Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Andy Janaitis Turns Wasted Budget into Predictable Growth | Ep. 191

Speaker A: 00:00:00

I always feel like once you forget about trying to sell the client and just get excited about how you can solve the problem, the sales kind of do themselves at that point.

Speaker B: 00:00:11

But I am the world's biggest super fan.

Speaker B: 00:00:13

You're like a super fan.

Speaker B: 00:00:15

Welcome to the Business Superfans Podcast.

Speaker B: 00:00:18

We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially.

Speaker B: 00:00:26

Learn why these advocates are a key factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce.

Speaker B: 00:00:31

This this is the Business Superfans Podcast with your host, Freddie D. Freddy Freddie.

Speaker C: 00:00:51

Hey super fans.

Speaker C: 00:00:52

Freddie D. Here in this episode 191, we're joined by Andy Jonitis, founder and chief strategist of PPC Pit Bulls and he tackles a challenge so many service based founders wrestle with.

Speaker C: 00:01:05

Pouring money into paid ads without a clear, simple strategy that actually scales profitably.

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With over a decade of agency experience supporting businesses from mom and pop shops to national brands, Andy saw firsthand how most digital marketing advice is built for companies with massive budgets, not hardworking founders trying to grow smart.

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That's why he built PPC Pit Bulls to simplify paid ads, focus on measurable results, and pivot fast when needed.

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If you ever felt overwhelmed by digital marketing or unsure how to scale beyond your current revenue ceiling, this conversation gives you the practical path forward.

Speaker D: 00:01:51

Welcome Andy, to the Business Superfans Advantage podcast.

Speaker D: 00:01:55

Thank you for joining us today.

Speaker D: 00:01:57

Great conversation that we had before we started going.

Speaker D: 00:01:59

You've got an interesting background.

Speaker D: 00:02:01

We both have an engineering background as we talked before we started recording.

Speaker D: 00:02:05

But what made you pivot to come up with PPC Pitbull, which stands for pay per click Pitbull.

Speaker D: 00:02:12

And how did you make that complete change from an engineer to to going into marketing and more importantly digital marketing into the pay per click space and Facebook marketing and YouTube and all that stuff.

Speaker D: 00:02:26

What's the backstory?

Speaker A: 00:02:27

Yeah, so give us the goods.

Speaker A: 00:02:28

Yeah, it was I came out of school, I got into government consulting.

Speaker A: 00:02:31

It was very data science heavy modeling and simulation and from there I kind of slowly found my way out of that world.

Speaker A: 00:02:37

I was ready to get into something a little bit more creative and at that point I had a software development background, kind of jumped ship and went into the non government side working for a traditional creative agency, so doing a lot of website, mobile app development, a lot of really cool design, both consumer facing but also some kind of corporate and government facing clients.

Speaker A: 00:02:58

I got a lot of experience there, really got to cut my teeth across the entire digital spectrum and became a product manager with Them really focused on the user experience and how we kind of marry that technology with actually getting things done and being usable for the end user.

Speaker A: 00:03:16

And then from there I was ready to kind of go off on my own.

Speaker A: 00:03:18

Probably part of the reason that I jumped into that creative space in the first place.

Speaker A: 00:03:22

I was a little bit sick of working with, you know, first government and then very large corporations.

Speaker A: 00:03:28

And I wanted to get out and work with some of these smaller businesses that I had come across.

Speaker A: 00:03:32

And that's what I've always kind of been passionate about, is helping small medium businesses grow and kind of that personal relationship that you get in that world.

Speaker A: 00:03:40

So I went off.

Speaker A: 00:03:41

Originally I thought it was going to be kind of more taking my background and skills that I was doing at the time, looking at more process improvement and team management and leadership.

Speaker A: 00:03:51

And pretty quickly I found that I wasn't really selling in that area and had a colleague at the time who said, hey, I'm running Google Ads for a few colleagues.

Speaker A: 00:03:59

I know you got a software background.

Speaker A: 00:04:00

I got to install some tags and do some of the more technical analytical stuff.

Speaker A: 00:04:04

And I said, hey, sure, I'll learn it as we go.

Speaker A: 00:04:05

And it was just really a perfect mesh of all my skill sets and also kind of my passion for building business and working with individuals and founders, really getting to know kind of these fun niche people with cool backstories.

Speaker A: 00:04:19

And it took off from there.

Speaker A: 00:04:20

That was five years ago.

Speaker A: 00:04:21

We started PPC Pitbulls and we've been off to the races ever since.

Speaker D: 00:04:26

Oh, what an interesting story.

Speaker D: 00:04:28

You know, I've got a similar background.

Speaker D: 00:04:30

drafts guy doing drafting the: 1982

Speaker D: 00:04:35

I'm the guy that designed the spot weld guns that spot weld the body panels.

Speaker A: 00:04:38

Awesome.

Speaker D: 00:04:39

The company got a computer aided system and all of us had to do an essay to see who would get qualified to get picked to get trained.

Speaker D: 00:04:48

And Luckily I was one of the five out of the 50 some people and got picked and got trained and I never looked back.

