How to Better Serve Your Customers Through Data Enrichment with Mark Lack

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down how to better serve your customers through data enrichment. To drop these value bombs, I brought Mark Lack into EO Fire Studios. Mark is co-founder of HeroPixel Software and Bitcoin Advocates, as well as MicroStrategy. In today's episode, we'll talk about data enrichment, some actual use cases, how to integrate data enrichment with your business, and the best time to start using it and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Mark and our sponsors.

0:37Fire Nation, you have a book inside you and it's time to share your message with the world. That's why I created Author 100, a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book. If you want daily guidance and mentorship from me, JLD, then head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details. Mark, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Well, hello, Fire Nation. It's Mark Lack in the house. Diversification. That's kind of like a very common thing when you start studying investing.

1:19And that's a big focus for me at this stage of my life is investing. Because at some point, you hopefully focus on making enough money so you have financial freedom and choices and security for you and your family. And at that point, once you've quote unquote earned enough money, whatever that means for you to cover your living expenses and lifestyle through passive income or investments. So you don't have to work for money anymore. Diversification is something that a lot of people teach, right? Like, um, no, don't have any more than 20 % allocation to one sector and don't have more than 5 % allocation within that sector.

1:53Meaning if I'm going to own stocks, I can only have 20 % of my portfolio in stocks and I can not have more than 5 % of one stock being, you know, 5 % allocation max. So I can only have 5 % micro strategy stock out of my entire 20 % allocation of stocks. And so that's, and then 20 % real estate and then 20 % bonds and then 20 % precious metals and 20 % whatever. And so, um, diversification is something that a lot of the times is taught to becoming successful, right? Diversify, make money. You can make money consolidated in one career or one business. But then when you invest, which is like the true way of building wealth, because I don't know of any really wealthy person that works for a living, as like, that's like the way they're wealthy is their salary, their 10, you know, their 1040 income form, which is taxed at the highest level.

2:38Most wealthy people make their money through investing or at least grow it and multiply it and preserve it. And so I think diversification is the biggest lie that's told to us. Let me jump in here because I think it's so true. And you actually mentioned the word micro strategy and Michael Saylor is somebody that you and I both look up to. And I think he made a great point around diversification. And he said, hey, when you find the right metal for an airplane, you don't diversify. You don't add copper and tin and styrofoam just to be diversified with your airplane material. No, you go with the best.

3:09And he's laser eye focused on Bitcoin and MicroStrategy has been the best performing company of the past four years as a result. And this might come up later in the conversation, but it's really important for a nation to say, hey, when you found something that you really believe in, you go all in. I went all in on Entrepreneurs on Fire 12 and a half years ago because I wanted to create the only daily show interviewing the world's most entrepreneurs. I didn't diversify, I went all in. So what are you gonna go all in on? And today we're talking about how to better serve your customers through data enrichment.

3:39And what the heck is data enrichment, Mark? Dude, I didn't know what data enrichment was either a couple of years ago. And I was blessed to have the market timed well in my favor. And in 2023, I exited one of my companies and I took that liquidity capital and I went all in, no diversification. I went all in on Bitcoin and MicroStrategy and it ended up being a great decision. And so that just kind of closes the loop on my previous comment on don't be diversified. Michael Saylor says diversification is selling the winner to buy the loser. And so for me, I went all in on Bitcoin and micro strategy from my exit.

4:15And I had some time to take some space to think about what my next move was going to be in business because I'm too young to retire. I don't know that long term retirement is ever going to be in my future. I think we go through phases of micro retirements and sabbaticals and then you jump back in and you get in the game. If you're, you know, somebody who's got that entrepreneur on fire, you know, spirit, you're always going to be in the game. Right. It's fun. It's something you want to do. Like this is a, it's a passion. It's a joy, especially when you can remove the financial necessity of having to make money and you can do something that's truly a passion and impactful.

