1691 – Utilizing A.I. To Move Faster with Atak Interactive Austin LaRoche

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0:58with us right now it's austin laroche austin it's great to have you you are the ceo of attack interactive that's atak interactive.com austin it's great to have you oh thanks so much for having me this is awesome i really like that intro well thank you yeah yeah good good cadence i'm happy to be here today all right well nowhere to go but down from here on my part so So, all right. What does ATT &CK Interactive do? We're a full-service B2B marketing agency. So, we handle all things strategy, marketing, development, design, and then marketing technology, which is kind of its own new little world, right?

1:39Really connecting systems across CRMs and marketing automation tools. So, there's just kind of that MarTech bucket. And I'll be honest, that's an area where I have been investing internally a ton the past three years because the demand continues to rise for a lot more of that technical marketing support. Yeah. Tell me more about that. What does that look like? Well, I think what it is, the reason why it is that way is there's just such a, the silos of sales and marketing are really starting to break down. And I think it's because of the technology, right? We've got popular CRMs like Salesforce and popular marketing tools like HubSpot.

2:19And these tools can speak together and really bring marketing and sales professionals together so that they can see who's communicating to which prospects, which contacts at which time. and the process isn't always easy, right? So some companies will adopt a platform like let's say HubSpot and they'll take all of this, they'll take every hub. They'll take sales, marketing, service. They'll put their website on there. And so everybody's working in the same sandbox. But a lot of times, some people want to have their CRM in Salesforce. They want marketing automation in HubSpot. They've got an ERP and they want all of these things to talk to one another.

2:58They want all of these things to be able to communicate certain content to different types of personas based on actions. And so it's a lot more complicated and there's a lot more architecture to this part of marketing than let's say your traditional lead generation or conversion rate optimization. Yeah. Well, listen, anytime I can get someone who is a pro on the B2B marketing side of things, always loved it. You obviously have your ear to the track. This is what you do day in, day out. Can you give us a little bit of a state of the union for like how B2B marketing is going right now? What has fallen out of favor?

3:40What do you see on the horizon as being something that, you know, service providers, consultants, agencies, et cetera, B2B service providers should be paying attention to? Well, I mean, we can't not talk about the elephant in the room of AI. I don't necessarily believe AI is going to take everybody's job and marketing and that we don't need to have critical thought anymore. But I do think the people who learn the AI tools are going to be able to get the most benefit. So if you know how to write faster because you have the support of AI, if you know how to code faster because of the support of AI, you know how to generate awesome images that really reflect what a brand wants to look like.

4:21if you can utilize these tools, you're just going to move faster than everybody else, which means you're going to get further along in a much quicker pace. I think that what I would say to me is really falling out of favor, and some may disagree, but the outbound, cold outbound outreach is just at an all-time saturation level of, I'm not saying it doesn't work. I will tell you this, I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not doing it. You will find no disagreement with me, sir. I could not agree more. I talk with VPs of sales regularly. That is absolutely the sentiment. I can confirm that hundreds of times over.

5:05You know, and that's the thing about content is like, if you build content that is original, that has something to say, that isn't afraid to say something that might like really get their target customer. Yeah. But somebody who's not their target customer go, Hey, I don't like that. Then, you know, you, you might just get lost in the shuffle. You might just look like a AI generated blog. Uh, but I think that's where really marketing and sales is going to, uh, continue to gravitate to because it always does. It's who is making the best offering who's articulating it the clearest, um, and who is providing the value that the customer's looking for?

5:42So I do think that, you know, some of the, from a tactical standpoint, I think one of the things that'll be really interesting to watch in B2B marketing is just going to be the difference in where search goes, because search is going to be on B2B, it's going to be a little slower of a transition than B2C, right? Hey Siri, where's the closest pizza place? I can help. I was like, oh, shoot, you're going to trigger mine. You got yours. You know, but, you know, so people are already going to those sort of voice activated things for B2C. You type something in Google Maps and, you know, but still right now for most B2B companies, they are typically are offerings that they have that people are searching for.

6:28And whether they're ranking organically or by paying to be at the top, I do feel like that is an avenue that if you can crack that code and get the right formula for you to be able to build your ROI, it can become the most consistent and formulaic way to be able to get an ROI on your marketing interest. Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, your lips to God's ears and in regards to your observations on Legion, Outbound, those sorts of tactics. However, I think that that ends up presenting a little bit of a stressor for, let's say, someone who's like, look, that's great, but we don't have 9, 12 months to develop an SEO strategy.

