[00:00:00] Corey: Hey, it's Corey. I am changing it up today and giving you an opportunity to hear some of my insights about specializing your company with a vertical market approach. So today you'll hear me being interviewed by the Chief Marketing Officer of Vanta, Jeff Tomlin, on his show, conquer Local. You'll hear my thoughts on the power of specialization, how specialization drives superior retention and its impact on sales.
I go into the three types of marketing for vertical specialists, how to generate word of mouth, what the zone of indifference is all about, and a whole lot more. There's a ton of great value for you right here in this episode. I hope you enjoy it now onto the show.
[00:00:58] Host: Corey Quinn. Hey, it is a pleasure to have you on the Conquer Local podcast, sir. Welcome and how you doing?
[00:01:06] Corey: I'm doing great, Jeff. Super excited to be here.
[00:01:08] Host: Well, glad to have you. So, um, you know, we went through a little bit of your, uh, your background, uh, in, uh, throughout the intro, but, uh, why don't you tell the audience a little bit more about you and about your life, and life is a fractional CMO and all things great.
[00:01:24] Corey: Sure. So thanks for that. I have over two decades of experience, combination of entrepreneurship and sales and business development. About 15 of that, uh, that of those years, uh, directly in an agency as an operator. My last role as at an agency was as a chief marketing officer of a company called Scorpion.
And Scorpion is a digital marketing agency and technology company that services, uh, small to medium sized local businesses with a, uh, a focus on vertical couple verticals. And, uh, while I was there, I was, I joined the company in 2015 and, Um, at the time it was about a hundred employees, a thousand customers, and about 20 million in revenue.
By the time I left the agency, it was 20, at the end of 2021, it was a thousand employees, 14,000 clients, and about 150 million in revenue. So during those six and a half years, I just, we had that explosive growth and. Gosh, I learned so much. I had such a good time, made lifelong friendships, and, and now what I'm doing is I've left Scorpion about a year, just over a year ago, and I'm spending my time helping agencies, uh, to grow by leveraging some of the, uh, the, the big sort of insights and learnings that I had both of my time at Scorpion, as well as across my professional career.
So you've helped
[00:02:56] Host: SaaS companies and agencies grow from seven to eight figures. Um, you've grown scorpion from 20 million to 150 million, which is an incredible amount of growth and, and a really incredible top line. So talk, talk a little bit about. You know, some of the practices that you had in place are like, you know, how do you take something from 20 million to 150 million?
Not a lot of people have reached that, that level of growth. Um, and so you, you, you must have some war wounds and battle scars and some, some, uh, practical experience
[00:03:32] Corey: to share was not a straight, it was not a straight line. You don't get. It was definitely a, uh, an interesting experience for sure. Uh, so I, I, when I arrived on the scene at Scorpion, as I mentioned, it was about a hundred person company and a, um, uh, nine person sales team.
I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but when I remember I was in the conference room, I was interviewing for the chief marketing officer role, which by the way, was their first marketing hire for the agency. Um, Previous to that, the founder and c e o had kind of done random, you know, acts of marketing to, to get the phone to ring.
Uh, but the, uh, the thing I learned in the, in the interview process, I was interviewing with my colleague on the sales side, my, my counterpart on the sales side. He was already at, at the company at that time. And he shared with me something that frankly I did not believe when I first heard it. And so what he shared with me was that the client retention rate was 93%.
Which for any agency of any size, that's a fantastic number. But when you're dealing with small local businesses that come in and out of business and change locations and, you know, uh, it's more volatile potentially than, uh, larger companies just due to their size. Um, I, uh, was taken aback and I eventually was, um, uh, given the job I was given offer to join Scorpion.
I took the offer, uh, in part because the, there was something [00:05:00] special about the company that, uh, I wanted to understand and to help the, the c e o to grow the company from where they were. And what I learned was a big part of Scorpion's success. In my, in my experience in others is the vertical focus, the vertical go to market, and I'll explain to you what that means specifically in this context.
Out of the thousand customers that were scorpion clients, vast majority of them were attorneys, and vast majority of those were personal injury attorneys. And so they'd really built the business since 2001 to 2000, um, 15 when I was there. When I joined around, really focusing in on that specific customer.
