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Helping SMBs Scale Smarter Through Fractional CMOs and AI with Joseph Frost, MBA · Sales Against the Odds

• [00:00:00] Joseph Frost: Buyers want simplicity. They want to show up... You know, if you're thinking of the web conversion, which is just one small channel of the overall, marketing tactics, when someone gets to your site, you got about two and a half seconds to get their attention and make them decide whether they should stay or do something. [00:00:30] Lee Brumbaugh: Welcome everyone to episode of Sales Against the Odds. I'm your host of Sales Xceleration CEO, Lee Brumbaugh. I am very excited to have Joe Frost joining us today. He is the co-founder of yorCMO, a close-- company that w- has worked closely with Sales Xceleration. If you need sales and marketing together, we know they go hand-in-hand, and Joe's company has done a great job in supporting us through that with, the SMB community. [00:00:55] Lee Brumbaugh: Joe, thank you so much for joining us today. [00:00:57] Joseph Frost: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Lee. Really excited about this. [00:01:00] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. So Joe, just talk to me as, as the co-founder. Would love to, from your perspective, just talk to me how you got into this space. Like, talk to me about the evolution of your company, how you saw the need, how you brought it in the SMB community. Just love to hear your s- your starting story of how yorCMO really got off the ground and, and grew to where it is today. [00:01:18] Joseph Frost: Yeah, that's a fun story. I'm, you know, I'm a serial entrepreneurial, parallel entrepreneur. I like to s- do lots of different businesses, and, this actually started to solve a sales challenge that I was having. I was operating a video production company. I owned it for about 20 years. We mostly did nonprofit work, made videos that, made people cry and want to give more money. [00:01:41] Joseph Frost: But we also did videos for small businesses, a lot of my, uh, entrepreneur friends. And I was always frustrated working with an entrepreneur with-- from a marketing standpoint because they just didn't understand, like, the value of the video and how to use the video. They were, uh, like a one-time client. But if they had a marketing person, like a leader, a strategic thinking marketer on their team, they would do video every quarter, and they understood the value of it. [00:02:05] Joseph Frost: And like, that's my ideal client, is an entrepreneur, founder-led marketer or company, but has a strategic marketing. But there weren't many of them out there. And it dawned on me, I could maybe sell more video if I could provide a fractional CMO into those businesses. And I started going down that path, you know, with that not direct reason, but that was part of the reason, and I became really excited about the opportunity. [00:02:31] Joseph Frost: I saw what was going on in the fractional CFO space. I saw that as a great, model to follow, and I didn't see much out there in marketing. And then I thought, "Gosh, we could put them together. We could provide that fractional marketing solution for our clients, give them that strategic leadership they need." [00:02:48] Joseph Frost: And sure enough, eight years ago we started, and here we are today, 26, 27 CMOs later in a, in a full franchise model. [00:02:55] Lee Brumbaugh: So for those who are looking at with your-- you mentioned your 26, 27. Congrats on, on all the growth. So I'm bringing in a fractional CMO, and I know the answer to this, but walk, walk them through. If I'm an S-- I'm a company, I'm a $10 million company, and I know my messaging needs work. It's not clear. [00:03:10] Lee Brumbaugh: It's not driving the results I need. When I bring in one of your 27 fractional CMOs, w-what, what are some of the clear deliverables that I'm getting? What are the low-hanging fruit of typically where they're helping me make sure my marketing's working for me, not against me? [00:03:24] Joseph Frost: Now, so we're a very fundamentals-based organization. We actually have the six fundamentals of marketing. That's our IP that we created. All of our CMOs and all of our processes follow along those six fundamentals, and they're sequential. And if you, if you skip one, it's like building a house without a foundation. [00:03:40] Joseph Frost: You've got to build them one at a time. And what that means is that when we go into an opportunity, we're first looking at making sure the client knows where they're going. And that's both strategically as a business, where are you going? But more importantly, where does marketing align with that? So if you're trying to grow your business 2X, 5X, 10X, what does marketing need to do to help with that? [00:04:00] Joseph Frost: And we generally set a two-year goal for that growth and then a 90-day set of priorities to help us get there. So that's knowing where you're going. What you're speaking to is the next fundamental, which is understanding your buyer. And to message pro-appropriately to the buyers, you've got to understand their journey, their problems, their needs. [00:04:19] Joseph Frost: And we do customer interviews and buyer studies with all of our, clients to understand from the customer's mouth what triggered their search, what they're looking for, what they're not looking for, what the true decision criteria is. And then we also are listening for the steps of the process along the way, the influencers that might have been involved along the way. [00:04:38] Joseph Frost: And we formulate then a plan, a series of insights that not only maps out that journey but uses their language. So then we go into the third, fundamental, which is, uh, messaging. it's around knowing what the client's looking for, knowing how we're different from the competition, and then using the client's own words back to them as we start to message. [00:05:00] Joseph Frost: And when you get that messaging right, you've understood your buyer, and you position yourself well, then we go to the fourth fundamental, which is sales and marketing alignment, which is why we get along so well. It's a core of our business that clients need to have alignment between sales and marketing. [00:05:13] Joseph Frost: So we're bringing in sales-- fractional sales leaders from your team