Are you missing a clear path to win online and drive more leads? In this episode of Stop Being the Best Kept Secret, we sit down with Josh Blankenship to break down how manufacturers can build a strong B2B Industrial Digital Strategy Framework and drive real growth.
Josh Blankenship is the Vice President of Business Development at OuterBox. Josh is a proven leader in digital strategy, sales growth, and team building. He has led high-performing teams, driven millions in revenue, and helped manufacturers scale with smart marketing systems.
Learn how to align sales and marketing, attract the right buyers, and turn your website into a growth engine. Simple steps. Real results. No fluff, just what works.
Don’t miss this powerful conversation to help you stop being the best kept secret.
Key Highlights
• Josh’s Journey into Digital Marketing 3:27
• Expansion and Current Role at OuterBox 6:58
• OuterBox’s Mission and Impact 8:01
• SEO and AI Evolution 9:42
• Paid Ads and Paid Search Strategies 14:56
• Tips for Small Manufacturers 18:08
• Introduction to Loop Analytics 21:56
• AI in Lead Analysis and Quality Assessment 24:47
• Onboarding Process for New Clients 38:52
• Final Thoughts and Business Advice 42:29
Resources
To learn more about SEO for Manufacturers, check out SEO for Manufacturers: Foundations, Strategy & Implementation.
B2Btail – Helping Awesome Companies with Digital Sales Growth Solutions
Get Your FREE SEO Report
You Have Only One Chance to Make An Outstanding First Webpression https://b2btail.com/webpression/
Stop Being the Best Kept Secret: Manufacturing eCommerce Strategies
Follow B2Btail on YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn.
Curt on LinkedIn
Damon on LinkedIn
Transcription
Damon Pistulka 00:01
Oh, you’re good. All right, everyone, it’s Friday, and you know what that means? It’s time for stop being the best kept secret. I’m one of your co hosts, Damon Pistulka, and we’re going to be talking today about B2B, industrial, digitally, digital strategy frameworks. Oh, man, Curt, am I excited? And I’m going to turn it over, and I gotta remember, I gotta go this way. My friend co host. Curt Anderson, thanks.
Curt Anderson 00:26
Happy Friday, dude. Man. What an honor, what a privilege, not necessarily repeat offender, if you will. But we have a repeat company here with our friends in great state of Ohio. But Josh our Josh is a digital marketing rock star coming to us from the great state of Texas, Josh, how are you dude,
Josh Blankenship 00:44
man, thank you for the intro. And yes, I’ll be less of an offender than the last guy on here
Curt Anderson 00:48
from OuterBox. That’s right, so I we got a ton of cover, lots of unpack. We’re going to go fast and furious today before we go there. Josh, my dear friend, so you’re a Texas guy. Through and through, my first question for you, when you’re a little guy growing up, when you’re a little guy growing up, who was your hero? Troy Aikman,
Josh Blankenship 01:12
high on that one, right, that’s right. I used to, you know, unfortunately, I’m a Cowboys fan, and unfortunately I was born right into the early 90s. Yeah. What a great life I’ve just embarked on. And then ever since, I’ve been disappointed. And you know, it’s been a miserable existence there. So I wear the jersey, and I was him for Halloween multiple times. My hero,
Curt Anderson 01:40
Troy Aikman, man, great answer. Dave, who’s your hero when you’re Did you have a you were in a Viking? Who are you? Who’s your team chiefs? Oh, you borrow
Damon Pistulka 01:49
a baseball guy. You know you’re on baseball, right?
Curt Anderson 01:53
Yeah, all right. So Troy, what a great we haven’t had that one. Josh, we’ve asked that question hundreds of times. We enjoy that was the first time. Great answer. So let’s go here. So you Texas Tech, if I’m not mistaken, are you Texas Tech?
Josh Blankenship 02:09
A tough road to hold, but it’s gotten better recently,
Curt Anderson 02:13
on the record. I We talked about this. I’m on the record. I How far are they going this year?
Josh Blankenship 02:19
Oh, come on, man, we’re spending the money. We have the expertise, yeah, show me the money. Well, we got, we got, you know, we got to the big stage this year, which was an amazing improvement, but then we got totally embarrassed by Oregon. So then it was that philosophical question, is it better to make it embarrassed, or is it better to not make it at all? But hopefully we’re changing that as we continue to spend on that team.
Curt Anderson 02:43
Baby steps, baby steps on a bus. Man, so, yeah, I absolutely love it and it I’m on the record here. I’m going on the record. I’m predicting Texas Tech Final Four. How’s it? I’m going Final Four for Texas Tech. So they, man, they had a killer recruiting class coming in this year. So it’s, it’s legit. So Josh, let’s go here. So Troy aikmans Your hero, you go to Texas Tech. How did you get into, like, this whole world of digital marketing? I believe you might have even been an intern at at Texas Tech now, guys, as you’re popping in here, do yourself a favor. Connect with Josh on LinkedIn. His company puts out enormous, wonderful content helping you on your digital marketing strategy. Josh, what brought you your talents, your skill set, your God given talents into digital marketing.
