Jeremy Weisz 13:02
Talk about the decision to start your own company.
Andrea Wolkofsky 13:07
So that kind of happened, didn’t really happen as like a planned thing. I had been working. Brett and I both had been working at another agency for quite some time about 15 years. And it was really good for many years until it wasn’t as the story goes, and we just had this really amazing opportunity to kind of go out on our own. And my husband had been talking to me for years about trying to do something different. My skill set being kind of straddled in sales and marketing. I’m a trained salesperson by nature. But I’ve been in marketing for so many years, I think that I have a unique approach when I speak to marketers because I do have that sales and marketing background. I think it was just the right time. And when the universe kind of puts all of these pieces in front of you, I think you just have to listen and Brett and I just kind of grabbed on the reins and we ran with it. When we actually launched the business, it was about six months before the pandemic. And so you can never really plan when you think it’s the right time. But you can never really plan for these things. So we braced ourselves not really knowing what was to come and 2020 ended up being a fantastic year for us and we built the business in the middle of a pandemic out of our living rooms.
Jeremy Weisz 14:28
How did the pandemic affect you? Because I know you have a lot of experience in healthcare. So certain industries that evaporated like restaurants and things like that. I mean, not completely because if they did delivery, but healthcare, there were good things and challenges and e-commerce. So how did you navigate the pandemic with your company?
Andrea Wolkofsky 14:51
Yeah, it was interesting because I think when the pandemic started, in marketing, what was happening is that everybody who was either a marketer or business owner all of a sudden realize, maybe I should be paying more attention to my website, am I being found online? I don’t even know what search engine optimization is, maybe I should be paying attention to it. And all of a sudden, people like us became very more relevant if we weren’t relevant already, marketers became even more relevant, right. And so besides some of the work that we were doing, and I can talk about that in a moment, because I was actually working with a very interesting healthcare company at the time that the pandemic happened. I think, in general, we became very relevant from the digital perspective, right? Because everybody was really worried if I can’t be out there. Like if I do have a brick-and-mortar store, or if I was doing things by go, if I was selling my business by going to trade shows or getting in front of people, and I can’t do that now, I need to pivot and think about doing things more digitally. And so folks like us, who had that experience became on speed dial with a lot of people.
Jeremy Weisz 15:59
So you mentioned the health care company, what were some of the things you were doing with them?
Andrea Wolkofsky 16:04
Yeah, so before the pandemic, one of the first clients that I brought in was through an older relationship that I had, there was a marketer that was working at RMA, which is Reproductive Medical Associates. So if you have trouble having a baby, you go to RMA, and you go through reproductive conversations. And so, about four or five months, we were going through a brand new campaign with them. And part of the issue was their perception in the industry. And so to change perception in the industry, you need to speak to clients and customers and understand what that perception is. So you can change it from a marketing messaging perspective. So we had gone through all of the research, we had done all the research spoken to mothers who had gone through the RMA program, mothers who had had two phone calls and decided not to mothers who had had a healthy baby through them. Mothers who had decided to use a different reproductive company utilized all that research and came up with a new campaign produced all of the marketing assets, and it was set to launch on, if I can go back to my notes, I’m pretty sure this is accurate. March 20th of 2020. This was a national campaign running in seven different newspapers, radio, TV. And on March 20th 2020, all of the healthcare facilities basically closed down, people couldn’t go into healthcare facilities, the entire campaign got stopped. And it was crazy. So for about two weeks, everything was quiet. And then RMA got approval from higher-ups than may right whoever it was to pivot the campaign and open their doors again, because they were deemed to be essential healthcare workers, for folks who are going through reproductive issues, we had to pivot the language a little bit in the campaign. So all of the assets had to be redone. And about two months later, the campaign launched. So, as long as we can be flexible, and we can work with our clients, I think they’re happy to have a team like us that can be super agile when needed.
Jeremy Weisz 18:16
You mentioned, Andrea, which is really an important point to the foundation of the work that you do, which is, the voice of the customer research that you do, and you worked with a manufacturing company. Can you talk about a little bit of how that works?
