The Role Of Artificial Intelligence In Lead Generation And Conversion Strategies With John Readman
Technology has helped us get through marketing tasks pretty easily. Chad Burmeister talks with John Readman, the Founder of Bosco, about the role of AI in digital marketing, specifically lead generation and conversion. In this episode, John discusses Bosco’s way of setting strategies for clients to implement the best practices in their business, elaborating how they’re automating lead generation tools. He then shares why he got into a different career, having started somewhere where his passion was. With a background in marketing technology, John is helping scale marketing agencies up by insourcing the function to an agency. Learn and get the necessary information you need to succeed in the marketing aspect of your business sales.
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The Role Of Artificial Intelligence In Lead Generation And Conversion Strategies With John Readman
I've got John Readman with me from the UK. He's with Modo25. He's the Founder and CEO. He has a passion for helping, not only companies but also orphans around the world. That's a by-product of the wonderful work that Modo25 is doing in the world. John, I'm happy to have you on the call. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me, Chad. It's a pleasure to be here.
Twenty-seven people you've grown to over the last couple of years. You got to be 1 in 50 to be able to pull that off. Congratulations on the successes that you got. You have multiple offices in multiple different places. To help our audience get to know you, John, I like to rewind the tape first and go back to when you were younger and ask the question, what were you passionate about when you were younger and some of your first memories? I like to connect the dots between what did you do then to what are you working on and how does that relate?
I grew up in the countryside in Yorkshire but very close to a military airbase. I used to sit at home, watching these planes going over all the time. I had this huge obsession and passion with Air Force and with planes. I joined the cadets. This is a bit cheesy, but when I watched Top Gun, I went and signed my life away to the Royal Air Force and became an officer cadet in what was then called the University Escort. They taught me how to fly while I was at college.
The longest story short is we agreed to disagree and they didn't want me. That's the short version. I'd spent all my time flying, drinking and playing rugby, which is another big passion of mine, rugby. It's a bit like American football but without the padding, I suppose is the way we describe it. The military and the Air Force were my passion, but because I'd spent all my time flying when I was at college, I didn't necessarily have the grades that all my friends had. I had to get into a different career, which is how I ended up in the internet and IT, which was by accident. My heart and passion, I was meant to be a fighter pilot.
I'm familiar with rugby because I lived in New Zealand for six months on a study abroad. Most people from the UK say, "I'm sorry."
The Kiwis are the best at rugby on the planet. Although, I don't know what the final score in the 7s was in the Olympics because they were in the finals of the rugby, 7s against Fiji. It was very close and then I had to get on a conference call. We had it on the TV in the office, in the background.
We'll have to check that. Tell us a little about Modo25. It sounds like you're unique. Most companies that I talked to that are in digital marketing are digital marketing outsourcers. The way you've described it and what I can see on your website is that you're helping companies in source by bringing that skillset inside. Tell us a little bit more about that.
My background in the past was either in marketing technology or helping scale up marketing agencies. Exactly what you said, outsourcing the function to an agency. One of our biggest competitors used to always be people moving in house. Nothing would scare an agency more than a client going, "We're going to move everything in-house." You're like, "No."
Always consider what to look across the marketing channel and where to spend the next marketing dollar.
When I exited the last business after we sold it to a global loyalty business, it was a case of, "How can we build a business that's a bit more future proof?" It's going to enable brands, retailers and clients to in-house things properly. People are paranoid about in-housing things because they think there's some magic or voodoo that the agencies have that they might not know what the secret source is. I believe in transparency and in empowering people to go on their own journey, whether that be our clients, team, company or the kids in Africa. We want to help people change their lives.
We can do that with our clients by helping them set a strategy, build up best practice, even recruit people and train. Over time, we then hand them off onto our marketing intelligence platform to keep them along on the straight and narrow but also provide a support service in the background. If somebody leaves or they go on and they're off work hill, we can jump in, help and provide that level of support. Chad, one of the worries about insourcing is if I insource, what happens if my supervisor leaves? What happens if they go on holiday? Who's going to pick it up? I might not know as the owner of the business or the CMO of the business. I might not have those skillsets myself to be able to pick it up.
So far, so good. People seem to be buying into it. That's the Modo25 side of it and then the BOSCO™ technology that we have built. AskBOSCO.io enables people to then manage and plan all their activity to see which channel is the best channel to invest my money. Also, it gives people data and insight to ask that agency or their team hard questions about, "Why are we doing this?" Historically, you've had to rely on the agency telling you what's going on.
