Developing a New B2B Marketing Perspective

The Real Test of Positioning

“The real test of positioning is how you respond to new business opportunities.” That’s a truth that Joshua Albert, Vice President of Business Development at Godfrey, reflects upon when thinking about his firm’s 70-year story of deliberate, incremental focus on the industrial space. And it’s also a truth that applies to more than just new business development. It also applies to how they market themselves. And by the way, the emphasis there is intentional — Godfrey has never hired an outside marketing consultant to help them speak to their audience. They’ve done it themselves all along, recognizing and leveraging internal expertise that consistently measures up to that of the clients they serve.

In this episode, Mark interviews Josh on how Godfrey’s team has improved their own marketing platform while they work to differentiate themselves in a market that is getting more crowded…

You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

Episode Transcript

Mark O’Brien: Hello and welcome to Expert Marketing Matters. This is Mark O’Brien. I’m the CEO of Newfangled and today I am joined by Josh Albert from Godfrey. Josh, you are the VP of biz dev over at Godfrey. Is that correct?

Josh Albert: That is correct.

Mark O’Brien: Excellent. Thanks a lot for joining the podcast. We really appreciate it.

Josh Albert: My pleasure.

Mark O’Brien: So this is interesting. As listeners have probably been able to figure out, a lot of the guests we’ve had on the podcast have been people who either are or have been clients of Newfangled. Josh, can you confirm that we’ve not worked together before?

Josh Albert: That is correct. We have not worked together before.

Mark O’Brien: Excellent. Great. And the reason why I was so excited to have you on specifically, and thank you for accepting my invitation, was that I’m just really impressed with what you’ve done on your own. Now, I say on your own. I understand that you work for a great firm and you’ve got a lot of support in a lot of ways, but Godfrey has been able to really make an art out of marketing your own firm. Over the years we’ve just seen that a lot of firms have a hard time doing that without outside help. I’m just really impressed with how far you’ve been able to go without that because to my knowledge you haven’t really worked with many, if any, outside consultants on the marketing front. Is that correct?

Josh Albert: No, that is correct. We haven’t worked with any.

Mark O’Brien: Yeah, so I think that’s really interesting and I think it’ll be interesting to our audience as well and so let’s get into it. If you could start just by letting us know about the brief history of Godfrey, which is not at all brief, and your involvement.

Josh Albert: Yes, so I started with Godfrey almost six years ago as the Director of Business Development. I had started with the agency right at about a point where we were getting ready to go through some ownership transitions, but Godfrey, a little bit about the agency. We’re a full-service B2B marketing agency. We work specifically with companies that make really complex things mostly on the industrial side, things like machinery components, chemicals, building materials, things that involve really technical buyers and require an agency partner to dig in and be really passionate about the business and go really deep to truly understand the nuances of the business and how we can take a creative approach to positioning and developing marketing communications programs for our clients.

Josh Albert: So Godfrey’s been in business for seven decades, over 70 years at this point, and so the agency originally started in Lancaster, Pennsylvania here where we remain headquartered today as just a general marketing agency working with both B2C, B2B clients. There might’ve even been some nonprofit clients in the mix there. Just really anything in terms of the local Central Pennsylvania region. The original owner, Tom Godfrey, established the agency in Lancaster because he wanted to establish a firm in Lancaster that could compete with some of the larger firms in the bigger cities like New York, Chicago, where you would typically imagine an ad agency being at that particular time. For us, it’s a really great place. Lancaster, over the last few decades has really come up in terms of creative culture in terms of just the types of people that are locating here and the types of work that are available in this area.

Josh Albert: But going back about, this was about 40 years ago, the decision was made to really transition to be focused on B2B. It really was becoming our bread and butter. There was a lot of opportunity in the space. So it was just a nice natural evolution for the firm to focus on B2B. Over the years, I would say into the late 2000s prior to me joining, the agency had started to develop its own sort of positioning in the industrial space. We weren’t necessarily coming out and saying that we were a specialist firm. We were still just really positioning ourselves as a B2B firm and using that as our differentiator. But when I came on board, I would say probably 80 or 90% of the clients really fit into that particular category.

Josh Albert: So that was something that I really wanted to drive. Coming on board with a firm just at the director level, seeing what’s out there in terms of who our competitors were at the time, looking at the track record for the agency in terms of wins and losses and why we were winning and why we were losing. So I really stepped back and helped to guide the agency through a couple of different exercises. I know that’s what we’ll kind of dig in here with perspective on marketing, but that’s kind of where things are in terms of history of the firm and how I got involved.

