You're Missing Opportunities If You're Not Talking To Your Prospects

Jeffro (00:01.438)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. When I say the term outbound marketing, do your eyes glaze over? Or do you think about cold calling or trade shows? While there’s lots of different outbound marketing strategies, there are some ways that are more effective than others. If you want to work smarter, not harder, then you should definitely pay attention to this episode. My guest today is Alex Levin, the co -founder and CEO of Regal .io. Alex and his team help companies set up branded personalized outbound campaigns that reach customers in the right place at the right time.

They boast 25 % more customer conversions using their methods compared to more traditional outbound methods. So I’m really excited to dive into these strategies and tools. Thanks for being here, Alex. Welcome to the show.

Alex Levin (00:40.59)
Thank you for having me.

Jeffro (00:42.238)
Absolutely. Now, before we jump in, I wanted to give some quick definitions for our listeners. Inbound marketing refers to things like social media, blogging, and SEO, where you’re trying to pull people in with valuable content and get them to like your brand. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, refers to things like cold calls, billboards, paid ads, where you’re trying to maximize your reach to make people aware of your brand and generate leads at scale. Alex, is there anything you would add to that definition?

Alex Levin (01:08.11)
Yeah, I think it’s a good place to start. You know, HubSpot made inbound marketing famous. You know, that’s, they actually started not as a CRM, but in that space, helping marketers generate all this content to get people to come in. And they’ve since obviously transitioned to be bigger. you know, outbound, I think, you know, how it goes through these phases where, you know, it’s very popular and then it’s less popular. So direct mail might be a good example where for a while direct mail was a very big channel and then it sort of fell out of favor. And actually as it fell out of favor,

some very smart companies started using it in a more personalized way, in a more data driven way and saw great benefits from it. So it’s actually come back and you may get better direct mail now than you ever did because they’re much smarter about who they send it to and what the messaging is. I would say calls goes through similar cycles. So in the 90s, it was very popular to do terrible telemarketing. it’s 8 p Let’s call people while there’s dinner. That was kind of the thing.

Jeffro (02:01.79)
you

Alex Levin (02:03.47)
And there were a lot of scams also involved in it. And so it sort of fell out of favor. And honestly, the technology providers that provided outbound calling capabilities didn’t invest in it because they saw no future. They said, voice is dying, outbound is dying, we’re not going to do it. So actually I came across it when I was at Angie, Sean’s Angie’s List and Home Advisor. And we were struggling to get people to have enough trust with us online to buy more complicated home services projects. So fence installation, you know, remodel, it’s not.

$500 it could be $50 ,000, right? And we actually at the time, you know, we’re sort of pounding our heads against like the wall go, why can’t we like, why aren’t we good enough technologists to build digital experiences that people just like use? And eventually I think we kind of relented is the wrong word, but sort of came to realize that there’s a real power to having human to human conversations that, you know, is never going to be part of that digital experience, especially as more and more people are using their mobile phone.

No, and that little tiny screwed real estate is all you’ve got to like get people to buy a $50 ,000 service. You know, it’s not going to work. Whereas a human conversation can help disambiguate and help emote and help them actually build trust to buy a service. So we started doing outbound calls and unfortunately we’re using a lot of the legacy technology that existed, you know, and basically what those tools that you do is put in, you know, a big list of customers and call them five times a day for five days. And that’s why it feels like spam to the customer because we had very little control on that channel.

And so Regal, my current company, came out of that where we said, well, actually, if we could have more control over understanding what the customer is doing, the customer signals, and then control over how we acted and how we reached out to the customer, outbound calls and text conversation would be very valuable. So all we need to do is go build a test system that can do that. So now we’re three and a half years in, we’ve gone and done that, we have hundreds of customers. That’s our MO is.

you know, helping these businesses be much smarter about reaching customers on the phone. I’d say the bad news today is most companies are using this crappy technology and pisses off customers and results in lower and lower answer rates. You know, and that there’s actually this bigger and bigger divide I’d say between a lot of companies and their customers because they don’t have a good way of communicating. The good news is when you go and interview customers, you know, and say, Hey, you know, if it’s something important, how do you want to engage with the brand? They don’t go and say, the website.

Jeffro (04:06.814)
Mm -hmm.

