Diagnostic Thought Leadership: Turning Assessments into Revenue EnginesDiagnostic Thought Leadership: Turning Assessments into Revenue Engines

Diagnostic Thought Leadership: Turning Assessments into Revenue Engines Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing great. How are you? 

Jeff White: I’m doing well, thanks. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Nice. We’re bringing together like two sides of the North Atlantic today. I feel like we’re, it’s just, I don’t know, in support of Greenland somewhere along the way. ’cause they’re in the middle. We should try to keep things current. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, it’s always important to be topical. 

Carman Pirie: Yes. Yeah. We’re nothing if not topical on this show. But now I’m excited for today’s conversation. I think the gist of what we’re talking about is something that as an agency we’ve deployed, it’s been in our DNA from, I think before I showed up. I think you were thinking about this type of work even almost before in the firm that kind of became Kula Partners.

So, you know what? It is just nice to bring somebody on the show that agrees with me, Jeff, is kinda what I’m saying. 

Jeff White: We’ll have to get Rich, the Producer, to ensure that we continue to find guests who meet your standard of approval. 

Carman Pirie: Look, people that agree with me only leave us about 10 more guests on the planet.

Jeff White: Then we’re done. Yeah, it’s all right. It’s only our moms that are listening anyway,

Carman Pirie: Nah nobody believes that. Alright let’s get on with it. 

Jeff White: Indeed. So joining us today is Maeve Ferguson. Maeve is a business owner with Maeve Ferguson Consulting. Welcome to The Kula Ring Maeve. 

Maeve Ferguson: Thank you so much. It is great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. Sounds like it’s gonna be a lot of fun. If this intro is anything to go on anyway. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, no, we got all the fun out of the way probably now. And we’ll just get into the boring stuff. But no, Maeve, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. And thank you for joining us. And to cut to the chase. We’re going to be speaking about, at some point in this conversation, the notion of diagnostic thought leadership and what we mean by that and how you bring it to life. But let’s just start by getting a bit of an introduction to you, Maeve, and how you came to do what you do and what you’re all about?

Maeve Ferguson: Yes, absolutely. If you hear the accent, I am from Ireland. So I live in Northern Ireland. I actually live on a horse farm. I have two tiny kids, so it’s a very busy life. Alongside my business life and my background and how I ended up here. I used to be an analytics jockey. It was a different chapter. Then I moved, and I trained as an accountant with Ernst and Young, so I worked in financial services in London for many years, and then I spent several years in the private equity industry. Ran a team of 47 people. Did that whole corporate chapter of life, climbing the ladder and all of those wonderful things.

And then a very long story cut short. I got very sick. I spent four years in bed in my early thirties. And then when I recovered from that, I just decided to be a bit of a cliche, but like a lot of entrepreneurs had just decided to do things differently. So I left my big high flying corporate career and jumped out on my own into this world that we are all in and I retrained as an executive coach, but I’m a very system driven person, very process oriented. I like logic and infrastructure. So very quickly discovered that I was really good at building infrastructure automation systems for our clients. So I then moved into the kind of quiz funnel world, what people know in the digital marketing space as qualified lead generation. And then over the last couple of years, I’ve really mapped up my own diagnostic approach to building assessments and diagnostics that allow big companies to route all of their leads that are coming into the company and get the right message and the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. Yeah, that is how I ended up here. 

Jeff White: My goodness the Streets of London being an accountant for E&Y to a horse farm in Northern Ireland. Honestly you couldn’t get more different if you moved to the Northwest Territories of Canada. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. That was a roller coaster. 

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah. I always say that I’ve lived like 10 lives in my 43 years, but wouldn’t change a thing, wouldn’t change a thing.

Carman Pirie: That’s one thing I’m actually missing about my twenties is I felt like you can pack a lot into a few years there where, yeah, I don’t know. You have more energy or something. 

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah. Young, free and single and No, no small children swinging around your neck. 

Carman Pirie: Exactly. 

Maeve Ferguson: I have the solution to that. That’s just easy 

Jeff White: How they change things. 

Maeve Ferguson: Exactly. 

