Mastering Your MarTech Stack feat. Dan McGaw

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way. With your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:33
Welcome to the all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge, the place online for you to learn about Small Business Marketing and Sales Automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers. We have a link for you to find out more about that in all of the resources always available for every podcast episode. At Allsystemsgopodcast.com Do me a favor, make sure that you’re subscribed to the podcast. We’re in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts. We’re on YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. We are there. While you’re at it, leave a five star rating and review to help let the world know just how amazing this podcast is. But Furthermore, to help the Small Business entrepreneur, small business owner and entrepreneur navigate the space of automation more efficiently. This episode, my guest is Dan McGraw. And Dan is an award winning entrepreneur. He is a serial entrepreneur, a speaker and the CEO of mcgraw.io. io and analytics in marketing technology consultancy and SAS platform UTM Dotto, so he’s a CEO of both of those. And in addition, somehow he also finds time to be a 500 startups mentor. And he previously started the first business accelerator in Orlando. Okay, he’s a thought leader in the MAR tech world. And he is a cx. Al This is conversion experience, conversion experience instructor on the topic and having spoken at the leading marketing conferences and online events, including track traction conference and forget the funnel, his his expertise. And you’ll see in this episode, it really lies in helping businesses extract and interpret the right data to grow their revenue exponentially. So we had a great time talking about the importance of the tools that you select, and the data that they provide. So enjoy this episode with Dan and I. Dan, welcome to the podcast, man. Glad to have you on how you doing,

Dan McGaw 2:52
dude, I’m living the dream. Thanks for having me. I’m having so much fun today.

Chris Davis 2:55
Yeah, yeah. And I’m looking forward to recording this one because we, we got a chance to chat in the beginning on how we kind of made it back full circle. Right? Because I you know, I remember connecting with you. And maybe at the time, then maybe you weren’t, you didn’t have two companies at the time. Maybe it was just no, I have both. I had both. I just wasn’t talking about one of them at the time. So yeah, keeping it close. So when I when your you know, your agent reached out to me for the podcast man, that name sounds for me. So we figured it all out. Glad to reconnect with you, man. Let our listeners know, give him a little bit about your background and the businesses that you run.

Dan McGaw 3:40
Yeah, well, I mean, first, thanks so much for having me here. It’s super fun to be here. So I appreciate you taking the time. And, you know, I’m Dan McGaw. I’m the co founder of mcgaw.io. And as well as another company called UTM.IO, but I’m a serial entrepreneur. So I mean, I started my first company when I was 13 years old. And I haven’t stopped doing it since I’ve had a couple in house roles. So I was head of marketing at kissmetrics. Before starting these companies, before that I was head of growth and first employee at a company called Code School Comm. So I definitely have been around through a lot of different companies. But my real specialty is in the marketing technology, space marketing analytics. I worked with a lot of CIO CEOs, CMOS and stuff like that, and helping them build world class tech stacks and as well as getting their campaign tracking in order for their marketing analytics.

Chris Davis 4:24
Yes, yes. Great. And, you know, we were just i won’t share too many details. But we were talking about listeners, everybody, we’re talking about how Dan and I historically could make as good employees, you know, and there’s certain criteria that’s in place and you get the most out of us as an employee. I know for myself, I’m a very loyal and structure and compliant individual. And anytime that I’m in an environment where thats condusive, you get the most out of me, you know, but yeah, a few elements that you got to watch out for. These could take a quick turn. So, Dan, you’ve got two companies that you’ve been an entrepreneur since you’re you were 13. Okay, yeah, you want to 2020 something? 23 years, 24 years? Oh, my goodness, you’ve been in the space in the tech space for at least a decade, right? Tell me you want to know, 20 years, 24 years I’ve been in the tech space. Since since you were younger, you’ve been in the tech space.

Dan McGaw 5:36
My first company was it was a an online booking agency. So it’s just like, if you’ve ever seen the documentary fire? Yeah, I’m that guy, but not a fraud. But back in. So I started the one of the first online booking agencies for EDM music, right? So that was what I did. I was I made I made

Dan McGaw 5:56
money on the internet from the time I was 13. On,

Chris Davis 5:58
man, that’s great. So you’ve seen many versions of the Internet, and you saw many versions of business online. And I just, you know, I want to touch on it briefly. Because what I really want to do is hone in on helping people identify how to navigate the mar tech space, when it comes to selecting the right technology stack, right. And for somebody like yourself that has seen so many versions of software, so many different ways people use it. What would you say now, I mean, we go back 20 years, man, maybe 10 tools would be like, absolutely mind blowing, like, wow, you’re using that much software in your business. And now just like some people have 10 different landing page tools. It’s just like, Yeah, wow. Right. So going to the market has never been easier than what it is now. What have you seen? What What have you seen? Let me not say what have you seen? But what has served you well, Dan, as you have matured in your marketing, to not just focus on the product, but how to get it in front of as many customers as possible, you know?

Unknown Speaker 7:11
Yeah, you know, I think the the most interesting thing when we think about marketing technology, and we see a lot of it, right, like our job at mcgaw.io is to choose tools, integrate tools and operate them for businesses. So we build like big marketing, tech stacks, and also build small ones, right. So we get to see a wide cusp of everything from enterprise to startups, right. So you know, the biggest thing about your stack and like the tools are going to really help you grow is you have to pick a tool based upon the size of the business that you are and what you’re going to be capable of using. Because naturally, if you can use the tool and actually take advantage of it, naturally, you’re going to pay for something and get value out of it. And I think that’s the common thing that we see companies kind of mess up on is they maybe are not extremely technical, but then they buy the most fancy artificial intelligence tool there is, but they can’t use it, because they really don’t have the ability, the technology wise to set up an artificial intelligence tool. So you really have to kind of like focus on the things that you can use, you can adopt. And I think that’s a common mismatch, people get like caught up in the hype, right. And these sales people out there nowadays have been equipped with the challenger customer sale, the the challenger, sale model, and all of these different sales tactics to just manipulate and lure you into this corner to make you sign a check. And a lot of times you buy tools that you can’t effectively use. And the big thing that we always try to teach companies, if you’re really trying to scale your business, you’re really trying to do a bunch of different things, you have to use tools that you can obviously use. However, most of the time, you don’t want to use the most innovative thing that’s on the market, you want to be an early majority. But you do not want to be the innovator on the bleeding edge and trying to use every new tool because it gets really expensive. There’s issues that slow you down, things become blockers. And it just kind of like slows you down in the big picture if you don’t have this giant team to manage it for you. So we typically tell people start simple start small use things that you can actually take advantage of. Don’t try to be on the bleeding edge. Like I still don’t use web flow. I know a ton of people who use web flow, yeah, I still use WordPress, she gets the job done. I can hire plenty of people, I can handle it. I don’t have to worry about a lot of problems because everybody knows how to use it. And I make a lot of money that way. However, one of my really, really close friends signed up for webflow, three years ago and has regretted his decision ever since it’s expensive. It’s clunky for him to use, they are missing half of the features. He’s had to spend 10x more I’ve had to spend on design and development because he chose a web platform that was modern and innovative. And he doesn’t get nearly the value that I get out of WordPress. Well WordPress still everybody says it sucks. I don’t think so. Like I think it’s a great tool. So those are some of the easy things that I would just say from the stack that will help you scale is because you need to focus on what’s going to drive revenue, right. And at the end of the day, if you can’t use a tool, it’s not going to scale you.

