the same experience to our customers. And that's, you know, we're telling them the same things. We're talking about the same outcomes. We're hitting on the same points each and every time so that, you know, our customers are getting that same experience across the board. Even there's a different face and personality delivering that message. So that playbook is directed with that goal in mind. And then as we add new things, we're updating it, we're changing it, we're referencing back to it, we're pulling it up in trainings and, you know, making changes to it, referencing it. Yeah, we use it and it's, it's a really special thing that we put so much time into.

Ron:

And what software, just to get a bit tactical, we originally put it in one type of software and I think we fully transitioned to another software. Can you talk about some of those logistics?

Kendall:

Yeah, so the software we originally used was called trainual spell exactly how it sounds trainual.com and that's great. We were all able to go in, be collaborators of it. There's an admin seat, but then as you bring on new people, you can track progress and things like that. Everything's broken into chapters. So you know it's nicely formatted to be digested, especially for new hires. Recently, you know one of our goals, obviously we have a lot of software pieces and parts out there and we want to consolidate those. So we are bringing all of that into Zoho. So you know we use Zoho one, which is sort of the umbrella. I'm speaking about this correctly, but the umbrella of all of these software subpieces within Zoho. So you know HR training or CRM campaigns, even through marketing, we're sending things out through Zoho campaigns. So that's just one way to approach it, but there are, you know, various tools out there.

Ron:

And they have a tranual like environment in the Zoho environment, in that ecosystem.

Kendall:

One thing I love about the Zoho environment is we're also able to quiz people at the end of that training. So you can go through, read particular chapters or things that, you know, we want people to understand, and then follow that up with a quiz that then they need to pass in order to kind of move to the next chapter.

Ron:

That's interesting. Now, in that same environment, anybody's been in a meeting with someone at one Firefly today, you know there's probably a video AI recorder in that same meeting.

Kendall:

Oh yeah.

Ron:

And so I wanna run down a couple of different lines of thought here. But one is we're recording, and we are recording most meetings, and you, from a sales management standpoint, are actually identifying examples of when something's done really well, and you're putting that back into the playbook. Can you kind of just talk about how you think about that and kind of your process when you're doing that?

Kendall:

Yeah. And I would recommend, you know, obviously the way that we communicate is strictly through video, but if you are doing, if anyone out there is doing any sort of external video calls using a tool like Fathom, another one is Fireflies, similar to record those videos. It's a time saver and it's a great way to reference, go back, do call analysis, or even, like you said, pull out those little snippets and drop it in for additional training opportunities. And you don't have to pull. I mean, previously, you'd have to pull a recording from Zoom, whatever it would be, put it into some kind of video editing software and, you know, kind of be savvy enough and take this.

Ron:

It was really hard 'cause we tried that. That's actually where we started. We were doing Google meetings. We still do Google meetings, but we were recording them. And then about 30 minutes after your meeting, it would be ready, and then you'd have to Drop it into a folder.

Kendall:

Yep.

Ron:

There was no good analysis of the content. I mean, AI has been amazing.

Kendall:

Even the titles of it, I mean, it's so silly, but the titles of it would start with the date. So you'd always kind of be searching through to, you know, figure out what type of call this was. Fathom does an incredible job at analyzing video and you can actually sort by different recaps that you want sales related recaps. They literally have a dropdown where you know it's from the perspective of a salesperson where you can look at the questions or it will pinpoint concerns that a customer might have and it breaks all of that important relevant information. Our account managers are using it too. One of the things I think that's great is that if you're talking to someone, rather than you know if you really are trying to capture all this information, sitting down and taking crazy notes to make sure you're not missing anything, you can just have fathom recording and you can flag things within the system that are important or just know that everything is being recorded and you can always reference back to it.

