Traps and Best Practices for Integrated Communication - Susan Thomas

Ian Altman 0:00

Welcome to the same side selling podcast. I am your host. Ian Altman, if you've ever tried to get media to pay attention to you, you know how valuable integrated communications can be. And I had the good fortune of working with a team at tenfold, and as I learned how they approach things with their clients to generate great results. I thought, Wow, this would really be beneficial for our audience. So today's guest is Susan Thomas. Susan is the CEO of tenfold. They're an integrated communications firm. They work with some of the most widely recognized brands in the world on making sure that they get attention. And we're going to talk about not only the things that you should be doing, but probably some of the things you shouldn't be doing. So Susan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Ian, nice to meet you. Great to see you. Can you give us a little bit of background about tenfold and kind of which types of clients you serve and why they come to you

Speaker 1 1:01

absolutely tenfold. Has been around 30 years. Now we're going on our 31st year, and we've always been focused on what the market we call is deep tech. So no Consumer Solutions, just deep tech in the B to B world. And often they come to us because they need a funding round, and they're not well known, and maybe they're going from a Series A to A Series B, and you just haven't had that notoriety. Or perhaps they're in a highly competitive market, and maybe a big player has entered the market, and they need to differentiate a little better. So they need a couple of different messaging. They need to turn on the gas when it comes to notoriety and visibility, maybe they need work with the industry analyst community to get a stronger endorsement from that group, or with social influencers. Those are all the kinds of things that we help also. They may have a crisis. We've seen a lot of crisis over the years, and they need help out of a jam. So those are just a few of the reasons that we get calls.

Ian Altman 2:03

Yeah. And obviously, you guys have won more awards that can confit on a website. I mean, it's kind of funny. When you get a note from Susan, it's like, and you're all the words we've gotten as you scroll for like, 10 minutes, you're like, wow, they're still coming. There's a lot of awards.

Unknown Speaker 2:18

Ian Altman 2:21

but that's still a lot of them. So what I want our listeners to really grasp is, what are the traps, what are the mistakes that people often make when they're looking for to create that additional visibility, to develop that integrated communications message, what are the mistakes or traps that they fall into?

Speaker 1 2:39

Yeah, I think that I have the advantage of being in the market that's over 100 years old. Erica has been around for 100 years, which is great. Most people understand what it is, so I'm not doing a lot of education. However, with that has come some really bad actors in my industry, and they've been a little bit shyster. They take money and they don't deliver results, and I think that has put a lot of customers on guard. It almost incent them to devalue it, because they probably won't get what they need. So my philosophy is, well, why buy it at all if it's not going to be what you need, you know? And so I'd rather deliver exactly what you need. We actually put guarantees behind what we do then. So we just take the trust issue out. Look, if it doesn't work out, we're going to discount your program to the percentage we miss on your program, which is better than having them, you know, slant eye and the negotiations become some sort of crazy antics, and in the end, they have to negotiate away things that they really wanted or that their stakeholders wanted. So I think that's one big problem they have is trying to force fit a price versus force fitting what they actually need to see. Think another thing is, you know how they consider vendors? I know, you know there's in my industry, it's always, it's always, you never get fired. Used to be you never get fired for buying IBM. Now there are different names in that spot, likely, but they always think, the bigger the brand, the likely better service they're going to be, when, in fact, a lot of these brands really get sort of dulled down, because the people that work there often have very specific silos that they work in, and you wind up having to work with a lot of different silos. A lot of them are not really trained to think creatively. They're really trained to just execute on something, because that's how the big brands can make their margins. So you know that those are just a couple of examples, and I think the third is people negotiate hours or a retainer, neither of which is a win, win. If you negotiate by the hour. You're just like wanting as few people, as few as hours as possible. And there's this question about, can't you just make a call? Can't you just this they're not going to get what they want if they negotiate a retainer, they think it covers everything, and most often, the agency is going to have to take people off that you think are. On your account to make ends meet, because there's simple physics there. So honestly, I think people ought to negotiate results. Yeah, and