Speaker D: 00:04:55

That got me into the beginning of the computer industry slash revolution I would call it.

Speaker D: 00:05:01

So how did you.

Speaker D: 00:05:02

You made the pivot you got going into starting to do some digital marketing, but more on a technical end.

Speaker D: 00:05:08

But how did you move your business from being on the technical end to starting to market that and starting to attract customers for what you're providing?

Speaker A: 00:05:18

Yeah, I've always kind of felt like I'm a bad salesman.

Speaker A: 00:05:21

Right.

Speaker A: 00:05:21

I'm good at what I do.

Speaker A: 00:05:22

The technical piece and building out marketing flows and analytics.

Speaker A: 00:05:25

But I've never been one to do a ton of cold outreach or selling to bring in new clients.

Speaker A: 00:05:30

And what we found over the years was just being authentic and connecting with clients, being transparent and answering questions in a way that they can understand, being honest.

Speaker A: 00:05:39

When things go wrong, clients just kind of gravitated.

Speaker A: 00:05:42

I always kind of said I'm very successful in sales for somebody who's terrible at sales type of thing.

Speaker A: 00:05:47

And I think that's really what we learned over the years is just taking an honest interest in a company, making sure that we treat each business like our own, making sure that we're giving them good advice and honestly just being curious.

Speaker A: 00:05:58

It's the most fun piece of it for me is learning about all these fun little niche businesses.

Speaker A: 00:06:02

And that's really how we've continued to provide great service.

Speaker A: 00:06:05

And we've always grown word of mouth and referral in that way.

Speaker A: 00:06:08

Just making sure that we're putting good work out there and the clients come when they need to come.

Speaker D: 00:06:13

Yeah, no, you bring up a great point because authentic is really important.

Speaker D: 00:06:19

And when I look at my biggest success, I was never really pushing the technology.

Speaker D: 00:06:25

I would come out there and say, hey Andy, there's four or five of us in this market space that do this stuff, so let's get that out of the way.

Speaker D: 00:06:32

They all can do the job.

Speaker D: 00:06:33

What's your biggest challenge that you're dealing with in your business and what's costing you the most money?

Speaker D: 00:06:38

And so when I was doing the manufacturing, in this case, it was scrapping metal because once you had the milling machine cutting through and if it gouged the metal, well, they can't use it anymore.

Speaker D: 00:06:50

Well, how much was that piece of metal?

Speaker D: 00:06:52

20, 30, 40,000 bucks.

Speaker D: 00:06:54

How often does that happen per year?

Speaker D: 00:06:57

Maybe 10 times, 12 times.

Speaker D: 00:07:00

So that adds up.

Speaker D: 00:07:01

So if we could save you two or three of those, would that be of benefit?

Speaker D: 00:07:07

Well, it's a no brainer.

Speaker D: 00:07:08

And you just paid for the software.

Speaker D: 00:07:11

And so that's how I was no longer selling.

Speaker D: 00:07:13

They were selling themselves in the fact that this was going to put money back into their pocket that they were already spending.

Speaker A: 00:07:22

Yeah, I always feel like once you forget about trying to sell the client and just get excited about how you can solve the problem, the sales kind of do themselves at that point.

Speaker D: 00:07:32

Yeah, people don't like to be sold, but everybody likes to buy for sure.

Speaker D: 00:07:39

So talk a little bit more about what differentiate you guys from other people that have offered digital marketing, especially in the pay per click, because that's really kind of a dynamic world.

Speaker D: 00:07:50

And the fact that, you know, wait five minutes and Google changes things.

Speaker A: 00:07:54

Yeah.

Speaker D: 00:07:54

And you've also got Bing as another platform people don't talk enough about.

Speaker D: 00:07:59

But at the end of the day that's like the number two search engine.

Speaker D: 00:08:02

Of course, new things are coming out.

Speaker D: 00:08:04

The game's changing with perplexity.

Speaker D: 00:08:06

Now a browser slash search engine.

Speaker D: 00:08:09

And then I think ChatGPT came out with Atlas.

Speaker D: 00:08:12

So the game is completely changing and Geo is now becoming really the new thing.

Speaker D: 00:08:18

So let's talk about how do you tie all that in together?

Speaker A: 00:08:21

Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:08:22

So certainly there's a lot to unpack there.

Speaker A: 00:08:23

And I think one thing that we've always focused on and kind of stems from when we got into the industry was that there's been this shift towards automated bidding models both across Google Ads, meta ads, it's all the same.

Speaker A: 00:08:37

Where in the past it was very manual, you were telling it exactly what audiences you want to get in front of, exactly what keywords you wanted to target.

Speaker A: 00:08:45

Whereas now today it's, it's a lot more of saying, hey, here's the goal that I trying to achieve and here's the budget that I'm going to set up to do it.

Speaker A: 00:10:18

And if you're Google or Meta or Bing, go out there and optimize in the best way possible to help me achieve my goal.

Speaker A: 00:10:25

Now the only way that can work is if we're passing good data back into the model so that it has the data it needs to be able to optimize.