And as a result of that focus, we were able to drive a lot of value for those customers and, and, and resulting in that great customer retention ratio. So one of the big factors, and this is one of the things that, um, we could talk more about, but uh, and I share with my clients, is taking a vertical focus to the market.
The other thing that was really instrumental in our growth was the, um, There's sort of three legs to a marketing sort of go-to-market process. Uh, it's inbound, outbound, and relationship-based marketing. When it came to the sales team, it was a nine person sales team, uh, at the time, and they were all, uh, they all drove very nice cars.
They all lived a very comfortable lifestyle, and it was a good time to be a scorpion salesperson. The reason was because, uh, there was a ton of inbound interest, a lot of inbound leads and. A lot of people, attorneys raising their hand and saying, Hey, I wanna be a Scorpion customer. I wanna learn more about your services.
The reason why was because every single Scorpion client got a brand new website that was SEO optimized, and back in the early 2000 tens, it was a lot easier to rank for competitive keywords than it is I, I'd argue today, but even still. And so the way that an attorney would shop for a website is that they would go to Google and they took search for attorney in, you know, my whatever city they're in, in, in Los Angeles or, or Baltimore or whatever it is.
And they would look at, see who came up in the search results, and they'd click on those websites In inevitably, it would be a Scorpion website. Client and they'd go to the bottom of the client website and there would be a link over to Scorpion, and that's how they'd get a lot of the business. The challenge was, and part of the reason why I was brought into Help Scorpion, was the, the founder, as I mentioned, really wanted to grow, like really wanted to grow the business, wanted to help more people, wanna reach more people, and the way that we, we were not going to be able to reach our revenue targets by just depending on inbound.
We had to do something that's called outbound. And outbound. You know, sales and marketing is really about going into the market and having con proactive conversations before people reach out to us. And so we had taken a, uh, very inbound focused sales culture and we brought in an outbound methodology. We trained the folks up on that and we, we brought that in.
And by doing that alone, that really helped us to almost double the business overnight. Just by, just by adding outbound to the inbound process. Uh, and then the third thing that we did, which is really critical for especially if you want to, uh, be a specialist in a vertical, is do something that's called what I call relationship based marketing.
And from a high level, that's basically building trust with, uh, the people in the industry that you're targeting through going to the conferences, associations and being, uh, sort of value driven. Yeah,
[00:08:43] Host: so I, I'm, I'm, I'm still reeling a bit by the retention rate that you, you talked about 93%. It's really unheard of because, you know, one of the reasons, you know, some investors particularly stay away from the SMB space is because there's a natural rate of churn built into the, into the market.
And, um, 93% is absolutely unbelievable. Um, and so you talked a little about, uh, both the, uh, vertical strategy. So unpack that a little bit. Like what are specifically some of the benefit focusing on a vertical like you guys did
[00:09:19] Corey: at Scorpion? Yeah. Well, uh, through my experience as well as I have, uh, interviewed a bunch of vertical specialist agency, the founders of those agencies, I've asked them the same question.
It's, everyone comes back this with the same answer, which is everything becomes easier and better when you are focused on a vertical. I mean by that is, you know, what lists to buy or to, or to, or to create, you know, what content to write. You know, you're not just writing a generic, uh, infographic about seo, but you're writing a, uh, an infographic for, uh, SEO for dental offices, right?
You're making, you're making a much bigger impact with [00:10:00] your content. You know where to advertise, you know, which conferences to go to and which associations to get involved in, and which podcasts to start, and so on and so forth. So it just brings a lot of focus and clarity to an agency or any business sa it could be SaaS or agency, um, that helps to streamline and create a bigger, bigger impact in today's world, especially in the crowded world of agencies.
For this particular audience. Um, you know, being a generalist, it makes it very difficult to get your message across. That's number one. It makes it easier. And then number two, I would just add to that, that when you are vertically focused, you're able to operationalize your business. You know, we went from, uh, a hundred employees to a thousand employees, but we.
You know, um, we 14 times our, our number of employees and the way that you're, we were able to do that with great client retention rates was through operationalizing the business. And the only way you could do that is if you're doing very, very similar things every day, all day. Repeated actions lead to processes and systems.