4:48That is even better. And so data enrichment was something that I came across in my short-term micro retirement. And I realized, wow, this is something that even as a hardcore marketer and salesperson for over 10 years now, and I would classify myself as for sure a top 1 % marketer. And I was like, why is this not talked about at all the funnel marketing events and all the business events and the marketing conferences? Like nobody's really making this like a top category of something that's discussed amongst any of the professional speakers. And I've also been blessed to be, you know, hired and paid to speak at a lot of these conferences and nobody was talking about data enrichment.

5:32I wasn't back then when I was on those stages, And so data enrichment in its simplest form, and there's a lot of different interpretations and definitions, but I'll use my own, is basically taking some existing data, such as a person's email, and enriching it. And what you're doing is you're basically sending it up into a data pool from Experian and TransUnion and all these other huge data buyers and data aggregates and data pools where they buy all the data. So when you open a credit card or a phone or you buy a house or you open up a business, your data is being sold. And that data gets sold to the biggest people at the top who own pretty much every single person's data over the age of 18.

6:14And anybody who's ever opened up a credit card, a phone, a house, a mortgage, a lease payment on a car, taken out debt, anything like credit card. You went to school, you went to college, like, boom, your data is sold. And they keep accumulating all of our data. and then you got guys like Zuckerberg, who's one of the richest people in the world, really because of data. He has the data of all the Facebook users and then he's able to sell that to marketers like us to run ads on his platform. And I'm sure a million other ways he uses that data. And so data enrichment is taking someone's existing data, like their email, something as simple as that, someone's email, and then enriching it through software and leveraging these existing data pools so that I have a company now where if you just give me your email, or if you're a business owner and you're running ads and your primary goal is to elicit an email so you can follow up with these people long-term without having to use ads, you can email them.

7:04A lot of businesses capture emails, they capture leads. And we can take that email in real time the second the person opts in or a database that you've already had for years that you've been building. And we can take those old leads and we can run them through our software, which then basically spits it through a whole bunch of the biggest data brokers and data aggregates that have already bought your data. And then we can scrape it through that list essentially and bring it back into our software with up to 400 data points. So in real time, somebody opts into your website and then my software will spit it back into your CRM or wherever you want it, HubSpot, high level, wherever, whatever you're using with 400 data points and all 400 data points probably won't matter to you.

7:45Like the shoes they wear, their, favorite TV show or foods they eat or whatever. But you might care about their annual income or their net worth or their equity in their house or their mortgage rate or their credit card and their credit card limit and their credit card debt and their existing debt. If they have medical debt, student loan debt, and a variety of other data that might be severely important to you as a business owner to know if this person's a qualified lead or a non-qualified lead or whatever criteria you would be interested in, we can tell you just from their email. And now you're going to get back hundreds of data points to basically be able to give a lead score or a customer score of the likelihood of this person becoming a buyer.

8:24And then we can use AI algorithms to interpret this data and get more and more and more accurate as you accrue more data in the system. Meaning for every one person, you get 400 data points. Imagine if you had 100 ,000 emails, 100 ,000 emails times 400 data points per email is 40 million is 40 million data sets. And then if you feed that 40 million data sets into an AI algorithm and say, Hey, out of these 100 ,000 emails, I had 6 ,000 people buy. Could you tell me what data separates the 6 ,000 buyers from the 94 ,000 non-buyers? And then it'll create a lead score and an algorithm that every time a new person gives you their email, it can tell you the likelihood of them fitting the criteria of the 6 ,000 versus the 94 ,000 and give you a lead score.

9:04So the second somebody gives you their email, it'll tell you a percentage of the likelihood of them becoming a customer. And so now in real time, you can have predictive ROAS on the return on your ad spend. And then you can also take this data of the 400 data points, take the most important critical data, and you can feed it back to your media buying team. And you can now create lookalike audiences and custom audiences based on credit score and net worth and all this other criteria that Mark Zuckerberg cannot sell you because that's why he's gone into court so many times because of data privacy and stuff like that.

9:35but TransUnion and Experian and all these other big companies, they can sell you the data. And so it's a crazy industry. And I'm grateful to have found it and discovered it because it's something that so many businesses benefit from when they are utilizing this data. Just like businesses that don't run online ads. It's like, what? Are you crazy? Like, give me the reason that you are not running online ads. And there's really never a good reason. I mean, the only reason they could give is because they don't think that they could be net positive in that action, which of course they're wrong and they just haven't found the right way to run out.