Ian Altman 5:09

that's it. And I think that in so many businesses, that's the case where, if you think about it, your clients want to get the greatest results they can with the least amount of effort or time, because that shows that you have the greatest expertise. So anytime someone's trading dollars for hours, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And then anytime you're getting this type of service, your team is very high level people. I mean, you've got very sophisticated, experienced people. The only way to sell it at a lower price is if you have less experience, less capable people who are going to deliver inferior results. But there's still that trap that people fall into where they say, No, this is my budget, and they often don't connect the budget with the results, which obviously is something that you guys are doing. So what type of results can people actually measure, and should they be measuring? Well, we

Speaker 1 5:59

have them measure everything that we can think of, right down to media response. We think that, you know, having been in the industry for such a long time, we know how to assess the market, what's hot, what's not there's all kinds of indicators out there. There's the Gartner Hype Cycle, there's all kinds of articles towards the end of the year, what's going to be hot, what's what's going to cool down? Where are people in this stage? And even, you know, we can actually look to see what kinds of announcements are playing, what kinds of trends and topics matter. And as long as we can negotiate like, what kinds of things that the spokespeople will talk about, what kinds of announcements they think they'll have, what kinds of programs they want to do. You know, we can get very, very close, if not exceed, for the same price, by the way, our expectations that we like lay out in the cell.

Ian Altman 6:48

And I think that, I mean, it's one of the things that really caught my attention is how, as an organization, you guys are so committed to the results, and here's what we're going to measure, and here's the type of reporting that we do. And when we were talking you were saying that a lot of your clients are like, really, you measure that because they've never had that experience.

Speaker 1 7:03

Yeah, they really haven't. And even right down to what we do is just getting a feature article may not even if it's in that tier that your client said was what they wanted, it may not be enough to convince the CFO or the COO or the board. And so what we've now done is we've overlaid Google Analytics or and also we're working on overlaying the AI llms to see what happened to the web traffic, to see did did this content draw in the people that you thought it would draw in? Did this support getting more top of funnel? And that's the name of the game. Yeah.

Ian Altman 7:39

It's always fascinating to me when people say, for example, well, you know, we want to cover story in The Wall Street Journal, and you're like, well, a, that's a pretty lofty goal, and B, is that really where your target audience is? So it may not be.

Speaker 1 7:53

C, it's behind a paywall, so nobody can read it unless they have a subscription. They never think of

Ian Altman 8:00

Yeah, that's a perfect example of your guy's expertise. Because I venture to say, most of people in your industry, someone says, Well, we want to get a featured article on The Wall Street Journal. Okay, we'll work on that. And no one pushes back and says, you realize that the search engines aren't going to hit that, and the way people find stuff today isn't going to be found, and you're going to hit 3% of the addressable market in that publication, as opposed to if we got you on this podcast, if we got you in this environment, if we got you featured by this analyst, that's going to have an order of magnitude more visibility for you.

Speaker 1 8:34

You're exactly right. And I've never seen a market change faster than fintech. We have three, one very large public company, and we watch this all the time, we're finding that new media, like podcasts are much more effective for driving traffic than some of the more staid publications that have been around for 25 years.

Ian Altman 8:55

Absolutely. So we talked about some of these mistakes that people make, and one of it gets back to this idea of budget, where people often have a preconceived notion of what it should cost, and then they come to an integrated communications firm like yours and say, Okay, here's what we have to spend. So why is that dangerous?