Speaker A: 00:10:31

And that's where that technical component comes in and making sure that everything is set up properly to pull the data over.

Speaker A: 00:10:38

But now working from that initial move towards automation, honestly move towards AI, that's been happening for at least five to 10 years, even before this release of ChatGPT, most recently good authentic content.

Speaker A: 00:10:51

And this is now on our clients, when we're marketing for clients, having the right answers that your customers are actually looking for before they buy your service, it's the best way forward.

Speaker A: 00:11:01

Whether it be in the olden days optimizing for SEO in that automated paid ads world where you're saying, hey, I want to optimize, I just want to put these pages in front of Google and then let it spend my budget however it wants to.

Speaker A: 00:11:14

And then now in the Geo world saying, hey, I got to make sure that I'm showing up in the answer engines as best as I possibly can be.

Speaker A: 00:11:21

The answer and the key to all of that is good authentic content that's not just slapped on the page as a way to do GEO or to promote more content to get found by the models, but actually authentically answering customers questions and helping customers through the buying process, that's where you're going to win at the end of the day.

Speaker A: 00:11:40

So it really is more of a focus on fundamentals.

Speaker A: 00:11:42

And as long as you kind of have that as your North Star, all these little trends and tweaks and technical things that you've got to stay on top of don't become quite as important.

Speaker A: 00:11:51

Back to that same overarching fundamental problem.

Speaker D: 00:11:55

Yeah, because the game is completely dynamically changing right now.

Speaker D: 00:12:00

I mean, I think back in the software days, you know, we had one new release in the year and that was a big thing.

Speaker D: 00:12:06

Then it became two releases in a year.

Speaker D: 00:12:09

Oh, man, that was a major breakthrough.

Speaker D: 00:12:11

Then we went to four releases in your every quarter.

Speaker D: 00:12:15

Now wait three minutes and you know, oh, there's a bug.

Speaker D: 00:12:19

Fifteen minutes later it's fixed, it's pushed out.

Speaker A: 00:12:22

Continuous deployment.

Speaker D: 00:12:25

Yeah, it's a completely different game than it was back then.

Speaker D: 00:12:29

And the same thing with the marketing and the digital marketing end.

Speaker D: 00:12:32

It's evolving so rapidly now.

Speaker D: 00:12:34

It's exponential, I would say, the speed that things are changing.

Speaker A: 00:12:38

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker A: 00:12:39

And I think what's interesting too, you know, at Gardner Hype Curve, right, as new things come out, we start to see the possibility of this new tool.

Speaker A: 00:12:47

So everybody say, hey, chatgpt, perplexity.

Speaker A: 00:12:50

You know, Google's going away.

Speaker A: 00:12:52

The whole concept of how people search is going to change and we're not going to have search anymore.

Speaker A: 00:12:56

People are just going to go and get their answer from one of these engines and they're not going to end up going onto people's websites.

Speaker A: 00:13:01

And certainly it is a big change and we are seeing trends in that direction.

Speaker A: 00:13:07

You start to see some of the capabilities and that's where everybody's mind first goes to.

Speaker A: 00:13:10

And that's where you've got to get to that peak of inflated expectations that this is going to change everything.

Speaker A: 00:13:14

And everything that we knew is going to be thrown out the window.

Speaker A: 00:13:18

And then you always kind of find tips over and you come to a place where you ultimately say, this is definitely changing a lot and it's going to change how we look at things.

Speaker A: 00:13:25

But it's not necessarily just going to throw out what there once was.

Speaker A: 00:13:28

And we're already seeing that now.

Speaker A: 00:13:30

Google is releasing its AI offerings in Gemini.

Speaker A: 00:13:33

So I don't think Google search is necessarily going anywhere because they have AI answers inside their search.

Speaker A: 00:13:39

You realize that Google doesn't make any money by you making a search and you just staying there on Google and not going anywhere.

Speaker A: 00:13:44

They make money when you click off and they get to charge for an ad.

Speaker A: 00:13:48

So I think Google's starting to implement that and we already know ChatGPT is implementing ads in their responses as well.

Speaker A: 00:13:54

So, you know, I think a lot of times we get carried away as we start to see those initial capabilities and say, hey, this is changing the whole way.

Speaker A: 00:14:01

We've always done everything.

Speaker A: 00:14:02

But then you realize, yeah, at the end of the day we come back to some of the fundamentals and that's where you know, from a paid ads perspective, I think the paid ads world is always going to survive.

Speaker A: 00:14:09

And as much as that authentic content is the way to get ahead and make sure that you're actually answering questions to show up, I think there's still always going to be a place for boosting and paying a little bit more to make sure you're at the top of those results.

Speaker D: 00:14:22

I incorporate, you know, when I talk to businesses and even on this show, old school still works and we forget about old school and there's this old little platform called direct mail.

Speaker D: 00:14:36

And everybody seems to forget about direct mail.

Speaker D: 00:14:38

Nobody's all busy about email and social media and all this stuff.

Speaker D: 00:14:43

But you know what works 100% of the time, all the time?

Speaker D: 00:14:48

Direct mail.