Andrea Wolkofsky 18:33
Absolutely. So QPSI there on our website, on our portfolio page, their contract packager, they were looking to go through a rebrand, go through a new website redesign kind of level up their look and feel. They also had a new 300,000-square-foot facility that they were opening this was about two years ago, they wanted a new name for it. And they felt like their entire new positioning needed to be changed. Well, to do that, you need to really talk to the customers that you’re currently working with. There it is, the brand experience center, we actually named the brand experience center and that name came out of the research that we did. So when you want to change perception or change your messaging, you need to talk to the people that are currently using you talk to the people that are engaging with your brand. And it’s not necessarily about understanding, are they happy or not happy? But it’s really about understanding why are they using you? What is the buyer’s journey that they go through when choosing you over somebody else who’s influencing that buyer’s journey because you may be talking with somebody in purchasing QPSI would be talking to somebody in purchasing, but who’s influencing that purchasing manager’s decision. So QPSI needs to understand that so we go through what’s called that voice of the customer. We do IDI eyes, which are in-depth interviews, where we really get to the heart like psychologically gets to the heart of the why of these decisions, we use that information to inform an impact, the new messaging and positioning that comes out of it. QPSI had a very unique understanding of, or position of what they wanted their new building to be. But it ended up being called the brand experience center. And that came directly out of what customers felt like they were getting when they went to the facility, they were getting an experience that elevated their brand. And we named it as such, we went through a full naming process and the brand experience center came out on top.
Jeremy Weisz 20:38
Are there any past examples? I don’t know, shock, maybe a little bit too strong. But they were shocking that came out of maybe just the company that came out of this, the voice of the customer in like, it’s so important, actually, someone emailed me the other day, and I was looking at their website, and I have some understanding of what they do. And I know people who need the service. But I felt their website didn’t speak to the customer at all. I was like, do they have they talked to the customer like these are not the pain points. When I read it, it was kind of a generic website, I’m like, I think I could write their homepage better. Just by and I talked to one person for 10 minutes about the pain they were experiencing, it wasn’t showing on their websites, this is like mission critical for a company because someone hits their page. And that’s the experience they’re having, and if it doesn’t speak to them, they’re bouncing off and they’re going to someone else.
Andrea Wolkofsky 21:36
I’ve actually spoken to people about that I have to kind of be careful if I’m not engaged in like a discovery call or a sales call with them. But if I do go to somebody’s website, and then I have a conversation with them about what they do, and I don’t see that on their website, I will very tactfully bring that up. And sometimes they know it and they say, oh, yeah, we’re in the process of a redesign, or those, they’ll kind of like get a little defensive. But it’s the first thing that I noticed, because your messaging has to resonate with the people that you’re talking to, right. So we were doing some work for a technology company, a software consulting technology company a couple of years ago, they have since changed over their leadership and their management. So I’m not going to name them, but going through the voice of the customer engagement research project, their customers saw them as a consulting business first, they saw themselves as a technology business first. And so they felt like their point of entry was their tech, but their customers saw them as their point of entry as their consulting. And so at some point, you have to marry that together and decide who do you want to be. Our position is you should always listen to your customers. It’s not what you want to say to people, it’s what they want to hear, right. And sometimes that means having to pivot, your business, your positioning, they chose to go with what they wanted to say not what their customers wanted to hear, I can’t change that I can only give them the insights. Right. But that was something that came up during the course of the research that we felt was very interesting. But at the end of the day, the client, they get to make the final choice.
Jeremy Weisz 23:19
That is interesting, that they would make that this I mean, because they pay you money. It’s a lot of time, effort and energy. How often does that happen? Where you give them the insights? And then like, no, we’re gonna go with what we have, right?
Andrea Wolkofsky 23:34
It doesn’t happen very often, I would say a good part of the time, what will happen…
Jeremy Weisz 23:39
It’s not that you’re making the SOP, their actual customer? This is what they’re saying.