Chris Davis 9:49
Yeah, yeah, you said a mouthful man. So many. So many points. I really want to want to hit hit because having the right stack is an absolute requirement. If you’re any product that you have, right? If you’re gonna go to the market at scale, you have to have the right stack. And I want to just kind of rewind a little bit, you talked about having not having technology that you can use and leverage. So one of the questions I’m on the record, one of the questions that drives me crazy is when I see somebody in a Facebook group, or in a community, I’m self capacity, hey, what’s the best blank? And it’s like, oh, who knows who you are, your capacity, your team’s capacity to implement, maintain, execute? Like it is the most lazy and irresponsible question that somebody can ask. But to your point, if you’re not selecting software relative to your capability, and your team’s capability, it’s practically impossible to walk away with the right tool. So when you’re, you know, you’ve got you’ve served so many companies, with your agency on both sides, you’ve seen a lot, like you said, from enterprise all the way down to solopreneur. What are some of the symptoms that that you can pick up? Pick up on immediately, when you see you know, what, you either chose a tool that was too big for you? Right, or you just have the wrong tool? in general? What are some of those common symptoms that you see across the board?

Dan McGaw 11:21
Yeah, I mean, you know, naturally, I mean, one of the hard things is, when you buy these tools, many of them even if you think about like marchetto, the average person is only going to use 20 to 30% of the tool, right and 70% of it goes wasted. And that’s kind of a common thing that we see with these tools, that people aren’t necessarily able to take full advantage. And you know, some tools you shouldn’t, right, like, we use Salesforce here, we’re probably using 40% of the features of Salesforce and 60% of it is like just there, there’s definitely things like that. But you know, the common things that we see is obviously bad marketing through personalization, bad marketing automation isn’t being done, or is being done, excuse me. And those are usually some of the key Crux that you see, people when they have these big suites, or even best of breed stacks, they don’t have a use is they’re not able to effectively do personalization. And they can’t effectively do automation, they can’t effectively pass data around through their stack. And that’s, that’s a key fundamental difference. Now, in the modern era of stack, if you can’t have the free flow of data and have data recycling all the time through the stack, you’re gonna get crushed by some of your competitors, because like, it makes such a difference to have free flow of data. It powers everything else. So a common symptoms are those and also bad analytics, right? We see a ton of companies that have just atrocious metrics, and I mean, they’d be better off, they lift their finger put in there, and they’re like, Alright, we’re doing good guys. Yeah, so

Chris Davis 12:41
those are the common ones that we see, man. And those three, if there were a nail to hit on the head, I feel like those three are, those are the three nails, right? Because terrible personalization, you can sniff out of nowhere, right? Like, it does not take an expert to say, hey, first name, well, you got it, you got a fertilization wrong, right. So many people get it wrong. And then just bad marketing automation, you’re just sending me messaging at static timing, you know, it’s not really catered to my experience, and then the data, but they all three work so well together. Because you’ve got a stack, right? If you have a stack with all of the tools that are tightly integrated, the data is synchronized. So something happens on line, your CRM is aware about it, maybe your your external analytics database, it’s aware of it. And then some project management tool. It’s all in sync, and it becomes this orchestra of technology where things are flowing smoothly. But if you jump on a call with somebody, and they have no idea of what just took place online, it’s just like, how did you not get the information? Why are you asking me for all of that information, you know, all over again, so great, great symptoms, and I would I want to highlight those for anybody listening to run your checks and balances. Because if you have three, there’s a good sign, there’s a good sign that you’ve got a stack that you need to revisit. You talked about analytics being recite, or let me say data data being recycled through the system. I haven’t heard of me been used like that. But I definitely the second you said it, I’m just like, that’s exactly it. Like it’s just propagating. It’s just over here. Now. It’s over here. Now it’s over here. to the audience. I think that big companies get this right. Everybody’s out for the data. Look at Google, right? Look at Facebook. It’s everybody wants to own the data. Just let talk to our listeners a bit about the importance of not just capturing it, but like you said, recycling it through so that you can get the maximum performance out of your marketing.

Unknown Speaker 14:48
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, our company’s mission at mcgaw.io is to help companies realize that their most valuable asset is their customer data. Like it is one of the most valuable things you’re going to have. It gives you your measurement, it gives you a personalized gives you everything. So really, really important there. And this is a key topic in my book. I’ll talk more about my book a little bit later. It’s called build, and ship. But it talks all about this concept and how to do it. Data recycling is really important. There’s this old adage that you’ve got to have the one system of truth, the one tool where we have our system of truth. And, you know, I’m not a big believer in that other than like having that data in my data warehouse and using like a tableau. And some companies try to like, oh, we’re gonna get all this data in one tool. And we’re actually the exact opposite of that, we think that you should be constantly trying to recycle the data around your entire stack, if Salesforce gets updated. There’s 26, other tools that needs to get that same exact data point, If marquetta gets updated, there’s 15, other tools that need to get that same thing updated. And what you want to be constantly trying to do is enable all of your teams with all of the data points that they can possibly get. So if a support ticket is submitted, and there’s a category on that, and there’s keywords in that that should be flowed into Salesforce into a certain place. So when sales goes to talk to that lead, they can see customers submitted 17, support tickets, categories, are these, these are the things that they’ve been reading on the support site. Okay, great. So we’re up for renewal. These are the common problems that they’re facing, we know they take advantage of these nine features, because we have our analytics flow in here. So sales is now equipped to do the deal compared to having to say, hey, support, what are their problems? Hey, CS, what’s the problem. So by recycling the data, and having a stack, which is fully integrated together, you’re gonna really, really create these crazy outcomes. And you know, for anybody who’s not familiar with kind of data recycling, and how to build a stack in that manner, I highly recommend checking out my book, we talked about with real threader, a really popular t shirt printing company, and we had across the offline and the online and make it all back appear into Salesforce. But what it was able to do was extremely equip their sales people to get on the first phone call and be like, Hey, we noticed that you were struggling with uploading a logo into the website, you uploaded seven versions of it, and then you selected 26 different colors, you know, I think a good opportunity would be to connect with one of our designers, and they can help you find the right color t shirt for the logo that you’re uploading. And we can get that all set up for you. That customer service changes the game, right? The fact that they have that Intel is so valuable and so important, because now you’re able to have a real conversation compared to Hey, you want to buy my T shirt. Like, it’s just by recycling that data and giving everybody that same Intel, whether they’re in support, sales, marketing, the executive suite, if you can recycle that to all of your tools, everybody’s got the data they need.