Speaker D: 00:14:50

It's an overlooked process of marketing.

Speaker D: 00:14:54

And today there's technology that you can go in to.

Speaker D: 00:14:57

Someone visits your website, they don't opt in for anything.

Speaker D: 00:15:01

You can grab that information and using a tool automatically send them a card, a postcard, a letter, whatever it is.

Speaker D: 00:15:09

And you didn't lose that opportunity because you were able to buy that lead that didn't opt in but left for whatever reason.

Speaker D: 00:15:16

And you can go around and market them and says, hey Andy, I saw that you stopped by our store.

Speaker D: 00:15:21

Here's a 20% discount for you to come on in.

Speaker D: 00:15:24

So in today's world, you still have leveraging all the technology, the opportunity not to lose opportunities.

Speaker A: 00:15:32

Yeah, it's always the way.

Speaker A: 00:15:33

It's kind of what's old is new again.

Speaker A: 00:15:35

The other thing I always love to bring up as we get increasingly remote and more and more digital, that personal face to face conversation, even taking it from an email to a phone call is really big.

Speaker A: 00:15:48

Especially as we talk about.

Speaker A: 00:15:49

It's amazing with the technology that we can hop on a face to face and have a zoom call without ever leaving our office.

Speaker A: 00:15:55

Going back in time probably more in your early days where people would always kind of get on the sales team, say hey, stop sending emails, pick up the phone and talk to them.

Speaker A: 00:16:04

Or like, hey, drop by their office, you know, go and have a relationship with this person.

Speaker A: 00:16:07

We find even in the paid ads world we're paying to get more clicks to the site and we're utilizing this digital approach.

Speaker A: 00:16:14

But building that personal relationship, whether it be nurturing through something like email or finding a way to make a personal connection on the website, or better yet, even getting to the point from a service provider's perspective, you can actually have that face to face relationship, that need for personal connection and a human relationship is fundamental.

Speaker A: 00:16:32

Now we have all these cool tools and technologies that can help us do different things.

Speaker A: 00:16:36

But never forget that that initial piece is the core.

Speaker A: 00:16:40

But don't get away from picking up the phone or starting a call with somebody and just making sure that you have some time to get a personal face to face.

Speaker D: 00:16:49

I know somebody that does digital marketing and he sells products through online store.

Speaker D: 00:16:55

He had a decent return rate and what he implemented was old school.

Speaker D: 00:17:02

So he had all the new school, all digital.

Speaker D: 00:17:05

You go to his online store, buy his stuff, gets all delivered.

Speaker D: 00:17:08

But he captured that information and sent them an old fashioned thank you card through a service that said thank you for buying our stuff in the mail.

Speaker D: 00:17:16

Yeah, he's documented that he significantly cut down his return rate by a significant amount just because he acknowledged.

Speaker D: 00:17:26

And that's one of the things I talk about is appreciation and recognition are very powerful things.

Speaker D: 00:17:32

And in my book, my quote is people crawl through broken glass for appreciation, recognition.

Speaker D: 00:17:38

What he implemented was appreciate and then recognizing them with the thank you.

Speaker A: 00:17:45

Exactly, yeah.

Speaker D: 00:17:46

Old school.

Speaker A: 00:17:47

And never overlooked that.

Speaker A: 00:17:48

Like you said, it's that old fashioned mail.

Speaker A: 00:17:50

One of my favorite things that we do, get together a list of all of our clients and send out a holiday card.

Speaker A: 00:17:54

And it's like what a simple thing.

Speaker A: 00:17:56

But actually getting a physical piece of mail, we like to include our own pictures on it.

Speaker A: 00:18:00

We have our mascot is Percy, my little pitbull here, include a picture of the dog on it.

Speaker A: 00:18:05

Just building that personal relationship I think is just so important and often overlooked.

Speaker D: 00:18:09

Yeah, and that's really, you know, that's how you start creating super fans is by that personal recognition.

Speaker D: 00:18:15

One of the things I talk about is recognizing people's birthdays, you know, is a simple way of doing it.

Speaker D: 00:18:20

Thanksgiving is an ideal time because you flip the words around, it says giving thanks.

Speaker D: 00:18:26

So for example, what I did this year is I sent everybody that was been on the show that had given me their Mailing address.

Speaker D: 00:18:33

I mailed them a card expressing gratitude for them being on the show.

Speaker D: 00:18:38

And I got tons of messages back because nobody does that.

Speaker A: 00:18:42

Yeah.

Speaker D: 00:18:44

And so I just leveled up my whole presence.

Speaker D: 00:18:46

And more people want to be on the show.

Speaker A: 00:18:49

I love it.

Speaker D: 00:18:49

So let's talk about how you stepped into a company, Andy.

Speaker D: 00:18:52

This is where they were at.

Speaker D: 00:18:53

And you guys took over, made some changes, what those changes were and what the results were.

Speaker D: 00:19:00

And now they're what I would call your biggest super fan.

Speaker D: 00:19:04

And they're out there telling all their business buddies of the services that you transformed their business.

Speaker A: 00:19:10

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker A: 00:19:11

So I'll use an example.

