Mark: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the unique financial services and business advisory show that challenges your old-school business practices and traditional business suit culture. On this show, you’ll hear from industry professionals who will challenge you to think beyond the suit-and-tie culture while offering meaningful, modern solutions to help you enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host, Mark Van Benschoten.
Have you ever looked at your marketing department and asked yourself, “What the hell is it they do all day?” Or are you a business owner who, like many others, are hesitant to increase a Marketing budget, much less adding a whole new department? If this sounds like you, then pay attention to our next two episodes. That’s right. For your listening pleasure, we’re bringing you a little marketing miniseries. On this episode, we’re going to talk about why marketing matters to your bottom line, and next week Brad Circone of Circone + Associates is going to talk about the importance of your business’ brand and why somebody really decides to buy from you instead of someone else.
Today, we’re joined by Becca Davis. As Rea & Associates’ Director of Practice Growth, Becca is not only in charge of our firm’s Marketing and public relations initiatives, she and her team helped develop this podcast … and they’re still employed, by-the-way … and they continue to work hard to promote our new episodes each and every week. Welcome to unsuitable, Becca.
Becca: Thanks, Mark.
Mark: It’s really a pleasure to have you here. You’ve been with me on this podcast for a while there and for us to finally see it getting going in twenty-something episodes. I’m quite happy, so congratulations to you.
Becca: Well, thanks, and you do a great job, also.
Mark: Oh, I appreciate that. I’m going to give you that $5 later. Recently, we launched The Rea Advantage, our new strategic plan, and part of that was leadership outside the firm. I want to ask you about your leadership of the Ladies Beer Club of Columbus. What leadership role do you have in there?
Becca: Yeah, there’s a group, it’s kind of defunct right now, but the Ladies Beer Club of Columbus, it’s just a bunch of girls who get together, no men allowed, and we just go to-
Mark: No men allowed?
Becca: No men allowed. We go to different breweries around town and just drink beer. It’s really just happy hour, but we make it sound like it’s a very important club.
Mark: It’s sound very interesting.
Becca: It’s a great time.
Mark: It is?
Becca: Yeah.
Mark: How did they get started?
Becca: I don’t know. I think just a couple girls just really love beer and wanted to drink more of it and meet other women who like beer.
Mark: That’s awesome.
Becca: Sometimes we also get to do a tour of the brewery and get to talk to the people that are responsible for making the beers, but usually it’s just-
Mark: Sitting around drinking.
Becca: Yep. Talking about the men who aren’t there.
Mark: That’s an awesome group. Obviously, if you get a leadership role, you can count that as-
Becca: Yeah, I’ll look into that.
Mark: I’m always trying to help here.
Becca: Thanks.
Mark: Before we get started, any Rick moments today?
Becca: I don’t think I’ve had any Rick moments today. I’m assuming you’re referring to, I don’t know how you know about this, but my-
Mark: My research is deep and intensive.
Becca: Yeah, so my father’s name is Rick and he’s a very smart guy, but I don’t think all cylinders are always all firing.
Mark: I’ve heard that said about myself.
Becca: Yeah, as I’m getting older, I kind of notice myself having moments like that and it’s terrifying.
Mark: It happens. Accept and enjoy. Go for the ride.
Becca: Yeah, I mean at least I’m oblivious to it when it happens.
Mark: That’s got to be where I am today. Becca, I’ve enjoyed working with you and I think you’re doing a great job with our marketing department. I kind of think you’ll say, “Oh, I don’t have a marketing department,” and I kind of disagree. They may not have a funded marketing department. Doesn’t everybody market at some level?
Becca: Yeah, even if you don’t have a marketing department, you yourself, anytime someone asks you what you do, you’re marketing your business and yourself. Whether you know it or not, you’re marketing your business and sometimes your lack of marketing is negative.
Mark: Negatively marketing is not quite what you want. Maybe spend $1.50, might have got a better result.
Becca: Yeah.
Mark: Also, some research on you, maybe when you were growing you’d might have want to have been a first- or second-grade teacher. Do you think that working with us is kind of similar working with-
Becca: Yeah.
Mark: Boy, you answered quickly on that.