Chris Davis 17:27
Yes. So in saying this, I can see I can see your transition from techie to entrepreneur to CEO, right? And the reason why there here’s the reason why the central source of truth is like the goal for every developer, any tech oriented individual, they want all of the data in one place, it makes them sleep well at night, we’ve got a data warehouse that stores everything, right? That’s how you start. And then you migrate into entrepreneurship and you realize, okay, I think I need to see things, things need to be a bit more free flowing, marketing needs something, sales needs something, product needs something, we’re gonna have to start to use this data, not just in this data warehouse, techie person, right? And then the CEOs is like, hey, look, this is the way it’s gonna go. I understand everybody in the marketplace is single source of truth. No, no, the data needs to go everywhere. And this is, and this is what we’re gonna use to do it. And I must say, You’re the first person, you’re the first person that has made that statement that I’ve talked to, at least this year in 2021. But I would venture to say ever, man. And it wasn’t until you made that statement that I realized, I pass data everywhere, like it’s free, then it’s free to do it for you is one of the benefits of digital marketing. So why not put those tools to use, somebody submits a contact form, I send it to my project management space, I send the information, parse out what needs to go on my CRM, put that into the CRM, like I’m sending it everywhere, air table, I’m doing all kinds of things. I love it. Right? Because it’s like, and I and I didn’t realize I wasn’t relying on the single source of truth. Yeah, you just said that, you know, is that? Yeah, it is. It really starts to highlight the importance of the stack, right? So I know you talked about getting that information and storing it, recycling it through your system. So everybody is equipped right to whatever the next step is, everybody’s on the same page. And you said that and what I had this vision of is everybody dreaming of their business operating like that. And then some people cringe and was like, that’s not a some people cry, because that would never be me. So let’s just talk through Some basic considerations of when somebody is approaching a new tool for their business. What is the approach that you like to take? Do you have a set set of questions that you’d like to ask them? Or, you know, what does that process look like for you?

Dan McGaw 20:16
Yeah, really, really good question, you know, and honestly, the first the first thing that comes to mind whenever I’m approaching new tool is to say no, as much as I possibly can. So because at the end of the day, the sales rep wants to sell you something and like, No, I don’t need that feature right now, unless you really need it, right. But I think the thing that people kind of forget about is, they have an idea. They’re like, we need to get a new tool, and then they kind of go run and look for it. And they never really sit down and understand what are our objectives? Right? What are the key results that we have as a business that we’re going to accomplish with this tool? And what are the realistic things that we can do to hit our objectives? And our key results? What by using this tool, Okay, great, what are the things that we could do and coming to that meeting much, much more prepared, coming at this tool, knowing, hey, we think that this tool is going to be able to help us because it does automation in this manner. So we can improve our customer contact rate, we’ll be able to reduce the amount of time that we have to reach out to a customer by 20%, or something like that, which is going to turn into revenue over here. Most people don’t come to a tool with a goal, they come to a tool with a shiny object, and then they let the sales rep tell them what it’s going to do for them. And that’s where you get problematic is because like, we all have case studies on our website, right? I have the best case studies on my website, I honestly as a business owner want to have on the front page, we failed on this project. And we just want to be transparent how it happened. Because I feel like that’s a good way to build a relationship, right? We did really, really good, we did really, really bad. And we want you to see all of that and make the best decision for you. That’s just my my vision, right? That’s how I work. But when you go to a company, they’re going to give you the seven case studies of the best examples they’ve ever had. So you can’t allow them to tell you what results you’re going to generate. You need to go into that with realistic framing. And then after you have those like, Hey, we want to achieve these objectives, these results. These are realistic expectations, we’ve set for ourselves, the biggest thing that we talked about what tools right, the first question that we always talk about is going to be of course, how are you going to help us accomplish these objectives? And then of course, being extremely pessimistic about what they say. But the next thing that we asked a lot about, what is your integration flow? What is your API look like? How do we get data out? How do we get data in? What’s it going to look like when I have to fire you? Right? And those are hard questions, right. But those are some of the best questions you need to have. And like on our website, I did a multi touch attribution tool. Analysis, there’s like eight vendors on there that we did analysis, we talked about all the multi touch attribution tools, just google it magotteaux, multi touch attribution, whatever. The thing that we realize, when doing our assessment of multi touch attribution, every one of the companies and vendors is a different data architecture, they have a different way they store their data, that became the most fundamental part on how we needed to choose the vendor with how they store their data, how they visualize their data, and how we can report on it. So after you start talking to vendors, you need to understand their data set. Because at the end of the day, that’s what’s most important. There is outcomes, there is things but how you use that data, or how do you see the data? That’s going to be some of your biggest questions. And then what does this integrate with? And how do I get my data elsewhere? So going back to that data recycling, how am I going to make sure that my whole stack can work together?

Chris Davis 23:17
Hmm. Man, I love it. I love it. What listeners when’s the last time one of the focal points of your conversation with the tool that you were looking at was? How do I do? How do I get data out? How do I get data? And it is

Dan McGaw 23:35
Dropbox, request Dropbox? How do I get my data? And I’d be like, Well, you know, I mean, they’re the best locking company of all time.

Chris Davis 23:42
Right? So yeah, yeah, this is true, man. And the thing about it is, you know, when you talk about going to a showing up to a sales rep, or going to a tool and just letting them tell you what you need. It’s It’s so irresponsible, and it just sets you up for failure. And I always use the example of going to the grocery store, like, you know what’s in your kitchen. And you know, what you need, you know what you want to cook. Now, if you just went to the grocery store, just like hey, the first person there, can you just give me a list of food that I can make? A good chance that sales associate fill your basket with no problem at all? Good food too Dan, it will be good food. What can you do with the good food? It’s not that the food is bad. It’s that the context is wrong. The context is missing. Your business is the context. What do you need to do? How are you executing your business? What data do you need? And how is this going to enable you to get that data in store it? And then like you said, when I fire you what happens? that yes, it man, these are all important conversations. You know what it reminds me of it It reminds me of like, dating and marriage, right? And a lot of times people get so deep into it. They’re like, I should have asked these questions. Early. Yeah. You should ask those questions earlier on. That’s what this seems like. And that’s the field that I get when people just haphazardly jump, you know, into a software. And they don’t, they don’t run their checks and balances, man. So thank you for sharing that. I want to give you the floor on two more items before you go, man,

Dan McGaw 25:29
when you say racing, I’ve got to make a tic Tock video though. I’ve got to go into my local grocery store, go down to Publix, and be like, Hey, I don’t know what to make for dinner. Help me pick it out. And just record the reaction, like and then see what happens? And I’ll send that to you. That’d be great. Yes, it will be hilarious. You have you have to send me that one man.

