Turning Manufacturing Website Visitors into Customers

Damon Pistulka  00:00

oh what was that? All right, everyone, it’s Friday and you know what that means? It’s time for manufacturing ecommerce success. We are excited today because we’re going to be talking about turning manufacturing website visitors into customers. Wow, I’m excited today I’m one of your hosts here. Damon Pistulka. That pretty man right over there. Curt Anderson, the other co host of this show, we’re gonna take it away talking to Nelson today, Curt, take it away my friend, dude,

Curt Anderson  00:32

man, I’ve been fired up. So I’ve been excited about this since January. So I met this young man we were in person at the industrial marketing Summit. You talked to this guy and you’re ready to run through a wall so Damon, I put I put padding on my wall in front of me just you know, I don’t want to get my no more brain injuries. Yeah, no more concussions. I’m going to concussion protocol right now. So let’s dive in. Man. We got Nelson Bruton the fourth in the house Nelson. How are you doing?

Nelson Bruton  00:59

I’m doing outstanding. Thank you so much, guys for having me. Oh,

Curt Anderson  01:02

man, we were gonna be manufacturing chats on manufacturing ecommerce success. Like what is better than that, man? two positives make Ultra positive so awesome. But before we go there a couple of things. I want to hit real quick. So you just before we went on, you said there’s there’s five Nelson rutan’s? Is that correct? Or five men? The world’s just a better place with five Nelson Bruton is walking around the world. So let’s go here, dude. So when you’re a little guy growing up, look guy grown up. Who was your hero? Who was your hero as a little guy growing up?

Nelson Bruton  01:35

For sure. My dad.

Curt Anderson  01:38

I’m no math major. But is that the third?

Nelson Bruton  01:40

That’s the That’s the third. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  01:46

All right. So Nelson real quick. So you know, Eddie Saunders Jr. So when Eddie was on that show, I said, Eddie, who’s your hero? He goes, Oh, it’s my dad, Eddie Saunders Jr. I said, Well, what’s your dad’s name? Eddie Saunders Jr. Anyway, that’s, that’s on me. So I’m not going to make that same mistake twice. So assume that we have Nelson Bruton the third what was so great about your dad.

Nelson Bruton  02:08

He operated in such a cool, calm and collected manner no matter what was going on. But he was also very, very authoritative. So he is a really good balance to look up to, you know, awesome, awesome.

Curt Anderson  02:20

And let’s go up the food chain real quick. How about number two? Let’s hear about Nelson. Number two.

Nelson Bruton  02:25

He was an engineer, actually, you know, and he my granddad. He was awesome. And, you know, he passed away a few years ago. But he was great, too. And, you know, that’s where my dad got the cool, calm and collected this from I’m, I strive to be more cool and calm. But I’m just full of energy. You know, I love life. And I’m grateful I have an attitude of gratitude. So yeah. containing my, my excitement is a challenge sometimes. So well,

Curt Anderson  02:52

I love it right on your LinkedIn profile, high energy, high integrity. And so hey, if you’re out there, drop us a note. Let us know Happy Friday to you, Alan, my friend. Great to have you here. Let us know that you’re out there and connect with Nelson on LinkedIn just in high energy, high integrity, fierce entrepreneur, Nelson, let’s go here. On top of that, you’re a Georgia Bulldog. Now, if I understand correctly, graduated like 2002 ish. Looks like you kicked off your entrepreneurial journey, like right out of college, like what was going on? Yeah.

Nelson Bruton  03:23

So you know, I was one of the masses who went to college without knowing exactly what he wanted to do. I wasn’t going the doctor path I wasn’t the CPA, you’re going to be an attorney. So I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do. So as I moved to my first goal out of college was, hey, I’m going to move to the beach. I know some people in Jacksonville Beach, I’m going to move to the beach. And I accomplished my first got to college, I like to say, right. And as I started networking around down here and trying to find my way, I quickly realized from talking to people that you know, if you want to make money, doesn’t matter what you sell, sell something. So I got my teeth wet right out of college and some outside sales opportunities with some big companies. And then, you know, long story made super short getting introduced to the CEO of interchanges, who had started that company about three years prior, and was looking to start to scale and we hit it off now was right over 20 years ago. And we’ve been just doing fun things in the digital space ever since. Well,

Curt Anderson  04:21

that’s phenomenal. And so let’s go here. So you’ve had you know, you kind of pioneer in many ways from digital marketing standpoint, you know, 2000 to 2003. You know, you’re early Google your pre social media until a little bit of that early stage. But then we’re going to take a deep dive into manufacturing Chad’s super excited to hear what’s going on there. And