We did spend for $3,000 a month for about 5 to 6 months. It was our only channel. We only did Google Ads for that period. It was easy to see where the lead came from. The baseline was 10 or 15 inbound leads a month. When we turned on the Google AdWords, we doubled it and then we track the conversion rates. Maybe $25,000 turned into $30,000 in revenue. That's not a real sustainable model. You don't want to spend $25,000 for $30,000. You got to spend $25,000 for $100,000, $25,000 for $125,000 or better than that. We were never able to try it cross-channel because it's sophisticated. It's hard enough tracking Google turns into an MQL, SQL, Op, a closed deal. You add 4 or 5 channels. Forget about it. It took me two years to get to a point where I was tracking one channel properly.
It is hard. People have tended to outsource it and empower the agencies to spend their money. On top of that is a fee and then I suppose ultimately, the people who are getting rich here with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and the media channels. I'm trying to enable our clients to level the playing field a little bit.
Tell me about BOSCO™ and where AI plays a role in helping your clients.
BOSCO™ can work for anybody who's got a monetary conversion point. It could work for B2B, eCommerce, lead gen, anybody who's got a point where they have a conversion and there is a monetary value they can assign to that conversion. What BOSCO™ does first things first is we connect up all your marketing channels in terms of performance data. We get all of that data into one place so that could be your Google Analytics, Magento, eCommerce platform, HubSpot data, wherever all your data and then we would associate the marketing costs to your Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads. Get all that data into those as well.
Did you overmatch it all up? At that point, if you wanted to and if you were brave enough, we could also look at an attribution model, which is quite interesting. What touchpoints caused all of this? A lot of people are still just looking at the last click and go, "That lead is associated with LinkedIn, Facebook or Google Ads." The first thing they might have seen was an email or something else. It's about understanding that attribution if you've got the desire to do that. What we do is pull all the data into one place.
Lead Generation And Conversion: One of the great things that performance and online marketing have given us is lots of data, but that's also part of the problem. There's almost too much data. It's crucial to try to understand which data points are the most significant to help us make better decisions.
Once we got clean data that we trust, what we can then do is run our algorithm over that, which has done a lot of machine learning over all the different data points, clients and third-party API data sources we've got to predict based on your service or product, on the market demand, your budget constraints and your targets where should you be investing your money to get the best traffic to your site. What we can do is look across the channel and go, "Where should I spend my next marketing dollar?"
I suppose the conversation we always joke about with CMOs or heads of sales is, "If you were to go ask Google, where should I spend more money?" Google will go, "Google.” If you were to go to Facebook and say, "How can I get more business for my leads or sales for my business?" They've all used some Facebook sales leads ads. It's the same with LinkedIn or Twitter.
What we do is we look at the math of your conversion data and we have direct API access into the demand side data of the individual channels. We can go, "Here's the opportunity. Here's how much money we need to get that opportunity. We understand your click-through rate, your conversion rate and the value of that lead or sale to your business. Therefore, we can then start predicting." Maybe you should be moving your money from Google to Facebook, from Facebook to LinkedIn or from LinkedIn to Twitter. We can help people make better decisions.
That's how we're using that. The more data it has, the more it learns. The more refined, the more accurate it gets. I suppose the exciting thing is when somebody goes and introduce a new channel. “Should we be even investing in TikTok or in Snapchat?” It can go. Based on what we know about your other performance in other channels and based on the activity in those channels, we think the opportunity for you in that channel is X. Rather than having to do a test, learn and go to the chief financial officer going, "Give me $10,000. I want to go spend it on this channel but I don't know what's going to happen," we can go, "Give me $10,000. I think we're going to get this back if we do these things."
I think of attribution. I go back to 2005 to 2008 when I was with WebEx, and we were acquired by Cisco.
The first time I ever did anything like this was on a WebEx.
They're still $1 billion company. People don't use them as frequently as Zoom on one-to-one meetings like this but if you're with a big company, you probably still have Cisco WebEx. You don't have it to a Zoom. It's amazing. I remember looking at attribution with the marketing team. I was a sales leader there. We'd sit down. The knee jerk is like you said. If it was a LinkedIn Ad or maybe they went to an event, "Let's give 100% attribution to that," that wasn't true.
What we ended up doing is saying, "Let's look at all the closed one deals. Let's go back after it closes and look over the last 1 to 2 years." Maybe there was some conference they went to two years ago and then give attribution along the way. The conference gets 20%. The ad they clicked on gets 15%. The cold call by the rep gets 10%. I have to believe that without AI, you can't make those kinds of valid, big data decisions. Otherwise, you're just looking at the last click.