Andrea Wolkofsky 23:44
Exactly. Yep, exactly. So I would say most of the time, the research will validate most of what a company knows, which is what should happen, right? Because you should know your business. But very often, there’s going to be some nuggets of information that come out of that research. And that’s the information that should bubbled to the top that you use to differentiate yourself in your marketing, because those nuggets of information is likely the differentiator between yourself and your competition, because it’s specific to what your customers are saying about you. So it doesn’t happen very often. I mean, since we started the business, I could probably think that’s probably the only time that we went through a research project where they completely said, well, we heard what the customer said, but we kind of want to go this direction with their lead messaging. Now they still utilized consulting as part of what they do. They just didn’t use it as their lead.
Jeremy Weisz 24:40
Andrea, I’m curious from the voice of the customer research. I’m sure it depends. But how long does that take? Are there a certain number of customers or stakeholders that you want to interview? A minimum that you want to make sure that you get enough data?
Andrea Wolkofsky 24:55
Yeah, so I think a lot of times when people hear research they hear we don’t have Time for this, it’s going to cost a lot. And it’s going to take a lot of, too much time and too much money, which is absolutely not true. So you can do a very quick research set with 10 to 15 IDI is 15 to 20 IDI and you can get a really good sense of what’s happening from a customer perspective. If a client has a little bit more time or there’s a little bit more, let’s say it’s a new product launch, or it’s a completely new industry that they’re going into, you probably want to make that research set a little bit longer, you probably also want to do quantitative and qualitative research. But if we’re just starting to like change, new messaging, or maybe do a rebrand or change perception, we really just need a short, small research set to hear what some of these customers and non-customers, so let’s say you had a customer that left, but maybe you’re still on good terms with them, let’s talk to them, right? If they’re gonna get on the phone with us and understand why maybe your business changed, and they weren’t happy, maybe there was something within the customer service that changed and they were unhappy. All that information, whether it’s positive or negative, is really good feedback for the client.
Jeremy Weisz 26:07
How many companies used those insights, because I could see a lot of applications, not just on website, but also, you know, sometimes I’ll look at someone’s LinkedIn profile or the company’s LinkedIn profile, and it doesn’t really say exactly what they do. It’s something generic. So how are people? How have you found some of these companies using the insights?
Andrea Wolkofsky 26:28
Yeah, so what we try and do is make our research very actionable. I know that you can probably talk to folks that will use very large research and consulting companies, and they’ll be given a 160-page research document at the end, and the clients don’t know what to do with it. That’s not the type of research that we’re talking about. And we’re gonna give you a deck that’s maybe six or eight pages long, which provides the research report of what we heard in those interviews. And right from there, you’re going to see actionable messaging and outcomes that you can utilize taglines positioning, pillars of messaging. So for your different audiences that you’re talking to. It might be partners, it might be vendors, it might be the different audiences. All of that is going to be very actionable coming out of the research. And that is critical for us. Because research is not something that you could measure, right? You can look at a website design, and you can say, yeah, that looks great or not, although it could be very subjective. Digital can be measured, research can’t really be measured, it’s very foundational. So what we want to do is make sure that when somebody does come out of their research, they have actionable insights that they can move on very quickly. So for example, if you look at QPSI, pure performance packaging is their new tagline that directly came out of the research that we did. So it allowed us to go right into the new messaging. And pure performance packaging is something that no other packager can say, in a way that QPSI can say it, it’s very authentic. And that messaging came directly from their customers’ voices.
Jeremy Weisz 28:13
Like see the software, I could see the voice of customer research. But then digital marketing, I know you worked with an insurance company, what, what did you do in the realm of digital marketing?
Andrea Wolkofsky 28:27
Yeah, so we’re in the process right now. And working with a large insurance company, when we started working with them, they were not using outside agencies support for their digital, and they have a couple of different lines of business manufacturers, contractors, etc, that they focus on for their different audiences, right for their agents to write these lines of businesses. They were already working either internally or maybe with another agency on one of their lines of business. And so what they did for a six-month test project was give us one of their other lines of business. And they said, let’s start small. Let’s see what you can do. And we’ll compare, after six months, our results with them are doing so well from a search social display LinkedIn campaign, that they’re now going into 2024 will be turning over their brand, and all of their lines of business over to us to manage all of their digital campaigns. So I think what will happen when we engage with a client and test projects are great, we love them, because we’re always trying to do well with them. We could start small with budgets that are manageable, and we can show really effective results very quickly. And then we can also give them opportunities to compare what they’re currently doing in-house, how their campaigns are set up. How areas where they might be wasting and spending budgets that they shouldn’t be different ways that we could utilize their dollars better. And then when they can compare those results, they can make a choice to say, we either want to continue doing what we’re doing, or we want to move our campaigns over to you, because we know that we’re going to see better results, more engagement, higher leads. And ultimately, that’s the goal.