Chris Davis 25:48
So you made two mentions, and I want to highlight them really quick. On the podcast, you mentioned utm.io. And then you mentioned your book, you got i o just walk, walk our audience through we’ve talked about data and recycling. But talk about the analytics and what utm.io allows you to do.

Dan McGaw 26:06
Yeah, so I mean, all of us have Google Analytics or some analytics platform that helps us measure what’s going on on our websites and our campaigns. And the biggest problem that you have is that data needs to stay clean for you to effectively measure it. And one of the problems that you have is that UTM codes, let’s use a UTM codes are the most common way to track links back to your website. So when you post on social or an email or on a billboard, you have a link that you need to track when somebody comes back to your website. And that’s what a UTM code is for, not going to dig into the details of exactly what they are. But they’re the most proliferates tracking thing on the internet period. It’s kind of boggling how popular they are. But the problem is, is if you don’t use the same UTM code on the same campaign, and you have one Facebook with a capital F and one with a lowercase F, it kind of messes up your stuff. And if you’re a big company that’s got seven different gios, and five, five different departments and in each geo makes it really hard to keep them in order. Usually companies are using like a UTM spreadsheet, and those are kind of clunky. So we created UTM, to help with that campaign governance, so that way, you can have 1000s of people creating links on your behalf. But they’re all using the same taxonomy. So it’s got UTM building rules, it’s got dynamic variables, UTM conventions, I mean, we have people from Unilever to Turtle Beach, to Landry’s restaurants to Shopify, that have hundreds of users that use the product, and then our free product, which is available for everybody. I mean, it’s gonna kill your UTM spreadsheet give you a ton of superpowers, you don’t pay for it. It’s really, really powerful, unlimited users. So highly, we wanted to make sure that the internet can clean up its game with campaign tracking. So

Chris Davis 27:37
we created Thank you, man. For that, I’ll add one additional layer to it, everybody. I also use UTM to personalize text on web pages. So you can get right, you can get so much out of UTM thank you for that resource, Dan. And And don’t worry, everybody, that link will be in the show notes. And then lastly, you mentioned your book. Yeah, how does one get access to to such a valuable gem? There’s

Unknown Speaker 28:07
a lot of fun, right? Um, so you know, I, you know, actually going back to this data recycling thing. Let’s talk a little bit about that one, the book talks about data recycling, how do you build a stack? How do you look at the tools and also gives you some tools you should probably go use. But I want to give you your audience a cool way to actually get a copy of the book. So if you pull out your cell phone, right, I’m going to give you a number and have you text the word to it, you can get a free copy of the book. So if you type in the number 415-915-9011, say that again. 4159159011. And just text the word martech, MarTech to it. And it’ll basically walk you through a bot that’s going to collect your first name, your last name, your address, and all that stuff to get you a copy of the book. So definitely do that. You’ll love the book, it’s really short, it’s got color pictures, you can draw on If you want, I’ll send you a pack of crayons, I don’t care. But the cool thing is, is when you go through that texting, but you have to understand there’s a bunch of stuff that’s going on in the background. As soon as you text that bond, your information is now being entered into our marketing automation system. It’s now being entered in our CRM. Soon as I get your email though, it’s also being pinged to a third party API to Now tell us who you are and all the information the internet knows about you. And then that enriches your profile. Then once that happens, it starts sending it to our other tools to be able to say, Hey, is this person a good lead? So the data recycling is really, really important, it will start sending alerts so like, hey, if you work at like a billion dollar company, it’s going to of course, then alert to sales and be like, hey, you should look at this email. Now. Nobody’s gonna reach out to you. We’re too busy to even have sales contact people. We have so much inbound deals, which is great. But it’s all about creating that harmony. And in my book, I talk exactly about that type of process. And it’s a super easy read. So I recommend people check it out.

Chris Davis 29:43
Wow, well, thank you for that say the number again that they need to text.

Unknown Speaker 29:48
Yeah, 415 915 9011 all you people in your car, like what is this guy doing? So anyway, that’s the number for you as well. And if you’re lazy and you don’t want to use your tech, just go to the website, there’s a banner at the top that says get Dan’s free books.

Chris Davis 30:06
Okay, great. Well, thank you, man, thank you for it. Thank you for coming on to the podcast and talking about the stack and recycling data. Man, I really do hope that this becomes more of a norm, right? More of a norm in the marketplace, because businesses need it. They need your data stored in various places. It even removes the failure points, right? You shouldn’t have a single single point of failure in your business. tools will do that. So make sure you have your data everywhere. Dan, thank you for the third time. Give us your website one more time, just in case somebody didn’t catch it.

Unknown Speaker 30:45
Yeah, and thanks so much for having me. And thanks for everybody listening to this. My website is mcgaw.io. So it’s like Tim McGraw. But no, our go check out the website, we got a ton of great content that will help you push forward in this journey.

Chris Davis 30:59
Yes, thank you so much. Again, everybody. As usual, links are in the show notes. Everything that you need will be there. Appreciate you coming on, Dan. Thanks for having me. All right. Hope you enjoy this episode with Dan and myself. And really what I hope you got from this is just how much it goes into just how many considerations and how important it is to understand these considerations when you’re choosing the right tool for your stack for your business. I cannot count how many times entrepreneurs on all levels, millionaires many times over to beginning errs, who only have a few 1000 select the wrong technology. It really hinders your growth. And it serves as a hole a hole in your bank account. So if you found today’s episode valuable in any capacity, make sure you share it, share it with with that online business owner just to make sure that they have a second look at their Mar tech stack and the considerations that went into selecting it. Maybe it was something as simple as somebody recommended the tool and they just went with it. Or they have shiny object syndrome, like Dan mentioned, and they just buy up everything. But outside of the tool you have to you also have to focus on the integration and how you’re going to pass data to and from, right, these are these are the considerations, these are things that we have to be mindful of. Now when we’re selecting our software, okay. If you’re not subscribed to the podcast, this is my official invitation for you to do so. And while you’re doing it, please leave a five star rating and review it will be greatly appreciated. Here at automation bridge. We’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers. Small businesses are in dire need of these marketers that have the ability to navigate technology, as we mentioned, assess the proper technology, but match it with your business strategy and deploy automated systems responsibly for rapid growth. So we’ve made it easy for you at the top of the podcast, I mentioned it but we’ve got one place for you to go. And you get all of the resources and that’s all systems go podcast.com you get the latest episodes, you have access to our amplify my automation packages that are dedicated to putting automated marketing and sales systems in your business over the next six months. We have a free Facebook group you can request to be a guest on the podcast or refer somebody in any resource or training that’s mentioned on the podcast. You can find it there one URL to remember get you access to it all all the time. And that’s allsystemsgopodcast.com. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. And until next time, I see you online. automate responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way. With your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:33
Welcome to the all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge, the place online for you to learn about Small Business Marketing and Sales Automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers. We have a link for you to find out more about that in all of the resources always available for every podcast episode. At Allsystemsgopodcast.com Do me a favor, make sure that you’re subscribed to the podcast. We’re in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts. We’re on YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. We are there. While you’re at it, leave a five star rating and review to help let the world know just how amazing this podcast is. But Furthermore, to help the Small Business entrepreneur, small business owner and entrepreneur navigate the space of automation more efficiently. This episode, my guest is Dan McGraw. And Dan is an award winning entrepreneur. He is a serial entrepreneur, a speaker and the CEO of mcgraw.io. io and analytics in marketing technology consultancy and SAS platform UTM Dotto, so he’s a CEO of both of those. And in addition, somehow he also finds time to be a 500 startups mentor. And he previously started the first business accelerator in Orlando. Okay, he’s a thought leader in the MAR tech world. And he is a cx. Al This is conversion experience, conversion experience instructor on the topic and having spoken at the leading marketing conferences and online events, including track traction conference and forget the funnel, his his expertise. And you’ll see in this episode, it really lies in helping businesses extract and interpret the right data to grow their revenue exponentially. So we had a great time talking about the importance of the tools that you select, and the data that they provide. So enjoy this episode with Dan and I. Dan, welcome to the podcast, man. Glad to have you on how you doing,