Josh Blankenship 03:29
Man, I appreciate that. Yeah, so, like you said, I’m from Dallas. Originally. I go out to Texas Tech. I got a degree in Public Relations and a business minor, and so through my time there, I interned at different departments, at Tech, was in the athletics department and then more globally, kind of the admissions, recruiting side of things, running social media, creating content. I used to man versus food was one of those shows I used to watch where the guy would go eat. There we go, big pizzas and stuff like that. So when I was a senior and I was in the admissions form, I was like, We got to make Lubbock look cool. And so I would go to different restaurants and convince them to make, like, the biggest taco they could make, or the biggest calzone they could make, and then I try to eat it, put it on YouTube, which was like, fairly new at the time, yeah. So that went well. And I was like, Man, I really enjoy marketing. I knew that was something I have passion for in that kind of creative outlet. So then when it came time to graduate, I was getting married, and so I was looking for a job. I had done some interned at Southwest Airlines. Thought that’s where I’d go. The job market when I was leaving was really tough, and timing was either like, find something or move back home. And didn’t want to do that. So via that admissions role, tech runs regional offices. So they have regional recruiting offices at Dallas, Antonio, Austin, in Houston. And never been to Houston, only through it, even being raised in Dallas. And so I thought I want to get to a big market, because big market will have opportunity. And so that’s what I did. Took that role in Houston, did that for a year, and was networking the whole. Time I was there, trying to find what was next. I wanted to get to an agency, because I wanted mass exposure. Wanted to see as many businesses as I could. And the game plan originally was do that for a couple of years, fall in love with one, or hopefully one would fall in love with me and pick me off and recruit me. And then 13 years later, I’m still at the agency, enjoying it, and have loved it ever since, the pace of it, the diversity of it, and what a time to be in tech. And so that’s really kind of how I got here.
Curt Anderson 05:27
Oh, good for you, man, that’s super exciting. So we’ve had a couple transitions. Let’s talk about, you know, talk about your role, you know, going into top spot, and then we’re going to cite an outer box, but just kind of like how you’ve graduated and where you’re at today, yeah.
Josh Blankenship 05:41
So, you know, when I originally grown joined the agency, we were called tops while you said I joined as an SEO specialist, and this would have been like 2012 ish, and I remember Googling, is SEO like a good career? No, I was like, I don’t even know. We didn’t learn about that when I was in curriculum now, at the time, that wasn’t something that was taught in advertising and marketing classes, really. So like, Alright, so, you know, I was convinced enough that it looked like a good opportunity. Joined as an SEO specialist. And really, you know, back then, it was about writing and creative and content. And so it really kind of married. My dad was a he’s a computer engineer. So I had done computer classes, computer software engineering classes. So I kind of loved tech. I could code a little bit. I loved content and PR and marketing. And so it really, actually became this, like perfect Venn diagram that I could sit in. So I was helping publish change websites, make them faster, write, better, content, expand, and then through that progress throughout the company. So we had a team model. Became a team lead, ran a book of business for a while. Then eventually I moved up to the client strategies manager. So I helped all of our different teams with strategy, positioning and client communication relationships. Eventually there moved over into business development. So did that for, you know, seven years, and then now we’re actually part of a larger group. So we joined outer box and a few other different agencies for expansion, both in vertical and then capabilities. So as we’ve grown, when I was originally top spot, we were mostly doing analytics, SEO, paid search, and that was kind of the big three. Now with the collective group, we’re offering email personalization and automation. We’re into more high fidelity, kind of UX, offering an AB testing right now, which is an incredible time. Is AI. We have products that we’re developing in AI, and then we’re also having AI as a service, which is really helping businesses create agents and some workflows and train their teams and help them kind of level up. That’s a huge challenge right now is everyone knows they have to be experimenting with AI. They have to start integrating and running pilots and getting serious, but it’s a very disjointed kind of experience. You’ve got some super users on teams and people that have never logged in. So businesses are really struggling. How do I kind of congruently like raise the level of my organization, and how do I do it safely? So that’s a huge topic in need right now that we’re supporting different organizations with. And so now I’m helping run that, that biz dev team, and then help with product strategy and
Curt Anderson 08:14
fit awesome. So okay, so kind of laid out a little bit of the menu on outer box. And again, if you’re just joining us, we’re here with our dear friend Josh OuterBox. OuterBox is a powerhouse digital marketing company, really targeting industrial companies B2B. So you shared, you gave us a little sliver question that we’d love to ask is, how do you and your incredible team at outer box make the world a better place?
Josh Blankenship 08:37
Yeah, so it’s what I love, and really why? You know, in particular, a majority of our client base are SMBs, small to medium businesses. And like to me, the mission of helping small to medium businesses in this country is important. Philosophically. It’s important to economy to well being. I mean, business is such a fun challenge, but it is a means for life. You know, we got to spend our time doing something. And so great business enrich their customers and their employees simultaneously. And so the most meaningful work we do is when we talk to business owners, we talk to these groups or have ambitions to grow. Maybe they’re chasing headwinds in the economy. They got to diversify. And so when we come in, and if we do our job, we have good discovery, and we really figure out what is the need? What can we do strategically? How can we different than what they’re doing and we help them implement it. We’ve seen businesses turn around, grow, expand, hire, and I mean that, bar none, makes the world a better place. It’s really powerful work, and it’s marketing done, right?
Curt Anderson 09:38
Great mission. Super admirable. Damon, what are your thoughts so far?
Damon Pistulka 09:42
Yeah, just thinking about that, the the amount of change that that we’re seeing, both in the last decade, in your case, and then the last few years, it really is a is a changing environment. What are some of the things you talked a little bit about? Ai. But just what are some of the things from an SEO standpoint, and then moving that into the AI, because SEO has changed an awful lot, even, and it’s what we have to do now. But just what are your thoughts on that?