Ron:

Yeah, no, it's awesome. For anyone listening, if you are conducting like maybe client discovery calls or maybe you're having project management review, maybe your client is you know in another location and you're having that meeting. Running a Fathom recorder in that meeting is, it's a superpower. You gotta trust us. And I say that even here at One Firefly, although we're adopters of technology, everyone does not always adopt it immediately. Sometimes it takes some, you know, practice and repetition to get people to try things because we're all humans and we're stuck in our habits. But I would say the adopters of that particular tool have become evangelists of that tool because everyone has adopted it.

Kendall:

Very little pushback. You have one or two calls with it and you see it. Even for internal calls, maybe you don't do a lot of external video calls. It's an excellent way to kind of document or refer back to an internal call when you're having some kind of follow up. It's amazing.

Ron:

I agree. All right, so let's jump into sales management. So you play a dual role here at one Firefly. We've elected to have a sales manager that is also our marketing manager. So I'm going to get into marketing, but for the moment, I'm going to, you're wearing your sales manager hat. Got it. How do you, how do you, Kendall, think of your responsibility in terms of that Sales Manager role? You know, how could you frame that for folks tuned in?

Kendall:

Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I try to break down where a lot of my day is spent into, you know, three or four buckets. One bucket I would say is just your every day-to-day questions, this and that, little fires going on throughout the day. But the other ones I would say are broken into a lot of time coaching and educating the team and, you know, practice working, data, data analysis, and then using that data for accountability. So those are kind of the, I would say the three main areas of sales management.

Ron:

OK, so let's take a one by one. Coaching, what does that mean?

Kendall:

Yeah, I think it's a common thing that sales managers are sometimes afraid of or not necessarily afraid, but unsure of how or where to start. How do you hold a coaching session? If you're not developing new products, what are you coaching on? And I think taking time to have dedicated time with the team where you're practicing the fundamentals. I mean, if you go to a baseball or a football game, you're going to see those practices and those football players are practicing the same snaps over and over and over and over again and building that muscle memory and taking time to coach and practice in that way builds that same muscle where it becomes second nature. So you know some of the things that we've been recently doing, obviously going back to Fathom, we've done a lot of call reviews and that's always fun. You have to kind of step back and be OK to watch, you know, have somebody watch yourself or listen to yourself. But when you take that step away and you're open to feedback, it always is good conversation. And the whole team is taking away little tidbits of I love how you phrase that. I love how you position that. And then you can see other things too that you do. Oh, I didn't realize that I touch my hair all the time. I know I do that, but you see all that stuff over video and it's very helpful. So that's, I mean, that's one way of doing it. We also do pitching practice, sometimes even just additional education. We bring in someone from our internal team to talk about our products. All of that just makes us better educators, better consultants, and better conversationalists with our team or with our customers.

Ron:

All right, number two thing that you said was accountability and helping hold those salespeople accountable. I mean, that sounds like you're a disciplinarian. Is that what you're referring to? What do you mean there?

Kendall:

You could ask them and see, you know, see if that's the case.

Ron:

I'm surprised they're not in here like harassing you in the commenting about it.

Kendall:

You know, the way that I like to think about accountability and talk with it about the team is we want to understand some of these pieces of some of the pieces of how you're breaking down your day, not to sit there and say, "Yo, why aren't you doing this?" or "Why aren't you doing that?" But to help make you and us better. If people are struggling with the amount of time they have to reach out to X, Y, and Z customer, or we're seeing they can only get so many emails out a day or phone calls in a day. Like I want to know the symptom of that and that's what helps. When you have that data, you can only change what you measure and when you have that data, then you can bring it to the forefront and say, hey, I'm noticing this. Is this a tools problem? Is this an organization problem? Is this a training problem? And it just frames a conversation nicely. But then also you can have goals and metrics. Hey, I see success when we have when X, Y, and Z happens. You want success. I want success. It's all I'm asking for. That's what we want you to be able to do. That's the metric we want to hold you to because I know it will be successful.