Dan McGaw 2:52
dude, I’m living the dream. Thanks for having me. I’m having so much fun today.

Chris Davis 2:55
Yeah, yeah. And I’m looking forward to recording this one because we, we got a chance to chat in the beginning on how we kind of made it back full circle. Right? Because I you know, I remember connecting with you. And maybe at the time, then maybe you weren’t, you didn’t have two companies at the time. Maybe it was just no, I have both. I had both. I just wasn’t talking about one of them at the time. So yeah, keeping it close. So when I when your you know, your agent reached out to me for the podcast man, that name sounds for me. So we figured it all out. Glad to reconnect with you, man. Let our listeners know, give him a little bit about your background and the businesses that you run.

Dan McGaw 3:40
Yeah, well, I mean, first, thanks so much for having me here. It’s super fun to be here. So I appreciate you taking the time. And, you know, I’m Dan McGaw. I’m the co founder of mcgaw.io. And as well as another company called UTM.IO, but I’m a serial entrepreneur. So I mean, I started my first company when I was 13 years old. And I haven’t stopped doing it since I’ve had a couple in house roles. So I was head of marketing at kissmetrics. Before starting these companies, before that I was head of growth and first employee at a company called Code School Comm. So I definitely have been around through a lot of different companies. But my real specialty is in the marketing technology, space marketing analytics. I worked with a lot of CIO CEOs, CMOS and stuff like that, and helping them build world class tech stacks and as well as getting their campaign tracking in order for their marketing analytics.

Chris Davis 4:24
Yes, yes. Great. And, you know, we were just i won’t share too many details. But we were talking about listeners, everybody, we’re talking about how Dan and I historically could make as good employees, you know, and there’s certain criteria that’s in place and you get the most out of us as an employee. I know for myself, I’m a very loyal and structure and compliant individual. And anytime that I’m in an environment where thats condusive, you get the most out of me, you know, but yeah, a few elements that you got to watch out for. These could take a quick turn. So, Dan, you’ve got two companies that you’ve been an entrepreneur since you’re you were 13. Okay, yeah, you want to 2020 something? 23 years, 24 years? Oh, my goodness, you’ve been in the space in the tech space for at least a decade, right? Tell me you want to know, 20 years, 24 years I’ve been in the tech space. Since since you were younger, you’ve been in the tech space.

Dan McGaw 5:36
My first company was it was a an online booking agency. So it’s just like, if you’ve ever seen the documentary fire? Yeah, I’m that guy, but not a fraud. But back in. So I started the one of the first online booking agencies for EDM music, right? So that was what I did. I was I made I made

Dan McGaw 5:56
money on the internet from the time I was 13. On,

Chris Davis 5:58
man, that’s great. So you’ve seen many versions of the Internet, and you saw many versions of business online. And I just, you know, I want to touch on it briefly. Because what I really want to do is hone in on helping people identify how to navigate the mar tech space, when it comes to selecting the right technology stack, right. And for somebody like yourself that has seen so many versions of software, so many different ways people use it. What would you say now, I mean, we go back 20 years, man, maybe 10 tools would be like, absolutely mind blowing, like, wow, you’re using that much software in your business. And now just like some people have 10 different landing page tools. It’s just like, Yeah, wow. Right. So going to the market has never been easier than what it is now. What have you seen? What What have you seen? Let me not say what have you seen? But what has served you well, Dan, as you have matured in your marketing, to not just focus on the product, but how to get it in front of as many customers as possible, you know?

Unknown Speaker 7:11
Yeah, you know, I think the the most interesting thing when we think about marketing technology, and we see a lot of it, right, like our job at mcgaw.io is to choose tools, integrate tools and operate them for businesses. So we build like big marketing, tech stacks, and also build small ones, right. So we get to see a wide cusp of everything from enterprise to startups, right. So you know, the biggest thing about your stack and like the tools are going to really help you grow is you have to pick a tool based upon the size of the business that you are and what you’re going to be capable of using. Because naturally, if you can use the tool and actually take advantage of it, naturally, you’re going to pay for something and get value out of it. And I think that’s the common thing that we see companies kind of mess up on is they maybe are not extremely technical, but then they buy the most fancy artificial intelligence tool there is, but they can’t use it, because they really don’t have the ability, the technology wise to set up an artificial intelligence tool. So you really have to kind of like focus on the things that you can use, you can adopt. And I think that’s a common mismatch, people get like caught up in the hype, right. And these sales people out there nowadays have been equipped with the challenger customer sale, the the challenger, sale model, and all of these different sales tactics to just manipulate and lure you into this corner to make you sign a check. And a lot of times you buy tools that you can’t effectively use. And the big thing that we always try to teach companies, if you’re really trying to scale your business, you’re really trying to do a bunch of different things, you have to use tools that you can obviously use. However, most of the time, you don’t want to use the most innovative thing that’s on the market, you want to be an early majority. But you do not want to be the innovator on the bleeding edge and trying to use every new tool because it gets really expensive. There’s issues that slow you down, things become blockers. And it just kind of like slows you down in the big picture if you don’t have this giant team to manage it for you. So we typically tell people start simple start small use things that you can actually take advantage of. Don’t try to be on the bleeding edge. Like I still don’t use web flow. I know a ton of people who use web flow, yeah, I still use WordPress, she gets the job done. I can hire plenty of people, I can handle it. I don’t have to worry about a lot of problems because everybody knows how to use it. And I make a lot of money that way. However, one of my really, really close friends signed up for webflow, three years ago and has regretted his decision ever since it’s expensive. It’s clunky for him to use, they are missing half of the features. He’s had to spend 10x more I’ve had to spend on design and development because he chose a web platform that was modern and innovative. And he doesn’t get nearly the value that I get out of WordPress. Well WordPress still everybody says it sucks. I don’t think so. Like I think it’s a great tool. So those are some of the easy things that I would just say from the stack that will help you scale is because you need to focus on what’s going to drive revenue, right. And at the end of the day, if you can’t use a tool, it’s not going to scale you.