10:13They hired the wrong people. They had the wrong team. They used the wrong platforms. Something. There's some part of the equation in this made up context that doesn't match. There's a disconnect, right? It's like, well, let me break in here because the one thing I think Fire Nation you really need to understand here is what Mark is saying is what are the most valuable things, if not the most valuable thing in your life is your time, is your energy, is your bandwidth, is your focus. and if you are going to waste time on 94 ,000 people potentially in this example that could could never would never will never buy from you will never take that next step that is a massive waste of time but if you could instead be focused on the six percent of people that's even a better way to put it let's put of the six percent of people that actually could be of could become a client could become somebody that takes the next step with you you could do a lot more.

11:02I mean, you could start spending money on those people, sending them out, you know, gifts and flyers and really just going above and beyond because that's 6 % instead of that 94 % that you're just fluffing away. So we're going to talk a lot more about this and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Traveling has always been one of my biggest passions. You get to experience different cultures, see places that are impossible to capture through a lens. These are a couple of the many reasons why I'm so excited for my Nepal trip later this year to trek part of Annapurna. So if you're like me and traveling this year, don't let your home just sit there.

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12:10Find a co-host at airbnb.com slash host. Fire Nation, you have a book inside you right now. But it's not always about our desire to write a book. Sometimes it's about knowing which steps to take and when to take them to make it happen. If you know you have a book inside of you but aren't sure where to start, then I have an exciting opportunity for you. It's called Author 100. Author 100 is a program I personally crafted to help you one-on-one every step of the way, from drafting to writing to publishing and even marketing your book. When you join the Author 100 program, you'll have access to me, JLD, for 100 days.

12:51We'll have weekly one-on-one calls, plus you'll get daily guidance from me whenever you have questions or hit a roadblock. Over the past 12 years, I've self-published five books, including one of the top five publishing campaigns of all time on Kickstarter, the Freedom Journal. I've also traditionally published with HarperCollins, so I know a lot about the book publishing world and where most authors go wrong. I created Author 100 to share my experience and the lessons I've learned along the way, and I can't wait to share it with you. If you're interested in learning more, head over to author100.com and sign up for a free call with me.

13:28That's author100.com So Mark, we're back and you kind of gave a real world example with Mark Zuckerberg and how he does it with Facebook and Meta and all these different things but let's bring it like really down to the small business level. I mean, a lot of people within Fire Nation, you know, they have a business with six to 10 employees, some with, you know, zero to five. Let's speak to that individual. Give us a use case for data enrichment for a small business like that. Yeah, so I got to make the assumption that if you're in business and you have customers, that there's some form of effort and energy that goes into finding more customers.

14:04You're not just sitting around hoping and praying that word of mouth is happening and your business is just growing organically. And there's nothing wrong with that. I've heard that a lot of times, right? I used to actually brag that my business had no paid media or affiliates and it was all organic growth. I remember that actually. I remember you bragging about that. Yeah. Because we've known each other for over 10 years now. And so, um, you know, it's, it's, it's funny because at the time it's something that's like, it's like, it's like, okay, cool. That's a really great accomplishment that you're able to consistently grow without even paid advertising, which means, can you imagine how much better you'd be growing if you actually had paid advertising?

14:39Cause clearly people like what you have. So you should get the word out there even more. And so, you know, no big giant business, um, is really bragging that it's happened organically. There's something they did. They had some form of a partnership distribution with built in, um, you know, access and distribution to their target audience through a partnership like Netflix, for example, like, you know, your show is going to blow up if it gets put on a big streaming platform. Ta-da, that's a partnership. If you're on Amazon, that's a partnership. Like you're leveraging their platform, right? So it's like in some capacity, no one's really growing organically, so to speak.