Speaker 1 9:14

Well, first of all, oftentimes they're not even the ones that think of it, but they may be getting advised by venture capitalists who say, Oh, I heard one firm, when it gave it gave the service out for 10k or 15k and I always try to take them back to, well, what did they sell for 10k or 15k because I normally, when I we create an integrated plan, it's just that it's social, it's social influencers, it may be industry analysts, it may be press releases. It's certainly going to be media coverage on the news, as well as proactive thought leadership kinds of things. There's all kinds of things that are going to be in our package, and they're all guaranteed, whereas most i. Know anyone yet that they'll go as far as guaranteeing a certain number of briefings, but not even in a tier. They don't guarantee results like we do. Yeah, and that takes a lot of staying power and sticking power and a lot of data, which we have from literally, we've been collecting data for at least 25 years,

and it gives you, it gives you the credibility that says, Look, if we don't deliver this, you're going to pay less. And your peers in the industry are like, She's crazy. There's no way you can do that. But if you know what you're delivering, it makes perfect sense.

Yeah, and I wouldn't promise anybody the wrong thing. So if they don't have the goods to get an earned Business Press article, I will tell them, yeah. And what we often find is, oh, right, right, right, right, yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. But, you know, I could do this or I could do that, and then it becomes like, Well, are they your customer? Have they had an actual ROI of a million dollars or more? So it's pretty funny, but we're not trying to be hard or difficult. We're trying to give people a realistic I mean, when you buy a, you know, hybrid, you know, leaf, for example, if they sell, still sell those. You're not expecting it to go, you know, not expected to win on a racetrack. I'll just put it to you that way. But still, somehow, these companies still think they're going to buy a starter package and get the, you know, Monte Carlo results kind of thing.

Yeah, it's funny. You said that we had, we had some friends in town visiting us, and I drive a Tesla Model S and, and our friend who was in town visiting said, Yeah, you know, I had a leaf at one point, but didn't drive like this. I'm like, Well, you know, it's, it's a different membership has its privileges. Yeah, it's a different product for that purpose. And I know that in your business, you had clients in the past who would come in with a budget that was below what they could really accomplish. So how has that changed in your business at all?

Yeah, we've learned that what happens is it affects delivery. And one of the best things about us is that sales and delivery teams are very closely intermingled, and so we just don't do that anymore. We just don't take them on. Recently was having a conversation with a repeat customer, and it always said, you know, when we get a little bigger, we're going to spend more and over many times working with them. That just wasn't the case, and I realized it always was a problem, and so I don't want them to be unhappy. I don't want them, you know, we have these meetings called Crazy good client set, and we it's one of our core indicators on how we're doing as a company, or what scores we're getting. And usually when clients are unhappy, it's because they under but yeah, and they somehow that always comes back on the vendor, even though the vendor is like, Well, hey, you're not going to get these programs, you know, and they seem to forget that. So I just would prefer not working with somebody that's going to under buy, because we're going to leave it all on the field, and it's really difficult.

Interesting thing is that the clients who spend more, here's the irony. Is that they're generally happier because they've made the proper investment. They're getting tremendously better results. So it's like they might spend 30 or 40% more, but they get 500% the results that they would have before.

That's right. That's exactly right. That's what we I think that's why we have so many repeat clients is because we don't gate results if they're all part of the same effort. So we may say we're going to get you 10 features, but we're going to, of course, like any sales rep, we're going to think about it in a funnel, and so just like media and we're going to know how many we need to put in, and sometimes we're pleasantly wrong, meaning a lot more reporters are interested than we thought they would be, and that's always a good thing, but at worst case, they're never going to get under what we promise.

If somebody is running a B to B Company and they're looking to increase their sales, they're looking to attract additional investors, they're trying to raise their profile, we talked about the mistakes and what they shouldn't do. What are some of the things they should be doing to really maximize the results of this type of integrated communication? Yeah, I