Mark O’Brien: That’s great. This is the first unique element here is that you’ve basically as the firm have decided to really be overtly stated experts. If you go to godfrey.com, we get right into this idea of full service B2B for companies dealing with complex issues like machinery, components, chemicals, that kind of thing, going right on the record. That’s something a lot of firms are scared to do. It’s very intimidating for good reason and usually a firm needs an outside person to kind of shake the cage a little bit and convince them to take this brave step. But you required no such external convincing. You of your own volition decided okay, this is a smart thing to do.

Mark O’Brien: It sounds like that really coalesced when you came on board six years ago. I know you’re pretty modest, you’re not going to want to give yourself too much credit here, but you’re just very matter of fact looked at what the deal was in terms of projects won, project lost, that kind of thing and just it sounds like made a objective, quite informed decision to go to where the money is, right? And say, okay, we tend to have a, for whatever reason, unfair advantage on these kinds of deals.

Josh Albert: Yes, and the data led me to dig in a bit more, talk with others throughout the firm as far as what resonated with the team members that we have on board. Our average tenure with our team is much higher than industry standards so going out and talking to the team members about why did they come to work at Godfrey? What’s unique about the firm? What keeps you engaged in the work that you’re doing? What do you find most interesting? Our team members are just as fascinated about these complex B2B industries as anyone else in the industry. In most cases our team members can go toe-to-toe with our clients. They understand the nuances of the audiences and the business and the engineering side of things and all the work that goes into developing these products and taking them to market. So that was certainly part of it as well.

Josh Albert: The data helped to guide me in a specific direction and support the case, but then the team really rallied around it as well. This idea of we need to focus and I came into Godfrey with no experience in the agency space. I had never worked in the agency space. I had never worked with a marketing agency even on the client side. So I came into it with the traditional business mentality. We do our SWOT, we go through, we do a strategy, we go through, we do our planning, our longterm plan and just we work through it in terms of that approach. You look at the landscape and I know as you’ve talked about there are thousands of marketing agencies out there.

Josh Albert: I could go around to anyone in the firm and ask them for who our 10 competitors were and I’d get at least five or six different answers every single time. There might be three or four that were consistent just because of the focus on B2B, but even today you can look around and find any 10 agencies you want to throw in the competitive set. That’s what we were even seeing with pitches. When we’d find out from clients who did we lose to or when we won, who were we winning against? When they would share that information with us, there was always somebody that we didn’t know, whether it was a 10 person firm or another firm about our size of about 90 people.

Josh Albert: So that’s when I said if we’re really going to be successful here, if we’re really going to stand out and differentiate ourselves, we’ve got to put a stake in the ground. As you mentioned, we haven’t leveraged any outside consulting help for that, but it was something that took probably a solid four to five years and it even continues today in terms of just really continuing to distill down our position as our space now becomes a little bit more competitive because other firms are entering the space with similar positioning maybe that they’ve evolved to over the last five to 10 years.

Mark O’Brien: Mm-hmm (affirmative). The highly complex manufacturing side of it I think is the real differentiator for me. But 40 years, when you decided to get into B2B specifically, that was revolutionary 40 years ago. That’s a big deal, right?

Josh Albert: Right.

Mark O’Brien: But this speaks to one of these eternal truths of agency life that we see again and again is that positioning is a constant journey and you’re never done. There’s always the level of it, but it’s very clear to me that you’ve got a self-refining culture in that you’re aware of when it’s time to change, when it’s time to go a little bit deeper, that kind of thing. You’re self-moderating in that way. You understand when it’s time to move.

Josh Albert: Right. I think I’ve heard from some of your other participants on the podcast, positioning is great. It works on paper. You can get everyone to buy into it, but the real test when you’re positioning holds up is how you respond to new business opportunities. In my first couple of years, just because I’d never been involved in new business, I’d never been in the agency environment, we were going after a lot of opportunities just so I could get some reps under my belt. The partners that were involved in the business at the time were by my side. We were going through all these things together. I was learning everything that they have experienced in their 30, 40-plus years of experience in the agency environment. So as we reached a point though where we really had started to distill the positioning down, we were using that to guide our decisions.

Josh Albert: It’s really nice and it’s really fun when you say, “Oh, we’re going to be an agency that does this,” but when that first opportunity comes in that doesn’t fit into what your positioning is and the agency needs new business, it can be a really tough sell to say, “We really shouldn’t participate in this.”