Ron:

So I'm going to draw that to a comparison in one Firefly and then maybe external. And I'd love to hear your kind of, do you agree that this makes sense? You know, in one Firefly, we know that clients can only, we can only help them, or we can redesign their marketing mix, or we can offer consultative solutions in terms of how to help them grow. We can only help them and do that if we actually meet with them. So like knowing the numbers of meetings, there's a correlation. The more meetings you have, the more stuff you do and the more value you're able to deliver. And we know those internal benchmarks and we hold ourselves accountable to that. We hold our team. I know you hold our team accountable to that. And outside for an integrator listening and you want more sales, let's say it's a tough market. I mean, some dealers right now are really banging out jobs and doing well, and some guys and gals are going, man, it's a little dry right now. Yeah. Well, there's a direct correlation with what are the preemptive activities they're doing? Are they calling people? Are they knocking on doors? Are they showing up? Are they sending information packages? Are they reaching out to past clients? So on and so forth. And so that idea of accountability is knowing the preemptive activities, leading indicating activities that probably when done at certain benchmark levels will deliver levels of outcome. It doesn't mean it always is one to one, but it has a probability of doing that. And I know it on Firefly, we didn't actually know what any of our benchmark activities were. So maybe just so no one thinks that we're pretending we have it all figured out, we're in a process of actually trying to figure it out. So maybe that's where I wanted to take that. How are you thinking about it?

Kendall:

It really does go back to the data piece of it. What data should we collect that's important? Why and how?

Ron:

Accountability requires a strong attention to data.

Kendall:

You have to. Yeah, you have to. You know, thinking about it for us, we know marketing is weird. Like we sell marketing. Marketing is weird. It's obscure. It requires education and understanding. For us, we know success means getting on a call and talking about marketing and teaching about marketing. So we know that's an indicator of success for us. You know Dealers out there, same thing. Sometimes the technology that we're talking about is obscure and hard to understand. So maybe it's getting people into that showroom so they can see and feel and touch and you know that that's that's what is a higher probability of having that deal go through. So it's the same thing. You just want to be able to measure that. I mean, for everybody, it's a challenge. If you don't have a data problem, I'm envious because I know so many do and you know we use a CRM to be able to track a lot of that stuff, but there still needs to put a lot of work and time and energy to evolve that CRM as our business evolves.

Ron:

Carry that forward. What do you mean by data? What exactly type of data and we could speak about one Firefly? Do we know that we probably need that we have historically not been good at documenting?

Kendall:

Yeah. For us, it's around really getting tight around phone calls, email, what we're calling the umbrella of activities. It takes time. Every time we may make a lot of phone calls in a day, we may have a lot of meetings. Not only do we need to track that that happens, but then we also need to document it as well and past us being able to document some of these activities. Just drop it in the notes. Just drop it right at the company record. But now that our business has grown, you know, 10 times from, you know, when I first started, we're at 80 people. We have all of these different departments and products. If everybody's dropping notes in the same little thread, you're really going back and having trouble piecing together the story of what's going on. So a lot of it is tailoring information to activities and then tracking those activities really well. So we're starting to get a good number on tracking the activities, but tying that together with what was talked about and being able to see reports on that. It's still very manual and we're not perfect. No one is.

Ron:

Anyone that's been watching One Firefly knows that we've been out there researching, talking about, experimenting, deploying within our business, things relating to AI. It's here whether we like it or not. It's our new normal. It's in our life. It's not leaving. And I know that I've, because I've seen some of the stuff you've sent me, you're using AI in some ways actually in sales and in sales management to crunch things and analyze things. Can you maybe talk about some of the experimentation you've been doing?