What an AI enables us to do is group cohorts of massive amounts of data to then spot the patterns, understand those and then apply some sense and logic to it. Over time, one of the great things that performance marketing and online marketing has given us is lots of data, but that's also part of the problem. There's almost too much data. It's trying to understand which data points are the most significant to help us make better decisions. On attribution, it's not an exact science. Attribution modeling is fundamentally wrong because every different path through every different customer is going to be different in the nature of what we're trying to do.
Marketing success is trying to find the least wrong model to fit your business.
It's trying to find the least wrong model to fit my business. Which one is least wrong? Which is the best fit for my business? Hopefully, they can then work through that show that we thought didn't pay off. Actually, it has paid off or that direct mail, catalog or whatever it is. I also think people avoid doing it because it's hard or different departments have different budgets and they don't want to do it because they're worried about losing their budgets a lot of the time.
Talk to me about AI in sales because we're talking about it from a marketing pay-per-click perspective. Have you worked with customers or maybe some of your staff using AI on the sales side? What are you seeing out there? What's the hot trend? Have you seen anything with AI deployed in sales?
The biggest thing is using the different AI. I suppose there are several around conversational chat, email sequencing and all of those. On one side, it's great but at the same side, when people are applying to the AI, when they genuinely think it's a human, that's great but we need a human to step in and how do we ensure that that works? We have as ourselves and also helped in B2B lead gen campaigns for clients. Encourage them to use the different chatbots, the different types of content generation AIs.
That bot technology has moved on a long way. I also think unless it's very good and very personalized, people are starting to get a little bit wary. It's very clever. We use lots of different automation across our own lead gen and biz dev tools to help get prospects to a certain point where they're ready to engage in a conversation with the SDL or the account execs. It means we can move quicker and we can spend more time talking to MQL or SQL qualified leads.
I'm always interested in learning more and understanding what are the best practices. All of this is changing all of the time. One thing we have seen with different AI tools we had historically been using on LinkedIn is that LinkedIn is changing all their rules and making it a lot harder to automate or use AI technology to drive lead gen on LinkedIn. They will be doing that so they can increase their ad revenue.
It's interesting because that's one of the tools that ScaleX brings to the market. Whenever there's a change, instead of inviting 100 people a day to connect, you can do 100 a week. That created some ripples with our customers and they were like, "The value of working with you went down by 80%." Within a week, an engineering team came back and said, "Check this out. You can send email invites to connect through the same LinkedIn interface, but instead of sending it through the LinkedIn app, it takes it offline and sends it through an email."
We're able to move the connection rate back up to 100-plus a day. Even 100 InMails a day is another capability. Next rev is going to have auto-replies powered by AI because you could put in a template. What happens is over time, as the human picks the right template to go with the right response, why not put a black box around it and build an AI so that it auto matches the right response with the right question? To your point, that's where I believe the world is going. People in sales will have a virtual assistant just like you have an email.
It's squaring away in the background. The important thing is ensuring that the people using it are trained. A lot of this is in people's mind, easy, affordable and mass production, people don't necessarily spend the time to think about the copy and the content. We need to invest time and money in quality content. Otherwise, you might as well go back to spamming loads of people with loads of rubbish content.
Lead Generation And Conversion: What AI is going to do is put your message in front of the right person at the right time without manually doing it.
Just because it's AI doesn't mean it suddenly becomes interesting. What AI is going to do is put your message in front of the right person at the right time without you having to manually do it but you still need to have great copy and a great call-to-action. Part of that puzzle is marketing needs to work hand-in-hand with sales, rather than just giving sales access to the AI and then running off and doing it themselves.
They'll blow it up 100% of the time. It's a fine line because traditional marketing copy and an HTML email is long and has a lot of features in it. A salesperson is like, "I can't send that to my customer." There's almost a middle person who's an expert sales/marketing analyst who's great at copy. That is where we're finding a huge opportunity for companies like yours to work with the customer and walk them through building the content. It's a huge need and you're exactly right. The last question is the future of AI for your organization and what you're seeing in the world. Where does it go years from now?
I don't know how familiar you are with this one but what we're looking a lot at is digital twinning, trying to run mass data simulations, rather than saying to people, "Let's split test this, spend some money doing this and spend some time doing that." With the processing capability and the data, we can run through different models. Potentially, we could start running the digital twin. We've run that model. There are these many million things of permutations that happened, and this is what we believe is going to happen with this percentage confidence.