15:11Like even if you're on Shopify, you're on a platform. And so everyone's leveraging some tech, some built-in distribution thing nowadays. Very few people are doing just organic. But the point is, if you're in business, you're probably generating leads. you're trying to find more customers so you can serve them and impact them at a higher level with your product and service that's hopefully good for the people that buy it. And also so that you can make more money. All right. That's the whole point of business too, is like have an impact and have great revenue and great income and be able to achieve financial freedom for you and your employees and your family and your friends and everybody who's a part of your business, give back to your community.

15:41So hopefully you're in the business of generating leads so you can get more customers and that whole experience can happen for you. And if that's the case, then you're generating leads probably through the only three ways to do it. Organic, word of mouth, referrals, et cetera, or partnerships. So you're able to buy it, borrow it and create it. Those are the only three ways you can ever get leads. Buy it through paid advertising, borrow it through affiliates, joint ventures and other built-in distribution channels, or you can create it organically, SEO, content, social media, a podcast, the YouTube channel, et cetera.

16:12Leverage the platforms and the algorithms for content creation and grow an audience and distribution that way. And so however you're generating your leads, people are probably either getting some form of a lead magnet. You're giving them some incentive to give you their email. Like, Hey, I'll give you 30 % off or I'll give you free shipping. Um, you see that all the time on e-commerce stores. It's like want 10 % off your first order. Give me your email. And then if you give them their email, then it's like, want 20 % off, give me your phone number. And so they're always trying to, they're always ethically bribing you to like give them more data in exchange for a discount on your first purchase.

16:42and so that's like one thing you see businesses do all the time another one is like want the chance to win up to 50 off your first order put your email in here and spin the wheel and so there's all these creative ways you see people constantly trying to get your email in exchange for some incentive and in our world of the education space which is my background which is where I sold my first company and I know you essentially are always in education as well in some form some form or another through podcasting, et cetera. And so, you know, what we often do is give something educational. So it's like, Hey, I'll give you a free book or a free chapter of my book, or I'll give you a webinar, or I'll give you this quiz, or I'll give you this live event coming up, this free online event that I'm going to be doing where I teach people, blah, blah, blah, or download this PDF for seven ways to set up your profitable podcast, right?

17:27Like whatever that thing is, we're trying to always as a business incentivize people to give us their email or their phone number so we can continue communicating our offers and programs and services with them in exchange for their email and a free thing. And so however your business works, again, I'm giving all these examples because I don't know one specific person I'm talking to. So I'm trying to do like more of an umbrella, an umbrella example. And so you're generating these emails. And at this point, you're a small business who's captured somebody's email and you probably have some existing ones to be redundant to what I stated earlier.

17:57Now in real time, what our software hero pixel can do is in real time, we'll connect to your API of your software that you're using and your CRM so that the second that email comes into your business and CRM, it's connected to ours, our software. And it's going to basically, as a visual metaphor, it's going to flow through the second somebody offsend your CRM into our software. It's going to capture as much data as we can. Usually it's up to 400 data points and it's going to flow right back into your CRM. Plus it can be zapped any other place you want. So maybe you're like, I want this data zap to my marketing team.

18:31I want this data zap to my sales team. I want this data zapped to my copywriter so they can segment our email list based on men, women, Democrat, Republican, rich, poor, debt, no debt, credit score above 700, credit score below 700, owns a house versus rent an apartment, owns a car versus whatever. You get the point. You can segment your email list. So they're like, I want this data zapped here and this data zapped here. And for some small business owners, they might be like, yo, that's going to be too many steps for my team and I. Great. You might just want to only care about income, right? Let's be honest.

19:01If the person doesn't have money, they probably can't buy your product. You probably don't want to be spending money for every text message, every email, like you were saying. Imagine you're just constantly speaking to this giant, massive auditorium of people, but 90 % of them are not qualified to ever afford your product or service, but you have to spend money every time you want to communicate your message to those people. Wouldn't it be very helpful to know, hey, these people are not qualified, so maybe I put them on a different segment of my list and I nurture them so they have a much longer nurturing sequence with an opportunity to buy our program anytime they want.