Carman Pirie: In the world of digital marketing the notion of a quiz funnel or what have you isn’t new, but you are bringing a new approach or a different approach and a more methodical approach it seems to it. So I guess, start by, what do you think most digital marketers get wrong?

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah, so it’s a brilliant question and I think for me it is the, everybody knows the quiz funnel, quiz funnels work superbly well in the correct environment. Like what I mean by that is like one of our clients, they’re running like a million dollars a month to their quiz funnel.

They are making an obscene amount of money. But they are in the e-commerce space. Okay. So they’re selling physical products. They also work really well for early stage coaches, consultants, and service providers. But as we start to move into kind of the more sophisticated realms or where people are selling kinda multimillion dollar deals, we gotta make sure that we don’t have the what type of Disney princess, are you type quiz funnel? Okay. It’s just not gonna work in certain industries. It doesn’t have the gravitas that is required. It doesn’t have the sophistication. And also there’s a huge data play that the diagnostic assessments allow you to make as a company owner, because all of us right now, especially with what’s happening with AI, we all should be in the data market, not just worrying about lead generation and sales. So the lead generation and sales happens anyway, but the data play is actually the big move to make here. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that makes sense to me. And I think part of what I think sometimes separates a wise approach from a foolhardy one in this space is, because I appreciate you’re talking about the data that you get and how useful that is. But I feel like some of it’s around what to give as well. I feel like the best examples that I’ve seen of this kind of using a diagnostic to really deepen a relationship and build a level of connectivity to a prospect or what have you, are ones that seem to give as much as they get, maybe even more so. Does that tend to align with your way of thinking or? 

Maeve Ferguson: Absolutely. So I often get asked why diagnostics work so well as opposed to other kinds of the normal late magnets and the rubbish PDF that nobody ever opens. And, I always say it’s two-sided. So one element of it is with the level of intent. So if we think of it, somebody who’s going through a diagnostic if you’re spending anywhere from five minutes. Maybe sometimes they’re even like up to 30 minutes long depending on the niche in the industry and all of that type of thing. The level of intent of the consumer, of the user is so profoundly different from somebody who is mindlessly scrolling on Instagram and barely has to glance at their phone nowadays, and it opts in for you to go to your spam folder. You forget their name, don’t even remember that you downloaded it. The level of intent is completely different. So that’s one angle. So the person showing up is different. I actually love diagnostics as a filtration mechanism because the way I view it, and we do it for our clients, if somebody doesn’t have the wherewithal to sit for five minutes and answer questions about their business, they sure as heck aren’t gonna cope working with me and the infrastructure and the systems and the amazing things we’re gonna build with them. So I actually love it as a filtration mechanism. And the other side of it is the level of personalization. So when we see you’re going through and you opt in for a lead magnet, it’s like it’s not talking to you. It’s the same spray and pre marketing, the same copy that’s going out to everybody.

It’s not actually personalized to where they are, their specific set of circumstances, because everybody’s business is completely bespoke. And the beauty of the infrastructure and how they actually build these things is that we can play a completely different copy in front of you, in front of the next person, in front of the next person, that based on their results, on their unique set of circumstances, they see a different copy. Different support, different guidance, different pieces of giving and learning and people get so much insight. One of the things we often hear is that this is creepy. It’s like you’re inside of my head. How did you know I felt like that? And because it’s personalized, it collapses that knowledge and trust timeline. And because the personalized reports are so full of value. They just automatically leapfrog 10 steps ahead of the person that just sprayed and prayed the 1992 lead magnet. 

Jeff White: Where do you think that level of lead tool, or piece of its interactive content, but in some ways it is content, competing against those white papers as you mentioned. Where do you think it fits best in that process? If you’re thinking of a more manufacturing type company is it the sort of thing when people are just beginning to gather information. They’re problem aware, maybe solution aware, and trying to figure things out and do you think it’s a good tool there or is it better for somebody who has maybe done a little bit more research and is one step away from asking for contact from sales?