Chris Davis 9:49
Yeah, yeah, you said a mouthful man. So many. So many points. I really want to want to hit hit because having the right stack is an absolute requirement. If you’re any product that you have, right? If you’re gonna go to the market at scale, you have to have the right stack. And I want to just kind of rewind a little bit, you talked about having not having technology that you can use and leverage. So one of the questions I’m on the record, one of the questions that drives me crazy is when I see somebody in a Facebook group, or in a community, I’m self capacity, hey, what’s the best blank? And it’s like, oh, who knows who you are, your capacity, your team’s capacity to implement, maintain, execute? Like it is the most lazy and irresponsible question that somebody can ask. But to your point, if you’re not selecting software relative to your capability, and your team’s capability, it’s practically impossible to walk away with the right tool. So when you’re, you know, you’ve got you’ve served so many companies, with your agency on both sides, you’ve seen a lot, like you said, from enterprise all the way down to solopreneur. What are some of the symptoms that that you can pick up? Pick up on immediately, when you see you know, what, you either chose a tool that was too big for you? Right, or you just have the wrong tool? in general? What are some of those common symptoms that you see across the board?

Dan McGaw 11:21
Yeah, I mean, you know, naturally, I mean, one of the hard things is, when you buy these tools, many of them even if you think about like marchetto, the average person is only going to use 20 to 30% of the tool, right and 70% of it goes wasted. And that’s kind of a common thing that we see with these tools, that people aren’t necessarily able to take full advantage. And you know, some tools you shouldn’t, right, like, we use Salesforce here, we’re probably using 40% of the features of Salesforce and 60% of it is like just there, there’s definitely things like that. But you know, the common things that we see is obviously bad marketing through personalization, bad marketing automation isn’t being done, or is being done, excuse me. And those are usually some of the key Crux that you see, people when they have these big suites, or even best of breed stacks, they don’t have a use is they’re not able to effectively do personalization. And they can’t effectively do automation, they can’t effectively pass data around through their stack. And that’s, that’s a key fundamental difference. Now, in the modern era of stack, if you can’t have the free flow of data and have data recycling all the time through the stack, you’re gonna get crushed by some of your competitors, because like, it makes such a difference to have free flow of data. It powers everything else. So a common symptoms are those and also bad analytics, right? We see a ton of companies that have just atrocious metrics, and I mean, they’d be better off, they lift their finger put in there, and they’re like, Alright, we’re doing good guys. Yeah, so

Chris Davis 12:41
those are the common ones that we see, man. And those three, if there were a nail to hit on the head, I feel like those three are, those are the three nails, right? Because terrible personalization, you can sniff out of nowhere, right? Like, it does not take an expert to say, hey, first name, well, you got it, you got a fertilization wrong, right. So many people get it wrong. And then just bad marketing automation, you’re just sending me messaging at static timing, you know, it’s not really catered to my experience, and then the data, but they all three work so well together. Because you’ve got a stack, right? If you have a stack with all of the tools that are tightly integrated, the data is synchronized. So something happens on line, your CRM is aware about it, maybe your your external analytics database, it’s aware of it. And then some project management tool. It’s all in sync, and it becomes this orchestra of technology where things are flowing smoothly. But if you jump on a call with somebody, and they have no idea of what just took place online, it’s just like, how did you not get the information? Why are you asking me for all of that information, you know, all over again, so great, great symptoms, and I would I want to highlight those for anybody listening to run your checks and balances. Because if you have three, there’s a good sign, there’s a good sign that you’ve got a stack that you need to revisit. You talked about analytics being recite, or let me say data data being recycled through the system. I haven’t heard of me been used like that. But I definitely the second you said it, I’m just like, that’s exactly it. Like it’s just propagating. It’s just over here. Now. It’s over here. Now it’s over here. to the audience. I think that big companies get this right. Everybody’s out for the data. Look at Google, right? Look at Facebook. It’s everybody wants to own the data. Just let talk to our listeners a bit about the importance of not just capturing it, but like you said, recycling it through so that you can get the maximum performance out of your marketing.

Unknown Speaker 14:48
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, our company’s mission at mcgaw.io is to help companies realize that their most valuable asset is their customer data. Like it is one of the most valuable things you’re going to have. It gives you your measurement, it gives you a personalized gives you everything. So really, really important there. And this is a key topic in my book. I’ll talk more about my book a little bit later. It’s called build, and ship. But it talks all about this concept and how to do it. Data recycling is really important. There’s this old adage that you’ve got to have the one system of truth, the one tool where we have our system of truth. And, you know, I’m not a big believer in that other than like having that data in my data warehouse and using like a tableau. And some companies try to like, oh, we’re gonna get all this data in one tool. And we’re actually the exact opposite of that, we think that you should be constantly trying to recycle the data around your entire stack, if Salesforce gets updated. There’s 26, other tools that needs to get that same exact data point, If marquetta gets updated, there’s 15, other tools that need to get that same thing updated. And what you want to be constantly trying to do is enable all of your teams with all of the data points that they can possibly get. So if a support ticket is submitted, and there’s a category on that, and there’s keywords in that that should be flowed into Salesforce into a certain place. So when sales goes to talk to that lead, they can see customers submitted 17, support tickets, categories, are these, these are the things that they’ve been reading on the support site. Okay, great. So we’re up for renewal. These are the common problems that they’re facing, we know they take advantage of these nine features, because we have our analytics flow in here. So sales is now equipped to do the deal compared to having to say, hey, support, what are their problems? Hey, CS, what’s the problem. So by recycling the data, and having a stack, which is fully integrated together, you’re gonna really, really create these crazy outcomes. And you know, for anybody who’s not familiar with kind of data recycling, and how to build a stack in that manner, I highly recommend checking out my book, we talked about with real threader, a really popular t shirt printing company, and we had across the offline and the online and make it all back appear into Salesforce. But what it was able to do was extremely equip their sales people to get on the first phone call and be like, Hey, we noticed that you were struggling with uploading a logo into the website, you uploaded seven versions of it, and then you selected 26 different colors, you know, I think a good opportunity would be to connect with one of our designers, and they can help you find the right color t shirt for the logo that you’re uploading. And we can get that all set up for you. That customer service changes the game, right? The fact that they have that Intel is so valuable and so important, because now you’re able to have a real conversation compared to Hey, you want to buy my T shirt. Like, it’s just by recycling that data and giving everybody that same Intel, whether they’re in support, sales, marketing, the executive suite, if you can recycle that to all of your tools, everybody’s got the data they need.