Nelson Bruton  04:41

it’ll be easy parlay to because the way the story goes, so when I joined, you know, interchanges was really operating as a company called matrix design. interchanges, is actually our DBA. And so, he matrix design was a web design firm. And right about the time that I joined the company, there was some people in the Office, were doing SEO and going to dabble in some paid search campaigns and some email marketing. And so we started bundling all that together, we called it our partner program. So we were there early, early pioneers of a full service digital marketing agency, right, we call it our partner program, we’ll build your website, we’ll drive traffic to it, we’ll send your emails, we’ll help you communicate with your customers and prospects. And we were doing that very, very well. And we started driving traffic very quickly to a lot of our small business customers. And we said, we got to start converting more of this traffic. And so probably a year after I was there, we built out our live chat infrastructure as a solution to convert more visitors into opportunities that we were driving to the website. And so we had that nice little bundle of services that we sold as on a retainer, to be the digital marketing agency of record, if you will. We did that for many, many, many years. You know, we grew it we grew, our customer base, we grew the size of the customers, we grew our expertise, and about seven or eight years ago, is when we kind of, you know, took a look at all the marketing stacks that were necessary to compete and necessary to implement, and all of the content strategy that was now necessary to create for all the different social media platforms that were now part of the marketing mix. And we said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, do we want to keep growing and try to be the agency of record for all of that or not? And the answer clearly was, you know, we took a good hard look at ourselves. And you know, Jim Collins book, Good to Great has the hedgehog concept. You know, for us what that meant is, we looked at, we looked at ourselves and said, you know, what, of our services deliver the fastest results, the most consistent results do we have the highest retention with? And we have the best customers we have our favorite customers to work with. And it was industrial customers who had our live chat service. So we were like, well, there’s our answer. Let’s go. Right. And so that’s when maybe shortly after that manufacturing chat, the brand was born. And so we’ve been really running hard for about 567 years on that. Awesome. Alright,

Curt Anderson  07:06

let’s dive in. I want to I want to really dive into that. Because now some what I love to talk about is we the tagline is niche down till it hurts right niche down till it hurts. Yeah. Can you take us back at that time? You know, in now, you know, hindsight is 2020. You know, and we just we just had guests on our show on Monday, where we just had a very similar conversation seven, eight years ago, they took a huge pivot with their digital marketing firm for manufacturers went all in in a certain direction. Can you go back to that time? Was it? Was it gutsy scary? You know, what, what type of courage did it take to like really make that pivot?

Nelson Bruton  07:39

It was very scary. And we took a hit revenue, revenue to get right. So it was it was a courageous move, but it was a necessary move. We had big clients paying big retainer monthly fees. Yep. Our chat clients, it’s not a huge investment. Right. It’s nowhere near the retainers we’re getting with the full service stuff. So when you stop when you stop going after those bigger retainers, and you’re trying to backfill it with a bunch of smaller ones, you just realize it’s just gonna take time, but we believed we believed in ourselves. We believed in the service, we believed in the results. And we have a 94% retention rate with our customers on the eighth

Curt Anderson  08:16

last and I’m demonized a little bit older. I’m done. I didn’t hear you. What did you say? Yeah, we have a 94% retention 84% retention rate do drop them migrate their data. I get a 94% and he told me that he actually told me that Nosson I think I think I did the same thing to you. I’m like, Hey, Nelson. But alright, let’s go here. So folks that ate Harry’s here today, Damon.

Damon Pistulka  08:39

Yeah. How you doing today, man? Thanks for stopping by. Again,

Curt Anderson  08:44

guys. You’re just joining us drop us a note. Let us know you’re out there. We’re here with Nelson Bruton does. Fourth. And we are here to talk about manufacturing Chad. So let’s dive in. Nelson, please share with our friends and family out there. How do you and manufacturing Chad’s? How do you make the world a better place?

Nelson Bruton  08:59

Yeah, that’s what it is we we help we help companies get more customers, we help them improve their customer experience. And it’s pretty, pretty easy to do, because they’ve done the hard part already. They’re already drive. They already have their agency that’s driving traffic to their website. They’re already doing tremendous amount of brand positioning and brand awareness work. So you know, any company that’s already doing all of that and driving at least 4000 visitors a month to their website. It’s copy paste one line of code, spend about 20 minutes with Ian on my team who interviews them and fills in a script playbook. And our team trains for about five to seven days. And once our chat team launches on their site, we flip the switch when our team is ready. It’s immediate results. Right? So from a marketing strategy plays you know what other marketing campaigns provide immediate results with immediate feedback. You know, there’s not many, you know, certainly some paid ad ad campaigns provide immediate results. but it still takes time for those to run them and to refine them to make sure that it is going to be a viable channel. So this is, you know, from from day one when you launch because the the visitors are already on the site. So the immediate results is something our customers love and the ease of tie in to their existing marketing stack. Integration with their CRM, their, you know, their HubSpot, or Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, whatever they’re using. So ease of integration, ease of launch ease of implementation, immediate results, that’s how we make the world a better place. Yeah. Wow,

Damon Pistulka  10:35

awesome. So what kind of I mean, so I got 4000 visitors coming to my manufacturing website right now. And I try this, what I mean, what, what kind of results do you guys see when you do this?