Mark O’Brien: Right.

Josh Albert: At that same time we were working on building up our marketing program. We were really starting to see some progress with continuous pipeline. So there were points where I was able to make the case that, look, if we say no to this this week, I know based on the program and how we’re running it and how things are set up, within the next week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, we’re going to see another opportunity come in. We have some other things in the pipeline that we’re working, but just based on what we’re doing and how we’ve seen things flow, we can say no to this because we have the pipeline there to support it.

Josh Albert: So that’s really where the support from the partners over the years has been really important to be able to really realize this positioning because you can come out and say you’re an agency that does in our case complex industries, we work with really complex companies, but if we’re then turning around and doing work with a company on the B2C side or maybe even a B2B from like in financial services or healthcare that doesn’t really fit into our industrial positioning, it can start to water that down a bit. Then people internally don’t believe it, they don’t buy into it. It becomes really difficult to sell that then to your audience.

Mark O’Brien: Sure, absolutely. All these things are core truths, it’s just hard. It’s hard to be disciplined enough. But as you mentioned, once you do have a marketing program in place that is reliably generating opportunity, you can be a little more brave.

Josh Albert: Right.

Mark O’Brien: And it’s easier to make those really difficult decisions that are necessary if you have confidence that yes, the right thing will come down the pike quickly.

Josh Albert: Right.

Mark O’Brien: So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the marketing side of this specifically and what you’ve learned, what you’ve seen over the past six years in terms of what works, what doesn’t work, things like that. What are some of the main lessons learned in the six years of really being in charge of this for Godfrey?

Josh Albert: Well, I think one of the first things that I learned coming into my role was that at the time that you really still, I don’t think it’s so much today as it was maybe five, 10 years ago, this persona of the new business person carrying around a Rolodex, just walking and sort of this personifying a salesperson. They’re able to just pull opportunities out of thin air and close them and drive the agency forward. We all know that doesn’t exist. But at one point in time you would read job descriptions and it really would read just that. We’re looking for somebody that can just pull opportunities out of thin air. So when I started, I did a look back at where the opportunities were coming from.

Josh Albert: They were coming from the website. There was this maybe perception that they were coming from other sources. But even at that time in 2014, most of our opportunities that we were winning were coming through the website. But our website really wasn’t a big focal point. It wasn’t a place that we were investing a lot, so that was the first thing that we really did. So we spent a lot of time doing that. I think if we would have brought in outside help for something like that, it would have made the process a little bit easier because we’ve gone through multiple iterations as every agency has in terms of really trying to get the right digital presence, but really supporting that with the content. I think the very first major campaign that we ran that I thought this works, we can do this, we can replicate this, is we had lost a client in the manufacturing space.

Josh Albert: We had worked with them for almost two decades and we had a lot of experience. So what we did was we took all of that expertise that we had internally and we bundled it up into a gated piece of content, a guide that was really valuable, really told our story, really helped the audience understand what’s unique about marketing in this industry to this audience. So we printed that out and we pushed it out in all of the relevant channels that we knew based on the personas that we were going after, that it would resonate with them, through paid social, pushed out direct. Now with personal invites with personalized messages. We pushed it out on social. We went out and we actually used it to parlay into speaking. So at that point we really hadn’t done any speaking in the industry.

Josh Albert: We had experts internally that were interested in it, but we never really put a lot of energy behind it. When we put this particular piece of content together and it just summarized our story in that space, we were able to go out to events and associations that were connected to this particular industry and say, “Here’s what we have to offer. Here’s what we think we can bring to your particular event. Are you interested in having a conversation?” We were able to get invited to speak at a really big prestigious event within that particular industry that led to significant opportunities for us. I think we had closed a pretty substantial size account within a few months of really kicking this off and it was just at that point that we were able to step back and say, “This worked for a number of reasons.”

Josh Albert: It was really specific. It was positioned really well. It was really thought out. It was deep. I had a lot of content associated with it. It really told our story and then we actually put some dollars behind it to promote it in a number of different ways. So that was just the first point where I was able to say, “This works. Here’s the model that we can use. Let’s replicate this or let’s change it in this way to grow it to maybe a little bit of a different audience set.”

Mark O’Brien: That’s so interesting and again touches on many of these sort of permanent truths. We see one of them being this not quite chicken-egg, but give and take between expression of expertise digitally and using that expertise and you’re proven command of the material in order to get speaking gigs. Then the people who see you speak going back to the website and that becoming this really beneficial cycle.