Becca: There’s an association called the Association for Accounting Marketing. One of my favorite weeks of the year is our annual conference because it’s a bunch of people who have the complete opposite minds that CPAs have and we all have the same-
Mark: Present company excluded.
Becca: Right. Yeah, honestly, our firm is very different. We’re not the stereotypical CPAs at all.
Mark: I was talking about myself, actually.
Becca: Oh, well, yeah. It’s just really interesting to see how everybody kind of faces the same struggles in accounting marketing.
Mark: Unfortunately, we’re accountants and we want to see return. If we’re going to spend $1, we want to get $2 back. Is that a battle you face?
Becca: Actually, no. We don’t really face that here. We’re really lucky actually. Our current CEO, Lee Beall, just really trusts us and he challenges us to be fearless. When we were developing the strategic plan, the consultant we worked with actually said, “Stop trying to measure your marketing department, because there are so many things that you do that you can’t necessarily tie back.” Did that lead come from a tweet they saw? Did they see our ad somewhere? Did they see an article from us? We don’t always know where they came from. Sometimes you can tell. I think tracking ROI is important when you can, but I don’t think it’s something you should stress out about all the time.
Mark: For the owner, 100% owner of an organization, and he’s out there, he’s dealing with HR issues, he’s dealing with bank issues, he’s just doing his deal, and again, we stated he has his marketing department, he’s projecting a message, is there something that he can do? Just to think about it, any advice if we had an individual sitting in here, he or she, anything you would say to him?
Becca: I think the best place to start is looking at your services or products, your channels of distribution, and your targets. Making sure that you’re selling the right thing to the right people and using the right method to get it to them. You might have to get creative about, “Okay, I’m trying to sell to this group, so what’s the best way to get in front of them?” I watch a lot of YouTube videos about makeup, which is a weird thing.
Mark: You look stunning tonight.
Becca: Thank you, but there’s one of the, I think she was on Inc Magazine’s Fastest 500 Growing Companies last year, she doesn’t have any stores that sell her products. She doesn’t do any advertising. She just sells them to other content creators on YouTube who are making these beauty videos and gets them to talk about her products and she’s one of the fastest 500 growing companies in the country. I think that’s a good example of learning where your audience is and that’s really great. It doesn’t cost her much, just the products to send. Yeah, just know your audience and how to get in front of them.
Mark: You say that, I’m like, “Oh wow, I don’t know how to do that,” but probably not that hard. I mean, know who you’re currently selling to. That’s your audience. People you would like to sell to. That’s your audience. Maybe a competitor might be your audience. What are they doing? It’s really not that hard to sit there and say, “Who’s my audience? What’s my potential out there?”
Becca: Yeah, and something we do here at Rea is research calls. You go out and you talk to your targets and you talk to your competitors and find out where they hang out and what issues they’re facing and that’s a great way to learn what solutions you need to create and where you need to be to get in front of those people.
Mark: That kind of ties into making sure your selling them the right thing. If you’ve got the greatest A widget, but everybody else wants the C widget, well, you’ve got to abandon the A widget. Even though it might be better, they want to be buying the C. You’ve got to be able to deliver what they want. Is there any kind of cycle to marketing budgets? It’s like sometimes it’s in vogue, sometimes it’s not, “Get rid of marketing.” Is there any kind of cyclical nature to marketing?
Becca: I’m sure there is. I think that our firm, I’ve definitely seen a cyclical nature of it. When I first started almost 11 years ago, I did a lot of flyers for community events and just a lot of really … of course I was right out of college, so I wouldn’t have expected to be way up high.
Mark: Sitting in on a podcast.
Becca: Yeah, but I think as technology’s changing and as the workforce is changing, we’re seeing a lot more Millennials and what they want and how they consume content is different. You have to stay on top of it. Even sometimes ahead of it, which is maybe what we’re doing here with this podcast, who knows?
Mark: You mentioned Millennials. We’re going to be talking to Pat Porter in a few weeks, I think, on Millennials. I’ll be interested to see if he ties that into that or not. It’s hard for accountants, again, we want this return. I spend $1, I want $2 back. Our clients see that and they’re like, “Why should I add a salesperson? Why should I go to this event?” Then you mentioned stop trying to measure ROI, but how do you get them to take that first leap, to actually do something from a marketing nature?