Chris Davis 17:27
Yes. So in saying this, I can see I can see your transition from techie to entrepreneur to CEO, right? And the reason why there here’s the reason why the central source of truth is like the goal for every developer, any tech oriented individual, they want all of the data in one place, it makes them sleep well at night, we’ve got a data warehouse that stores everything, right? That’s how you start. And then you migrate into entrepreneurship and you realize, okay, I think I need to see things, things need to be a bit more free flowing, marketing needs something, sales needs something, product needs something, we’re gonna have to start to use this data, not just in this data warehouse, techie person, right? And then the CEOs is like, hey, look, this is the way it’s gonna go. I understand everybody in the marketplace is single source of truth. No, no, the data needs to go everywhere. And this is, and this is what we’re gonna use to do it. And I must say, You’re the first person, you’re the first person that has made that statement that I’ve talked to, at least this year in 2021. But I would venture to say ever, man. And it wasn’t until you made that statement that I realized, I pass data everywhere, like it’s free, then it’s free to do it for you is one of the benefits of digital marketing. So why not put those tools to use, somebody submits a contact form, I send it to my project management space, I send the information, parse out what needs to go on my CRM, put that into the CRM, like I’m sending it everywhere, air table, I’m doing all kinds of things. I love it. Right? Because it’s like, and I and I didn’t realize I wasn’t relying on the single source of truth. Yeah, you just said that, you know, is that? Yeah, it is. It really starts to highlight the importance of the stack, right? So I know you talked about getting that information and storing it, recycling it through your system. So everybody is equipped right to whatever the next step is, everybody’s on the same page. And you said that and what I had this vision of is everybody dreaming of their business operating like that. And then some people cringe and was like, that’s not a some people cry, because that would never be me. So let’s just talk through Some basic considerations of when somebody is approaching a new tool for their business. What is the approach that you like to take? Do you have a set set of questions that you’d like to ask them? Or, you know, what does that process look like for you?

Dan McGaw 20:16
Yeah, really, really good question, you know, and honestly, the first the first thing that comes to mind whenever I’m approaching new tool is to say no, as much as I possibly can. So because at the end of the day, the sales rep wants to sell you something and like, No, I don’t need that feature right now, unless you really need it, right. But I think the thing that people kind of forget about is, they have an idea. They’re like, we need to get a new tool, and then they kind of go run and look for it. And they never really sit down and understand what are our objectives? Right? What are the key results that we have as a business that we’re going to accomplish with this tool? And what are the realistic things that we can do to hit our objectives? And our key results? What by using this tool, Okay, great, what are the things that we could do and coming to that meeting much, much more prepared, coming at this tool, knowing, hey, we think that this tool is going to be able to help us because it does automation in this manner. So we can improve our customer contact rate, we’ll be able to reduce the amount of time that we have to reach out to a customer by 20%, or something like that, which is going to turn into revenue over here. Most people don’t come to a tool with a goal, they come to a tool with a shiny object, and then they let the sales rep tell them what it’s going to do for them. And that’s where you get problematic is because like, we all have case studies on our website, right? I have the best case studies on my website, I honestly as a business owner want to have on the front page, we failed on this project. And we just want to be transparent how it happened. Because I feel like that’s a good way to build a relationship, right? We did really, really good, we did really, really bad. And we want you to see all of that and make the best decision for you. That’s just my my vision, right? That’s how I work. But when you go to a company, they’re going to give you the seven case studies of the best examples they’ve ever had. So you can’t allow them to tell you what results you’re going to generate. You need to go into that with realistic framing. And then after you have those like, Hey, we want to achieve these objectives, these results. These are realistic expectations, we’ve set for ourselves, the biggest thing that we talked about what tools right, the first question that we always talk about is going to be of course, how are you going to help us accomplish these objectives? And then of course, being extremely pessimistic about what they say. But the next thing that we asked a lot about, what is your integration flow? What is your API look like? How do we get data out? How do we get data in? What’s it going to look like when I have to fire you? Right? And those are hard questions, right. But those are some of the best questions you need to have. And like on our website, I did a multi touch attribution tool. Analysis, there’s like eight vendors on there that we did analysis, we talked about all the multi touch attribution tools, just google it magotteaux, multi touch attribution, whatever. The thing that we realize, when doing our assessment of multi touch attribution, every one of the companies and vendors is a different data architecture, they have a different way they store their data, that became the most fundamental part on how we needed to choose the vendor with how they store their data, how they visualize their data, and how we can report on it. So after you start talking to vendors, you need to understand their data set. Because at the end of the day, that’s what’s most important. There is outcomes, there is things but how you use that data, or how do you see the data? That’s going to be some of your biggest questions. And then what does this integrate with? And how do I get my data elsewhere? So going back to that data recycling, how am I going to make sure that my whole stack can work together?

Chris Davis 23:17
Hmm. Man, I love it. I love it. What listeners when’s the last time one of the focal points of your conversation with the tool that you were looking at was? How do I do? How do I get data out? How do I get data? And it is

Dan McGaw 23:35
Dropbox, request Dropbox? How do I get my data? And I’d be like, Well, you know, I mean, they’re the best locking company of all time.

Chris Davis 23:42
Right? So yeah, yeah, this is true, man. And the thing about it is, you know, when you talk about going to a showing up to a sales rep, or going to a tool and just letting them tell you what you need. It’s It’s so irresponsible, and it just sets you up for failure. And I always use the example of going to the grocery store, like, you know what’s in your kitchen. And you know, what you need, you know what you want to cook. Now, if you just went to the grocery store, just like hey, the first person there, can you just give me a list of food that I can make? A good chance that sales associate fill your basket with no problem at all? Good food too Dan, it will be good food. What can you do with the good food? It’s not that the food is bad. It’s that the context is wrong. The context is missing. Your business is the context. What do you need to do? How are you executing your business? What data do you need? And how is this going to enable you to get that data in store it? And then like you said, when I fire you what happens? that yes, it man, these are all important conversations. You know what it reminds me of it It reminds me of like, dating and marriage, right? And a lot of times people get so deep into it. They’re like, I should have asked these questions. Early. Yeah. You should ask those questions earlier on. That’s what this seems like. And that’s the field that I get when people just haphazardly jump, you know, into a software. And they don’t, they don’t run their checks and balances, man. So thank you for sharing that. I want to give you the floor on two more items before you go, man,

Dan McGaw 25:29
when you say racing, I’ve got to make a tic Tock video though. I’ve got to go into my local grocery store, go down to Publix, and be like, Hey, I don’t know what to make for dinner. Help me pick it out. And just record the reaction, like and then see what happens? And I’ll send that to you. That’d be great. Yes, it will be hilarious. You have you have to send me that one man.