Speaker A: 00:19:12

One of my favorite clients, honestly, one of our first clients that we brought in was this local chocolate shop.

Speaker A: 00:19:17

This was, you know, four or five years ago.

Speaker A: 00:19:19

They started working with us, and they're doing all right.

Speaker A: 00:19:22

They had an agency working at the time.

Speaker A: 00:19:23

They had moved to E commerce not too many years prior to that and were having some success on Google Ads, but weren't really breaking through.

Speaker A: 00:19:31

So when we came to them, they were looking at a really small ads budget, honestly, to the level that we were questioning if we even wanted to take them on, because it wasn't really that viable of an opportunity.

Speaker A: 00:19:41

But it was this really cool local brand.

Speaker A: 00:19:44

We loved what they were doing.

Speaker A: 00:19:45

We loved the chocolate before, as we were in the pitch process, we bought some of the chocolate so we would have it on the calls and be able to talk about the different flavors we liked and everything.

Speaker A: 00:19:53

And so we got in, and for the first year, I would say it was definitely not one of our most profitable clients.

Speaker A: 00:19:59

We were fixing a lot of the problems that a previous agency had done.

Speaker A: 00:20:02

A lot of the technical issues, the way too many campaign types, consolidation, like a lot of the different things that we see a lot of times with these new accounts that we inherit.

Speaker A: 00:20:11

But over the same time, we were taking the time to really understand what their goals were.

Speaker A: 00:20:16

One of the examples that I love to use is early on in their building growth.

Speaker A: 00:20:20

They were located in the Seattle area and they were looking to expand nationwide.

Speaker A: 00:20:23

So we were able to implement a few different techniques where I think their previous agency had just come in and said, hey, let's just try to throw some generic ads at it and just try to get you some purchases in the cheapest way possible.

Speaker A: 00:20:34

But as we kind of listened and heard that next tier down of the stuff that a client is saying but they're not really saying out loud kind of thing, we began to realize that, yeah, that's all well and Good.

Speaker A: 00:20:43

But there are certain areas of the country that are more valuable to them because they're able to convert these clients more quickly, or that's a new market that they want to break into.

Speaker A: 00:20:52

Even if it's a little bit more expensive for them to get those purchases, it's more valuable to them to get a footprint in that area.

Speaker A: 00:20:58

And we're able to tweak their strategy and push them in that direction.

Speaker A: 00:21:01

When a lot of it was pushing the client a little bit and helping them to understand that it's not purely roas, not purely the cheapest purchase possible.

Speaker A: 00:21:08

This is how we're going to actually help you meet your overarching business goals that you've let us in on.

Speaker A: 00:21:14

So we started doing some of those pieces of work with them, and then internally, the contract just grew over time.

Speaker A: 00:21:19

We were able to spend a lot more on Google.

Speaker A: 00:21:21

As they saw the results pouring in, they said, hey, at these results, I'd like to put more money against it and multiply those results.

Speaker A: 00:21:28

We're able to take on Meta for them and start doing their Facebook and Instagram ads as well, both for that particular client.

Speaker A: 00:21:34

As we grew the relationship, it really came down to just listening to what, what they were saying and also some of the things that they weren't saying.

Speaker A: 00:21:40

And it kind of helped push them in the direction of what they actually needed to help build their business goals.

Speaker A: 00:21:45

But then also outside of the client to get some of those referrals, we've had other clients come in that were able to let other people in the business world know, hey, these are some people that did great work with us.

Speaker A: 00:21:56

They've always been honest and transparent with us.

Speaker A: 00:21:58

You know, give them a call and they'll look over your ads.

Speaker A: 00:22:01

Even if it's not a good fit, they'll give you an honest answer about it.

Speaker A: 00:22:04

And we've been able to sign some additional clients in that way.

Speaker A: 00:22:06

So just really taking an honest curiosity and understanding not only what they're asking you to do, but also understanding enough about their business that you start to understand some of those things that they're not asking you to do, and being able to solve some of those problems as well really went a long way.

Speaker A: 00:22:22

To this day, four years later, every year, we're growing 20, 30% year over year revenue.

Speaker A: 00:22:27

We actually just helped walk them through a major rebrand where the entire name of the company changed at a nationwide scale.

Speaker A: 00:22:33

So kind of walk through how we marketed through that and getting back to the level where they were selling under the previous brand name.

Speaker A: 00:22:40

We've been able to take on some interesting challenges to this day.

Speaker A: 00:22:43

They're one of my favorite clients.

Speaker A: 00:22:45

Yeah.

Speaker D: 00:22:45

So you could say that they're a super fan of how you've transformed their business.

Speaker A: 00:22:49

I like to think so.

Speaker D: 00:22:51

You bring up an important point there, and I'm going to share this.

Speaker D: 00:22:53

For people that are in sales, the secret to selling successfully is really understanding where your customer wants to go.

Speaker D: 00:23:03

What's their objective, what's their outcome that they're after?

Speaker D: 00:23:07

And then really, your job is to help them get there and get out of the way.

Speaker D: 00:23:12

They'll buy the stuff if it gets them there.