7:11like we really need to have sales conversation sooner rather than later. What is a service provider or a B2B owner? What's, what's the sales team to do today? Well, that's, that's a great question. I think the, you know, obviously it always comes down to us knowing our target audience, right? We got to know where they are. And so one of the things I like to do is I've kind of built a framework that starts where the first part is really clarifying certain elements of your business, right? Really clarifying what the vision is, documenting the vision, because a lot of times the vision is stuck in somebody's head and they have it and it's really smart, but nobody else knows.

7:50I've been that person before. And really documenting the vision, understanding what the comms and messaging are that make up the brand, knowing what data needs to be looked at. What is, you know, what is our average value of a, or average annual value of the customer look like? What's a lifetime value of our customer? Okay. And then what can we spend to acquire one customer, right? Understanding some of those elements and then really thinking about who's our target audience. Who are the target audience? And then once we dive into that target audience, let's go in and let's think, okay, how can we, based on where these people are, how do we attract that target audience?

8:27And once we get in front of them, how do we convert them into an opportunity? And once they're an opportunity, how do we close that opportunity into a customer? And then once they're a customer, how do we delight that customer? So they tell every single, everybody about us and they, you know, and they become our biggest evangelists. So I always like to look at it in those buckets that attract, convert, close to length. And if you're an accelerated timeline, you know, unfortunately, you're probably going to end up doing more, you know, desperate, desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

8:57So, you know, if you're doing it right, then you're going to think about maybe instead of cold calling or cold emailing people you don't know, maybe start talking to people that you do know who actually like what you're doing and have had success with what you're doing. And maybe you say, hey, is there one person, is there one person in your life who you think might need what I've got? And then look for maybe more of a mutual connection in that way. Because I do believe that as a business owner myself, I'm sure you're the same way. If I had never heard of you, the shield of mine has never been bigger.

9:35And the force field has never been stronger to tell you to go away. But if you're somebody, if I'm getting introductions from somebody I like, even if I can't help you, I'm going to help them because I like them. And I'll start that conversation with you. And I'll at least, you know, be able to hear you out and see if there's any way I can guide you where you want to be. Do you advise on that side of it as well? Kind of, or is it just like, come on, this is common sense networking? Or can you actually put some structure and some guidance around that? Well, I'm glad that you said structure because our company motto is strength and structure.

10:09I think that the biggest problem with all of marketing is it's a lack of focus, right? Sales, marketing, it's, hey, what if we try this? What if we try this? What if we try this? And so through that prism that I was talking about, the attract, convert, close to light, I really like to be really granular in the tactics, each tactic that a company should be doing. They should be establishing a KPI for each tactic, a role and responsibility for each tactic. Somebody's got to be in charge. They need to know whatever, just a base creative approach. We don't have to have the best tagline ever, but we at least need to know what value proposition we're going to come after.

10:48And then one thing I've noticed when you're building out these strategies with companies, there's always a gap, right? There's always an obstacle because you can create the best strategy. So for instance, in that convert stage, let's say we want to send somebody to the best landing page that's ever been built. And you're going to tell everybody, you know, why you're the best, but you also know that people convert 35 % more when they see a video where they like somebody talking. You have a lot of videos on your site, so you know exactly what I'm talking about. And so it's like, oh, that's a great idea, but we don't have a video.

11:24Right. And so what ends up happening is you end up building a strategy and then you want to execute the strategy, but there's this gap. And the gap needs to be filled typically with some sort of technology or a resource, content, or some sort of process. I think those are the four that I've really pinned down where that implementation gap gets to. And then you really need to try and focus on minimizing the amount of time implementation takes. because again, like when you're thinking about a company, you're investing, right? You're investing in strategy. This sounds good. Okay, we're investing in building the foundation.

11:59That sounds good. But now we're a couple months in and we want more leads. We want more business. We want to go, go, go. So you got to be pragmatic with that and meet people where they are and build a structure and a system that's going to work for them. But I do think that those structures have to be very, very much customized to companies. I get in this debate a lot because I'll see a lot of other agencies and they have these like packages. I know it's much more scalable and I'm bravo to them. But like, I know that every single company that comes and talks to us has a unique problem and to solve it to the maximum that we can, we're gonna have to have a unique solution.