Jeremy Weisz 30:17
With that particular example, was it paid social was that the…
Andrea Wolkofsky 30:21
Paid search social display, LinkedIn, Reddit, actually, after two months, we decided the LinkedIn campaign wasn’t working, not working, but it wasn’t performing as well. So we moved some of those budget dollars over to a different part of the campaign. And again, when you’ve got the right vendors and the right partners working on campaigns like this, they’re touching the campaign every single day, they’re looking at the dollars, they’re looking at the areas where the budgets are being spent, and seeing where they’re spending that is not performing as well as it should be, and making those pivots very quickly. Right. So with digital, I think you have that opportunity to spend, pivot, optimize, and make decisions if you’re utilizing the right team. And I’ve seen folks not utilizing the right team and kind of get burned.
Jeremy Weisz 31:11
I’m sure it depends on the industry. But what have you seen as some underutilized ad platforms? You mentioned Reddit, actually, someone emailed me a couple of weeks ago. I’m like, oh, Reddit, as advertised, I don’t even think of Reddit as advertising. What are some underutilized platforms people should be thinking about?
Andrea Wolkofsky 31:31
So it’s interesting, because people will say to me, what are the best platforms? Where should I be like, should I be on TikTok? Should I be on Snapchat, and it’s like, just because there’s eight, nine, 10 different platforms and channels out there, that doesn’t mean you should be on all of them. Right? So for shyft, you’ll only find me on LinkedIn, my business audience are marketers of mid and large-sized companies, I’m going to reach them from a business perspective on LinkedIn. That doesn’t mean that my client, who is a marketer at this insurance company, in her spare time is not scrolling on Facebook, she probably is. But that’s not where she wants to hear about business from shyft. So I’m not going to target her there. Right. And so for me, when I’m talking to a company, I want to understand who their audience is. And that’s one of the things actually, that we’ll do in that voice of the customer research is understand where do those customers and clients hang out on social media? Where are they engaging with their content? Where do they like to consume content? Where are the channels that are going to be the most effective, so we can then go back to the clients and say, look, you’re on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and you don’t need to be on Twitter, because you’re not getting any engagement there and your client, we spoke to a handful of your clients, and none of them even care to engage with content on Twitter, with your brand, it doesn’t mean with other brands, it’s not going to be effective, but with your brand, it might not be the best. So why waste your time and money on that brand? So I think it’s a very customizable conversation, depending on who the client is and where their customers are.
Jeremy Weisz 33:11
Andrea, I want to talk about you working on a scholarship campaign. But related to that, which we’ll get to in a second. These companies you work with have a team of in-house marketers. So I’m curious what makes them decide to yes, we’re going to use you as opposed to we’re going to do it in-house because I’m sure if they’re thinking about it, can we do this in-house versus not? What are some of those reasons why they’re like, No, we’re not going to do this in house versus you shyft.