Speaker D: 00:23:15

I mean, when I was selling in the early days, I used to carry around a Mac with me, and we would sit down and we would put together the roi, because this was in the early days of, you know, going from drafting boards to computer aided design.

Speaker D: 00:23:31

And so they knew that they needed to do something because otherwise they'd be left behind.

Speaker D: 00:23:37

But how did I get them to justify it was I got them to sit next to me and we put together a whole roi, but it was them sitting next to me giving me their numbers.

Speaker D: 00:23:48

So it wasn't me creating the ROI for them.

Speaker D: 00:23:52

It was them creating their own roi.

Speaker D: 00:23:55

And then they would go up to management, and they were already emotionally connected, and it just completely collapsed the sales cycle.

Speaker D: 00:24:02

The other thing that you brought up that I want to really emphasize is a referral is one thing, but an introduction is the thing, because referral, you still gotta go chase it.

Speaker D: 00:24:12

When someone gives you an introduction, they're actually connecting you with that person.

Speaker D: 00:24:17

And an introduction can significantly collapses the whole sales cycle.

Speaker D: 00:24:22

Because now they're not going to go out shopping around.

Speaker D: 00:24:25

You're going to say, oh, you know, Andy said I needed to talk to you.

Speaker D: 00:24:29

So they contact you and says, hey, Andy says you're the guy, and what do we got to do to make it work?

Speaker D: 00:24:37

My fastest sale was 30 minutes for a $60,000 sale.

Speaker D: 00:24:42

And the 30 minutes was putting together the configuration of what the customer wanted and then using their fax machine to send it in to corporate.

Speaker D: 00:24:51

They didn't want to see it.

Speaker D: 00:24:52

It was just what's it cost me?

Speaker D: 00:24:54

How fast can you get it here?

Speaker D: 00:24:56

I already know what it does because Jack already told me I need to buy this.

Speaker A: 00:24:59

Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:25:00

One of the things, too, I love that you called out in both of those stories, is that communication internally and the internal politics.

Speaker A: 00:25:06

Oftentimes we think from an ads perspective, like, hey, how are we going to get the best results from a revenue Perspective or, you know, oftentimes we're talking to a marketing team and we're telling people, hey, you're getting great results here.

Speaker A: 00:25:17

We really should start to increase budgets.

Speaker A: 00:25:18

And a lot of times marketing agencies or in general, service providers, I think that story of banging your head against the wall saying, hey, I've shown you why I've got great results.

Speaker A: 00:25:26

How come you're not taking me up on it?

Speaker A: 00:25:27

How come we're not increasing spend here?

Speaker A: 00:25:28

How come you're not doing more?

Speaker A: 00:25:30

And oftentimes you have to realize that business results are key.

Speaker A: 00:25:32

That's the number one thing is making sure that you're achieving those revenue goals and helping the business to grow.

Speaker A: 00:25:37

But oftentimes it's about your direct point of contact and making sure that you're giving them the tools that they can both be a superstar inside the business and also advocate for the changes that you're looking for.

Speaker A: 00:25:48

A lot of times it's like, hey, we should really be boosting budget on this thing, because I've been meeting with you weekly and showing you how the results are great and why are we not putting more against this?

Speaker A: 00:25:55

And the answer you're getting is, you're preaching to the choir.

Speaker A: 00:25:58

I understand this is great, but I don't have budget for it.

Speaker A: 00:26:00

So in those cases, we found a lot of success in helping our partners to make the case internally.

Speaker A: 00:26:07

It's giving them the tools that they can be a superstar internally and making sure that they're the ones who are getting all the credit.

Speaker A: 00:26:13

That as a marketing director, I'm able to go pitch this up the wire and I've got all the numbers in front of me that really make an awesome case of why we should increase spend.

Speaker A: 00:26:22

And then next year, we're going to see this big increased revenue and really making them a superstar and a winner internally.

Speaker A: 00:26:29

I think a lot of times is something that can get overlooked and something that as a service provider, we can do a really good job of helping people with

Speaker D: 00:26:37

you bring you bring back a memory, because that was one of the techniques that I used.

Speaker D: 00:26:41

I turned around says, all right, Andy, you know, what's your objectives here in this company?

Speaker D: 00:26:46

I know I want to really become the IT director.

Speaker D: 00:26:50

Okay, well, what's it going to take to help you get there?

Speaker D: 00:26:53

They spilled the beans, so I would sit there and work with them to help them look like the rock star in the company like you mentioned.

Speaker D: 00:27:02

And so now you, in turn, create your internal salesperson within that organization, AKA they're a super fan of you because you're helping them look like a rock star within their organization.

Speaker D: 00:27:14

And it significantly collapses the whole cycle because you've got a champion in there that's batting for you.

Speaker D: 00:27:23

When you're not there, they're doing the selling on your behalf.

Speaker D: 00:27:26

Well, I want to work with Dandy.

Speaker D: 00:27:27

He's showed me all this good stuff.

Speaker D: 00:27:28

Look at this data that we put together that we're leaving money on the table because we're not doing this.