19:32But really I'm nurturing them. Cause if you're just hammering people with buy my product, buy my product, and they can't afford it or can't, you know, they're either going to unsubscribe or you're just wasting money sending them an email, or they're going to report you to spam or something. Cause they'll be sick and tired of your emails. So it's costing you money to generate the lead. It's costing you money to nurture the lead. And it's costing you money to send out text messages or call them and have human capital and energy going into messaging these people, reaching out to these people. So you're wasting a lot of money if you don't know who's on your list.

19:59Now you hope and pray that that lead came from a source that is qualified. Like I paid Facebook for their targeted quality lead that my media buyer said was the right person. But then my sales team said they're not qualified. And there's always this disconnect between the media buyer says, I'm doing my best to target the right audience. And the sales team saying, well, the lead wasn't qualified. I'm the one on the phone with them. I don't care who you're running the ads to. I'm actually talking to them. They're not qualified. And so there's always this like headbutting between the marketers and the sales team.

20:25I'm generating qualified leads. And the business owner's like, dude, I'm paying all of you. I'm pissed. Like where's the synergy? And the synergy is in data because the data creates the congruency. And so if you're a small business owner and you have this incongruency where you're like, I'm trying Facebook ads, not working. And my sales team's complaining that they're not getting qualified leads. There's the disconnect. And that disconnect is usually a lack of data. You don't actually know who you're targeting. You don't actually know who's getting on the phone. You don't actually know who's on your database.

20:52We have a million emails. Okay. But do you know who's qualified? No, you won't know until they buy. Like you can't tell me if they're qualified unless they've bought or unless they filled out an application. So maybe you have an application funnel for a high ticket thing, like putting in solar or doing, you know, whatever, um, construction, or maybe you're a roofing client or HVAC client. These are all big popular services that like every homeowner eventually needs. And they're really big, fast growing businesses and private equity is buying up HVAC and those types of service businesses all the time because they're very great, sustainable businesses.

21:24So maybe you have that type of a business and it sells a high ticket service. Our service in this case, you'd be able to just get somebody's email and we'd be able to tell you 400 data points on them, like their credit score and give you financing options attached to that and their net worth and their income and their equity in their house and that they own a house and all these other factors that really we have a lot of clients in this industry, which is why I'm using it as an example. It's extremely valuable for them because now they also don't have to ask their clients to fill out these long questionnaires, essentially pre-qualifying themselves.

21:52And so that's extremely one valuable use cases like HVAC and solar and any type of high ticket service for like a house. We've also got doctors and lawyers and dentists and people who sell high ticket services in that space. And we can tell you a lot of information about them to know if they're qualified. Then we have education companies, because that's my background. So I know hundreds of people in the education space, they use it because they really understand customer acquisition costs and lifetime value and average order value. And so for them and our background of online marketers and education space, we really understand the value of this.

22:26For some reason, it's just not common knowledge amongst our industry, data enrichment. And then the one question I can hear people probably asking is, well, how much does this cost? Typically it costs pennies on the dollar. And so we only charge 35 cents per enrichment. So you imagine you already paid Zuckerberg for a Facebook lead, maybe five, 10,$15 is a very common number amongst my friends who do hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in the agency space. Like they're, they're managing 50 clients or a hundred clients and spending a couple hundred million a year, a billion dollars a year on behalf of their clients as agencies running all different types of offers and ads, which is like the best use case.

23:02Cause you're like, they'll really tell you what's working, not just one business, but like an agency running 50 businesses spending that much money, they're really going to tell you what's working and what's not. And a lot of these agencies use our software for their clients. And so typically it's about$10 an email lead just to get the email$10. Well, we're only going to charge you 35 cents to give you 400 data points on that email. And so you're like, I just paid $10 for an email. I don't know anything about the person I just got, but for 35 cents, I now will be able to tell you 400 things about them, including their net worth, their annual income, their household income, their equity in their house, their debt on their credit card, their limit on their credit card, their credit score soft pulled in the last 30 to 90 days, and so much other stuff to basically determine, is this person have a likelihood of being able to afford my product and service?