Andrea Wolkofsky 33:47
So I think first of all, and I don’t want to speak for all in-house marketing teams, because I love in-house marketing teams, I think they’re amazing, because I work with them, and I partner with them. And I never want to put them out of business. Right? I think my job is to partner with them and be an extension of their team, if you will. I think those in-house teams might sometimes have blinders on in the sense of, if I’m hired to be at this company, I should be hired to be able to do everything. And it’s impossible for one marketer to be able to do everything in marketing, right? It’s just impossible. It’s also why it shyft, I’ve got a handful of vendors and partners and freelancers that surround me and make me look better and perform better because there’s experts in the field that do individual things that much better. My job is to make sure that I know who they are, and I can bring them in at the time that my clients need them. Right. So when you’re talking about this healthcare company, that we were doing a scholarship campaign for them. There’s two parts to this campaign. It was creating the assets for the campaign, the website, the print material, the video talking about the scholarship campaign for these kids, but then it’s the marketing of the campaign, we gave them scopes for both, they moved ahead on just creating the assets and said that they would do the marketing on their own. Two months after the marketing on their own happen, they only had 26 applications that they brought in, which was clearly not enough for them to make any type of decision for who was going to get the scholarship. So what we did was we created a search engine, a paid search engine optimization campaign, not organic, because it needed to be very quick. So we did a paid advertising campaign. So it’s called Search Engine Marketing, and a PR push. I have a PR person, listen, there’s some very large PR companies out there who I love and I partner with and they’re referral partners for us. And they have a place with very large enterprise businesses. But there’s also individual entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, that run smaller PR firms that for a campaign like this are fantastic, because what they’re doing is she is literally following high school guidance counselor’s on a one-to-one basis, letting them know about the scholarship campaign. And that’s exactly what she did. And in the first 30 days, we saw a 15% click-through rate over 1500 impressions on the ads that we ran. And in a two month time period after running the campaign. We got from there 26 applications to 383 applications in eight weeks. It was amazing.
Jeremy Weisz 36:30
How do you communicate with those marketing teams? Because I could see if I was them. And you’ve been there, you were on one of those teams, when you workflows or companies, you’re kind of on their turf, and you want the person least I would want to feel valuable and feel like okay, should I be the one doing everything? Even if I’m not, I don’t want someone stepping on my toes in my territory? How do you communicate to them so that, because even in I think, the best of scenarios the person yes, we’re ready to go, there’s still in the back of everyone’s mind, I want to be valuable. And I don’t want someone necessarily stepping on my toes when it’s my, project or this is my actually, the task I’m gonna be working on.
Andrea Wolkofsky 37:29
It’s interesting with marketers on these teams, I have never encountered a situation where they feel like I’m trying to take over their job or they’re not willing to work with me. I mean, they have final approval on everything. They’re the ones providing me the briefs, the background information, we’re working together, I kind of come in, and I’m an extension of their team, right? The only time that I actually ever had that situation was actually not while I was at shyft, but while I was working at another agency, I actually had, I was working with another company and I had a designer who did not like working with another marketing team. He was an in-house designer. And I think he kind of felt like people were stepping on his toes, right. But for the most part, at shyft, at least, in the four years that I’ve been doing this. And again, I come in from a consultative basis, they usually have some sort of gap that they’re looking to have filled. And I can fill that for them. And if I can do that, I’m making them look really good to their bosses and their executive team. And at the end of the day, if we’re helping their sales team be successful, because we’re filling the funnel from a lead gen perspective, then everybody wins. And so nobody’s looking at us like we’re trying to encroach on their territory, they’re actually looking at us as a partner that they want to keep on their team.
Jeremy Weisz 38:51
Love it. From a sales perspective, you have a lot of experience in sales. I love to hear favorite sales story that you learn from it could be a Chevy could be with another company that you remember
Andrea Wolkofsky 39:06
A favorite sales story. I don’t think this is a sales story. But my very first sales job and my husband laughs at this all the time. My very first sales job was with Aetna, US healthcare. So if I don’t know if you’re outside of New Jersey, if you don’t know at all,
Jeremy Weisz 39:24
I mean, here there’s that know for sure.
Andrea Wolkofsky 39:26
Okay, so years ago, this is 99 I think because when I got that job, I was an entry-level salesperson. I had no sales experience. They take these like brand new kids that want to be in sales, and they send you away for three weeks to Bluebell, Pennsylvania and they train the hell out of you. They do one week of sales training, one week of Aetna product training, and then one week, I don’t know something else and you come back and you’re like a experts salesperson. Well, my job was to sell health insurance to small businesses that had two to 50 employees literally knocking on doors. Well, Aetna’s logo is the apple. Right at the basement level of Aetnas. Office was a was a refrigerated floor of Apalis. And every morning, you had to show up with your company car that they gave you and open up your trunk and somebody would come out with cases of apples to fill up your trunk. And then you left to go into your territory. And you did knock on doors and walk in with your pamphlets and your business card and an apple and leave it on everybody’s desk. And at the end of the day, if you want apples leftover you either brought them home or you gave them to your family or you made pie I don’t know. We just everything smelled like apples and everything was all about the Aetna apple.