think a lot of it comes down to readiness on their part, the companies that sometimes we find just don't have the assets, and like with anything, you can't go out and sell if you don't have a product or a service to sell. And that's the same when you're when you're working from a visibility perspective, people need something to latch on to. So as an example, they're going to need a team to work with us, or somebody to work with us, a dedicated marketing person. We often get calls from a CEO who's trying to fly between many meetings, many different things. It's often very difficult for that person to manage the program. So, you know, please don't start your program if you're not ready. Oftentimes, people want us to do a project, and they'll come back to us. And I'm like, you know, probably just better off to start when you're ready to go on a consistent basis, because people aren't going to remember your name for six. Months in between. So recommend that you that you wait until your your readiness is a bit higher. I think they should also think about like, what's going to be most important for them. So what are their priorities? I love the shows on HGV TV, for example, Love It or List It, or whatever. What are your must haves? And I always appreciate that, because I feel like that's the type of thing that I want to make sure that my clients have communicated to us. And then when we create our plans, we can show them different tiers with all of their wishes and desires, all the way down to just their must haves, and they can mix and match the program that works best for them?

Yeah, and so I think that level of team, I can see that happening, where people say, Okay, I'm just going to outsource this. It's like, I often talk to my clients, I'm like, Look, until the principals can sell this stuff, you can't have a sales team, because the principals have a decided advantage in selling it. So until you can prove that there's a market for this, don't add a bunch of salespeople and then wonder why they're not performing. Like, let's make sure that we got that focused.

I also think that they do it because they've been told, like, you should get PR, but they don't understand. They haven't quantified the impact of what that PR is going to have on them. They don't know how to know how to know, like, Oh, my God, my phone's gonna ring off the hook. I mean, we've been credited with things like, one of our clients was bought after a strategic introduction through an industry analyst. Yeah, you know, we've had, you know, just all kinds of I mean, I've one that we worked with. It was one of the biggest. They were valued at couple of billion dollars in an acquisition. I'm still hearing from the guy that handled that deal like every every Christmas I get a card, you know, kind of thing. So the impact can be giant. I mean, reputation is a huge part an acquisition process and also part of an exit process.

And I think that so much of it nowadays when it comes to private equity or valuations, one of the factors that they often calculate is hype, and it's very difficult to succinctly quantify, but the bottom line is, what's the buzz out in the marketplace for this brand or this product or this sector? And if there's a lot of hype around it, it boosts valuation. And I know that, for example, one of my clients remember when they were going to raise private equity, they were targeting middle market, and middle market was like where they were going to grow the most, but they were falling behind. And then we worked with their team. We went from 20% to over 95% of their team hitting their number in one year. When they raised capital, they got more than double the valuation a year later, because private equity said, Man, look at how fast they're growing. We better invest quick there. We're going to lose this thing. It's the same thing. If there's hype and buzz around it, they're thinking, Man, this is a hot company. If we don't invest now, someone else will, yeah.

And I think we've seen similar stories in that we can trace back to before we were really thinking about impact and value to now we were just and we're seeing that a customer set, well, Kim in our security group reported all 10s in our client set. She got a whole like she had six different crazy good client set meetings, and I think nine out of 10 of them, or something. It was huge number, or 10s out of 10. So not only are they happier, but also our revenues are 40% higher, and that's because we're able to give them all the things that they need, and they don't even know they need it. You know, I always when I go into like, it's just kind of like going into a doctor. When you go into the doctor, you're not going to say, well, you know, I'd like this kind of drug, and I'd like this kind of surgery, and I'd like this tell me what I need. And we really appreciate it when our customers understand our expertise and trust us hold us accountable, for sure, but trust us to at least give them a good plan.

And I think that's another great thing. So in those pieces of things. To do, one, you need to make sure you have the right team. Second, you want to make sure that you're not focused on a project based approach. Because for Integrated Communications, it's not a flash in the pan, it's you're building that repetitively over time. So be able to say, Wow, these guys are always in the news. They're always top of mind. That's it, and then prioritizing what's most important where you're going to be, and that last one being, look, are you deferring to the expertise of the people brought you in? I always laugh when people will say to me, Well, here's what I want you to cover with our team. And I'm like, interesting. Okay, so you have a sales kickoff this what you want to cover? Okay, how similar is that to what you've worked with your team in the past on? Well, it's the same kind of stuff. Okay, how effective has that been? Not very effective. Okay, so do you want me to do that? You want me to do what I think you need? And it's the same thing in your business. It's like you have deep expertise. If people don't take advantage of that, shame on them, and those are probably the people who aren't willing to make the proper investment you. You can look at them and say, If you invest at this level, you're likely to get a 5x return. If you invest this lower level, maybe you'll get a 1x return. Maybe you won't get a return at all. But you know, what do you want to do? How similar is that? Yeah, it's so similar.