Nelson Bruton  10:49

Alright, so a couple things. Let me start the conversation with the topic of preferences. Those 4000 visitors that are going to your website have different preferences, some of them like to pick up the phone and call it like to dial your phone number. Some of them will find your contact form when they’re ready, they’ll fill out that contact form and they’ll wait for somebody to reply to them. More people than ever prefer chat is their communication option. Sidenote, as long as it’s not a bot first, yeah, people are annoyed by bots. All right, now there’s a place for AI. And you know, we have lots of r&d going on with AI, we use AI in many different forms. But the testing that we’ve done over the years, human first chat is thing, so preferences, phone calls, contact forms, and chat, so having all three is immediately going to increase your conversion rate. Okay, if you remove one, you’re gonna have less conversions. If you remove your phone number from the site, you’re gonna have less conversions. If you remove your contact form, you’re gonna have less conversions, if you don’t have chat, less conversions. If you have chatbot less conversions, when if then if you had a human first chat team, and I don’t know if we talked about that early on, but one of our value propositions with manufacturing chats, is that we provide humans that respond within seconds 24/7 dedicated teams of real people, alright. And so that’s a huge huge differentiator when we’re talking about, you know, putting a chat on the website. Not to say there aren’t instances where bots can work, because we’ve seen that, but by and large from the testing that we’ve done, so the results that you can expect. And in fact, if you have no I didn’t share this link earlier. But if we go to manufacturing chats, I do think this is where we’re sharing, manufacturing chats.com, and click on the profit kick profit calculator tab at the top. Yeah, I like to speak from data, right? Clinical and marketing nowadays. So we have 20 years of our customer performance data, which allows us to predict results pretty accurately. So if you go to manufacturing chat.com, and then you click on the profit calculator calculator, you put in 4000, monthly visitors into that top line, and you’re gonna see the calculations done for you. And by the way, I don’t know whatever on the screen yet. I don’t know if you’re working on that, Kurt, but it’s 1.1% of those visitors will turn into what we call a meaningful chat conversation. And I always use air quotes, when I say meaningful.

Damon Pistulka  13:17

And you can add, I see your chat, your chat, people come up right away to enclose

Nelson Bruton  13:21

that. So we can see the money, I can see the numbers on the right. So if you have 4000 visitors, our data tells us that we’re going to send you 44 meaningful chats every 30 days as a meaningful because, you know, if somebody leaves the chat halfway through, or they’re trying to spam you, we don’t even send those chats over to our customers. So there’s a common sense qualification that takes place right away. Wow. And then you can you know, this just put profit calculators, you know, it’s not super detailed, but you can drill down and, you know, put in your, you know, we know, we know about how many of those chats are going to be sales leads, not all of them are going to be sales inquiries. 40 to 70% are going to be sales inquiries, though, based on our years of doing this, and then closing percentage and so on and so forth. But to answer your question, you know, the easiest way most top level is we’re going to send 1.1% additional opportunities your way. Yeah, the increase in conversion?

Damon Pistulka  14:21

Yeah. Well, I like your like your calculator, because you go, Okay, what’s your conversion ratio? Normally, what’s your closing percentage? What’s your average sale? I mean, you can walk right down through this and figure out what the dollars are in this thing for some might.

Nelson Bruton  14:35

And some companies can do this easier more easily than others. Because sometimes average sale amount varies, right? Because it could be a part sale, but you know, new equipment sale. So you know, getting an average is tough. Yeah. But it gives you an idea of what the opportunity is. Yeah. And you know, I’d say probably 85 to 90% of the time when we run the the free trial for our customers. These numbers hold up. There’s anomaly is obviously like there’s a

Curt Anderson  15:03

couple of things I want to touch on Nelson. First off, congratulations, kudos to you for just providing this wonderful free, valuable tool, you know, whether they become a customer or not, man doesn’t just read value add that you provide. Absolutely brilliant. And secondly, for our friends out there, friends, family manufacturers, what a great tool that you should be considering. I hope everybody out there not only is going to Nelson’s website to check this out, if you’re not using chat. And secondly, start thinking about what is a what is a tool that you could have on your site to provide free value for your customers. So I’m complimenting you on both fronts here. This is absolutely brilliant, man. I just I love, love, love seeing this way to go. Okay. Anything else that you want to point out while we’re on your website? Because we’re going to dive into some customer examples here in a minute. Anything else that we want to talk about here? On your website? The whew, you I heard you say it, Nelson, I heard you say, human first, what? Can we dive in that? What do you what are we talking about human life chat first?

Nelson Bruton  16:03

Yeah. So humans versus chatbots. Right, and chat bots and whole AI. I’m sure we’ve all seen it. And we’ve been marketed to, like heavily over the past couple years with all these AI chat bots and all the capabilities that AI is bringing to the businesses and AI follow up and AI this, right, we’re starting already to get bot fatigue, right, as I call it bot fatigue, fatigue. And, you know, the two reasons that we’ve kind of honed in on with our testing and with our experiences with our customers that humans perform better than bots in this particular capacity, acknowledgement and empathy. Humans are still better than acknowledgment and empathy during these technical conversations, because remember, we’re talking about manufacturers of equipment, machinery, custom components, architectural components, and building, you know, supply. So very technical, very much engineering driven conversations and a lot of cases. So, you know, that acknowledgement, that understanding of very, you know, unique applications and situations is really better at this point done by a human. And then secondarily, one comment I’ll make on that is, you know, anywhere on the website, you can see lots of research from other sources that we’ve put on there. But you know, I go to these trade shows, you know, four or five times a year different trade shows I’ve talked to over the union combined, that trade shows 1000s of people every single year. And I’ve been, you know, asking people having the conversation, you know, what’s your what’s your experience with chat, chat bot, you know, chat humans, like, I hate chat bots, I hate dealing with chat bots. It’s a resounding, we hate chat bots, as people why? Because people like to do business with people, right. And so it’s not to say the language models aren’t going to continue to improve. In fact, we have some tests going on right now where we have hybrid human first plus AI capabilities for knowledge bases and question answering. But in terms of the bottom line results that we’re seeing with our customers, humans perform better than chatbots in the industrial space.