Josh Albert: Certainly.

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Mark O’Brien: I know that some people listening to this will hear the story and it’s very inspiring and interesting and again, what I love about it personally is that it just follows your data-based to decision making process, right?

Josh Albert: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark O’Brien: We look at the facts and make some decisions and then move forward and but this constant analysis of proof. But that particular initiative, I think a lot of listeners would think, wow, that’s a ton of work. As with so many things, especially if you’re doing it on your own, the first time through is the most difficult time and then you figured out a process. What does content marketing look like today? How often are you producing these really deep guides now? How often does that happen over the course of a year or so?

Josh Albert: The deep dive guide is something that we’ve done a handful of times. I think we’ve done maybe now on average two a year. We’ve shifted to doing them on actual capabilities, practice areas versus the industry so we’ve sort of experimented both ways with it. What I’ve found, and I think what we’re working towards this year into next year is going back to really using that large piece of content to drive our program. Because what we found four or five years ago was when we developed that one I think it was 30, 40 page piece of content, really heavy, that we were able to chunk it out into so many different ways. It helped to drive efficiency because there’s this continuous battle for internal resources as everybody that’s listening to this podcast understands.

Josh Albert: So you can get folks rallied around developing one large piece of content. Then you can pass that off and somebody else can take it and chunk it up into blog posts, chunk it up into social posts, infographics and other things from it to really drive the program for six, 12, 18 months or more, just depending on how it fits into your goals. So that’s something that I think we’re getting back to. We had kind of experimented with a cadence of I think we’re at about three blog posts a month that we’re doing right now. They don’t always tie into industry or audience-specific topics, but they do have this slant towards complex industries and marketing within those specific environments.

Josh Albert: But they tend to come from our broader team. So of the 90 people that we have in the firm, I would say we have as many as maybe 15 contributors, maybe even 20 contributors to our blog.

Mark O’Brien: Incredible.

Josh Albert: It certainly is and it’s great that we have so many folks from our partners all the way down through to some of our account executives and subject matter experts on different topics that want to share their specific opinions as it relates to marketing and the experience that they bring. One of the reasons why that works well for us as we were talking about, so we’re a 90 person firm with two partners and there’s four people on the senior leadership team including myself, and so we’ve experimented and we’ve talked about, okay, should the content really only come from the partners and from the senior leaders in the firm?

Josh Albert: What we’ve found over the years is that our clients are interfacing with our teams and our team members are the folks that are really making these engagements successful and they have something to share. So that’s kind of how we grew it to the 15 or 20 that we have now is we just know that there’s so much valuable input that they can bring to our content marketing program and then it’s just on us to really provide that sound content marketing strategy, what the topics shouldn’t be. That’s just a continuous refinement process, as you know.

Mark O’Brien: Of course. It takes a lot of effort to build up to that. There needs to be a certain level of cache to this in order for 20% of the company to voluntarily want to be part of it. That’s a lot. You’re not mandating this, these people want it. It’s almost a perk of the job. It’s a career benefit to them to be able to be published on the godfrey.com platform, right?

Josh Albert: Right, and I think over the last couple of years we’ve had about five different team members out speaking on behalf of the firm and our expertise in those things and they bring their own perspective to that. So yes, in some way it’s a platform to help elevate some of our key team members to give them a voice, to help them find a way that’s really unique for them to contribute to the success of the agency now and in the future. So it’s just worked really well for us. Of course, it comes with the pros and cons of elevating team members if they are staying with the firm or if they end up moving on and so you can have a whole debate about that as well. It’s just a model that right now for us we found has worked really well.

Mark O’Brien: Absolutely. That’s such a great sign of health. What is the mix between marketing and sales inside of Godfrey? So how much marketing work do you do and how many leads are surfaced because of it?

Josh Albert: So how much marketing work do we do?

Mark O’Brien: Yeah, what does the marketing mix look like? Marketing as compared to outbound sales. I guess a simple way of asking it is where is your opportunity coming from these days, roughly?

Josh Albert: So our opportunity is coming from our marketing program, whether it’s web, anything in terms of organic content. We do some paid media, so opportunities are coming in through there, and client referrals. I would say a third of our opportunities are coming from our marketing program, almost all digital. Another third are coming from client referrals and there’s another third that are coming from just discussions within the industry. So the B2B space is pretty small and so oftentimes what you see is clients leaving one organization and going to another and they tend to at least invite us in for a conversation and in many cases that leads to some opportunities or they’re out in the trade show and talking about who they’re working with.