Speaker D: 00:27:34

And people forget that, especially young, new, fresh salespeople don't understand how to leverage the internal mechanism within an organization to sell on your behalf when you're not there.

Speaker A: 00:27:48

Exactly.

Speaker D: 00:27:49

We would come in and bring in a technology and do a demonstration of what the stuff would do, how it would do their particular part.

Speaker D: 00:27:54

I made sure I got everybody's name, the guys from the shop floor, I got all their contact information.

Speaker D: 00:28:00

And then back then, email didn't exist in those days.

Speaker D: 00:28:03

I would send everybody a letter thanking them for their time, appreciate their input.

Speaker D: 00:28:08

It was all personalized, it wasn't standardized.

Speaker D: 00:28:10

So I tweaked it, it was a boilerplate.

Speaker D: 00:28:12

But I made fixes to.

Speaker D: 00:28:13

You contributed this, you contributed that, and I sent it to everybody.

Speaker D: 00:28:17

So the guy in a shop, Florida never got anything.

Speaker D: 00:28:22

All of a sudden gets a letter and they feel like a rock star.

Speaker D: 00:28:26

And then when the company would get together, say which vendor we're going to pick, we would win most of the time.

Speaker D: 00:28:32

And I would ask, why did you pick us?

Speaker D: 00:28:34

And they said they felt that after the sale we would provide the best level of support.

Speaker D: 00:28:41

It was all because of the follow up.

Speaker A: 00:28:42

Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:28:43

So important, so important.

Speaker D: 00:28:46

It's what differentiates you from everybody else.

Speaker D: 00:28:48

And it's more importantly about making sure that you recognize everybody in that equation.

Speaker A: 00:28:52

Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:28:53

That's the important part is don't think through, hey, who's the most impactful person here?

Speaker A: 00:28:57

And let me really make sure that I'm getting in front of that person and putting all your eggs in the key decision maker basket.

Speaker A: 00:29:02

You never realize how important some of those other relationships can be.

Speaker A: 00:29:05

You know how just treating like in your example, the person on the shop floor, treating them well, taking interest in what they do and with the problems that they're going through as opposed to maybe that top level business problem can really go such a long way.

Speaker D: 00:29:19

Yeah, because they become your advocates, they become your superfans because they felt again, it goes back to recognition and appreciation.

Speaker D: 00:29:27

So let's talk a little bit more about the services that you guys offer.

Speaker A: 00:29:30

Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:29:31

So we focus predominantly on Paid ads as our name would imply.

Speaker A: 00:29:34

We got our start in Google, that's why we're ppc, pay per click.

Speaker A: 00:29:37

But now we do Google Ads, meta ads, and then we do some of these other services that are often fundamental, especially for small businesses.

Speaker A: 00:29:43

If you're running paid ads, you might need some landing page support, you might need some email support to help get some better results out of of those paid ads.

Speaker A: 00:29:51

So we like to take that holistic approach to understand the business problem.

Speaker A: 00:29:55

And then, you know, we're not just a hammer and our hammer is paid ads.

Speaker A: 00:29:59

And every problem that you have is a nail that we hit with paid ads.

Speaker A: 00:30:03

We like to be able to have answer and say, hey, this is as far as you can go on Google Ads.

Speaker A: 00:30:07

Let's go ahead and help build out this other email flow that's going to help those Google Ads be more successful first.

Speaker A: 00:30:11

Or hey, let's make sure that we're putting some money into meta as well.

Speaker A: 00:30:14

At the same time, we're flat rate, month to month contract.

Speaker A: 00:30:17

We don't get incentivized to make you spend more money.

Speaker A: 00:30:20

And we're going to give you honest feedback and do whatever it takes to help you actually meet your goals and get sales.

Speaker D: 00:30:26

And that's an important aspect because there's budget creep, I'll call it, where all of a sudden you're paying for this and somebody comes back and says, well, oh, you want that?

Speaker D: 00:30:37

That's another 50 bucks or 100 bucks or $5,000.

Speaker D: 00:30:41

Yes, especially in business budgets you got to put a budget and this is the budget.

Speaker D: 00:30:47

I think a lot of times people wing it when they put together their budget versus getting proper information of what it's going to actually take to fund, for example, pay per click campaign.

Speaker D: 00:31:01

They don't understand it and so they says, well, I'm going to just put a thousand bucks a month to it.

Speaker D: 00:31:05

And in reality that's just a number they pulled out of the air.

Speaker D: 00:31:10

And I think one of the things that you guys do is really help them put together that budget based upon their objectives and then they go, okay, wow, it's going to be $2,500 a month.

Speaker D: 00:31:21

Okay, but now there's a strategy because one of the things I've learned over the years is there's always money someplace.

Speaker D: 00:31:27

They may pull it out of this other budget, they may reallocate this, but people can find money if they see the value and what you're promoting that can always find the cash.

Speaker A: 00:31:38

That's exactly it.

Speaker A: 00:31:39

Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:31:39

And taking that interest, we Every quarter, sit down and look at annual budgets and forecasts of hey, at this level, this is what we think we can get for you.