Curt Anderson  18:06

Well, yeah. So Damon, once again, twofold, I want to I want to say firsthand, if you want to learn how to network at a conference, this guy is in person to follow. So I’m going to give a quick little story Nelson. So we’re social marketing summit in Austin comes right up, we like instant friends right off the bat, we’d connect on LinkedIn recognize each other start chatting, just he makes you feel like you’ve known him for 20 years. And so then we had a breakout session through grill 76. There’s probably I don’t know, 100 Couple 100 people in the room or whatever. And what they did is they broke up people by sections of if I’m not mistaken, what CRM you’re using, exact what I’m talking about. So I’m in this little group. Also, next, I know Nelson’s like plopped down, he’s next to me. He’s like, you know, talking to a group, and I see him get up, he goes to the next group. Then he goes the next group, he goes the next group and just and the thing is Nelson, what I really admire, I’m bringing that up, is when you came in, like you’re bringing value, you’re bringing your passion, you bring that high energy, just like on your LinkedIn profile, that high integrity. So I just really commend you and I really admired how you work the room. It’s it’s really a thing of beauty.

Nelson Bruton  19:12

Appreciate that. I appreciate that. And I have to admit, it was for myself learning, right. I wanted to learn from the Microsoft Dynamics people, the Salesforce people, the HubSpot people, you know, what’s their experience with the API’s and the plugins and in the workflows and everything so yeah, absolutely. I remember that. Yeah. And it’s what a what a great what a great summit that industrial. Awesome. How about elevated energy? It was amazing. And you know,

Curt Anderson  19:38

Chris, Luke, so we actually we stream live Nelson so Damon, nice stream live and, you know, fortunately Damon was there but we had Lukey we had Nikki Gonzalez, we had you know, we had the whole crew, Joe Silva and Wendy, Adam. Apologize, Greg. Michelle was there tonight, Jacqueline? Hello, Jay. So, you know, I apologize for anybody I’m missing but we stream live in I agree with you 100%. What a great, great conference. And so what we’ve been doing this month is you’ll enjoy this. We’ve been having Dale who was a keynote speaker on AI. He was on the show last week, we had Carla who was on the panel for the AI discussion. She was on two weeks ago, we have some of the grills 76 People coming up. So and that’s why we had you hear it. So I just think this is such a great topic, great conversation on how to convert causal sales. Let’s see if you want to add in anything else. And then whenever you’re ready, we’re going to, we’re going to take a little road trip, and we’re going to see some examples. Yeah,

Nelson Bruton  20:31

and let me let me say one thing, before we go there, what we all have in common is we want to see manufacturers succeed to the highest level in years. Right? And that was so resounding from everybody, they’re all manufacturers that were there, the passion that we there’s so much to love about manufacturers, right? And you mentioned something earlier about niching down, when you talk about the manufacturing space, you can niche down to the manufacturing space, but there is no niche within the manufacturers. Right. Yeah, sure. Your packaging, and you got fabrication, but it’s just such a wide open. Yeah, array of all the types of manufacturers, which I absolutely for years, I found fascinating, enjoyable, part of what I part of why I love what I do, because I get to meet so many different unique companies all the time. Totally

Curt Anderson  21:15

agree. And that’s, you know, we say it all the time, you just look around the room, everything was manufactured, and the more that we can manufacture here in the States. Yeah, just absolutely wonderful. And it’s just wonderful. Having, you know, someone like you bringing this new technology to help them, you know, beat you know, create that competitive advantage. Yeah, so let’s, let’s go, we’re gonna take another road trip, let’s, let’s dive into some of your clients pull