Josh Blankenship 10:12
Yeah, you know, it has changed an immense amount, and I think for the better. So I’m the first to tell you, as an SEO specialist, like, I can hate this industry. There’s parts of SEO that’s just like grotesque, oversimplified, manipulative tactics that candidly made the internet a worse place. And so it’s matured, which I like because it means that, like, authentic expertise wins better than ever, which is always Google’s goal. Yeah, they kind of built the search engine. I mean, originally it was about keyword density, who can just say the keyword the most times, and then you have people that would put in the footer the keyword a million times, but make it white on white, so no one could see or they forget that. You know, bots just look at code so they see it immediately, and they can tell what’s happening. So it’s gone from this kind of, like, probably more rudimentary strategies on keyword density and over permeation of like, you know, page counts and things like that, to a more nuanced, sophisticated view, you know, complimentary semantic keywords and other things. It’s contextualized now. So I love that. So it has changed because more mature content that’s first person and originally sourced performs better. That has changed too with the introduction of AI. And you know, it’s important when you think about AI, because it’s so it’s in every conversation these days, and it is incredibly important. You have to be paying attention to it, not only from a customer journey and acquisition standpoint, but also acquisition standpoint, but also an operational standpoint, which we could talk about as well on agents and integrations and things, but it’s still a 10 to one, you know, roughly, on monthly users, on, you know, who’s using llms versus traditional search. So it’s not a zero sum game. So it’s not like every AI user is a is taking from search, so you’re actually both rising. What it means here is that, you know, in search, you may track three to four keyword phrases, three, you know, keyword phrases, three to four words and then that kind of thing for long tail or more specific, LLM conversations are hyper personalized and really deep. You’re talking about multiple conversation points with paragraphs and sentences of context and things that users are going with for so the level of precision is going further, and we’re seeing that in the data. We’re seeing shorter lead cycles when coming from Ai, because the user is doing more of their research before reaching out. And I think that’s the big takeaway. There was a Gartner study from a few years ago that talked about that, by the time you hear from somebody, especially in B to B phone call or form submission, that they’re already over halfway through their decision to buy from you, they’re 57% of the way through the customer journey by the time you hear from them, and that’s because they do their own research. Yeah, your site, competitor’s website, etc. And if you don’t meet their perceived standard, they don’t call you to clarify. They just hit the backspace. So fair or not fair, the majority of the battles won or lost before you hear from them. AI is making that exponentially more so the case, because now they can have very thorough recommendations, conversations and so forth, especially in engineering fields, about metallurgy and other challenges in the business that AI is being prescriptive with, and you’ve got to be present in those conversations, because now they’re collaborating and taking conversations they used to have to have with your team that was more on the consultative side, they’re doing that with AI. Yeah, that’s a really big shift.
Damon Pistulka 13:41
It is. And as you see how Google is has changed that too. I mean, like you said, it’s still 9010 with the AI compared to what traditional search is, but Google is getting because of AI. Google is getting a lot smarter on you just can’t put 100 pages up on your website and different topic and just expect it to rank anymore, because they just simply won’t index it if it’s not good enough content.
Josh Blankenship 14:07
That’s right. That’s right. And we see a lot of that, where you’ll see these huge swaths of a website and it’s in Google Search Console, and they’re just straight up not indexing it because they’re not value it’s not worth it. And they’re they’re being inundated, like if you look at the amount of AI content I read something the other day, it exceeds now human written content. Yeah, yeah. That has to consume that noise, right? And make heads or tails of it. And they’ll just straight up go on the side of ignoring huge areas of your website if it’s not good enough.
Damon Pistulka 14:36
Yes, yes. And that’s you know, it’s given on the other side of that, though, from a user interaction, though you’re getting better information, because if your content isn’t good enough, it’s not getting indexed about being shown on Google, so we don’t get those garbage sites coming up really, as much as we used to. That’s right,
Josh Blankenship 14:54
and that’s yeah, fundamental that change we were talking about at the beginning, where it’s it’s more mature now, which is a win for everybody. Yeah.
Curt Anderson 15:00
So alright, guys, again, if you’re just joining us, we’re here with our buddy Josh from outer box. Josh, what about paid ads? So for our friends are doing paid search on Google, how that’s had a huge impact with, you know, geography, you know, from the landscape of, you know, search like So for people that were like, crushing it and paid years ago, now, it’s completely changed. What conversations? What are you talking about with folks there?