Jeffro (04:24.566)
you

Alex Levin (04:26.03)
They say, I want to have a conversation. Phone is actually number one, text is number two, but they’d rather have a conversation once about their education, their financial health, their wellbeing. So you just have to bridge the gap and provide the ability to, in our words, treat customers like royalty. So if you call a customer about something they don’t want to talk about at a time that’s not good for them, click. On the other hand, you have a customer that’s going and try to refinance their student loan.

Jeffro (04:33.918)
Hmm.

Jeffro (04:49.462)
you

Alex Levin (04:53.742)
and they can’t figure out how to do it, in that moment you call them and it’s Brandon, so they know it’s you, they’re gonna go, thank goodness, I love that you’re helping me do this, that’s such great service. So everything is context.

Jeffro (05:04.997)
Well, and I think, you know, you mentioned how a lot of this stuff has been around a long time and that kind of shifts between different channels as people kind of get used to it or get annoyed by it. And it doesn’t mean that it just, you throw it away, you need to improve it. And that’s why it comes back because there’s a newer version that’s now better. It’s a better experience for the customer. It’s more meaningful to the business because you’ve got more data or it’s more personalized like you were saying. And it sounds like what you’ve done with Regal is almost

then taking the next step where you’re combining inbound and outbound. So there might still be an inbound component where the website draws them in, you get some trigger and then you call them, right? So you switch it and.

Alex Levin (05:41.87)
Yeah, the customer expects to engage with the brand in the way they want to. And during the consideration and buying phase and the post -buying phase, that may mean some digital websites, some emails, some texts, some chats. It’ll be in these different channels. A lot of what was happening historically is that marketing and contact center teams are completely separate. So the marketing team would go and spend all this money or do all this work, getting people interested or engaged and had no connection to the contact center team.

whoever was talking with a customer, whether it’s customer support or collections or sales or whatever, they had no idea that the marketing team had told this customer on Facebook, hey, you look like a great prospect because I see five people in your area were also interested in solar panels because there’s a special tax thing in your area. If that information is not getting to the sales team, sales gets on and goes, hi. And the customers go, wait a second, you told me that like I’m eligible for a tax rebate in my area for a solar panel.

Okay, it’s not gonna work. So having a unified view of the customer, not just in marketing, but actually bringing all that into the contact center and then having tools that allow you as a contact center to act upon them, which is very novel, right? So not just like, there’s a profile that pops up with some info, but automate the ability for the system to say, based on what we know about this customer, we need to reach out to them about this thing so that your agents can then get on the phone and sound super smart, because they’re going.

Yeah, I’m a genius. Like I knew that right at this moment was the right time to reach you because you know, these five things happened. And so I’m here. Like you want your agents to feel like geniuses, not to be the ones bashed over the head going, why’d you call me now? I’m not interested in talking to you. So, you know, make your, you know, make your agents feel like geniuses, give them some automation that allows them to take advantage of everything the customer’s doing to treat them right.

Jeffro (07:31.678)
Yeah. And you need a platform that can handle all that. I think a lot of businesses have been very fragmented traditionally because you’ve got your email platform over here, got your CRM over here. You do have an automation thing over here. You got your calendar system over here and like they don’t all talk to each other very well. And so having it all together obviously solves a lot of those problems. Do you think, the problem went out my ear. I hate it when that happens.

But the question is really like, why does that… it’s gone. All right, I’m going to ask my next question then. And I think it’s related, but a lot of solopreneurs and founders kind of approach business in a very transactional way. This kind of allows you to get past that. It’s more of a relationship because you’re paying attention to the details. If you were just ignoring stuff that your friend or significant other said, and then you bring it up again,

We already talked about that. And that’s exactly what you’re describing, where there’s a disconnect between the marketing and the sales team and all that.

Alex Levin (08:31.758)
Yeah. Yeah. So particularly when we’re talking about small businesses, this is, I frame it this way. My wife has a friend in the small town they grew up in who’s an insurance agent. She used to do fabulously well because most of the people would actually walk into her office and say, you know, I need life insurance. And, you know, she knew their kids, their pets, where they live, what was important to them. She knew what to pitch, how to pitch it. And she got them, you know, to buy. Today, the majority of her business is ding.

something on her computer goes off and there’s a phone number and she does nothing about them and she has to try to get them to at least answer her call, which is hard. And then when they’re on their call, they’re like, you know, it’s hard because she’s saying generic things and they’re kind of going, well, maybe this isn’t for me because they don’t know that I really need this product because I have two rental properties. And so her business has gotten much tougher. So I don’t look at it and say, Hey, small business owners are bad at what they do. I think, I think it’s