Nelson Bruton  21:37

up, let’s pull up will deck, let’s pull up the wheel deck website, because I have an interesting story there kind of ties into what I mentioned earlier, in terms of preferences. So you can see, the way we typically deploy our chat, it’s it’s a proactive chat, so that chat window will automatically open up either on the bottom right or bottom left, depending on the aesthetics of the site. So it’s so as to not cover up something important on one side or the other. Right. And the side of the site, the chat window opens up does not matter in terms of the performance. And we time it you know, anywhere from 10 to 15 seconds and some of our customers we wait about a minute because they have a long average time on site. Right? So there’s a tidbit of information there. Study your average visitor time on site. So if you’re going to deploy a chat, if your visitors are on after longer than four minutes, don’t pop the chat up for about 45 seconds to a minute. If your visitors are on for less than two and a half minutes 10 to 15 seconds. 20 seconds is your timeframe for your window popping up. But you do want to open up proactively why? Because you’re going to get more conversation started. versus just having a button somewhere someone can click OK. So that’s the best practice is proactive and then judge your time of opening based on your average visitor time on site. Now if you can click on the Get a Quote button at the top for me, please sir. You got click on any one of those mezzanine RFQ. Alright, so as you scroll if you’re in marketing and you know E commerce and marketing, you know the word friction, this is a high friction forum. However, when you have a high friction form and somebody completes all of those fields, it’s a an extremely high quality quote request. Yes. Right. They’re highly motivated. It’s high quality. So you can make that shorter, shorter, shorter, probably get more people filling it out, make it longer, less people will do it but it’d be higher, more highly qualified. So you can use friction as a dial for quantity and quality of leads generated from a contact form 10 years ago when we started with this company, Kelly cam lagger who if you don’t know Kelly cam lagger, she’s an awesome marketer. Connect with her on LinkedIn, she shouldn’t be hard to find Kelly cam Wagar que. And so anyway, she was the marketing manager at the time. And I told Kelly, I was like, more than likely, you’re gonna get less of these quote requests, you’re gonna see an overall increase in conversion, but less of these quote requests because of how much friction and how long they were. And one thing I’ve learned over the years in marketing is you never assume you test, right, testing trumps everything. To this day, they still get the same number of people filling out those forms, we got almost 100% increase in quote, requests that when we added our chat, we almost doubled their, quote requests. And they get the same number of people filling out the forms which solidified in my brain a decade ago. People have preferences, the people that were going to do the form the people that want to call are gonna call and the people that want to chat are going to chat.

Damon Pistulka  24:26

And you’re missing the people with that wanted to chat before this before this

Nelson Bruton  24:31

if you didn’t like you know, chat, you’re missing those people leaving because they don’t call them they don’t wanna fill out a form. Yeah, even give them their preference. Say great observation. Now, one other cool element of this particular customer is about three or four months in, they continue past the trial period, obviously, in about three or four months in their invoice went through the roof, it went way up because they started getting a lot more chats and I had to call Kelly trepidatious Lee like Kelly Hey, you’re bingo. was a lot higher this month, get a lot more chats. You know, she’s like, Oh, we know, we saw that that was a normal thing with the increase in conversion. So we started spending more on SEM and SEO to drive more traffic. So they saw that when you double your conversion rate, your traffic sources become less costly, right? Yeah, lead goes down, right. That’s another value of increasing conversion in any way that you do it as your traffic becomes less costly.

Curt Anderson  25:27

Who Yeah, that’s phenomenal. So you know what, shamelessly, I’m going to share something else. So it’s what it’s great seeing an example like this, Steven. And so check this out. I’m gonna show you something real quick. And let’s go here. So here’s somebody else confirms this. I read on your profile here, Nelson. Nelson, Chris, Jason, the entire exchanges crew did a phenomenal job for us. They’re not cheap. However, they are worth every penny. And so you know, you go on Nelson, why don’t you guys connect with Nelson on LinkedIn, and Nelson you, you’ve done a great job where you’ve got wonderful testimonials. And people are just raving about your marketing acumen. And what I really love, what I’m learning today is, you know, here’s a guy that was a digital marketer knows pay per click, you know, from really a pioneer from the early days of paper clicks, SEO, and saw the transition. So you know, what they are going through, when Kelly says, I’m going to do more pay per click, I’m going to do more SEO, you understand that you speak that language, you’re objective about it, and you’re helping her convert those those, those conversions. So absolutely, just phenomenal.

Nelson Bruton  26:31

And what’s cool, what’s cool about what we did with this pivot is if they have an agency they love that’s getting results. And great keep doing that we’re just working right alongside as a partner, I know. And it’s a seamless plugin. It’s it’s really great. And we give more data to their agency to have in their strategy meetings, reports together, we you know, with the CRM, integrations and everything, so yeah, we’re able to work alongside even if they have a digital marketing agency.

Curt Anderson  26:57

That’s phenomenal. Do you? Do you want to take another road trip? Should we look at another client?

Nelson Bruton  27:02

Let’s see here. Go to go to a Moto moto.com/america. They’re in the metal fabrication business, one of the largest

Damon Pistulka  27:15

know them well? Oh, yeah. Geez, I don’t know how many companies I was in or ran that we used a moto equipment exclusively,