Josh Blankenship 15:22
Yeah, so paid, you know, continues to be a very important channel for a lot of our clients. And if you have pulled up a search result recently, you know, and really pay attention to what you’re seeing, there’s many landscapes that are important to our clients, or search result pages where the whole top two thirds are paid real estate followed by an AI overview. So you actually look at some of these were like the first organic result or rank position one is until half to two thirds down the page. Yeah. So in some ways, it’s kind of a funny spot that Google and these giants are in where they have to almost work against their own self interest in times of these AI overviews that are coming in that are disrupting and taking up real estate, yeah, but they have to in response to user expectations and what llms and AI are giving people. But paid still works. And you’ll notice, you know, over time, they’ve gone from these yellow boxes that were really kind of differentiated to now they’re almost indistinguishable. Yeah, people I was on a call not too long or someone was telling me they don’t click on ads and don’t click on ads, and they were sharing their screen. They searched something, clicked on an ad, right? They don’t even know. You know, in so many ways, it’s still extremely valuable. You only pay when people click. So in some ways, it only is used when working. It is simulated organic results, so we don’t see a difference in intent between people to click on the ads versus the organic. I mean, if the phraseology is right and the intent is right, it’s the same intention the person has. They’re not less sophisticated. And so we use it as a very important tool for a few reasons, both fastest way to find audiences and diversify and test and measure, because organic is a long journey, so you can actually go ahead with paid and kind of, is this valuable? Is this worth pursuing? Can I measure it? So that’s one and then two, if you’re talking about maybe in this context, B to B, these longer consideration cycles, you know the remarketing aspects and other things that paid media can give you are really important for staying top of mind and brand and other things. So, you know, we’ve seen where it is. You know, is just as important as ever in your media mix to have some paid in there, whether it’s branding, remarketing, testing and measuring different places in the search landscape. And then, you know, I think, as always, you’ve got to be just kind of careful and be your own advocate, or work with an agency that can help be an advocate for you. On all the new bells and whistles that the search engines continue to roll out, there’s a lot of them that look really good on paper, but can really hurt performance. And I think that comes down to a lot of times that these platforms struggle to have a quality layer. So they’re chasing automation is the big trend. How can you hook up automation? How can you leverage the AI within these platforms to do bid optimization, all sorts of things? It all matters, though, on how good the data is that you’re putting into those systems. So what we see all the time is people work, say, with a maybe it’s just a rep or something like that, and they track everything on their site as a conversion. Maybe it’s time on site, maybe it’s number of pages viewed, other things like that that are superficial could be good data. But then they’re now putting automation on top of that, and so they’re training a system that’s rewarding things that aren’t connected to business impact. And so those are risks that I would say are in the nude age of automation, and AI that are coming into these systems. And if you’re not careful, you can use them incorrectly and really tank performance, or they can provide really good avenues to scale now, man, I
Curt Anderson 18:50
tell you, dude, this is a master class. Yeah, gold. Let’s I want to take a step backwards, and then you’ve got some information. We’ve got some we’ve got a few charts and some little information that you want to share with folks. So for this, you know, we speak to a lot of small manufacturers, maybe Mom and Pop, you know, 1020, 30 employees, that type of thing. And maybe they just feel a little bit behind the curve, you know, and they’re like, gosh, we’ve got great machinery put out great product. We’ve got the amazing people, but we feel like the best kept secret, what’s a tip or strategy that you would share. They’re just kind of starting out their digital marketing journey, if you will. How do you help those folks stop being a best kept secret? What’s like a first step for these people?
Josh Blankenship 19:29
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it depends, really on kind of, again, the business and where it’s at in its life cycle, but that’s really kind of going back to paid so, you know, the first thing you’ve got to have, obviously, is a good website, a website worth receiving traffic. Now, super subjective in some ways. They’re definitely best, you know, best practices that you would want to adhere to, but you want to make sure you’ve got a website worth receiving traffic. So what you don’t want is a $40 website that puts a terrible brand impression. Then you go spend a couple 1000 bucks put it in. Traffic to it you got, but there is a, there’s a diminishing return on starting with just like a long SEO strategy, yeah. So it depends if it’s a brand new business, that’s where paid, paid absolutely, because the hardest part of marketing is getting the timing right, and that’s where search is still really powerful. Because if someone’s searching, they’re in market. The user is on offense, trying to solve a problem, and thinking, you know the timing’s right because they’re searching. So if you use ads correctly, you can find in market buyers. Send them to your website. You have enough credibility, you can get your phone to ring. So that’s kind of bar none the other place that I think is not looked at enough. And it depends, again, on the life cycle of that business and how if they’ve been around a while, but they still feel like they’re a secret email. Email is such an important category, not buying lists, but if you’ve been around for a while, people often neglect that owned audience. So we see a lot of people that can run really good win back campaigns, cross sell campaigns. We’ve been doing this a while. I’ve had clients that we’ve worked with for years. They’re like, Oh, I didn’t realize you built websites. You’re like, oh, man, what you know, what a failure. So it’s like, those are opportunities where you may have clients. You’re like, Man, I gotta grow. And you’re like, Well, how many of your clients are doing and taking advantage of all the things that you could be offering? And sometimes, email is a really easy place to kind of just turn to the group that already trusts you, that allows you into their inbox to drip them and work them and grow them. Lifetime value is big, especially in B to B, a lot of that is left on the table. So it’s like, instead of investing for new because that’s one of the most expensive times, I should look inward, mature that a little bit and find some revenue and growth, right?
Curt Anderson 21:36
Excellent tip, sir. That’s great advice. Yeah, so website making making sure you make that good first impression. Secondly, talking, hey, get back down to the basics. Right, blocking and tackling. Let’s potentially email and of course, you mentioned paid Josh, let’s go into you’ve got a few things to share. Damon, we want to pop that up for Josh, yeah.
Damon Pistulka 21:56
Here we go. So what were you seeing here? Josh, awesome.