And then we built a lot of software that allowed us to, um, provide the same amount of value that a human would in some respects. In certain aspects of, of the business without, without relying on humans to do it. So we, we brought a lot of software in to help us to run the operations of the business.
[00:11:22] Host: That makes, that makes perfect sense.
And, um, and, and, and it, I can understand it too, uh, I came from a, a world where we focused on building real estate websites, uh, and building real estate website platform had the same benefits, uh, that you're describing. And, uh, it to totally resonates. You've got a very target audience and you can create repeatable systems.
[00:11:44] Corey: I was one more thought I wanted to add on that. You reminded me. Which is that you begin to get really familiar with your buyer if you're just servicing a real estate agent or, you know, uh, in, in this ca in your case, uh, you become very familiar with them, their world, their, the problems you're solving for them, and that allows you to.
Stand out even more with your marketing and your positioning cuz you're, you are a specialist in their world. And in many cases, in the case of Scorpion, uh, what we were able to do was to solve problems that they didn't even realize they had yet. Because we knew their business, we knew what success looked like for them.
And many cases these attorneys were, uh, not very sophisticated when it came to marketing. So we were able to. Use our specialization and our familiarity with their world to help them to achieve a lot of growth in a short period of time.
[00:12:44] Host: Must make things easier on your sales floor and making, building repeatable processes on the sales floor too, because similar to, you know, all of your marketing efforts, uh, your sales people are becoming experts at, at speaking to a very specific client and a lot of repeatability Yeah.
That you can build into that. I could see for sure. Hundred percent. Uh, one thing I, I did wanna note, by the way, cuz I heard you mention podcast and you have vertical, uh, a vertical Go-to-Market podcast. And I I wanted to ask you, uh, what the fo well, I, I can imagine what the focus is, but who, the, who, who's the target audience in that podcast?
Mm-hmm.
[00:13:22] Corey: Thank you. So the, it's the Vertical Go to Market podcast and the, um, the, it's for business owners, agency owners who. Have, be, been successful by being a generalist, meaning serving businesses of all shapes and sizes. And they're at that point where they wanna specialize and they, they're, they're, they know that they need to sharpen their focus and, and get, and get more, uh, vertically oriented potentially.
And so that's really the audience. And what I do on this podcast is I interview. Founders of agencies and of SaaS businesses who've already made that transition. From a generalist to a specialist, and they've been wildly successful. So these are the sort of the after, um, uh, you know, the people who've, like I said, been through that transformation.
They, they've been through the process of being a generalist, knowing what that's like, and then deciding to specialize and then being very successful as a result.
[00:14:22] Host: Oh, there you go. So, um, one of the other things that you had touched on earlier on is the three legs of the stool. And can we, can we, can we back up to that a little bit and you go through that?
Sure, of course. Because I like, I think that it's such an important concept for people to be super clear on their, on, on their go-to-market strategies and it's, uh, it's just an important concept.
[00:14:42] Corey: Mm-hmm. I speak with a lot of agencies who really. Today focus on inbound as their primary channel for growing their business.
And I think that there's nothing wrong with that and I think it's a very good way to go to, to market. It becomes a challenge. However, when you [00:15:00] want to increase the volume of business that you're driving, you're sort of subject to. The, the market. Uh, and what I mean by that, let's just say you're targeting, you know, local businesses or, or it could be any vertical.
Uh, at any one point, there's been various studies about this. Um, you, you know, they're, let's say three to 5% of the market is searching for a solution. They're actively looking, which means that 95% of the market is not currently looking. However, there's gonna be a sum percentage of those businesses. That, uh, that would benefit from your service.
And so, um, you know, inbound is, and that, that, that what I'm talking about is, is outbound. I'll talk about that here in a second. But from an inbound perspective, uh, the way to do out inbound very effectively is number one, um, if you speak to me, I'll always say that you need to be vertically focused. You need to understand your specific consumer, the person you're buying to at a very deep level.
As a result of that, you're able to communicate at, uh, communicate to them much more effectively, uh, than if you were a generalist. And so doing the customer research and being the ver being vertically focused is really important. Um, and the purpose of inbound is to make sure that your offer and your brand is in front of those three to 5% of the mar of the mark who's actively.