Nelson Bruton  27:23

great company. The high performing company bought or rented. My contact over there, pulled me aside at the last lab tech meeting, we had a conversation where he’s like, you know, he was busy. I went up to him, he’s like, Come back, come back, come back. Because finally the last day I went over, he sat me down, he looked at me across the table, he said Nelson had a conversation with our CEO and CFO about the results of this. And it was impressive. Right, I didn’t know what he was gonna say he’s, he’s an intense guy, super, super great, dude. And, yeah, it was great. So we generate lots and lots, and it was immediate, lots and lots of quote, requests. And, by the way, one of the comments I’ll make here is most of my customers sell through some sort of unique distribution model, whether it’s, you know, manufacturers, reps, right, distributor reps, as they’re called, or, you know, their own dealer network, who sells other types of equipment. And so, you know, our wheelhouse really is with with the OEM, who is looking for ways to push more opportunities, more sales to their dealer network, or to their manufacturers reps, because their brand and the brand marketing, they do generate the traffic to their site. So leverage that traffic, push it to your dealers to your to your reps. So that’s a cool story, or something else I mentioned. And it wasn’t with this particular site, we don’t need to go anywhere for that for this comment. But I had a conversation last week, earlier this week, and then later this week, yesterday. Another cool benefit to live chat, you know, our customers every six or seven years, rebuild their websites, or update them. So one of the big hesitations I hear in my conversations when I’m talking to a prospective customer, is we have well, we’ve got to rebuild our site. First, we’re about to start rebuilding our site, then we want to add the chat to the new site. And I always try to shift their thinking and flip it around. Because when you put our chat team on your site, you’re going to get directly from the people who matter. insights of what you should build into your new site, where are they navigating? What content are they asking for? That’s not there. What questions are they asking that you could do a better job with the content that exists? Right? And so those insights, do the do the trial as soon as possible. If you’re about to build a website, don’t wait for the new site, because then you’re gonna have to add the Insight jeweler anyway, you know? Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  29:38

yeah. Because it does, because the questions you get asked are the things that you should be answering on your site. So you don’t get those questions and people can answer them easily. Yes.

Nelson Bruton  29:47

Yeah. That’s yeah. Because the general trend, people want to self serve. They want to learn and learn and learn no matter what industry you’re buying a car, if you’re buying a refrigerator, you’re researching, researching, researching them, and then when you’re ready, so Make it easy for them to research. Right? Yeah. True mark, and you do an amazing job with all the content strategy recommendations for manufacturers, right.

Damon Pistulka  30:10

Good stuff. We got a couple of comments here. website could be more attractive, you’re right that that happens. But in I think every website, especially to developers, you look at a website, or the people that know the websites, well, they’re like, oh, yeah, we should have done this. That’s a constant thing. But Nelson, this is a, this is a great insight here. Chat, just like your website is a virtual door to walk into your business. And that’s a great observation. I think without chat, you’re locking customers out, especially younger ones. And, you know, the the other thing that we get used to, too, is, chat. A good chat is almost immediate response. I mean, there’s, there’s certain places when I’m going myself, and I’m not a youngster, right, I go myself, I hit the chat, because, hey, I don’t want to wait. I want to get somebody to help me. Now. I want to get my question answered, I want to get moving on with my day. And the better those people are empowered to get those answers and get you all the way to the quote through a sale, whatever the heck you got to do. They’re getting me as a customer. Whereas if I had to call and wait on hold, or whatever the heck they expect you to do there. That’s just not my game. Yeah. And like you said early in the beginning, you got to be able to give, some people are a little more timely. They are take more time. Maybe it’s contact form. Some people want to call in some people want that chat, because immediate response.

Nelson Bruton  31:40

Yeah. And I will say, if you are going to put any type of chat on your site, make sure your response time is paid attention to so our response time, by the way, 25 seconds or less 24 hours a day, we’re responding within 25 seconds or less, all the time. That’s, that’s on that for what you exactly what you’re talking about. Yeah. The other other comment I’ll make on that is, you know, another challenge that we’ve heard from people and we have some customers that tried to staff chat themselves, what if you’re already staffing chat yourself? What are some considerations there? Right, let’s say you have an internal customer service team or some inside salespeople, customer service team, whatever it is that are available, quote, unquote, during your business hours? What if they have to go to a meeting out there that day? What if they’re working on a very important project? Or what if they’re on a sales call that came in? Right? Is that making your response time suffer to your visitor? Right? And you know, when that response time, the one time it would when we have a really good prospect on the other end of the chat? Yeah, right. So so those are some things to consider, too, if you’re trying to Snapchat yourself. 24/7 coverage, it’s going to be hard to doing it yourself. So there’s a whole page that talks about that on our website, so you don’t have to go to it now. But if you peruse through our Features page, you can kind of learn about some of the challenges we’ve heard from people trying to Snapchat themselves, is a good idea to do so because you can have your best people on it. But think about what I said earlier to where there’s a lot of chats that come through, they’re spamming, you know, during the day, how much time do you want your team who’s highly paid and highly technical spinning on people who are gonna leave the chat halfway through, if they waste five minutes of their day, four or five times a day, it’s gonna frustrate them, they’re going to be annoyed is going to cost the company money. So there’s a lot of reasons if you’re doing chat yourself to consider the company like ours, to make your employees who are highly technical, more profitable, more impactful, get less annoyed, et cetera. And by the way, side note, St. Shameless plug, we have hybrid options, where we can integrate our solution with people who can be available during the daytime work during office hours.

Damon Pistulka  33:47

I’ve been I’ve been I’ve had clients before, where you got a customer service team 1015 people and seeing that them trying to support chat is even tough because of the fact that okay, now I’ve got six people that are trying to do it that are on the chat duty right now. And they’re all busy. I mean, they all got phone calls, they’re all trying to email, it’s just a hard thing to do unless you can actually dedicate people. And then even when they’re dedicated, right, it’s hard because what if I have three chats go on at once? Yeah, you know, or five, or whatever that is, you know, I think, you know, the solution that you guys have is really, I think, real relevant for the vast majority of people because you want to keep that in that section. And hold those people that have those real high value questions for your internal people.