Josh Blankenship 22:01
Yeah, so you know, this is a platform that we’ve actually developed called loop analytics. And you know, the point of showing this is not necessarily to over emphasize loop itself, but to talk about the challenges that B to B organizations have in marketing, and some of the things that you can be doing today, that we see the best in class are starting to leverage. So loop analytics here again, platform that we’ve built and own. And the point of it is, it’s really a customer journey and attribution tool that looks at lead quality. So Lead Quality has always been the hallmark of B to B, you know, marketing and strategy, you know. And you see on here, this 99 leads. Well, you and I both don’t know if 99 is good or bad, so we know who they were, what were they asking for, and could we help them? And I’ve actually seen, and we have case studies on it where, you know, it could have been 105 or 120 last month, it’s down to 99 it’s the best thing that ever happened to that business. Yeah, because it’s all that matters is the quality. And too many campaigns and agencies are sitting there just trying to promote clicks and impressions, and that’s how they get paid, and that’s what they want to show charts that do that. But it’s it’s never satisfying to the business, and actually limits you in a lot of ways. So this tool here was built to help solve some of that. There are other tools out there, like HubSpot and others that you can configure to do some of this, but loop analytics, what we’re looking at here bunch of different channels you can track and get attribution, especially in B to B. It’s not single channel people. So almost anything you do is going to connect users to multiple channels. So that’s kind of one thing to think about as a business, is you’re spending money and paid, paid alone is not going to close those opportunities for you. These are often team buying decisions. It can give you original awareness. But then they come to the website, then they’re going to open social later, then they’re going to Google something else later, then they’re going to ask their chat GBT about something so you really, depending on your level of maturity, what you have in place. Need to think about, how do these channels pick up off of each other? And we measure that all the time here in loop, and I can show some examples. And then if you come down here, I’ll show the last, say, three months. You’re looking at the leads we see down here. This is some of the data that we’ll track of different users that are coming in. So we can actually see who the individuals are, what were they requesting, and then we can see the attribution that’s coming from them. So whether it’s this is Thomas sending them bing ads, Google ads. And then you can see, you know, what were the keywords that were being attributed to these users. And when you come in, you’re able to actually, then see what did they do on the website itself. So what is influencing a good opportunity? And so you see person came in originally on February 25 comes back on the 31st and then contacts the business. So painting those stories is really important, and then looking at ways to measure what were the qualitative aspects of what good looks like. So for years, our team would go through the forms and try to read them. Curt and flag the best looking ones, and say, Hey, client. Did we talk to this person? Sarah, Sue, Robert, etc. What was that conversation like? And try to get feedback
Josh Blankenship 25:11
that qualitative analysis can now be scaled out really well to AI. So AI can do quality analysis at scale, which is really a kind of a revolution in opportunity for this kind of work for most organizations. So again, whether you are already a chat to BT organization, you’ve got access to these however, it is that you collect lead data. One of the recommendations I have for you is go ahead and pull, you know, three months of those forms out and upload it to one of your agents and ask it to analyze those submissions for trends. So for a lot of businesses, this data lives siloed in CRMs, so each record is kind of an individual place you got to go look. So it’s really hard to amass patterns. So we do a lot of our best work looking at lead quality like this and picking up on the little details in the comments. So as an example, there’s a chiller manufacturer that we work with. And chillers go into all sorts of application, plastic manufacturing, you kind of name it. Most things have a chilling process somewhere in there. We’re looking at leads with them, and we see some comments talking about breweries, and I’m coming from a brewery, blah, blah, blah. So we flag it, otherwise I fly under the radar, and we bring it up in a conversation. Hey, this one was talking about a brewery application. Is that a fit for y’all? Y’all even chase that business. They go, Well, yeah, actually, that’s a great fit. Glycol chilling is perfect. And all these little micro breweries all over use chillers like we sell. We actually have clients in that. We say, Cool. And we then we can step back and we can actually search in this system. Or if you’ve got a pattern, or you put it into AI like this, how many different breweries have reached out to me in the last three to six months, and all of a sudden we found, well, there’s actually been seven different people over the last six months that someone mentioned brewery or glycol in their request. But we’re not targeting it. We don’t mention them on the website. We’re not leaning into it at all, so it’s a quality aspect that is hidden from us. So the analogy is like you’re in a dark room. There’s a room on the other side with the lights on, and the door is barely cracked. There’s a little light coming through, so we see it. We can actually open that door if we want, and lean into it so client validates it, and we go spin up keywords, not glycol chillers, brewery chiller application, we added to the website, and all of a sudden, now, guess what? They’re getting five to six a month in that same theme, because it’s that 57% of the journey we talked about earlier. Those people may have always been there, maybe not at the same volume, but when they’re on the site, they don’t read anything about brewery experience. Glycol is an application. So they’re just hitting the backspace and going to someone else who talks about it. Now, all sudden we’re talking about it. We see the pattern and we mobilize it. The business can steer into things that matter, and that really is what becomes so important. So down here in this example, everything written in this lead quality box was written by AI. So AI will look at the leads that are coming in. We write a client profile, so we work with the client, and you can do this in your own agents. However it is that you’re set up, or there’s a lot of ways to approach this. We write what does good look like? And that’s been such a difficult thing for B to B organizations all these years, and been working with them for a long time. I could take a random lead and put it in front of my client and say, What do you think? Say, what do you think? And their intuition would be like, yeah, actually looks like it’s got some legs or terrible waste of time. And what they’re doing in their mind is they may be looking at, oh, it’s a Hotmail email address. Doesn’t seem like it works for a business low volume, actually looking for free consulting like I can read the tea leaves waste of time, or no, that’s Boeing. That’s an engineer. They’re talking about volume that works in that, yeah, that works. And it’s those little details. So now you can actually put that into a client profile and say, These are the materials, these are the quantities, these are the certifications that look like good to us. And then you can run analysis against it. That way. You’re not having to read every one. You can actually do an MQL and marketing qualified standard and scale it. So this here, got an excellent here’s the lead. Here’s what they’re looking for. This is priority, some exotic grades for this client. And they let a demo out of their account here. So they love high exotic steals, so that we put those in there. He’s mentioning that. And then it can look at all these things based in Texas, there’s urgency, there’s product scale, there’s budget alignment. Does this person have authority? So it can take all that into to account now and then you can distill it and tie it back to campaign attribution, like I showed earlier. So now you can say, you know, not does Bing versus Google Get me the most quote, unquote leads. But what is the quality difference? And so then you make counter intuitive decisions. Now, when you have this where you may actually fund the campaign that has a higher cost per click and a lower conversion rate, better quality, yeah,
Josh Blankenship 29:56
it’s like we’re always chasing this any. Way we just have it’s been really hard to distill down in scale, and that has changed. And so we’re using this a lot more. Same thing with calls. So calls have always been kind of that really important, but unicorn to kind of hunt down. It’s more old way of doing it was, well, let’s look at the longest calls, and hopefully those are the best ones. Listen to them and try to pull out some notes. But you can see here you’ve got calls that are the same distance, same length. This one is following up to an invoice, so it’s not a lead. This one here looking for three or 4h round bar, perfect. And so you can come in and we actually have then an integration with the calls, but then you’ve got the whole transcript. Yeah. So you think about the hours and hours of direct client talk time, your own customer voice explaining what’s on their mind, what’s going into a decision, what their concerns are, what they’re weighing in. You potentially have now 1000s, 10s of 1000s of, you know, written text and words summarizing that, you can then go build some of the most meaningful strategies out of So, and that’s first party data. So I’m just showing this illustratively to say B to B space, leveraging AI to review inbound phone calls, forms, setting a standard and using it to summarize patterns and things that are top of mind for your own customers is then how you go upstream and you change your channel strategy, you optimize your campaigns differently. AI, you can use that as a rock bed for writing, you know, thought leadership pieces that no one’s talking about, because it’s like surveying a market. Yeah, you know, you take 50 phone calls from people that are interested in products and services and take what’s top of mind and the most common questions, you can do anything with that.