12:38And so we, everything we do is very much customized to those customers. And I do wonder if it holds scale back a little bit more than I wish, but I know that that's why we are able to consistently deliver and why we've got such a good reputation because we're more interested in problem solving for our particular customers than being able to create some sort of cookie cutter package and hope everybody can sign. Yeah. Okay. So, ATT &CK Interactive, who are you typically, because it's obviously B2B, but maybe you could share a story or two or a project that you worked on. Just if someone's listening to us right now, they might be wondering, huh, I wonder if attack would be good for me.

13:20Yeah. So I see that a lot of different types of customers, right? I've got a persona that's probably, let's say like a five to$200 million company. That's very sales focused. They have a really good sales team and they might have a marketing coordinator. You know, they, they, they need, they need something for a PowerPoint, but they're not really utilizing real marketing sophistication. And they could use a boost of leads. They could probably use a fresh content, you know, some fresh content. They could probably just use some marketing support and understanding within their communications how they could be working better.

13:58And for those kind of companies, we come in as kind of an outsourced marketing department. So filling in all the gaps of strategy, marketing, lead gen, design, anything, anywhere that there's a gap, we can fill it and they can lean on us for that. I'd say another engagement that's been very popular for us recently, though, is some larger companies. We've worked up, there's one company we've worked with that's a$27 billion company, Air International, and they really needed a lot of technical work done within their CRM. You know, they had many different instances on a particular CRM across five continents.

14:38We needed to consolidate that, connect it to their sales force. It was, you know, and it was one of those things that project that took a few years, but we're seeing a lot more of that too. A lot of companies that have, you know, these legacy systems, all this data from all this years back. And it's like, whoa, like we got to clean this up. We got to clean this up and it's all got to be streamlined and it's got to make sense because at the end of the day, these companies want to be able to get the right message to the right person at the right time. And particularly utilizing, you know, tools like HubSpot and Salesforce.

15:11they want to automate that whole process. And so that's where, that's what we've been able to help a lot of customers too is automating processes. And it's not just with the messaging. A lot of times we help those processes with salespeople, right? Because one thing I know about salespeople, nothing brings them greater joy than getting in a room, shaking hands, smiling, and just own and getting that person on the other end to buy into what they're doing. They love that. You know what they hate doing? Taking anything that happened to that meeting and putting it in notes in the Sierra. they hate that so why not give them a tool where they can do a voice message uh or a voice text and go hey those guys are great uh so and so really liked it i think we're gonna have the deal done by next week boom that makes their life easier because you're kidding oh man all yeah all of the uh all of these sophisticated crms uh are doing it these days that's great because you you just identified me to a T.

16:07I like, I like being in the moment. I like being a hundred percent present for that person right then. But then, you know, you asked me 10 minutes later, like, oh man, I probably should have taken some better notes. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, and so if you can, if you can do that and you can automate certain things, right. You can move, you can simply move something from one deal stage to another in a CRM. And then all of a sudden the, uh, the docu sign goes out. And then once that gets signed, the next thing goes out. And then, you know, and then it's just a series of these if then triggers, right?

16:41Something happens, someone hits submit, and then something new happens. And so there are a lot of these tools that make both marketing and sales professionals lives so much easier. And that's typically what we aim to do. How do we make your life easier? And how do we get you the results that you're looking for? Yeah. All right. So your website, ATAK Interactive, A-T-A-K Interactive.com. When our friend is listening to our conversation, our very private conversation right now, but they've been listening in every word we've been saying. When they go to your website, what would you recommend they do?

17:13What's that next step? Well, take a look. I said a lot today and think about where some of your gaps are. We've got five very clear service pages. And if you need some help with your strategy, check out how we do strategy. We've got a framework for everything we do. Check out our marketing framework. Check out our dev framework, our design framework, and our marketing technology framework. because we live here. We know that our customers come to us with vision and ideas and they typically don't have the setup to get where they want to go. And so when they work with us, they get organized, they get focused and we get them on the right path towards being where they want to be.

17:54Austin LaRoche, I have to say, thank you so much for recording this. I was just going through our previous communication and I think we tried to record this one time and I got knocked out by a power outage And it's funny, it was because as you got on today, I'm like, oh, you're never going to guess what's going on. We have one of those central Florida thunderstorms going on right now. So thankfully, we got it recorded. Yes, I lived in the south many years in August where I always called them the Armageddon thunderstorms would come down around four o 'clock. You thought the world was ending by six o 'clock.

18:25Everything was dry and you never would have thought anything had happened. I miss them sometimes. Yeah. All right. Again, ATAK Interactive, A-T-A-K Interactive.com. Austin LaRoche, you're the CEO. Austin, it's been great having you. Yeah, thanks so much, Josh. This was a lot of fun.

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