Searching for a solution. So that means being on search and being on social. It's a bit about putting out great content that educates the buyer about the problem that they're trying to figure out, so on and so forth. That's what good inbound is, is being visible in the buyer's journey so that they can include you to the list of businesses that they're thinking about, uh, you know, interviewing to, you know, become their partner or vendor.
That's, that's inbound. Outbound is targeting the rest of the market that's not currently shopping. And I'll share with you concept that I talk about with my clients, which is the zone of indifference. Probably haven't heard of that, that concept
[00:16:58] Host: have not heard of the concept. Okay.
[00:17:00] Corey: Fill us in. Okay. uh, yeah.
Alright. I'll fill, I'll fill in the gap here. So I'll, I'll give you an example by sharing a story about my wife. So my wife has the iPhone X. Okay, I think we're as, as, wait, wait. Now the latest iPhone is the 14 and the phone crashes. The, the, the memory card is full. It's slow. It has a short battery life.
And I, and she complains about it once in a while. Uh, however, I, um, uh, you know, for whatever reason she doesn't go and get the new phone, I encourage her, like, honey, you all this stuff will, will be resolved by just going to the, you know, the store or. We're with Verizon here, and I said, go to the Verizon store.
And she says, well, you know, I, I, I really am frustrated about this phone, but gosh, I don't wanna lose my photos. And so I'm just gonna, you know, I'll, I'll go down there sometime. And of course she never does. And so, Where she is is she's in what I call the zone of indifference. She doesn't love her phone, but she doesn't hate it enough to actually go and fix it.
She's not yet in that three to 5% of the market that's actively looking for a solution. She knows what she needs to do, but she's not doing it, and that's what really good, effective outbound does. It attacks that zone of indifference. It finds the, the largest percentage of the market. That you're targeting who know they have a problem, but it's not bad enough yet for them to actually go through the pain of making a change.
We all hate change. Right. You know, human nature. Yeah. And so what good outbound does is assuming you really know who your, your target customer is, you can go outbound to them and en and encourage them to think about the problem that you solve in a way that helps them to realize, hey, you know, I can, I can actually solve this really easily.
You know, through these services and, um, and do so proactively. Yeah. What, what the great thing about outbound is from a strategic perspective is by the time they're in the buying process, they're already in the inbound process. They're gonna be shopping, [00:20:00] they're gonna be comparing you to everyone else. If you are you, if you reach out to them directly, you can bypass that whole comparison sort of competitive nature.
You can have a direct conversation with them and influence them potentially to buy your service. Uh, right out, right out the gate. So that's number two, inbound, outbound. And the third one is relationship-based marketing. The, the, the focus of relationship-based marketing, and I mentioned this briefly a minute ago, but it is in any vertical or industry, there are going to be places where the people who are a part of that industry go and spend time and socialize and hang out.
Things like association, con associations, conferences, events, meetings, all those things are really important when you're, when you're focusing in on a vertical. But in addition to that, there's uh, there's an author, uh, ma, um, uh, uh, Gladwell who mentioned this, this concept of connectors and mavens. And where I, where I apply this in, uh, Malcolm Gladwell, sorry.
Uh, where I apply this into, uh, my work is in any vertical industry, there are going to be people in that industry who have more social capital than anyone else. They're the ones that everyone else looks to. To make decisions. Maybe it could be the biggest brand, it could be the biggest influencers. And so from a strategic perspective, knowing that these, that these folks, these influential folks, uh, are out there and they're very believable by their, by their vertical building relationships with them is really a smart thing to do.
As well as targeting the, the, the companies and the brands in your target vertical who have the most credibility. If you can bring them on as your clients, you're gonna make your sales process a lot faster and a lot smoother than if you didn't.
[00:21:40] Host: You know, in the, uh, in the past two episodes, um, we had Barrett King and uh, um, and Jim, we had Jack Perez, uh, who was speak speaking to us.
And we, and in, in both episodes, the idea of the, of the trifecta, inbound, outbound, and. Partnerships or word of mouth and, and, and re referral based marketing, um, came up. Yeah. And so I'm so glad to hear you talk about it because it reinforces that, uh, hey, some of our positions on this, we're not just making this shit up.