Becca: I don’t know. I would just not give them a choice if it were me, but I don’t know. I guess you just have to do your research and talk to other companies like yours who have seen success in it.
Mark: That’s a great point. Maybe you’re being bypassed. All your competitors are doing significantly better than you and you’re like, “Oh, what are they doing? Maybe a little self-awareness.” Do you have a Marketing degree?
Becca: It’s actually in speech communication, which I don’t really know what that means.
Mark: It’s just interesting. I enjoy talking to you quite a bit and I do talk to you, I don’t if you’ve noticed, and ask you a lot of questions throughout the day, “Can you help with this?” I don’t think that marketing is necessarily, “Oh, you have to have a marketing degree to do this.” You might have somebody in your organization already that can help out with marketing, I guess, is the question I’m asking.
Becca: Yeah, I think a lot of marketing is psychology. I think having an interest or a background in psychology could help because it’s just getting inside other people’s head and how am I going to connect with that person? Trying to figure out what are they really interested in and they say they want this, but what is really behind that. Anybody who likes to investigate, psychology. I think being outgoing helps just because you have to be able to connect to people and get them to trust you quickly, especially in an environment like a CPA firm. When I first started, it was like, “Why are you here?”
Mark: We were asking you or you were asking yourself?
Becca: That’s a good question. Maybe a little bit of both, but I’m still here and I think everybody’s coming around.
Mark: I tend to think of the marketing people as having more fun than anybody else. Is that a fair statement?
Becca: I think so. Yeah, there was … cheers, Mark.
Mark: Cheers.
Becca: There was a CPA firm a few years ago when the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercial was really big and they did a video of, “I’m an audit and I’m a tax return.” It was the same kind of thing. Then at the very end, you see this guy off in a field spinning around in a spinning chair and they go, “Who’s that?” They’re like, “Oh, that’s the marketing department.” “What’s he do all day?” “I have no idea.” We do. We get to be creative and have brainstorming sessions, which to some people sounds like complete torture, but I think it’s really fun.
Mark: I enjoy our conversations. I throw a lot of oddball things at you.
Becca: You do. Sometimes I’m like, “You need to leave my office and I’ll get back to you in a few minutes. I just have to digest this.”
Mark: You can say that. I’m perfectly fine with that.
Becca: I do say that sometimes, but I say it kindly enough so you don’t notice that I’ve said that.
Mark: I’m a happily-married man. I take direction well.
Becca: Good.
Mark: For somebody who is, “I don’t have a marketing department, this doesn’t apply to me,” that’s not true. You’re always projecting some sort of an image. You’re always selling something to somebody. We’ve encouraged people to know their distribution channels, know their product, know who their audience is, and how important is that and hopefully that doesn’t seem to be too cost-prohibitive. Why shouldn’t everybody have a marketing department? They have an accountant, they’re going to have a bookkeeper, right? Why shouldn’t they have somebody doing marketing?
Becca: Yeah, even if they don’t have an internal marketing department, there are plenty of agencies out in the world that they can just talk to about their brand or work on little individual campaigns if they have a new product launch. Just to help get that publicity. You don’t always necessarily have to have a big staff in-house, but I do think it’s important from time-to-time to make a splash in the industry and have some big awareness going on.
Mark: Sure. We talk about the business owner, and I think Dave Cain said on one of the earlier podcasts said, “You know, instead of working in the business, working on the business as an owner, as a manager, maybe an executive director of a not-for-profit.” I think this probably applies to exempt organizations, also, is stepping back and saying, “Okay, what’s that message that we’re sending? Is that the message we want to send?” I think that’s important.
Becca: I think, also, just educating yourself on what marketing is. I once asked someone, “What Marketing are you currently doing?” He just kept saying, “We don’t do any advertising.” I was like, “Okay, great. Aside from advertising, what marketing are you doing?” “Oh, I don’t do any of that.” Okay, but it turns out he did a lot of networking on the golf course, which doesn’t necessarily to him sound like Marketing, but it is as long as you’re networking with people that you really want to do business with.