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah, so this is an amazing question and this to me is the beauty of this infrastructure because it allows for both, because essentially it’s a big giant writing engine in the back end, and the user can’t see this. But if somebody answers a question, I’m just like, new to this world, just trying to figure out how all this works.

As it relates to the manufacturing space, we are actually siphoning them off down a different route than somebody who’s just I’m here with $5 million to spend. This is what I need. Here’s when I need it. How can you make it happen? It actually acts as that engine so people can self-select out of seeing certain things based on the stage of the journey they’re at, but also their investment level. So say for example, for us, one of the things that, and it’s a completely different industry, but it’s the same principle, is that we have a lead classification system that only allows, so if somebody wants to come and work with us for our multi-six figure offer, people who have indicated that they have 20K to spend, don’t even get to see that. They don’t get that invitation. They don’t actually get that call to action. And likewise, if somebody is wanting to work with you at the multi-six figure level, or in your case, multiple billions of dollars, you don’t want to try to sell ’em your 10K thing, because it’s just a mismatch in the level of kind of handholding and exclusivity, et cetera, that people at that level want.

So the whole beauty here is that we can actually siphon off completely unqualified leads. In our case, it’s no problem. Here’s our YouTube channel. Off you go. Wish you well. They don’t actually get to speak to my sales team. Same for our clients. And then for those who have financially qualified themselves, then they can also be routed to see different calls to actions based on their journey. So if it’s just a nurture play, you can do that. If it’s just a wait list play, so they’re joining a wait list to be able to find out about new product X, you can do that. Or if it’s somebody who is what we would call a platinum lead. They have indicated the level of investment, it’s the right thing. They’re a perfect fit. They’ve answered all of the questions in what we call the right way. They then get flagged as a platinum lead and we have automations and everything where it’s set up that the sales team are notified immediately to go and white gloves handle that person completely differently to the unqualified lead who’s just kicking tires and trying to sniff about type things.

Carman Pirie: So I think I’m picking up what you’re putting down in that the diagnostic thought leadership experiences that you’re creating tend to span longer in the customer journey. I’m curious how many, like from a buying cycle perspective as an example and off a good number of our clients, and I find an awful lot of people in the. B2B manufacturing space. The idea of an 18 to 24 month sales cycle is not at all strange. So of course, it can be hard to imagine it. One interactive experience being deployed, as you look at the clients where you’ve been most successful in this approach, is there a sales cycle alignment or any kind of patterns that you see there?

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah, I think to answer that, it’s not really about the vertical that these are placed into. It’s more what is the strategy at the back end. So the last thing we actually do is build a diagnostic. And then we reverse engineer from there. So let’s pretend 18 months is a normal sales cycle. We don’t want to, it’s not gonna be a click and buy sales page at the back end of this thing. It’s not that, it’s just not that thing. Okay? So whenever we actually strip all of the sales mechanisms out, you wanna reverse engineer out of every single offer, every product, different price points. It might be a two month sale cycle. For some people it might be a week, some people it might be a day. It just depends on the industry. So what I would actually do there where it is like a really long sales cycle, you’re not using it as a mechanism by which to sell a thing that day. You’re filtering people into the correct nurture sequences.

So that over the next number of months you can hit all the touch points automatically you need to as a company. And then the whole idea was like, great, how can we carve that back from the norm that is 18 months? How can we collapse the time and make that happen even a little quicker? Because we have the infrastructure to know that these are the people in our pipeline here. Here’s who we’ve routed through. Here’s where every single human being in our pipeline, we know exactly where they are because we have that lead classification and writing system at the front end. 

Jeff White: I like that, we talk about this as starting at the money and working back. I really like that approach. I think too often people start at how do we get people there? What’s the end goal? And then we’ll figure it out. 

Maeve Ferguson: Just create your quiz hook and you’re like, that’s the last thing you do. Literally the last thing you do 

Jeff White: on that front when you’re creating these. Quizzes and funnels that way. Are you thinking at all about the notion of making it, I hate the word gamification, but are you thinking at all about making it fun to not like meta levels of engagement, trying to keep people engaged and using it, but just are you thinking at all about the user experience and how they’re feeling as they go through that?