Curt Anderson 31:54
Yeah, so in this software tool, so loop is available through any of your your your clients, or your water box, right? And right, yeah. And it’s a full blown SAS tool, like anybody can so even a non client, can they sign up and use this tool?
Josh Blankenship 32:11
Yep, exactly, right? Yep. We use it primarily in conjunction with our clients, but it can be a standalone as well. And yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s extremely cost effective compared to other things in the market, because we see it as like a fundamental layer of how you measure success. So we use it primarily, just to support the relationships overall. And this kind of insight is again available, but not organized, and not enough groups are using it. And really AI, sentiment and quality scores have been a game changer the last 18 months.
Curt Anderson 32:46
Yeah, dude, drop the mic right here. Damon, what we we didn’t even know that this was coming, right? Yeah, now, Josh, you’re young guy, when you hang out with two old guys like us, like, you got to take you got to take you got to be gentle, right? Like, I don’t know if our hearts can handle how exciting right here. Damon, are you? What are your thoughts?
Damon Pistulka 33:08
Well, I mean it, this is, this is, this is a more comprehensive tool than you’re going to see in just about anywhere, right? Yeah, because what you just showed here on the customer data. You know your customer service calls, and if you could get your sales calls in this, it is just gold, absolute gold. Because, as you said right now, if I’ve got five, five sales people that are out there on the road or out seeing customers, if I could get the conversational data from that, and just understand that, how that could affect our marketing, the kind of things that we’re, you know, we’re really going after. Because, other than that, you’re supposing, guessing, that’s right, that’s right, yeah, and how you described, you know, going into something that may look counterintuitive, because the quality of the people that you’re talking to, and that’s that with that channel pipe, whatever you want to say, it’s incredible. Yeah, cool stuff. This is powerful.
Curt Anderson 34:13
So Josh, I’m asking for a friend. So a question just came in, if, hypothetically, hypo like, if a Texas Longhorn friend fan is having a conversation. And what, like, what does a chatbot? Does a chatbot, like, say, like, bad quality or, what does it do that
Josh Blankenship 34:29
we bake in a Longhorn bias to everything that we build? I’m married to a Longhorn. So we’re
Curt Anderson 34:36
Yeah, I’m just good. I’m teasing. So, man, dude, this is i This isn’t even a nice to have, like, this is like, yeah, it’s almost like, I’m almost speechless. Like it’s almost like, once you get into it, your clients are like, how did I live without this?
Josh Blankenship 34:52
Yeah, that’s exactly right, because you realize how much guesswork there is, and people come about it honestly, but it happens all the time in discussions, either with probably. Prospects or even current clients, depending on where they sit in an organization their experience. But we hear all the time, I need more traffic, or, like, any more clicks or whatever. And really they’re just asking for that because they think, well, I’ll get more leads. So they’re just but that’s how people phrase it. I need more traffic. I need more traffic because I get more leads. And so you remember, all of this is just for leads, good leads. And I tell our team, and I tell our clients all time, like we have fun doing this, but nobody does this just for fun. Invest in Google ads because they’re bored. They do it with expectation, and this is the expectation was chasing. So whether you’re kind of stuck on man, I need more clicks, I need more traffic, because you’re thinking not gonna be leads. Maybe you’re thinking any more conversions or form fills, because you think, well, that will get me leads. But then, really, the deepest layer of all is, did I get leads that actually mattered? That’s why you do any of this. And so then you just spend your time here instead. And again, this has been hard to get data, or even when you could get it, the only way to analyze it at scale was man hours, yeah? And that’s the other thing, is that AI can bring a consistency to that, not only scale, yeah, but the three of us are no longer subjectively rating things based on our own experience and intuition. You can set it standard, and you can rate and then we have in here where you can come back and you can actually manually say, actually, this is a poor lead, right? And then it’ll say, okay, never again will I, you know, recognize an international lead at the same standard, and it can learn that. And then you have it going forward. So it’s, it’s really about kind of curating this knowledge base over time that you can apply, right?