As this shifts online, small business owners need new sets of tools to allow them to do the same thing they’re great at, which is to use the things they know about customers to treat them like they’re special. In addition, as small business owners become bigger business owners, there’s an incentive to automate everything. And automate historically has meant make everybody treated the same. And so actually you go to contact centers and they’re proud of the fact, we treated everybody the same today. Give me a gold star. And you know,

I get it, like they’re trying to do the automation efficiency thing as they scale, because that’s what they think the goal is. I look at it and go, no, the goal is to get back to what you were doing so successfully when you were just a one person shop, which is you could treat somebody in a way that they felt they had a connection with you. So, okay, you need automation, but automation doesn’t need to mean sameness. Automation can mean use all this information that you know about the customer from first party data, from other sources, to make sure that you’re treating them in a way that makes them feel special.

Jeffro (10:07.294)
Mm -hmm.

Alex Levin (10:24.398)
The brands that do that online are the ones that are going to win because what we’re seeing in more and more industries, so take financial services, the infrastructure supporting financial services online is the same across all the brands. They all use the same infrastructure. So the brand is different. A bit the website is different, but the biggest differentiator over the long run is still going to be service. So the brands that think of themselves as digital only and financial services are going to lose to the ones that realize that service is still going to be the differentiator. There always was a place for a banker.

That was part of the model. Online, we created more distribution, but the ones that could bring back that feeling of personalization and treating somebody right in a digital model is going to be the one that wins.

Jeffro (11:04.606)
Yeah, and I think there’s a balance there because obviously you want to embrace new technologies, but you don’t want to erase the human connection. You see all these websites now with AI chatbots or customer support chatbots. First thing I ask it is, can I talk to a person? Because I wouldn’t be talking to support if I had a problem that the AI bot could solve. And so it’s just kind of almost a waste of time trying to get past that gatekeeper as a customer. Then that experience is not as good.

Alex Levin (11:20.462)
you

Alex Levin (11:30.894)
Yeah. One of the more interesting sort of pieces of data from my old life is that we would, you know, often deflect customer inbound to your point and not handle it. And we took a segment of customers that we thought were the best customers for us and actually practically went out to them and said, well, for free, give you a higher level of support. You can always come into us. We’re always going to help you. Blah, blah, blah. By doing that, we ultimately drove more business. Now.

Had we done it for everybody, would it have worked? I don’t think so. We were very intentional about which customers we did it with. So I don’t actually advocate that all inbound comes in and is handled in the same way. What I advocate is that you as a business think intelligently about which customers you want to support and why and what the goal is. So if a customer that looks exactly like a perfect customer comes in, yeah, don’t send them to the chat bot. Give them whatever is the most premier experience. And now the funny thing is in two years, that may be the chat bot. That may be the premier experience.

Jeffro (12:26.046)
Yeah, true.

Alex Levin (12:27.214)
But whatever it is, give them the premier experience. Versus if there’s somebody that is not going to be a good customer for you, then it’s not worth you having that same experience with them. So as a business, you need to segment your customers and decide how you’re going to treat them. That is perfectly logical. You can’t treat everybody in the same way.

Jeffro (12:46.398)
Right, well, and that sounds like you’re defining multiple customer journeys, really. Where do you start if you want to map that out?

Alex Levin (12:54.062)
Yeah, you know, very common two by two matrix that people use is to think about the customers, you know, along the axis of how much they’re spending with you now and what the potential or the size of the customer is, you know, whether it’s an individual is your customer or company, the same matrix can be used. So, you know, the ones that are the most exciting are the ones that are spending a lot of money with you and there’s a lot of potential to do more. And those are the ones you should be doing all kinds of crazy things for. On the other end are ones that are maybe spending very little or unlikely to grow. Now you don’t want to.

mistreat them, but those are the ones where maybe it’s a two day SLA, you know, text only, maybe it’s an AI bot if they want something faster. It’s a different level of support, right? Versus like the two other quadrants that are left, like the ones that are big but not growing, you have to maintain and make sure that you’re maintaining that revenue. And the ones that are smaller, but you think there’s opportunity, like that’s the ones where you want to be prospecting into them and figuring out how you can do more for them in a different way. So

I think that’s the basically simplest way to start segmenting your customer base without knowing industry. Obviously in each industry there are going to be nuances about what you do.