Maeve Ferguson: You have to be honest, and it’s very bespoke. Again, this is why we only build these things bespoke. There’s no cookie cutter, push this button and copy and paste. It just doesn’t work that way. So it’s very industry specific. So say for example, we work with a big golf company and they have the loading screens and the golf swings and it’s all animated and like cheering them on as they go through and “you’re just like 62% of other people” and et cetera, et cetera.

Where you’re in a very serious industry, that kinda stuff is not necessarily gonna be appropriate. What would be more appropriate is where you’re sharing statistics or insights, or did you know in the manufacturing space X percent of such and such, some really interesting fact that not only positions you as the expert, you know what you’re talking about, but they’re actually discovering something that they didn’t yet know. Then it’s all subconscious that is all happening in real time subconsciously. They’re like, oh gosh, didn’t know that. And then they press keep going. And then they keep going and then you give ’em another little nugget. But we wanna make sure it’s sophisticated enough for the type of market that you guys are in.

Carman Pirie: It’s an interesting question, Jeff, because I don’t know, my mind always goes to, people always think about B2B manufacturing as being almost like boring technical engineers that sell the other boring technical engineers, and they clearly have no room for personality whatsoever. But if you talk to those engineers, you find out that’s not true, and they’re actually real people and all those things. So where my mind was going is that you guys were back and forth on that. I was just imagining what are the, have you ever been surprised by a level of a UX approach or something that was a little bit more personal and an incredibly professional or buttoned down environment?

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah. So, what I would always say is like the insight, I would call it the insight approach. So it’s like you’re giving them, and all of this can be personalized. It’s speaking to them and it’s just we got it. We see where you are. Did you know that you’re, 38% of people, or 92% of people are also X, Y, Z. Those little snippets of insight, and again, it’s to do with the aesthetic of the diagnostic and all of those sorts of things. You can make sure it’s positioned at a professional enough level for the industry that you’re in. So we want to tailor it up or down. Depending on the game you’re playing. 

Jeff White: Talk a bit about the automation that happens after completing the initial quiz. What are you doing there to continue to deepen that relationship and how are you bringing folks in from the organization that are receiving that lead intel?

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah, so I could talk about this for two hours. So I’ll keep to the Cliff notes version. Okay. So the kind of the bog standard 101 stuff, we have obviously the bespoke nurture sequences. Okay. So where people are going through, they’re getting a specific result by putting them into a certain category. Certain investment levels, et cetera. We then want to speak to them at the level that they’ve indicated that they’re at and also about the things that they have just discovered about themselves. Okay? So if they have gone through the diagnostic and it’s like you’re all in, and then you start sending them emails.

That’s stuff that’s relevant for C people that’s not gonna land. Okay. So the whole idea is that because we have this segmentation system on top of a funnel, we actually get the opportunity to have bespoke conversations instead of just generic spray and pray, let’s send the same email to everybody on our list and hope to goodness that something sticks. So that’s the baby 101 steps. Where it gets really exciting, especially with agentic AI. So we build a lot of agentic AI solutions for our clients. This is where you can actually start to have so much fun with not just the data that is coming through, but for example, we have agents running the analysis over what was at the top of the funnel? Messaging or copy that brought this person through, and what result did they get? What investment level are they at over time? What did they actually invest in and what did the agents then do? You’re able to analyze patterns of behavior as to what’s working at the top of the funnel. Here’s what’s bringing in complete duds. So then we know as it feeds back to the marketing team, go and do more and more of this, and less of that. Because as we run water through the pipes and you start to get all of the data outta the backend, it becomes this self-fulfilling. Self-optimizing machines that tell basically instruct how to do better and better and better. Okay. And the agentic AI is just growing at such a ridiculous pace. We now have the opportunity for that entire cycle, including the marketing and publication of everything to be automated as well. So it’s just running at the speed of light. But we also have the opportunity to, like lead scraping agents for example. We’re able to then look at the lead, we’re able to, agents are able to gather all of this information about who they are, their company size, company structure, employee size, et cetera, so that we can then do lead scoring from an additional perspective than what the diagnostic has given us.