Chris Davis 25:48
So you made two mentions, and I want to highlight them really quick. On the podcast, you mentioned utm.io. And then you mentioned your book, you got i o just walk, walk our audience through we’ve talked about data and recycling. But talk about the analytics and what utm.io allows you to do.

Dan McGaw 26:06
Yeah, so I mean, all of us have Google Analytics or some analytics platform that helps us measure what’s going on on our websites and our campaigns. And the biggest problem that you have is that data needs to stay clean for you to effectively measure it. And one of the problems that you have is that UTM codes, let’s use a UTM codes are the most common way to track links back to your website. So when you post on social or an email or on a billboard, you have a link that you need to track when somebody comes back to your website. And that’s what a UTM code is for, not going to dig into the details of exactly what they are. But they’re the most proliferates tracking thing on the internet period. It’s kind of boggling how popular they are. But the problem is, is if you don’t use the same UTM code on the same campaign, and you have one Facebook with a capital F and one with a lowercase F, it kind of messes up your stuff. And if you’re a big company that’s got seven different gios, and five, five different departments and in each geo makes it really hard to keep them in order. Usually companies are using like a UTM spreadsheet, and those are kind of clunky. So we created UTM, to help with that campaign governance, so that way, you can have 1000s of people creating links on your behalf. But they’re all using the same taxonomy. So it’s got UTM building rules, it’s got dynamic variables, UTM conventions, I mean, we have people from Unilever to Turtle Beach, to Landry’s restaurants to Shopify, that have hundreds of users that use the product, and then our free product, which is available for everybody. I mean, it’s gonna kill your UTM spreadsheet give you a ton of superpowers, you don’t pay for it. It’s really, really powerful, unlimited users. So highly, we wanted to make sure that the internet can clean up its game with campaign tracking. So

Chris Davis 27:37
we created Thank you, man. For that, I’ll add one additional layer to it, everybody. I also use UTM to personalize text on web pages. So you can get right, you can get so much out of UTM thank you for that resource, Dan. And And don’t worry, everybody, that link will be in the show notes. And then lastly, you mentioned your book. Yeah, how does one get access to to such a valuable gem? There’s

Unknown Speaker 28:07
a lot of fun, right? Um, so you know, I, you know, actually going back to this data recycling thing. Let’s talk a little bit about that one, the book talks about data recycling, how do you build a stack? How do you look at the tools and also gives you some tools you should probably go use. But I want to give you your audience a cool way to actually get a copy of the book. So if you pull out your cell phone, right, I’m going to give you a number and have you text the word to it, you can get a free copy of the book. So if you type in the number 415-915-9011, say that again. 4159159011. And just text the word martech, MarTech to it. And it’ll basically walk you through a bot that’s going to collect your first name, your last name, your address, and all that stuff to get you a copy of the book. So definitely do that. You’ll love the book, it’s really short, it’s got color pictures, you can draw on If you want, I’ll send you a pack of crayons, I don’t care. But the cool thing is, is when you go through that texting, but you have to understand there’s a bunch of stuff that’s going on in the background. As soon as you text that bond, your information is now being entered into our marketing automation system. It’s now being entered in our CRM. Soon as I get your email though, it’s also being pinged to a third party API to Now tell us who you are and all the information the internet knows about you. And then that enriches your profile. Then once that happens, it starts sending it to our other tools to be able to say, Hey, is this person a good lead? So the data recycling is really, really important, it will start sending alerts so like, hey, if you work at like a billion dollar company, it’s going to of course, then alert to sales and be like, hey, you should look at this email. Now. Nobody’s gonna reach out to you. We’re too busy to even have sales contact people. We have so much inbound deals, which is great. But it’s all about creating that harmony. And in my book, I talk exactly about that type of process. And it’s a super easy read. So I recommend people check it out.

Chris Davis 29:43
Wow, well, thank you for that say the number again that they need to text.

Unknown Speaker 29:48
Yeah, 415 915 9011 all you people in your car, like what is this guy doing? So anyway, that’s the number for you as well. And if you’re lazy and you don’t want to use your tech, just go to the website, there’s a banner at the top that says get Dan’s free books.

Chris Davis 30:06
Okay, great. Well, thank you, man, thank you for it. Thank you for coming on to the podcast and talking about the stack and recycling data. Man, I really do hope that this becomes more of a norm, right? More of a norm in the marketplace, because businesses need it. They need your data stored in various places. It even removes the failure points, right? You shouldn’t have a single single point of failure in your business. tools will do that. So make sure you have your data everywhere. Dan, thank you for the third time. Give us your website one more time, just in case somebody didn’t catch it.

Unknown Speaker 30:45
Yeah, and thanks so much for having me. And thanks for everybody listening to this. My website is mcgaw.io. So it’s like Tim McGraw. But no, our go check out the website, we got a ton of great content that will help you push forward in this journey.

Chris Davis 30:59
Yes, thank you so much. Again, everybody. As usual, links are in the show notes. Everything that you need will be there. Appreciate you coming on, Dan. Thanks for having me. All right. Hope you enjoy this episode with Dan and myself. And really what I hope you got from this is just how much it goes into just how many considerations and how important it is to understand these considerations when you’re choosing the right tool for your stack for your business. I cannot count how many times entrepreneurs on all levels, millionaires many times over to beginning errs, who only have a few 1000 select the wrong technology. It really hinders your growth. And it serves as a hole a hole in your bank account. So if you found today’s episode valuable in any capacity, make sure you share it, share it with with that online business owner just to make sure that they have a second look at their Mar tech stack and the considerations that went into selecting it. Maybe it was something as simple as somebody recommended the tool and they just went with it. Or they have shiny object syndrome, like Dan mentioned, and they just buy up everything. But outside of the tool you have to you also have to focus on the integration and how you’re going to pass data to and from, right, these are these are the considerations, these are things that we have to be mindful of. Now when we’re selecting our software, okay. If you’re not subscribed to the podcast, this is my official invitation for you to do so. And while you’re doing it, please leave a five star rating and review it will be greatly appreciated. Here at automation bridge. We’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers. Small businesses are in dire need of these marketers that have the ability to navigate technology, as we mentioned, assess the proper technology, but match it with your business strategy and deploy automated systems responsibly for rapid growth. So we’ve made it easy for you at the top of the podcast, I mentioned it but we’ve got one place for you to go. And you get all of the resources and that’s all systems go podcast.com you get the latest episodes, you have access to our amplify my automation packages that are dedicated to putting automated marketing and sales systems in your business over the next six months. We have a free Facebook group you can request to be a guest on the podcast or refer somebody in any resource or training that’s mentioned on the podcast. You can find it there one URL to remember get you access to it all all the time. And that’s allsystemsgopodcast.com. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. And until next time, I see you online. automate responsibly, my friends