Josh Albert: So there’s some opportunity there. Even in our space there’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions so we’ve actually had a lot of opportunities over the years just by way of that, whether it’s an divestiture, now we’re working with two companies or another company acquired them and has invited us in to participate in particular engagement. As far as outbound sales go, that was something that when I started almost six years ago now, I used that as one of the key tactics in the first six to 12 months, but it really was not successful. We even pulled in a firm that specialized just in doing outbound sales for agencies and we’ve had mixed success with that. We had a really targeted list of accounts that we wanted to work with and so just picking up the phone and calling them and doing it in some sort of even warm fashion with the right approach on email and things like that, it really just didn’t surface the opportunities that were ideal for us.

Josh Albert: We’re working with mid-market to enterprise level companies, so we’re talking companies that on average have $500 million and up in annual revenue for their particular business unit. We just didn’t find that that approach to reaching that particular part of the market was successful for us.

Mark O’Brien: That’s really interesting and I think what’s particularly compelling, and I would imagine be compelling to our listeners, is that somebody as motivated and as intelligent as you are and someone who has had as much success as you’ve had from a biz dev perspective, even you couldn’t make outbound work.

Josh Albert: No, and it really does take a special person. I don’t know too many biz dev people that at least in the marketing space, when we’re trying to win two, three, maybe four clients a year, when you think about the volume that most agencies need to really sustain the growth of their firm, it’s just not the right approach. We’re not a transactional firm. We’re not doing one off projects. If we were doing that, then outbound, certainly. If our services are structured in a different way, it might be a better for us. But with the type of sale we’re looking for, it’s really got to come in through other means. We’ve got to reach that audience in different ways and provoke a feeling, provoke a desire to think, okay, the agency that I’m working with at this point doesn’t understand my business. They don’t know how to reach engineers. They don’t know how to speak to architects.

Josh Albert: They’re not coming to the trade shows and really participating with us and we just don’t feel like they’re a true extension of our team. That’s what we’re trying to provoke as an agency is we’re out there with our clients in the trenches, we’re attending trade shows, we’re having conversations with engineers and so that’s the story that we want to portray as an agency. I think one of the things that really helped us bring that forward was something that we did, and we still continue to do it somewhat externally and internally, is something that we called B2B sightings. It was really an internal effort at the time where team members would just be walking around in any community across any state that they’re in, any region of the world, whether they’re attending client events or just traveling on their own personal vacations and things like that.

Josh Albert: But they would see our clients’ technologies out in the wild, so to say, and they would snap photos, whether it’s heavy equipment that they’re passing by, whether it’s floors that they’re walking on in a hospital, whether it’s ceilings or lights or exterior products or machinery if they’re walking through a client’s facility. We oftentimes see five or six different things in there. We’re working with those companies that are making those things then too and so we take photos of that stuff and it really just starts to develop this internal culture, this fascination for these things. That’s what we bottle up and really try to use in our marketing communications program because that’s what resonates with marketers today, at least in our space.

Mark O’Brien: 100% familiarity and it’s all about trust. It’s all about trust. What’s interesting about the way you just described all of that and the play between digital inbound and traditional outbound, is that you need to reach a very sophisticated audience, decent sized firms that are going to make a decent size investment in the marketing. This is not a quick project based work. These are big, big, big engagements. Your point was, well, you can’t reach the level of executive you need to through outbound and the counter you hear oftentimes to the approach that we espouse and that our clients are committed to is that, well, people in leadership positions don’t read content. No one checks their email. No one’s on Google. They’re too busy for any of that stuff. It sounds like what you’re saying is counter to that.

Josh Albert: Right, and we’ve used a marketing automation platform now for pretty much the entire time that I’ve been in the role that I’m in. So I’ve used that as a really strategic tool in the sense of okay, we send emails out, we’re running these campaigns, we’re driving traffic to our pages. We can see once they’ve identified who’s interacting with the website. We have the ability to see anonymous user data as far as just the companies goes so we can see the types of companies that we’re reaching, and then sure, you can use that data to start to inform your outreach program or you can use it to really tighten up the messaging and change how you’re going to communicate over the next several weeks maybe in order to reach that particular company that you’re trying to elicit a conversation with. I would rather pick up the phone and call somebody who’s been engaged with our content, who’s attended an event where we spoke and engaged with us on social afterwards.