Kendall:

Yeah, tools like ChatGPT are your friend. They're not scary at all. And I don't think a lot of people realize the capabilities that some of these tools have. I sit on a lot of data. We do collect a lot of different data, but it's hard to know what to do with it, what's important. And then yes, OK, maybe you have an idea for something, but now you also have to match that and make sure your Excel skills are up to snuff to be able to visualize that data. I know mine aren't. I know many people's aren't or you forget it. Using a tool, and I'll give you an example, we're doing some annual sales planning. We were able to extract all of our sales, every line item of sales from the past year, anonymize it because you don't want to upload anything that has any sort of personal information to a tool like that. So it really just date, number, state, upload it to ChatGPT, and it puts together all sorts of different visualizations of what teams, any trends for the year, what states did you sell the most, the least by salesperson? I mean, in minutes. I know sometimes I'm sending you these things at 10:30 at night because I just, I sit there and I'm like, oh, let's try this. Let's pop this data in. And you may not even know what you want to extract from it yet. And ChatGPT can kind of guide you through some of that.

Ron:

That analysis has led to you working with, maybe we'll close out this theme of sales with this question. It has led to you now collaborating with our sales team and developing plans, like a plan for the year. So what is that and how has maybe just to tie those ideas together, how has some of your ability to analyze and crunch data tied to planning strategies?

Kendall:

Yeah, so we all have goals. You know We have goals that we want to hit for the year. And sometimes that big hairy goal just feels obscure and you don't quite know how to get there. Some of the analysis that we're doing and being able to break it down into just these little snippets of information start to piece together. All right, let's look at your sales by state. Let's look at it by customer. Let's look at by product. Let's look at by size, by close rate, all of these things. You can start to extract if I move the needle on this metric by 5%, that would give me this. If I grow this state by 10%, it could get me this. Now, if I want to grow that state by 10%, here's how I could do it. Here's who I can reach out to. Here's how many deals I would need. It just starts to take that big picture goal, break it down and break it down and break it down until you have a plan that then you can break down on a monthly or quarterly, you know, group.

Ron:

How does that result in an individualized approach for the different members of the sales team? Because they're not all the same.

Kendall:

Yeah, so every piece of data that I pull, I try to pull it for each individual person. So when our team is looking at data, they're going to look at the team averages too, but they're going to look at their data and their territory for their customers, for the people that they know and then build an individualized plan. I mean, we know markets in different states are feeling, you know like you said earlier, having varying levels of feeling how the economy is right now. Projects are up, projects are down, Resi is up, commercial is down, and being able to look at that, take that data in the context and lens of your own territory helps to put together that plan, if that answers your question.

Ron:

It does. What is the role of marketing as it relates to selling? Is marketing selling? Does marketing replace selling? In your mind.

Kendall:

Stick it in the egg. What came first? Yeah. You know, when we do these sales plans, we don't start them until we have our marketing plan. And they're really done in tandem. We start to put together quarterly goals for marketing and put those goals. These are the events. These are some of the initiatives, tentative promotions, things like that. And then they can formulate that sales plan around that marketing plan. But that marketing plan is built based off of the success of the sales team in the previous year. What worked last year? What did we sell more of, less of? And what time of year, all of those things?

Ron:

Walk our audience through maybe our approach that I wanna say started close to end of summer.

Kendall:

Yep.

Ron:

And it occurred through the fall and the winter that led to ultimately the tactical plans we launched into 2024. What did that timeline look like?

Kendall:

Yeah, so first of all, I think it started, I want to say, when did we do budgeting, October, something like that?

Ron:

It started in probably late August, September timeframe is when the conversation started.

Kendall:

Yep. So as you guys were starting to kind of button up the years, finances, we started to do the same for marketing. So looking at the past year, we do have a marketing budget. You know, we practice what we preach just a little bit. And you could probably say what the percentage we put into marketing every year.

Ron:

Yeah, well, we tell integrators that folks listening to be investing 2% to 5% of their projected revenue. So if you were in 2023 and you were projecting a number for 2024, we advise two to 5% of that number. And here at one Firefly, we do seven and a half percent of that number.

Kendall:

I thought it was around seven. So we take that you know budget and we look at the previous year and we looked at what worked and what didn't work. And I'll give you a great example. Shows have been weird for us the last year. So what we need to do is look at what we invested, look at what came out of it. Of course, we're still going to shows, but we need to look, hey, is our approach different? What do we do different? Is it less? Do we invest in certain ones more than others? And really just doing that analysis piece by piece of every part of that marketing budget gives us a really good framework to then starting to move forward. We're still going to invest the same amount, but how do we split up that pie across all of the umbrella of marketing?