So the diagnostics very much gives us that. Qualitative data and lead, qualitative lead score, but now all of these AI agent solutions can start to quantify that as well. We bring those two things together and we have a true lead score we can do. There’s so many things you can plug in there at the back end where you’re, because somebody’s been through the diagnostic.

We’re able to analyze that lead. We’re able to be brief. The closers of the sales teams on exactly where they are, what they’re struggling with, what they need, how the in level they can invest with. So there’s no big long sales conversations trying to figure out what people need and want. We already know all of that before the sales even happen.

Carman Pirie: I wonder, part of me thinks about when we talk, start talking about using agentic AI in this regard, in this manner. You can imagine, you said this is all happening at the speed of light. And so you can imagine a fast forward scenario where people are experiencing this in a larger number of their transactions, et cetera and. On the one hand, you could potentially make the argument that it becomes less effective as people become maybe a little bit more numb to it or a little bit more used to it. Then on the other hand I’m thinking we need to keep pushing forward and there’s always the gulf between those that are doing it and those that aren’t.

Maeve Ferguson: Exactly. Exactly. I’m just back, I was in the States last week at an Agentic AI private event. And I am well down this rabbit hole and the things that we talked about in that room would honestly boggle your mind. It is incredible and it’s not, here’s what’s common. It’s already here. The things that are, have been built, that are live, that are running, and normal people, what I call like normal people, just have absolutely no idea what’s coming from a business perspective. Like entire industries are gonna be just wiped off the face of the earth and like I knew this myself for our own company. I met the host of this event at an event last March, and just with the type of work that we do, we build a lot of infrastructure and funnels and systems, all of that.

Like last March I knew, I was like, I need to make a big, bold move here because what I currently do in its current form, and yes there’s gonna be hangers on who hold onto it for dear life, but in the next two to three years. That will be gone as an industry agency’s Facebook ad managers, all of these industries that are so commonplace and so normal now will be, and it’s not like they will be eradicated because, and it’s just better than the human beings trying to do the same thing. ‘Cause humans are humans. 

Carman Pirie: I wanna, because you talk about a lot of this, about compressing that, that time from initial contact to having built enough trust to proceed into a transaction and. It seems to me that a level of detail, knowing what people actually want, knowing what their budget is, knowing timeline, all those things, that’s part of that build, that’s part of that trust build.

But that’s not all of it. And it seems to me that some of it is time driven, like some of it is a bit elapsed, time driven. You can think as you can think, we can have a conversation today and you can feel as great about it as possible. But you’ll still trust me more if we’ve had three more great conversations. I guess. Do you think that there’s a limit to how much success you can drive? How, can you or have you considered how you allow for that? Time in this work. 

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah. So it’s the same, it’s exactly the same principle though, as we talked about earlier. It’s horses for courses.

Okay? So if you’re selling a $10 million thing, it’s highly unlikely that they’re gonna land on a sales page and press, click and buy like they would if it was a $47 widget. Okay? So it’s a very horses for courses conversation in that where it is a $10 million thing. It’s invariable that they probably will need two to three conversations. The difference here is the diagnostic gets you to have that conversation in the first place. Then you’re able to know where they are. They have, instead of looking between you and 15 others… not you personally, but you as in the business owner and 50 other competitors, and everybody looks the same. They feel the same, their branding’s the same. None of them are providing any value apart from just please, please choose us. It’s gonna be so head and shoulders above every single other competitor that you’re actually going to get to that initial conversation for the $10 million thing quicker.

And if it’s a lower ticket thing where the investment lies for it to be a faster sales cycle, then again, that can be built into the writing engine. So the whole idea is that they choose you over the competitor because of that level of intent, the level of personalization, the intrigue. Gosh, I was really curious. I’ve never, especially in a market where this is not normal play, it’s gonna be head and shoulders above everybody else in the industry. 

Carman Pirie: Do you find the impact in your work? What, I guess if you had to rate the impact, is it higher close rate or faster close rate. Which is more… 

Maeve Ferguson: yeah, so again it depends. Okay. So, it depends if you are, what are we optimizing for? We have to always ask that question. Okay? And again, if it is an 18 month sales cycle and a $10 million thing the speed you might carve off a few months off that, great. But it’s actually, what are we optimizing for? And every single client is different. So for the golf client, they’re selling a digital product. It’s a sale that day. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. 