Nelson Bruton  34:36

Exactly. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  34:39

I just power let’s let’s recap a couple of things. Just you know, powerful takeaways. Again, if you’re just joining us, boy, go back to the beginning and catch some of these, the golden nuggets. I this was just a masterclass 1000 Because I’ve always been a chatbox supporter, but however, you know, all the points that you’re hitting and, you know, customer service who’s going to hand know that while I’m on the shop floor, and somebody’s waiting for me to respond, you know, everything that you just, you know, they’re not missed. These are challenges. These are frustrations. And, you know, we’ve been talking with a lot of manufacturers about, you know, you know, it’s custom manufacturers, they’re a great outsource, you know, solution, you shouldn’t be in internally doing your powder coating, or you shouldn’t be internally doing this, you know, function. So like, you know, they’re creating content around like, don’t do this internally, outsource it. And so I love what you’re saying, like, don’t do this internally, let the experts do what we do best. And I want to recap for folks, maybe they came a little bit later, you have scripts, can you just hit on the script? So like, you know, these aren’t just random people that are typing answers that they don’t know anything about just yet. You talk to me about that. And awesome. Just walk

Nelson Bruton  35:45

through that. Yeah. So yeah, for all of our customers, they get a dedicated team of people. They’re not bouncing from site to site, they’re not randos, right. They’re dedicated before they’re allowed to go greet anyone on that site, they’re going to go through a five to 10 day intensive training, study every page of the website, studying what we call the script playbook, which has all of the canned responses and canned qualification questions that we’ve been trained on by our customer. So it’s going to be people, you know, dedicated team 20 473, shifts of people, you know, depending on your traffic volume of your website, you’re gonna have anywhere from about eight people to 60 people on over three shifts, covering and engaging your visitors. So yeah, that script that script playbook, we start simple, because we’re not and this is another common thought process misconception that’s out there. We’re not trying to train our team to be able to answer every single possible technical question that could come in, it would be impossible, right? Most of my customers, it takes them six months to 12 months to train a new sales rep for their company. Right? So we literally can from go, we can launch in less than two weeks. Because our scripted development process having done this for 20 years, we know what questions to ask, to at least get our team competent enough to engage the visitor in via qualification team, we’re gonna we’re there and really ask the questions and qualify the visitor find out who they are, where they are, what they need some more information about their application, is it new equipment, is it parts, and then we say, Alright, great, one of our experts is going to get back to you, boom. And then we for that chat transcript within about five or six minutes to the appropriate team, based on the type of chat inquiry it is. So that script playbook also gets updated. As we send the chat transcripts to our customers. They give us feedback in real time, they forward the chat to us and say, Hey, this didn’t feel right. This doesn’t sound right. Next time. Have the team say this. Yeah, that feedback continuously, the script continuously gets better and better. The team gets better and better. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  37:44

This is, yeah, what a powerful solution. And so and we’ll start winding down, Nelson, I want to go here, the size of a manufacturer, I guess, you know, maybe we should call this like dispelling myths, right. I feel like you’re doing a phenomenal job, despite a lot of myths. And you know, like you’ve completely I’ve been a chat proponent. You’ve completely sold me on what you’re doing. Yes. Well, let’s say for the small manufacturer that like, yeah, you know what, that’s that Nelson, good for you. That’s great for the bigger manufacturers, just kind of walk us through, like what size manufacturer could could use a service like yours?

Nelson Bruton  38:15

Yeah. So what’s interesting is there’s no size limit, it’s from small to big. Are you doing marketing? Do you drive at least 4000 visitors a month. And in some cases, we can even go to 3000 visitors a month, but you know, three to 4000 visitors a month minimum threshold, that’s really the main because if you’re spending money and driving people to your website, then let’s let’s let’s do a test. Let’s see if they react to the chat. And let’s see if we can increase your conversions. You can be small, you can be huge, right? And a lot of times the bigger companies, sometimes I’ll say a lot of times, the bigger companies don’t get as much traffic as the medium sized company. So it’s all about traffic volume. If you’ve got the traffic volume, if you got people go on your website, engage them. Here’s a really good parallel that I’d like to draw for this particular conversation. If you’re going to a tradeshow you have 1000s of people walking by your booth. You would not leave your booth empty with none of your people in it would you know, but every single day, companies are leaving their website empty and they have 1000s of people going past it every year.

Damon Pistulka  39:16

It’s hysterical. Great point. Yeah. That

Curt Anderson  39:19

dude dropped the mic, man. Right there. Yeah. Man, that was just another. I know. So we’ll start winding down here. Anything, any any last words? parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share for our friends out there that are really kind of considering the soul chat process?