Ron:

We solicit our team's input across the company.

Kendall:

We did.

Ron:

How does that work?

Kendall:

Yeah, Rebecca, who heads up our corporate marketing team, she led this and it was an amazing initiative to have everybody. I mean, we are a team of marketers. That's what we do every day. So why not invite our entire team to give ideas and insights and things that they've seen working and not working. So we held a couple, she held a couple town halls and many of us joined for hours and people would pop in and out and give ideas and feedback. I mean, some team members gave a page of written notes. I mean, just goes to show how invested the team was and just sharing what they think could work from us. And so we took that budget, the collection of feedback, data, my favorite, and we put all those things together to start formulating a marketing plan.

Ron:

What does that do for one's company culture when you involve everyone in the process?

Kendall:

I think everybody feels bought in. You know, one of my goals, even for this upcoming year, is I want to feature us and our team and the awesome things and the outcomes of all of the things that our team is doing. And I think the team really appreciates that and feels bought in when they can give those ideas that we didn't grow the way we grew without bringing in people that know more than we know. You bring in experts left and right. And I was just having a conversation like this the other day with someone we had recently hired. You're here for a reason. Bring all your knowledge and tell all your knowledge because now we're that much stronger because of it.

Ron:

So we're marketers. So therefore all of the marketing that we do must be perfect and it must always hit the bullseye, correct?

Kendall:

Oh, always. Always. I'm just kidding.

Ron:

Taylor's watching Kendall. So be mindful of saying yes to that.

Kendall:

No, not all markings working and it's good. I mean, it is equally good to know what doesn't work as what does work. And there's so many, gosh, there's so many different variables and things that you're pulling that could make something work or not work. And I play golf and I use the expression of golf that you can have a terrible day of golf and then you sink your last putt and you're like, I'll be there tomorrow doing the same thing because you find out a lot that doesn't work, but then you get that glimmer of something that does work or you do have a successful campaign and it's addicting. You just want to do it over and over and over again and keep seeing what works.

Ron:

Let's dig in a little bit deeper into a particular tactic that I want to say generally our industry is not doing and we are doing at one firefly and I would challenge we're getting better at it and I think we like what we're seeing and that is the idea of very segmented or finely tuned differentiated lists yep and the message or outcome you're expecting or wanting from that particular segment. Maybe just kind of talk about that, how you're thinking about it and what you and Rebecca and Melanie and team are executing?

Kendall:

Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that we've really tried to start thinking about this year was really looking at what is our end goal, you know what is it that we want someone to do or interact with us and then break down okay we have this end goal now who would be the person or if you look at it all of the people that we have that we work with, who does this most apply to? Who would find this the most valuable and put them in a bucket? Then you say, okay, who might still find this valuable but maybe doesn't know about it or maybe hasn't done the other thing and you know it's really just thinking about different segments of how we can speak to people that it would be that whatever activity or product we think is a right fit for them and how can we position it in front of them in a way that's relevant? And I think a lot of business owners across our industry can think about that too. It is hard list building for us putting together those segments. I mean Rebecca and Melanie, if you're here, I know you all can attest this. It is probably harder. It is harder than even building all of the assets for it is getting that right list. I know it's not an easy thing, but when you can position something that's relevant or include things in copy that are relevant to that person and speaks directly to that person, it hits home. So that's something we've been practicing and seeing some success from.

Ron:

What are examples of that tactic that would be analogous to the integrators tuned in? If you were to kind of run that forward and say, here's what they could do if they were to take maybe not three steps forward, but if they were to take one step forward, what would that look like?

Kendall:

Sure. I think, I mean, at the most basic level, and I say the most basic because I still know, but I know what sort of an uphill. You know.

Ron:

It's all hard. So everyone needs at the beginning. It's all hard work.