And when you work with engineers, and often those with a couple of different PhDs. They have a high opinion of what they know about what you do, and so it's, it's one of those things where it's like, you know, you may code anything in the world and you're clearly a genius, but in this area, there's a reason you called me, because if you could have done it, you would have by now, and that's ultimately my comeback is, if you had already, you already have the keys to success, why'd you call me? And what I find often is that it's exactly this behavior, you know, and I don't blame why they started this, because, again, the bad actors, there's a lot of agencies and they got caught up in this macroeconomic thing that's been going on with tech where, you know, tech companies went Ouch, and they've got edicts to cut all their budgets and this and that, and so what? How did agencies and firms respond? Well, they removed some of their more expensive, higher level people that know how to do these things. I didn't, yeah, and that is a very big differentiator. And so they have these people that are 22 years old, and nothing against 22 year olds. I have one myself in my family, and so I have a daughter that's 22 and she's brilliant in her own way, but she certainly doesn't have the expertise to tell somebody how to do something at this point. And so I feel like that's the biggest thing. Is they're going for price versus expertise, proven success. My husband's a pilot. He fly. He's typed in like, 18 different kinds of airplanes, and they call it time and type and that's what's going on with our industry, too. Well. How many IPOs have they been through? How many crisis have they been through? How many, you know, acquisitions, mergers, difficult product launches, I'll take anything, because I've had 500 clients and so, you know, that's, that's where we are.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So Susan, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you and to learn more about what you do at tenfold?

Yeah, just check out our website at dub, dub, tenfold.com, one, zero, f, o, l, d.com, we'd love to hear from people that are have questions, and either even if they can't be a client happy to help them out and point them in the right

direction, that's perfect. Let me try and recap the key points. Then you can tell me what I missed. So the first thing is the things you want to avoid. Want to make sure you don't start with budget, you don't start with things on a project basis, and you don't assume your expertise in terms of what you know about how this stuff works, in terms of building out a team and a process. You want to make sure that not only are you leveraging the expertise of the integrated communications firm, but you have people who can execute inside your business to make sure you take advantage of that once again, avoid those project based missions, set your priorities so you can define your goals, because you might, if you're trying to constrain to a budget, you might have to give up some things, but at least you're knowingly doing that more often than I think. When people see different levels of what they get at different investments, they kind of make that clear. And then finally, that idea of defer to the experts that you bring in, and let's face it, if they don't see that you're bringing expertise, then why would they bring you in the first place? So if you're dealing with someone and you feel you have to tell them how to do their job, maybe that is the person you should hire. What did I miss?

Oh, I think that's perfect. And I think that, you know, I had this one client that said, Well, there's one prospect that said, Oh, well, the other firm was just so much cheaper than you. And I said, oh, so they guaranteed results in all these other programs? Well, no, they didn't do any of that. Did they have all these programs on their list that you were going to get? Well, no, not that either. And I'm like, so were they cheaper? I think, you know, maybe cheap isn't what every firm, especially in these times. Yeah?

And let's face it, if you're tight on resources, you can either spend the money once and get the right results, or you can spend less money and do it five times over, and that usually doesn't work out too well. Yeah, there you go. All right, Susan, well, thanks so much. And to our listeners, reach out to Susan Thomas and their team, and they will give you guidance, even if they can't help you, they'll point you in the right direction. And to get that level of expertise is something that not everyone needs, but if you need it, they're the good people to reach out to. So Susan, thanks for joining me. Thank you.

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