Speaker A: 00:31:48

But then we revisit that every quarter and especially every month.

Speaker A: 00:31:51

So we have a forecast of hey, this is what we would propose to spend and this is what we think we're going to get you.

Speaker A: 00:31:56

If you tell us that either of those things are off, we can make all the different tweaks and say, okay, maybe we're going to spend a little bit more to get a little bit more out of it or we really got to run a little lean this month.

Speaker A: 00:32:06

So these are the results that we're looking at.

Speaker A: 00:32:07

That lower budget or maybe I think something's going on in the team that your close rate is going to be a lot higher, that maybe you're running a special promotion that you've got a higher close rate.

Speaker A: 00:32:16

So perfect.

Speaker A: 00:32:16

Maybe we can hit those higher results with a lower spend and just kind of understanding all those components to create a good forecast and doing it together where it's really a collaborative effort with the client.

Speaker A: 00:32:26

I think the more you can get into that budgeting and forecasting process, the more successful you're going to be.

Speaker D: 00:32:33

I think the key word that I want to really emphasize is collaborating.

Speaker D: 00:32:38

Because a couple years ago I was running a service based company.

Speaker D: 00:32:41

We brought in an agency to do some of our digital marketing and I have a pretty solid background in that, so I was guiding them.

Speaker D: 00:32:50

I didn't want to do it, I got them to do it, but we went through some iterations and we had them doing some pay per click stuff.

Speaker D: 00:32:57

But then I would get the reports and it'd be just a report and it'd be like, okay, well what's the strategy?

Speaker D: 00:33:04

What's working, what's not working?

Speaker D: 00:33:06

And after 90 days I said adios, muchachos.

Speaker D: 00:33:10

Basic stuff I could do, I could go into, I had access to Google AdWords, I could run my own report and take a peek.

Speaker D: 00:33:17

It was what I needed, which they didn't provide.

Speaker D: 00:33:20

Which you talk about this, that's what you provide as a collaborative is they went in and says, okay, this is what's working.

Speaker D: 00:33:26

This is not what's working.

Speaker D: 00:33:27

This is what we should be doing and this is what we should shut off because it's not gaining any traction and you're wasting money on this.

Speaker D: 00:33:34

It's refreshing to hear somebody that actually pays attention to that stuff because that at the end of the day gives that business the comfort and trust that they know that their money that they're investing is being maximized for the betterment of the growth of their business.

Speaker A: 00:33:58

So important.

Speaker D: 00:33:58

So as we kind of wrap up to the end here, Andy, how come people find you?

Speaker A: 00:34:03

So I'm always on LinkedIn.

Speaker A: 00:34:05

You can always come out and connect with me there.

Speaker A: 00:34:07

I love starting chats, love talking shop about marketing and working with small businesses.

Speaker A: 00:34:11

So feel free to reach out.

Speaker A: 00:34:12

I love to hear from small businesses and you can find us@ppcpitbulls.com there.

Speaker A: 00:34:17

You can again book a free strategy call with me and we'll get to know your business a little bit and see how paid ads is either a good fit or not a fit.

Speaker A: 00:34:24

We'll be transparent and let you know whether it's a good deformed for you.

Speaker D: 00:34:28

Okay, well we'll make sure that that's in our show notes.

Speaker D: 00:34:31

Thank you so much for your time, great conversation and definitely would love to have you on the show down the road again.

Speaker A: 00:34:37

Absolutely.

Speaker C: 00:34:37

Thanks for having me Freddie Hey Superfans.

Speaker C: 00:34:41

Andy reminded us today that even in a world driven by AI and automation, the real edge still comes down to fundamentals.

Speaker C: 00:34:50

Authentic content, real relationships and truly understanding your clients goals.

Speaker C: 00:34:56

His journey from engineering into pay per click marketing shows that when you combine technical precision with genuine curiosity, you don't just run ads, you drive strategic growth.

Speaker C: 00:35:08

And for service based business owners, that's the lesson.

Speaker C: 00:35:12

Collaborate.

Speaker C: 00:35:13

Align marketing with real business outcomes and focus on long term trust over short term clicks.

Speaker C: 00:35:20

That's how you create super fans.

Speaker C: 00:35:22

If this episode brought you some value, leave a quick 5 star review.

Speaker C: 00:35:26

It helps other service based business owners discover the show.

Speaker C: 00:35:30

Join the Entrepreneur Prosperity Hub on School it's free to join and get your free Service Provider Prosperity playbook at school.

Speaker C: 00:35:38

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Speaker D: 00:35:53

Thanks for tuning in today.

Speaker C: 00:35:55

I'm grateful you're part of the Business Superfans movement.

Speaker C: 00:35:58

Every listen, every action, every brings you closer to building your own super fans.

Speaker C: 00:36:02

Be sure to subscribe to the show.

Speaker C: 00:36:04

We've got another great guest coming up and I'll talk to you in the next episode.

Speaker C: 00:36:08

Remember, one action, one stakeholder, one super fan closer to lasting prosperity.

Speaker B: 00:36:16

We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Super Fans podcast.

Speaker B: 00:36:22

Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.