Jeremy Weisz 40:50
What did you learn selling for Aetna.
Andrea Wolkofsky 40:54
So what I learned was foundational sales. I learned how to overcome objections, I learned about dial days, I learned how to be competitive in sales, I learned how to, I think how to hone my sales practice, which again, has turned out to be a very consultative sales approach, understanding what a client needs versus telling them what I think they need. And I think that has served me well as I’ve gotten into my own business. But I don’t think I can do what I do now if I didn’t learn the foundation. And that’s what I learned at Aetna, which was really foundational sales training one-on-one.
Jeremy Weisz 41:39
I have one last question. It’s kind of a combination of two questions. But before I ask it, Andrea, I want to point people to check out partnerwithshyft.com, he sought on the websites partnerwithshyft.com, to learn more. And my last question kind of is in that realm, which is resources, like your favorite resources, that can be books, business sales, whatever, and then mentors. So what are you some of your favorite resources, books, and mentors that have helped you throughout the years?
Andrea Wolkofsky 42:15
So I use a lot, I use LinkedIn a lot from a resource perspective, I definitely learn a lot just by scrolling through LinkedIn and hearing different books that people read or different videos that people watch. I mean, I definitely use it. It’s easy, it’s light, it’s consumable. I can scroll through very quickly and find good tidbits of information, things that I didn’t know about, if I want to dive in a little bit more I could. So LinkedIn is probably my primary source of like starting information. From a mentor perspective, I definitely feel like over time, I have found sometimes it could be a client that I work with, or a vendor that I work with, but I really not that I don’t love, men in business, so don’t take this personally. But I really love working with women who have successful businesses that I can learn from because, you take somebody like Niki, she’s been in business 20 years longer than me, she has run a successful business, she’s seen the ups and downs and the pros and cons and you spend a half an hour talking with her and I can learn so much about my business and things that I can do. And it allows me to get so much more empowered about continuing on this journey that I’m on. Every time I talk to somebody who has kind of been down that path before me, I learned that every day I have a lot more to learn.
Jeremy Weisz 43:45
Who’re still their favorite women business owners that maybe you know them maybe it’s just someone you’ve learned from, from a distance.
Andrea Wolkofsky 43:55
I definitely love following folks like, you’re gonna put me on the spot for names. But like the woman who started Spanx, Sara Blakely. Yeah, like I love like folks like that, like, I watched Shark Tank a lot. And I love listening to stories like that about just how they failed, how they got up again, how they started, like, stories like that are super inspirational. And certainly I’m not looking to have shyft, you know, be like that what we’re looking to do with shyft is just continue to work with businesses and help them with their marketing and be really successful. Helping other businesses be successful. But I think every time I look at other businesses that have kind of come before me, I definitely can take some tips away, which is really good.
Jeremy Weisz 44:44
What about tech stack? Software’s that you like to use? You mentioned, obviously, LinkedIn as a platform. What are some other tech stack you use for your company?
Andrea Wolkofsky 44:54
Yeah, so for me, I use Canva. I mean, I have a designer, so I’ll use Canva for like really quick little things, but anything that I need to look nice I’ll use my designer but Canva is fantastic. I use Hootsuite for my social media postings and analytics, which is great. We use Slack obviously a lot. I use MailChimp you know for my emails so you know a lot of the we use HubSpot kind of go back and forth sometimes between HubSpot and MailChimp. So, we use a lot of the same basic technologies that again for our business being the size that we are kind of works really well for us. Apollo, I use Apollo for lead gen.
Jeremy Weisz 45:43
Andrea, I want to be the first one to thank you, everyone check out the website partnerwithshyft.com and more episodes of the podcast. And thanks, Andrea. Thanks, everyone.
Andrea Wolkofsky 45:54
This is amazing. Thank you so much for your time