Josh Albert: We’ve had quite a few opportunities come out. Just after speaking the audience walks up and starts talking to whoever’s presenting and oftentimes I’m there as well. Even if it’s just a conversation then, we’ve had it where I think at one point I was able to put a number to it where it took 90 touches in order for me to really take a prospect and turn them into an opportunity. We were able to see that. Maybe they opened an email. Maybe they clicked through a link, maybe they did this, but over the course of the whole engagement before I get that signature, it’s like 90 touches. That becomes a huge mountain to climb when you really think about it.

Mark O’Brien: Right, such a huge mountain to climb, but when you do have an effective marketing program in place, it doesn’t take much more effort to generate 90 touches among one prospect than it does 3,000 prospects. That’s the whole magic of it. 90 is a ton, but if you can do it at scale, then it’s quite doable because it’s not as if you have five person biz dev team at your disposal here. You’re 90 person company, but the biz dev section is pretty slim.

Josh Albert: Yes, it’s me.

Mark O’Brien: It’s you. It’s you for a 90 person firm.

Josh Albert: Yes. Yes.

Mark O’Brien: Yeah, and that’s a big deal. So you’ve got to be efficient. One of those efficiencies is getting broad input and contributions from the team. So it’s you, but you’ve got 20% of the company who really believes in what you’re doing and believes in what Godfrey is doing and wants to be part of it in various ways. So you could say, well, I’ve got a 20 person biz dev team because they’re all out there expressing their points of view on the site and off the site as well and in the real world. So that’s just really inspiring. I love it and I love that it’s really self-made. That’s just quite admirable. It’s very, very hard for a firm to do what you’ve done, so congratulations on that.

Josh Albert: Yes, thank you.

Mark O’Brien: In the minute we have left here, any thoughts on the future of marketing, about what marketing might look like for a firm like yours say in five years?

Josh Albert: Well, I think it’s just going to continue to evolve and this idea of being hyper-focused, taking the position that you have today and just continuing to refine that and distill it down because you’re still seeing more and more agencies enter the space. You’re seeing the larger agencies just continue to struggle and you’re seeing a lot of these small to midsize agencies just multiplying in terms of ones even in our local market here. So I think positioning is going to continue to be a big focus.

Josh Albert: I think getting thought leadership out in digital formats is going to be a huge opportunity even in the B2B industrial space, whether it’s thinking about ways to scale our program, even if it’s not speaking because we can’t speak at 40, 50, 60 events out of the year so whether it’s the explosion of video and just continuing to do webinars and podcasts and experimenting with new things like that, I think that’s going to be a really big focus area. But then really just thinking about from a service perspective, how do we best align with our clients? We act as an extension of our client’s marketing team, and so we’re coming in building customized teams to fit them. So I think just really thinking through that as well and as our clients’ businesses evolve and become more digital and their offerings are changing constantly, that ours just have to continue to shift and align with that as well.

Mark O’Brien: Right.

Josh Albert: It’s hard to say exactly what it’s going to look like, but I think it’s just going to continue to refine.

Mark O’Brien: Different themes.

Josh Albert: Yes, I think so.

Mark O’Brien: I’m in complete agreement. Moving deeper and deeper and deeper into true core expertise channels as being the differentiation and using that expertise to build relationships. Of course the main source of that expertise is the actual client work you’re doing and paying close attention to what they need and what’s generating results for them. That refines your own operation, which is great.

Josh Albert: Right.

Mark O’Brien: That’s great, Josh. Well, this was so wonderful. Thank you. It was inspiring. It was relatable and also really practical. It’s hard to be all three of those things at once, but I get the sense that that kind of sums up who you are in a lot of ways. So thank you for sharing your experience and your great intelligence with us. I really appreciate it very much.

Josh Albert: I appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast and talk about this. It’s a topic that I’m really passionate about and it’s good to see a firm like yourselves out there just continuing to drive the conversation forward. I couldn’t have done this stuff over the last few years without firms like yourself and David Baker and [inaudible] and others that are out there just providing a lot of this thought leadership and provocative topics for us to talk about and react to as development and agency leaders. So really appreciate what you guys are doing.

Mark O’Brien: Oh, we love doing it because of people like you who actually listen. That’s great. Thanks a lot, Josh. I appreciate it. I look forward to our next conversation.

Josh Albert: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Expert Marketing Matters, a podcast by Newfangled. We are a digital marketing consultancy helping expert firms use their knowledge to build and deepen relationships with prospects and clients. To learn more, connect with us at newfangled.com.