Jeffro (14:00.094)
So then what about once you’ve kind of defined all that, how do you know if you’re missing a piece of the journey? What’s the feedback loop or the metrics that you look at to figure that out?

Alex Levin (14:08.142)
Yes, a great question. There’s a business called Medalia that’s gotten enormous by basically saying, hey, you should be surveying all your customers. And like that was for a long time, you know, it’s kind of survey monkey on steroids. You know, Qualtrics was another one sort of in a different age, but you know, Medalia is a newer one. They’ve started shifting from just saying, hey, something is wrong where they’re sort of doing surveys and looking at a website and behaviors and sentiment to actually, hey, how do you act on that as a brand? What do you

do when you know that there was a call with a customer where the sentiment was bad? What do you do when you get a bad NPS score? Because just knowing that something was bad wasn’t enough. So I’m not suggesting every brand goes and uses Medallia. I actually think they’re a 20 -year -old technology that still sells successfully into very big orgs and is kind of a bloated product. There are much newer, better ways of doing this, but you should be getting feedback from customers using the thing. Like if a customer is trying to click on your

Log in button five times and they can’t log in. That’s frustrating, right? But customers, you know, moving their mouse all over your screen, that’s frustrating. You know, if there’s an error that keeps popping up for your customer and they try to do something, that’s frustrating. So, you know, you should be watching the basic website behaviors and, you know, the basic sentiments in, you know, conversations and the basic NPS data to know who to reach out to. Like every branch do that. You don’t need a big company product to do it. I think the harder part is, yeah, how do you automate the outreach based off of that?

You know, I go back to sort of very basics again, which is like, you know, you as a business should be starting to do this as a baseline and then start A -B testing and seeing, you know, if it worked better or worse, if you do it on phone or text, does it work better or worse if you do it immediately or a day later? You know, yes, there are best practices, but in the end, like you’re going to have to find for your own business what works best.

Jeffro (15:58.91)
Yeah. And I think, you know, the more we talk about this, the more complicated this can become, right? Because you can define a lot of different nuances of that customer journey and how to handle this one if they call it well and this one if it didn’t. And if they saw a text versus if they responded to an ad, you know, how do you get all that set up so that it’s going to work and run smoothly and effectively, you know, on a platform?

It sounds like it’s going to take a long time or a big team to manage all of that.

Alex Levin (16:29.998)
Yeah, again, it depends on the size of your business. Like, you know, for SMBs there are, you know, there’s like SurveyMonkey, you know, that takes stuff or there’s little, you know, simple VOIP phones, whether it’s Google Voice or like OpenPhone or things like that. So like, you know, that may be the right tech stack at that stage. As you get to be sort of more than one person and now you’re, you know, you’ve got a team that’s actually doing all this stuff, you’re going to need more sophisticated phone systems, you know, maybe closer to Regal or, you know, things like that.

you know, as you move beyond the capabilities of a survey monkey, maybe you do need something more sophisticated. I don’t know what one step up from that would be. You know, I think that’s a very classic thing. Like there are products that were built for each segment. So an email, for instance, you have like a MailChimp that was built for very small businesses because it’s quite easy to use or a Clavio for small retail businesses versus a Braze or an Interval for more sophisticated businesses.

You know, obviously if you’re in the wrong tool, it’s just going to be a bit of a big mismatch. But luckily there are tools built for each side.

Jeffro (17:31.774)
So one of the things you talk about is having someone call at the right moment. You know, when the prospect is doing something, they get a call and they’re like, wow, great timing. How do you know that I needed this right now? That sounds like you need an army of people on standby, ready to call like at any moment that a notification comes in. How do you actually accomplish that in practice?