Kendall:

Exactly.

Ron:

Easy button here.

Kendall:

That would be breaking down bare minimum your resi customers, your commercial customers, and maybe any sort of trade partners. Then you could go deeper within those buckets. Resi customers who have a project base of this size or have bought this type of product. Because when you can start dialing in even more, hey, you have this product and you could say that in your email. I know you've enjoyed this product. Here's another product that I think might be interesting to you. And we get that type of marketing all the time. I mean, Amazon tells us those types of things. But when you can start tailoring that message to maybe what they've purchased or, you know, just smaller details like that, you start to hit home a little bit deeper.

Ron:

And then we're practicing a marketing methodology. You know It's colloquially known as drip marketing. It's the idea of someone's in a funnel and they maybe aren't ready to make contact yet, but there's through the appropriate education and confidence building, maybe one day they do make contact and maybe they even become a customer. Can you just, how are we starting to practice that? I won't, I'm not willing to say we're experts, but we're starting to think about that and to try to help our prospects and people checking one Firefly out for marketing, you know, maybe one day make contact.

Kendall:

Yeah. And I'll position it this way. I know some people have a feeling about drip marketing or a, you know, I don't know what you'd call it sort of preconceived thoughts or negative feelings about it. But I would also position it in the way of how many times have you gotten an email about something and said, you know what? I'm meaning to get around to that. And then something happens, you know, you're off to work, you're in traffic, you're, you know, you're something else comes up in life and you lose that email, you mark it unread, and it's gone. It's in the ether. That happens to me all the time. And one of the most satisfying things that we're seeing, and for those that don't know drip marketing, that's the concept of sending multiple emails within a couple week sprint. So maybe a Monday email, a Wednesday email, a Friday email, or every week, you know that you can space them out in different ways. One of the most satisfying things to us is to see we track it. When we finally get somebody that fills out a contact form, there is nothing more satisfying than going back and saying, this person, we could track it in our campaigns, in our CRM, open the first email. They clicked, open and clicked on the second email, but didn't do anything. They finally opened the third email, clicked, and filled out a form. It works. Drip marketing works. And you just don't know what's going on in that person's life that maybe they've missed that email.

Ron:

Just so everyone knows Kendall is so telling the truth, like there are literally virtual high fives. Like the person hasn't even bought anything. The listener has not necessarily spent any money. Maybe you never will, but you did the thing that the marketing funnel was desiring, which is you ultimately said, yeah, I want to watch that, or I want to download that, or I want more information. And it's fun to put, you know, the science to the test and then see if it works, and then modify it, and then put it to work, and just to go through that iterative process.

Kendall:

Yeah. I mean, think about doctor's appointments, right? How many text messages or emails do you get ahead of doctor's appointments? A couple, but it helps. The morning of your, oh, yeah, that's right. I do have that doctor's appointment. It's the same context of just kind of getting in the forefront of someone's brain.

Ron:

I agree. I'm mindful of time. And so I just wanna switch gears. Maybe we'll close out on this. So when you're not designing amazing sales and marketing strategies here at one Firefly and you're not thinking of creative ways to help our clients, what does Kendall do outside of work?

Kendall:

Oh man, what does Kendall do? Well, I am currently I'm very, very busy. I have my hands full. I mentioned it earlier, but since the five years I've been on here, I now have two kids. So I have a two-year-old daughter, name is Paige, and I have a six month old son and his name is Baker. So we were two under two and we are busy time. So most all of my time spent out of work is with them. So it's still sunny here. We're in South Florida. So on the weekends, even in February, we are going in the pool. We are doing swim lessons. We live by a place called Butterfly World. We go to that all the time.

Ron:

Who likes the butterflies more? You or Paige?

Kendall:

You know, it's little known fact, Coral Springs, Florida. Look it up. It is the butterfly capital of the world. So there's a place called Butterfly World and everyone on the team hears me talk about it because we have passes there.