Maeve Ferguson: Increasing, getting your bump, getting your one time offer, getting that seal that day and then selling them into golf clubs and things like that on the back end way, other end of the spectrum, 18 months, two year sale cycle. Okay. It’s not about are they gonna buy that thing today? What are you actually as a company, what are you optimizing for? And then you build the infrastructure to match exactly what we’re optimizing for. 

Carman Pirie: Sure. Yeah, no I totally get it. I was just thinking that there’s an, that it allows you to have smarter sales conversations and it may allow you to get to some of those conversations faster or progress through them faster.

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah, exactly. And it’s rid of the discovery call. That’s one of my favorite pieces is that there’s no, this awful term discovery call or let’s have a coffee chat. Every single conversation is a sales conversation, all of the preamble, all of the chat, all of it. Tell me where you are. Tell me what exactly you need. It’s already done. So your closers, your sales team, whoever they are, they’re actually going into that initial conversation, not having to start popping the hood and getting somebody’s life story to get to the point. We’ve collapsed all of that part of the process down.

Jeff White: Typically at this point in the conversation we’d be asking you about what’s next, but you’ve already described what’s next in a way that so many people won’t even understand, where it’s potentially going. 

Carman Pirie: But I appreciate bringing in the horses for courses reference from a horse ranch. However, I mean that really tied it all together in my moment. 

Maeve Ferguson: Yeah, the agentic is just, like it’s one of those things where it, there’s literally no words to even describe what, and it’s not even what’s coming. It’s like what’s already here. We were literally in this room, and this has nothing to do with your industry, but I just think it’s such a good indication. It’s nothing to do with my industry either, but literally they have an e-commerce store that is profitable every single day. The Facebook ad account, Facebook ad campaign, Facebook ad sets, ads, all the creative, all the copy, completely identified. Zero human involvement. Then it was all gamified. So it was just like through the screen and there’s all these little agents sitting behind their desks. All like in different colors and orders would come in, they were selling sneakers. Just again, proof of concept examples, selling runners and order would come in. And little fulfillment agent Shopify drop shipping, boom. Posted out, then tickets would come in. Do you have them in a size seven? Do you have them in the color red? My trainers arrived and they’re torn. And this little chief of staff agent was like running across the screen, getting the tickets and assigning them to the staff members who were also agents who were there. There was gamification involved, and they got tokens and prizes for doing a good job. So then there was like an agent leaderboard. And it was like you were watching something out of a sci-fi movie that this is actually real. I’m like, I can build one of these. ‘Cause I build these things all the time. What is possible? It’s just one example from an e-commerce business. But what is gonna be possible for all of us with the agent to agent economy where agents then start trading between each other. It’s like I’m missing a skillset, but your agent has a skillset and they start trading between each other. And I think especially for what I would call old school industries, what is being built, what is happening, what is normal right now in these kinds of fringe industries. All of that is gonna catch up so fast. The companies who are gonna survive the most are the people who have something physical. So they have manufacturing plants, things like that where ai, like obviously you might have bought building things in due course and all of that. I get that. But when there is something physical, I’m like, happy days.

I live on a farm. I’ll be able to grow my own food if this all ends badly, but, this is where this world is going. The industry that I am in will cease to exist in its current form because knowledge is no longer valuable. It doesn’t matter what, you can go into any clot or whatever, and it knows infinitely more than you ever could have known. So knowledge is no longer powerful. Taking action is part, and then the data play is absolutely everything. So this is the biggest play with the diagnostic is the data that you get from the back end of it as it relates to your market, is a hugely monetizable asset. And that is actually the play that we all need to be focusing on as this world changes into whatever it’s gonna become.

Carman Pirie: You’ve given us all a lot to think about. Thank you for sharing it with us today. It’s been lovely to have you on the show. 

Maeve Ferguson: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Enjoyed the chat.