Mark: Correct. You’re with that audience that you want to be with. I always hear, people say there’s a difference between sales and marketing. You just said there is in advertising and marketing. What’s the difference between sales and marketing?
Becca: Sales to me is, obviously, it’s actually getting the business. Our department, I view our job as the lead generation. We’re getting the Rea name out there and we’re trying to bring leads in the door. Once we get leads in the door, we pass that off to someone like you or whoever is responsible for the service that the person’s interested in, to build the relationship and make the sale. I would not be very successful as a salesperson. I don’t know how people do it, honestly, but getting the leads in, I love that.
Mark: You do. I think you take a personal interest. When somebody comes to the firm and you kind of own that. “Are we following up?”, which I appreciate. You own that. You’re like, “I worked hard to get this person to show some interest, Mark, don’t screw this up. Make sure you fully vet this.” I appreciate that. It’s important to you. From that marketing aspect, you do a hell of a job.
Becca: Thank you.
Mark: The marketing departments, I think some people do still link them together. Marketing and advertising, it’s like all one and the same. You went through and described that sales and marketing are different and you’re more on the lead generation. Is there some campaign that needs to go on from the Marketing departments of the world? Here is what we do. Are we okay with kind of going along with this misconception that’s out there?
Becca: I definitely think internally within each marketing department’s organization, they might want to work on educating the people, “Here’s what we do. Here’s what we don’t do.” I know a few years ago, people were asking, “Well, what business development has the marketing department done?” It’s like, “Well, that’s not really what we’re supposed to do.” I think just educating and setting expectations on, “Here’s what we’re responsible for. Here’s what you’re responsible for.” That can maybe help create some more-
Mark: Obviously I’m employed by Rea, I get a paycheck from Rea, so I’m going to speak highly of Rea, but that’s something we’ve struggled with is, “What’s this marketing? We didn’t get any sales.” Wait a minute. That’s not the marketing’s department. They’re bringing us opportunities. It’s our job to vet those and to close them. If we’re not getting the leads we want, we need direct marketing to, “Okay, we don’t like this pool over here. Let’s go to this pond over there.” I think that it’s important to continue that communication of here’s what marketing is. It’s not just placing ads or doing flyers for community events. It’s creating opportunities for you to go out there and to sell. I think that just needs to continue to happen internally here at Rea and for our clients, I assume. Maybe somebody does it better than we do. Could be. Who knows?
Becca: Maybe. Right.
Mark: Becca, before we dodge, I really want to say thank you for all you do for Rea and for myself because if I’m struggling at my desk and I can’t think, I need to be creative, I call you, and I appreciate that very much. Thank you.
Becca: Thank you for trusting me with your questions.
Mark: They’re kind of screwy, I know.
Becca: Well, yeah.
Mark: Before we wrap up, as you’re well-aware, you sit in on all of these, there’s a question we ask every guest, so you’ve had plenty of time to think about this. If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
Becca: I have the best answer that you could possibly have to this question, so get ready.
Mark: I’m ready.
Becca: I think the best superpower you could possibly have is controlling time because if I need to get across the country and I don’t want to fly, I don’t need to have the power to fly if I could just super-speed that amount of time. Or if I need more time to work on something, I could just pause time and un-pause time for a few other people that I need their help with. If Kyle Stemple really wants X-ray vision, he could just pause time. He could find a way to see whatever he’s trying to see with his X-ray vision.
Mark: I think that’s great. I think that would be a great superpower. You could kind of manipulate. You’re sitting up there, controlling, “I need a little more here. I could speed this up over there.”
Becca: That’s the best one ever.
Mark: It is the best one ever. I have to agree with you.
Becca: Thank you.
Mark: You set the bar kind of high for our next-
Becca: Yeah, poor guy.
Mark: We’ll see. Hopefully he’s creative. Who knows? Thank you for joining us today, Becca, and a huge thank you to our listeners who listen to our show every week. Don’t forget to tune in next week for Part 2 of our marketing miniseries. Just a reminder, you can find additional insight and resources on our website at www.reacpa.com/podcast. You can subscribe to unsuitable on iTunes and SoundCloud. Until next time, I’m Mark Van Benschoten, encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.