Ron:

So you know what? So my son is in the ninth grade, you know, Max, he's in the ninth grade. And a couple of years ago, maybe when he was 13, 12 or 13.

Kendall:

He probably went on a school trip there. Everybody goes.

Ron:

Oh no, he did. But then like Danielle and I and Max, we were looking for something to do and we were like, "Oh, butterfly world is open." And I've been in South Florida for lots of years, decades, and I've never been there. And we literally drove there, parked in the parking lot. And at that time, my 12-year-old son was like, "There's not a cold." He didn't say this, but I'll paraphrase. Cold chance in hell that I'm going into Butterfly World and telling my buddies that I went to Butterfly World. So we actually, I went in and I looked at the brochures. I was like, I'm totally ready to check this out.

Kendall:

Thousands of butterflies.

Ron:

I think we went and got ice cream or something. And now that he's 15, I was like, there's just not a chance. I'm going to get in. Danielle and I will have to go visit Butterfly World to check it out.

Kendall:

It's great. You could feed the birds. There's all sorts of fun stuff. And it tires kids out. That's most important.

Ron:

Yeah, when you have little ones, you really need to get them walking around and oohing and eyeing so they can take some good naps. That makes a lot of sense. Well, Kendall, thank you for being the guest here on Show 260 on Automation Unplugged. Obviously, it's a pleasure to work with you. Anyone that's worked with you, whether they're at one Firefly or our customers, they know you, they like you, they trust you, and so appreciate all the hard work that you're doing. Anyone wants to get in touch with you? Any handles or places you want to send to anyone that might want to get in touch with you directly?

Kendall:

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn under Kendall Clark. I might also have Ellison, my married name. I'm on LinkedIn. Obviously my one Firefly, Kate Clark at one Firefly, and I'll be at Lightapalooza next week. So I would love some visits and people to come say hello there.

Ron:

That will be awesome. Kendall, thank you for joining me on the show.

Kendall:

All right, thanks for having me, Ron.

Ron:

All right, folks, there you have it. Show 260. We love to bring our fireflies on the show every now and again. And there really is so much exciting invention happening here at one Firefly around just sales and marketing and how we're thinking of doing it for ourselves and kind of that invention and how that then translates to what we're able to do for our clients. And so if anyone's curious, why am I sharing these tactics and methods here publicly? It's at the end of the day, I wanted Kendall to come in here. A, you can tell she's excited. I'm excited. And there's just a lot of really good things that we're discovering for ourselves. And ultimately, you could think of us as a lab and we're experimenting on ourselves so that we can experiment and bring value to our clients. And we've been doing that for many, many years. I could point at many of our products and services were tested out on ourselves before we ultimately determine how to turn that into a product or service for the industry at large. So on that note, I'm going to, I'm going to sign off, but I am going to let you all know I will be at LightPalooza with Kendall, with Kat, with JW, and we'd love to see you. So stop by the one Firefly booth. Say hello. I see there in the notes. We're in booth 409 and it'd be a pleasure to see you. I am instructing and co-instructing the four courses there. So go to the Leidapalooza.com webpage. We, when Firefly will also be at further shows in the spring and would love to see it in person as well. Like we love the virtual, we love running our Fathom recorders in those virtual meetings, but we also love in real life. And we love to see you and shake your hand, give you a hug, or have a drink with you at the bar, and kind of whatever feels appropriate. So on that note, I'm going to sign off. I'll see you soon. And appreciate you tuning in. Thanks, everybody. Take care.

SHOW NOTES:

Kendall Clark is One Firefly’s pioneering and creative sales leader. As Director of Sales, Kendall is responsible for overseeing the account executives and all sales activities, providing leadership focus and priority guidance for the department. Kendall previously led the Digital Media department, and oversaw the production of hundreds of industry-focused websites for our clients. Kendall has also been instrumental in developing and launching several of One Firefly’s award-winning products, as well as managing One Firefly’s video shoots.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and links from the interview:

• Meet our team
• Kendall Clark LinkedIn page
• Our Services