Nelson Bruton  39:36

So I’ll just say one thing that I thought of earlier when we’re talking about response time, because really, everybody’s so busy. So response time is becoming more I mean, it’s so critical. Gotta respond quickly. If you’re gonna offer chat, don’t offer chat if you can’t respond quickly. And you’ll notice this now maybe when you go to websites, a lot of them with their and there’s lots of good chat software out there. But some of the worst thing that I’ve seen in that chat chat software at the top is it says we typically respond within three minutes, or we typically respond within the hour, right? That is an absolute horrible expectation to say, Okay, let me just sit here and wait for three minutes cuz I have nothing else to do, right? 30 minutes is a big thing in the grand scheme of things. But we’ve all been there on chat, right? We want instant response, right? So don’t set the expectation in your chat window that someone typically responds within three minutes, right? Well, am I gonna get am I going to be the typical one where nobody responds? Right? Because when we talk about, you know, in marketing, conversion rate optimization, and credit to marketing experiments and marketing Sherpa for this little nugget here, conversion on a website doesn’t occur on the website. conversion occurs in the mind of the visitor. Right? So when you’re designing a page or anything, you’re optimizing a sequence of thoughts that occur in the mind of the visitor by putting credibility indicators out there, the content, and of course, if you put it in their head that they may get responded to within three minutes. Most likely, they’re going to close that chat window, because you’ve created a fear if not, don’t have that time. muck waiting three minutes, right. So anyway, that was my last little nugget about response time. Dude,

Curt Anderson  41:06

that was a that. That was a big one. That was a big that was like that was a chunk. Man. That was a big golden nugget. I’ve never heard that one before. No, I wrote that converting. It’s converting the shopper or the consumer, the customers mind. That was absolutely brilliant. Nelson. Let’s wrap up. I have one last question for you my friend. Are you are you baseball fan by any chance? I am in your Braves. Braves Okay, so a Braves fan. If let’s Can I give you a hypothetical? Let’s give you a hypothetical. So the the Braves playing the dreaded hated Mets. Okay, bottom of the ninth tie score. There’s somebody on second base high score two outs bottom nine somebody on second base and the manager turns on the bench and says hey Bruton the fourth get up there. We need the winning run. Dude, can you like go you know? So you grab your bat grab your helmet. You’re you’re gonna go hit into winning run. Okay, as you’re as you’re on your way to home plate. What’s your walk ups on?

Nelson Bruton  42:03

So let me first say how insanely ironically timely this question is. Because two days ago, I play old man softball here in Jacksonville Beach. Yeah. Bottom of the seventh inning is down by three. There’s two outs. I’m up. There’s two men on base. Walk off home run

Curt Anderson  42:25

your head hit a walk off home run off. There you go.

Nelson Bruton  42:33

Yeah, we don’t have we don’t have songs but we have little boombox radios that play all kinds of stuff from country to hip hop. Yeah, while we’re playing sounds

Curt Anderson  42:42

awesome. Well, hey, congratulations on your walk up we got hate we’ve got one more comment from Mary here. Now you do more damage to your brand when not responding to spot on Nelson get another job to migrate. So thanks, Harry, Damon, takeaways thoughts? What

Damon Pistulka  42:57

do you what do you got? I’m just more excited about chat and the human first live chat and I see this now you know, with with the examples today and thinking about it in these OEM manufacturers, how powerful it could be to really get those people the information they need, and help them you know, probably not going to buy right there. But get them to the next level of getting the information they need and really down the down the process a bit further. So cool. Yeah, so cool. And

Curt Anderson  43:28

just think the competitor, I that was one of my numerous golden nuggets today, numerous value bombs. A customer likes to call, you know, probably like the older generation, but even Damien your Hinayana had Mirja annexures we don’t call anymore, right? So like, alright, am I gonna call Mike an email? Or can I get an answer right now like, like you’re making such a phenomenal point. And when you don’t offer that you’ve just eliminated that. So now that person now I have a choice to make. Do I go look go i do i What’s worse manufacturer out there, think about this one. I’m going to go back to Google. Because I don’t want to I don’t want to tell you I don’t want to email I’m going to Google and I’m going to find somebody else. That’s that’s your worst case scenario.

Nelson Bruton  44:10

Get them while they’re on your site period.

Curt Anderson  44:12

Get them while they’re on your site, Nelson. Any last words parting thoughts? Thank

Nelson Bruton  44:17

you so much, guys. It was a blast. I really appreciate you having me on. You know anybody definitely have people connect with me on LinkedIn. If there’s any other questions after this feel free to shoot me a DM happy to help I love helping companies grow the walk

Curt Anderson  44:29

off home run this time. That’s the first time give him a round of applause for Nelson Bruton the fourth and so Nelson we’re sending tons of respect and love. First, Bruton the second the third or fourth and I know you’ve got to fit that home there. So do thank you for joining us. We appreciate you. We admire and just respect the heck out of what you’re doing to help manufacturers. Let’s keep in touch and let’s Damon. Let’s close out on this one man just go out and be someone’s inspiration just like Nelson Bruton a fourth is, and we’ve got a great program. We’ll be back here on Monday. Yes,

Damon Pistulka  45:07

yes. Well, thanks everyone for being here again. You know, we love the manufacturing ecommerce success and just loving them break people like Nelson and how they’re helping manufacturers. Go back if you didn’t already and get back to the beginning became in late start over. He’s dropping tons of nuggets about human first live chat and how it might help your company. And if you have any questions about that, go ahead and contact Nelson on LinkedIn like he said. As Kurt said, we’re gonna be back again Monday with another great guest helping manufacturers find that ecommerce success. We’re off for now. Have a great weekend everyone. Peace