Curt Anderson 36:37
And vice versa, where, like, say, if it looks like immediate, AI might think it’s a mediocre lead, and you’re like, hey, wait a minute, that was a really good call, you know, again, it’s but it’s almost like you’re, you use the number 57% of the buying decisions made before they pick up a phone or drop an email. Same thing here, like this is doing 5060 you know, like getting us to the red zone. And maybe now the human element comes in, but what you did made my life so much easier, so much more efficient. You let me do the work of like five people, and now I can have my human touch. We’re like, maybe this wasn’t poor, what have you. And then tailor the messaging moving forward, right?
Josh Blankenship 37:15
That’s right. And you know, we get into conversations a lot, and it doesn’t matter, even if your if your if your business is doing well and trying to grow, or hard times are hitting you, the right businesses know that, hey, I’ll invest somewhere to kind of get leads or get revenue coming back in. And so the question is always, where would you spend your next 5000 bucks, 10,000 bucks like, where would you do that predictably? This is the only way to really do that, outside of, again, more guesswork and intuition. I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve been on over the years. Over the years where, how’s business, business is good. How are Leads? Leads are good. Okay, we have no idea if that was us, you. You have no idea. No one has any idea why that’s the case. They’re just kind of, let’s keep doing things. And it seems to be working, but like, it’s just too much guesswork, too much guesswork.
Curt Anderson 38:01
Yeah, man, what a powerful, super exciting. I was going to ask you, like, what you’re excited about this year. I’m not going to ask you anymore, because you already, you just showed it to us, Josh, so we’re going to start winding down again. Our friend Josh from outer box. We strongly encourage, welcome, invite you, implore you. Check out their website. Connect with Josh on LinkedIn. Damon thoughts comments as we start mining down. What are your what’s your takeaway here with with this wonderful tool at loop analytics,
Damon Pistulka 38:29
once again, I just another application where AI is is making things better. I it just just the scale that we can now quantify, analyze and utilize good data. Is this incredible?
Curt Anderson 38:48
Yep, yep. So let’s Josh. You got a couple questions left for you, my friend, as we wind down. So when a manufacturer, our friend is out there and they’re like, man, back to like, I feel like I’m the best kept secret. This thing is super powerful. I still like, I’m, like, I’m not even getting leads. I need some help. So I could use a line with a partner, like outer box, as far as like, website, web presence, you know, whether it’s SEO, paid click Pay Per Click ads, what it might look like? What’s that onboarding process like? If somebody reaches out to kind of that first date, if you will. What’s that? What’s that process look like for a
Josh Blankenship 39:24
manufacturer out there? Yeah, yeah. So it all starts with a good discussion, you know, and it’s really about going further, just kind of like we’ve described here. So, hey, you want to grow well, what does that mean, you know? What are your capabilities? Who are the end markets, where you’ve got expertise? What are the materials you handle. Well, what kind of certifications differentiate you? You know, what does that really look like? And I’ll and I’ll share this as briefly, and this is from a different kind of conversation, but it’s a methodology that we have we call the Be smart method. And the Be smart method is a framework for finding intent. And particularly applied to B to B manufacturing is very powerful. So what we’ll do is kind of talk to it and say, Okay, what are maybe the sizes of the stuff that you’re doing? You’re doing Swiss screw machining and tiny parts. You’re doing large format parts. Like, what does that mean? What is, you know, not just leads and not just stamping, not just machining, but where in that world do you like to exist the materials, not just I want to work with stainless steel. Which alloys are you doing? High nickel and exotics? Do you like some of the commodity stuff? Like, what materials are good? Leads to You same thing. Like the they ask, we’re going to build something that’s more precise than not. We can always loosen it up later, but that’s how we want to find them. What what do engineers and technical buyers? How do they search when they’re being very specific? So we look at applications requirements. So if you’re ITAR certified as 9100 like, what is it you’ve got you’re certified in that we can actually help differentiate you and capability. So it starts with, where have you been in the past? Where are you trying to go, and then probing to go deeper, technically, what does that look like? And then, depending on budget and goals and things, it’s kind of about channel selection and funding there. It would be better to participate in less channels well than more channels poorly. So it’s like amount of budget. It’s probably going to be starting with an analytics base, like loop putting it in there. What’s the baseline? What kind of quality and volume are we getting? It all and then paid. Paid is typically the place to start, because if in the first, say, 6090, days, I can start to show and measure paid search leads from these campaigns coming in that your team is qualifying and quoting. Then that buys us the future to grow in the long term, and then that that’s really more about content SEO, maybe the email, like I talked about, most of our clients are doing a little bit in multiple channels so they integrate. Each channel has pros and cons. They work really well together. So again, depending on budgets and kind of state of the website, it might be a mix. It might be a single channel. Start always an analytics base, because we don’t want to spend your money once we know how we’re going to measure it. So that’s really what it starts with. Is just a business conversation. Try to go a little deeper, pull those things out, and then make a plan.
Curt Anderson 42:00
We don’t want to spend your money if we don’t, if we can’t measure it. I love it. That’s another drop of mic moment, right there. So, alright, Josh, phenomenal. I love the Be smart. Where can people find the loop analytics? Can they just Google loop analytics? Do they go to outer box? Where they go to
Josh Blankenship 42:16
outer box? Yeah, go to outer box or connect me on LinkedIn. Email me. Those are places where we can start, introduce your team. So that would be the place to go and get a conversation started and see where you’re at on your journey, and maybe what’s a good fit? Awesome.