That it's, it's, this is a great way to think. And, and you made a couple of things a little bit sharper, and number one was focusing on verticalization for inbound, which I think is, is, is super smart. And then you layered in this concept of this gap of indifference, um, Which is, I, I think, I think is a really cool way of, uh, of thinking about the opportunity with outbound because, um, you know, we do know if you can, if you can quantify the amount of pain that, that, that somebody has and get them to see that, that actually solving that amount pain, even if they think it's kind of small, um, you go a long way to getting, getting them to agree to a, to, to, to a certain path.
Um, yep. And, and that's right. And, and you know, one of the things, um, you know, we were, we were also chatting about in, in the previous episode was, was, uh, partnerships. Uh, and uh, Barrett King, uh, at HubSpot was, uh, talking a lot about hi, his focus is on global partnerships there. And, um, you know, there's a couple of different ways of looking at that at sort of indirect channels, if you will.
Indirect being Yeah. You know, word of mouth and referral and. You have an equation when you're thinking about, uh, word of mouth. Mm-hmm. You wanna explain that a little bit? Yes.
[00:23:25] Corey: Sure. Absolutely. So I am basing this off of the work of Chip Conley. Chip is a, the ex founder and c e o of a boutique hotel group called de.
It's no longer in existence. They were bought by some massive company and he ended up becoming the, the chief customer officer over at Airbnb for a while. And you know what he taught, uh, in his, in a, in a book he wrote as well as just in general. Is that the way to. Um, really build word of mouth predictably, is to meet their customers, meet your customers unrecognized needs.
So I'll give you an example of what the heck that means. So, and I, and I do, I do use an equation. So the first part of the equation is you wanna meet your customer's needs. I'll use Scorpion is the example. So what we did at Scorpion is, They came to our attorney clients and later other verticals. But the attorney clients came to us because they had a need to fill, which is they needed more cases.
And so of course, in order for us to stay in business, we needed to make sure that we were delivering on that need. The challenge with stopping there as a business is be, is. That it becomes a very transactional relationship. If, did you get me the leads the day? If you did, great. If you didn't, then you know I'm gonna find someone else.
You end up becoming a commodity and, and competing on price and all these really horrible things. And so what you don't wanna do is you don't wanna stop it meeting your customers needs. You also wanna meet their wants. And so what does a, an attorney want with a [00:25:00] company like Scorpion, uh, or other agencies?
Well, they probably want, based on my experience, they want someone who is gonna answer the phone, is gonna listen to my questions and help me to understand what's going on and be, be an advisor really, and be a, be a trusted resource. And when you are able to meet their wants, you create more customer intimacy and you sure you're gonna get some word of mouth and some referrals over time.
But there's one more level, which is to meet your clients' unrecognized needs. And so the context for this, and, and again, you scorpion, is that what we realized was because a lot of attorneys were new to internet marketing, they didn't really know what to do with leads. And so as a result, I'll give you an example.
So. We would, you know, a, they would advertise on Google and, and then, um, maybe a, a potential client or potential case would call in and, and no one would answer the phone or maybe they wouldn't get back to them in a couple days. And what we found was the best attorneys who are, who are our clients would have the a really well, I called dial dialed in intake process.
And that's the process of what happens, you know, as they, as the, as the campaigns are running, what happens when the phone rings or when someone sends in an email. Like how do you process those leads? And what we realized was that a lot of these, a lot of these, uh, attorneys would not be successful with Scorpion or anyone else if they didn't have someone to help them figure out really what is the best practice when it comes to inve, um, to intake.
And so what we learned by working with some of the best law firms in the country is like, We, we inherited sort of an understanding of how to do the best intake. And so what we would do as part of the sales process, we would ask them, so tell me about your intake process. Like, what happens when the phone rings?
And we would begin to consult them on things far outside of just, you know, is my, you know, my website ranking On page one of Google, we got into more of a position of a business advisor, a trusted, uh, true, trusted business advisor. Someone who really cared for. Their business. And what that did is it really solved an, an, uh, an unrecognized need that in our case, the attorney clients really needed, they were a fish out of water.