Alex Levin (17:52.59)
Yeah, so we are a software provider. We don’t provide the teams. When we work with a Roman or we work with a SoFi or a AAA, they have, to your point, armies of people that care deeply about the brands, understand what the relevant information is about the brand, and then get the contacts from Regal, get the call, and are on the call doing the actual hard work. So huge respect to them. I think what we are seeing

and faster than any of us thought. Four years ago, we started or three and a half years ago, we knew eventually AI agents would become a thing. And we knew all the data we were collecting would allow us to train those agents better. But we thought it’d take a while. Six months ago is when really something started happening. We started getting excited about the capabilities of voice agents. We’re now pushing our customers to find use cases that are more high volume and more rote.

you know, whether it’s a qualification call, a scheduling call, a basic kind of IVR use case, meaning like there’s a couple of questions and you’re trying to route somebody and move those away from wasting agents time towards the AI agents. You know, I think whether it’s a year from now or three years from now, we will be having those conversations about almost every use case in the contact center. And it’s not because like we’re trying to give the customer this cheaper experience. It’s actually because

the AI agents are going to be better at it than humans. There are things that you can train the AI agents in that you can’t train humans in as well. I was talking with a friend of mine who’s run contact centers for years and he was laughing that he was training one of these AI agents basically and it was much easier than him hiring. He was like, I was going to hire 10 more people next month, but I think actually I’m only going to hire five and use more of this AI agent. Because to hire 10 people and train them is a difficult thing.

Jeffro (19:42.174)
Yeah, it’s expensive too.

Alex Levin (19:44.206)
Yeah, when it was, you know, bots, it wasn’t that interesting because like you had to kind of make the bot like go if one than this, if two than this, if three than this, that didn’t really work very well. But the AI agent is much more, it’s not like software, it’s much more like training an agent. Like it’s like working in a contact center where you’re teaching it about your company, you’re teaching it about the questions that are going to come in about how you want to answer. You’re then letting it do it a hundred times and every time it’s going to do it differently because it’s not deterministic software model. It’s actually pretty.

you know, distributed widely the answers it gives. And then you’re going to have to do QA and then you’re going to have to get feedback. And then, you know, so I actually think running a contact center is a much better metaphor or parallel for AI agents than software. So the people that are very used to running contact centers, like contact centers are going to be great at building AI agents. People who like, you know, think of it as software are going to really struggle with AI agents.

Jeffro (20:39.006)
And that makes sense. So what about if the companies that don’t have an army of people to call right now, who should have an outbound strategy? Does your company need to be at a certain revenue number? Do you need a high ticket offer? What does that look like?

Alex Levin (20:53.678)
Yeah, look, I think largely it’s a question of the lifetime value of the customer and the complexity of the thing that you’re selling, the product or service you’re selling. If you have a customer lifetime over a couple hundred dollars, it’ll probably make sense for you to be engaging on the phone because it’s enough money that you’re making. If you have something that’s like selling pencils, even if it’s high value, selling pencils is not that complicated. It’s a pretty commoditized product versus things like

education, healthcare, local services, financial services, you know, these are industries that are much higher consideration. So usually, you know, where I draw the line is I say, look, retail, by and large, you don’t need as much of this human sort of connection. Sure, in some, so in like higher end retail, you do maybe, but most retail, you don’t versus in all these other industries, which make up about half of the consumer economy, you do, you know, and as consumers, you know,

we might have been shopping online for a long time, but now we’re demanding that our doctor is online and our banker is online. And as we demand those things, those companies have to figure out how to move from having an in -store person -to -person experience to an online person -to -person experience.

Jeffro (22:10.046)
Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s actually kind of a good place for us to wrap up because as we look towards the future and realize, Hey, you got to kind of make this transition and assess where you’re at and what you need to be doing in order to stay relevant and be competitive in the future, you can start making these changes. So thanks for joining me today, Alex. You know, it’s so important to connect with customers. It always has been, and you could say it’s getting harder, but you really, it’s getting easier if you embrace the new technology.

So I’m glad we had this conversation. For those of you guys listening, go check out regal .io if you need a better way to connect with your prospects. Last question for you, Alex. What’s your number one recommendation for service businesses when it comes to outbound marketing?

Alex Levin (22:53.294)
Yeah, I’d say, you know, always I like people to take sort of a bit of a test and learn approach. So, you know, I would hide, even if you’re just doing it sort of with an Excel sheet and you know, your cell phone, you know, you know, if you got a hundred calls to make, try them at different times of the day, try a slightly different script, like don’t do it exactly the same. You’re not going to learn as much. I think it’s important to constantly have that mindset as a small business owner that like,

You’re not doing it the right way yet. You’re not doing it the right way yet. Challenge yourself to do it better than you are today.

Jeffro (23:25.63)
That’s great advice. Thanks again for being here, Alex. Thanks all of you for listening. Get to work defining your customer journey, figure out your outbound strategy, and I’ll see you guys back here for the next episode of Digital Dominance. Take care.