Curt Anderson 42:30
All right. This is phenomenal. All right, that Damon, any we got two last questions. Eddie, this is awesome. This dude, this is phenomenal. I knew this was gonna do as high as my expectations were, Josh, you still beat them. Alright. Questions for you, my friend, best. What’s that? These are the hard ones. These are the best business advice that you’ve ever been given. You’re What do you tend to 13 years out of college, maybe a younger guy, your younger self or somebody newer entrepreneur. What’s best business advice that you’d like to pass along? Well, it’s kind of
Josh Blankenship 43:07
two things. It depends on where you’re on your career. So some of the best advice I was given early on was patience. I remember when I was young in my career, yeah, feeling ambitious and, like, frustrated with either lack of promotions or you’re just, like, thinking about growth. And it’s like, then, as you get a little bit older and you you see people younger in their careers, there’s just no replacement for time and experience. Like, you just got to be on 5000 hours of talk time, and you’ll get there so patience and like enjoying the process. Young career advice that I was given that really helped me just kind of settle in and enjoy and not get ahead of myself. Then, you know, the business advice on the other end is like you, you know, as a leader, you have got to make sure that you are arbiter over the checks and balances and egos in your business to work as one team. So I’ve been in part of teams that have had them flowed where we’re out of sync, and maybe sales and marketing and doing things that ops can’t fulfill, and Ops is frustrated, or marketing is frustrated. And I’ve also seen where Ops is too much. Ops is too much authority over maybe sales and marketing. We’re too risk adverse, and we’re hedging too hard. So really it’s about kind of defining some of these standards together as a team. A lot of what we talked about here today is like those qualitative standards, like, what does ops agree good looks like? What does sales and marketing also agree at that table? How do you get a shared definition and how do you use it jointly in the business? So you can say these are leads that look like they meet that standard sales is helping close the right business. We got a sales quality metric. Ops is fulfilling their side. So I’ve seen too many times where those metrics aren’t in place, and so it’s just a bunch of gut feel finger pointing, obviously selling the wrong stuff, and it just you sit there forever until someone can come in, get joint share definitions and then help actually apply them across. I’ve seen that change businesses, and that’s really important. It’s hard work to do. Leadership’s got to do it.
Curt Anderson 44:56
Yep, excellent. Okay, last question for you, my friend. Uh, hey, are you baseball fan? By any chance?
Josh Blankenship 45:03
I am not super deep, but enough.
Curt Anderson 45:05
Who’s your team?
Josh Blankenship 45:07
Well, I love my Rangers, so I was
Curt Anderson 45:09
wondering if you’re gonna be Rangers or Houston. So here’s my question for so Ranger, who’s, who’s the arch, who’s the nemesis of the Rangers?
Josh Blankenship 45:18
Man Oakland. A’s obviously the the Astros too, for not too long ago. Man, it was tough.
Curt Anderson 45:26
Yeah, alright, so let’s go here. Let’s say the Rangers are playing the dreaded Houston Astros, maybe even like during the 2017 now, I won’t go back then. So yeah, back in we’ll leave the Houston leave the Houston fans alone. So anyway, let’s say the Texas Rangers are playing the Houston Astros. Okay, it’s the bottom of the ninth. Bottom of ninth. Texas Rangers playing Houston Astros. High score. There’s a guy on second base. Manager turns on the bench and he says, Hey, Josh, grab your helmet, grab your bat, get up to the plate, hitting the winning run. We got to get out of here, right? We got to win this game and go home. I’ve got dinner reservations, right? Yeah, you grab your helmet, you grab your bat on your way to the plate to go hit in the winning run to beat the dreaded Astros. What’s your walk up song?
Josh Blankenship 46:16
Man, that’s a great question. Um, it might be Smells Like Teen Spirit,
Curt Anderson 46:26
team spirit, man, you go, dear, you’re in Demons hometown, like that’s back in your early days.
Josh Blankenship 46:35
That’s it. I’m a drummer, and so I love any of the grunge and kind
Curt Anderson 46:38
of are you a drummer? That’s awesome. That is Josh. Thank you, David. You know what is big of a grunge fan as I we’ve never, we’ve asked that question probably 500 times, and it never had smells like team spirit. So Josh, thank you. All right, guys, we’re going to wind down. How about first and foremost, if you’ve been sitting hanging out for 46 minutes, how about a stand up, give a big round of applause, standing ovation for our dear friend, Josh. Josh, this was a master class. Damon, your thoughts
Damon Pistulka 47:06
as we close out. Oh, just thanks for being here today. Josh is so, so incredible. Just allowing you to share with us. Thank you.
Josh Blankenship 47:14
Appreciate you guys. It’s been a lot of fun. All right.
Curt Anderson 47:16
So hey guys, we’re gonna wind down. Do yourselves a favor. Connect with Josh on LinkedIn. Stop by Iver box, if that loop analytics, man, if it didn’t pique your curiosity, I’m not sure what will but reach out to Josh. He’d be happy to explain that more, maybe even take you through a demo. So go and hey, we’re gonna wind down. We’re gonna wrap up Josh. Hang out with us for one second, and as we do, do yourselves a favor. Go out there and be someone’s inspiration, just like our dear friend Josh and you too, can make the world a better place. So guys, we will be back here soon, and we’ll close out on that. Damon take us away.
Damon Pistulka 47:50
Alright, thanks everyone for being here today and Josh, thanks once again for stopping by. If you got in this late, you need to go back to the beginning and check out what Josh was talking about, all the way from his beginnings in SEO, back a while into now what AI and all the other different things put together into their loop analytics product really does because and it is incredible for B to B industrial companies and wow, wow. Thank you, Josh. We’ll be back again with another awesome guest, see y’all, thank y’all, bye.