It came to internet marketing. They needed someone who could take care of them and help them to understand what's going on, as well as how internet marketing fits within the larger context of their business. So as a result of us being more of that trusted advisor for these attorneys, Uh, and helping them to grow their business on, on topics across the entire law firm.
We were able to really resolve or solve an un, uh, an unrecognized need. They weren't coming to us to help them, you know, um, with intake and, and these other sort of business growth, larger business growth topics. But that's the value that we provided. And as a result of that, the. Client intimacy went through the roof cuz we were solving very profound problems, but we were only charging them for a fraction of the value that we were creating.
You do that enough, uh, with enough of your clients over a long enough period of time and you're gonna generate a lot more word of mouth than if you were just meeting their needs. I
[00:28:19] Host: can completely agree with that. We had a, um, another gentleman on the, you know, on the podcast, his name was Tim Ster with Corporate Visions, and he talked about this, uh, this idea of an unconsidered need.
And if you can, if, if you can uncover it or you can introduce an unco, uh, unconsidered need in a sales conversation, instantly it's you create this break in this. Data quo bias that the buy, that the buyer has this, this, you know, bias to just stay with the way things are because you, you get them scratching their head and say, Hey, maybe things aren't all, you know, perfect over here.
And it opens up their mind. Uh, I, I really like that. Uh, I like that thinking and you know, I can perfectly see how you can't get to that level of understanding of your buyer persona if you're not vertically focused, uh, you know, in
[00:29:16] Corey: a particular area. Correct. It goes back to just compete continually doing the same.
Work for the same buyer. Over time, that intimacy goes through the roof. From an institutional perspective, sales people get really smart. Your, your account managers really understand it, and the value that you're able to provide as a result of that goes through the roof.
[00:29:36] Host: Hey, it's a, it's a privilege being able to chat with, uh, such a seasoned marketer with, uh, these are amazing insights.
And, you know, I, I, I learned something new with, uh, everyone that I, that I chat with. Um, I, especially on your, on your one idea of, uh, Zone of in indifference. When I, when I go home this evening and my wife asks what I'd like [00:30:00] to make for supper, I'm gonna tell her that I'm just currently in a zone of indifference.
Tell her I just learned that today. Hey, Corey, it's, uh, it's been a pleasure having you on. One thing that we like to do on the Concord Local podcast is to leave people with one takeaway. Um, there's a an awful lot to, to digest in, in, in some of the great insights that you had on the chat, but if there's one thing that you wanted to leave people with, what would it be?
[00:30:28] Corey: This is gonna shock you, but, uh, uh, what it is, is I, I'm gonna recommend that you verticalize your business, and that doesn't mean necessarily day one. You have to commit yourself to one vertical and only do that as if you're a younger or, uh, an agency that's just getting started. I actually prefer that you do the opposite and really take on a lot of different clients and say yes a lot, but over time, You begin to understand and see really where your best fit customer is with regard to the work that you do, the value you create, who you like working with.
Once you have some of those signals, it's time to start verticalizing focus in your business so you can benefit from some of the things we talked about in today's episode.
[00:31:10] Host: I've learned the incredible value of consistent messaging, and I, uh, I, uh, totally agree with you and your stance on, on verticalization.
Hey, Corey, if someone wants to get ahold of you, um, and reach out, they've got additional questions, how can they
[00:31:23] Corey: reach you? Great. So the best way to find me is on my website. It's corey quinn.com. That's spelled c o r e y Q U I n n.com. I also have a daily newsletter where I send out marketing tips specifically around this concept of.
Going from a generalist to a specialist. If that's of interest to you, you may wanna check it out. You can find the link to sign up on my website. So thank you.
[00:31:47] Host: Hey, it's been a pleasure you ha, having you on the Conquer Local podcast and it's been a pleasure chatting with you. I wanna thank you for taking some of your very valuable time to spend with us, uh, and, and chat today.
And I hopefully you'll come back and visit us again, uh, and we can have another chat in the not too distant future.
[00:32:04] Corey: I would love that. Jeff, thank you so much for the opportunity. Appreciate it.