You could do that with a lead gen campaign, a marketing campaign and a new version of the website. That's interesting because at the moment, most people do a campaign and go, "Let's launch and see what happens. We'll then do a split test and we'll review it.” Soon, you won't have to do a split test. It will run a digital twin, basically a model in an AI and go, "I'm confident. This is what's going to happen."
I talked to a company who does that for electricity power lines. Seventy-six percent of the fires in the US are started from trees being too close to power lines. They go in and take aerial photography, drones, airplane footage and helicopter footage. They create a digital twin that they can run instead of AB testing. We don't want fires. Let's run this digital world and see what happens to the foliage in the digital world.
A lot of this has come from an answer with a lot of forward-thinking, data analysis and technology. A lot of this has come from things like formula one. A lot of the high-tech sports or banking worlds are aware that a lot of this stuff evolves from. How we can take and learn from that is I suppose, ultimately statistical modeling. How can we then apply that to the more sales and marketing world to help people analyze what is going to happen before it happens? We're not doing a test and learn campaign or a split test. We're betting with a little bit more confidence.
Sometimes, I think that's what's happening with contact tracing and things like that.
The phone is listening to you. It's called in-market on Facebook. If you talk about certain products, you get ads. That's in my opinion. I'd rather have relevant ads but don't get to me talking about cookie-less marketing because we could talk for hours.
Thanks so much for joining, John Readman, who is the Founder and CEO of Modo25. We didn't cover the charity that you work with. Let's give you a minute or so to talk a little bit about what you're doing there. £100,000 to £200,000 a year feeds 280 kids, gives houses and education. Tell us a little bit about the charity.
I met my business partner, an investor, Bonamy Grimes, on a charity bike ride that I set up with a friend of mine. We're cycling from the UK to Sydney in Australia over 25 years, to help raise money for the orphanage. When I met Bon on the bike ride, I was saying, "There are problems about in-housing, attribution and measurement that need fixing." He was like, "I agree." We set the business up. One of the core fundamentals of setting the business up is we want to try and make the world a better place. We said, "That's easy. We'll donate some above profit to One More Child," which is the name of the orphanage in Uganda in Jinja. I said, "I'd like to make it more core to what we're doing and who we stand for."
An important thing that AI in sales can do is ensure that you make better decisions in your business.
I was trying to work out how we can do it. When we were coming to name the business, I was trying to come up with all these cool agency names or technology names that I was going to call it, probable, certainty or all these sorts of names. I thought, "What better way to recognize the core purpose around why we exist?" To empower and change the future of not only our team, our clients but also the kids in Africa is to name the company after one of the children. One of the children was called Modo, and 25 also links together where Bon and I met, which is the bike ride from London to Sydney over 25 years.
We're on leg nine. We're coming in Turkey. 2020 and 2021, we're going to have to miss because the pandemic kiboshed our opportunity to go cycling around the world. The technology is named after the man who runs the orphanage called Bosco. We help and donate our profit. We raised money. We manage all their marketing. We help them manage all their corporate fundraising. We helped facilitate between £100,000 and £200,000 each year across all our activities that we do that looks after, feeds, clothes, educates and houses 280 children.
It's something I'm hugely passionate about. It's fascinating, Chad, because it's helped us attract some top talent. Some people don't want to go work for a company that exists just to make money for their shareholders. The world is changing. Some of the young, smart people in the world want to come to work also to try and change the world and make a bit of a difference. That's what we're doing. Thank you for asking the question. It's something that's important to us.
One of the big things I want to do long-term, and I don't know if I'm going to pull it off, is create a delivery center in Uganda. We're helping educate these kids and get them jobs hopefully. What we're finding is we're educating more kids than there are jobs. Wouldn't it be cool if we could create a Modo25 office in Uganda and give them jobs as well? That will be super cool. That's the medium-term vision, but we have got our first child to the orphanage into university. He's going to go to university in Kampala. He's going to do medicine, which is amazing and then he's going to come back and be a street doctor in the slum where we found him. If you think about the impact that we can have, it's really cool.
When you're making decisions of who to buy from, it's important to choose companies wisely that make a difference in the world. It's great to know that not only will they get the best AI and approach to spending their money in where it's beneficently but also to go to feed orphans in Africa. It's cool what you're doing, John. Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate you being here.
Thank you for having me, Chad. It’s been interesting chatting to you.
We'll catch you on the next episode.
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