to help out when they have a need, and you're bringing us in the same way. If that alignment's not there, it's really difficult for the clients to get the kind of growth that they want. After we have that alignment, then the next two pillars are more around execution, having a cadence for planning and accountability, which is 90-day plans, weekly check-ins, clear scorecards. [00:05:34] Joseph Frost: And then finally, the last is understanding the right ROI from your campaigns. So how do we invest money in marketing, not spend money in marketing? And that's generally where most people start in the marketing space. It's what-- You've worked with agencies before. It's like, "What's your budget? What should we spend it on?" [00:05:52] Joseph Frost: That's the last thing we talk about. We got to have all those other things in place [00:05:55] Lee Brumbaugh: Gotta have it right before you spend, yeah. Yeah. [00:05:58] Joseph Frost: Yep. [00:05:59] Lee Brumbaugh: Makes a lot of sense. A good logical explanation of the walkthrough. [00:06:07] Lee Brumbaugh: I really like the part where you talked about interviewing customers, right? And kind of what that looks like. what do you do when... So you're out there, your in- yorCMO is interviewing some of their customers And you're going back to the business owner, and the business owner thinks, "This is what really resonates. [00:06:15] Lee Brumbaugh: This is what our clients want," whether it's the product or the service or the message, and it's very different than what that valid- that validation. There's not alignment there. How do those conversations go? How do you drive that? Walk me through kind of what that looks like. [00:06:28] Joseph Frost: Yeah, that's actually the reason why we, insist on these interviews is because when we want to have that, whether it's a positive or negative or a tough or an easy conversation, we want it to be backed by actual customer words, um, truth. Because the business owner's not going to argue with their customer. [00:06:47] Joseph Frost: They can argue with me all day long if I say that, "You shouldn't be messaging this way. You should be messaging that way." They're like, "Well, you're wrong because I've been doing it for twenty years like this." But if their customer says they're wrong, then they listen. So we insist on those, uh, buyer personas because it's really important for our sales, our CMOs when they get into those collaborative sessions where we build the strategy and have those conversations around messaging, we can back it up with what the customer actually said. [00:07:10] Joseph Frost: What we're looking for, though, is also a little different than what most people think when I say customer interviews. Most people are always post-sale when they think about what the results are from those interviews. We're always pre-sale. So what we're not looking for how well you're doing. We're not looking for, like, what they like about the service, what they don't like about the service. [00:07:30] Joseph Frost: What we're actually looking for is how they found you and what was the problems they were encountering that started their search for your service in the first place. And that's the piece that most people don't understand well. Even business owners that have been doing it for twenty, thirty years. [00:07:47] Joseph Frost: Today's customer's challenges and when they start looking for your solution is much-- and how they find you is much different than it was when you started the business. So a lot of founder-led companies, they have these assumptive ways that they're going to find clients and needs the clients have, and they're marketing to those old ways of finding business, and a lot of it's word of mouth. [00:08:04] Joseph Frost: But the reality is people are looking at, different pathways to find your company, different trigger points, and that's what we try to uncover, and those insights are gems. So generally, when we go in and present our findings, we're getting a, a lot more ahas than pushback because we're actually looking at stuff that they didn't think about for a long time [00:08:22] Lee Brumbaugh: You know, it's really interesting and, and we work a lot with, you know, on top of the funnel too, right? And it is very different. I mean, we have so much noise, whether it's w- we can't even keep up with our emails, you know, if it's a business owner, whether it's emails or LinkedIn, it's very hard to keep that noise rate. [00:08:37] Lee Brumbaugh: So how that company finds you really intrigues me because I think the stats point to it's more and more of by the time they get to that salesperson or they're really reaching out, their decision's almost all the way ma- Like, they've, they've validated so much. Like, that journey is so much different than it was even five or 10 years ago. [00:08:53] Lee Brumbaugh: So how do you see those, that differs between, like, different types of companies? Do you find it's, there's a wide gap on the some companies in the B2B world, they're finding LinkedIn, some it's still email, some it's You know, influencers. Like how big a range is that difference of how companies find you today? [00:09:11] Joseph Frost: I, I think it's very, um, it's very similar in some respects. Like B2B, it's still a lot of it's word-of-mouth referral. No, no matter how much we wish it wasn't, that's still a big driver. But what's different might be the trigger that started the search and then what the search is looking for. So example, if, if, if I'm working with a, an accounting firm and they want to go after clients, they're probably gonna likely find a new client that's either just paid a big tax bill and pissed off at their CPA and looking for a new one, or just got some sort of life-changing event that's going to create them to search that need. [00:09:52] Joseph Frost: that might be a lot different than a, a legal professional services client that might have just got in a, a traffic accident or is looking in buying a new business or selling a business. So those triggers are different, and then what they're searching for is different, but still a lot of it's word-of-mouth. [00:10:06] Joseph Frost: But where do they go for that word-of-mouth? Are they going to their peer groups or are they going to their local networks? Are they going to existing,partners that they already have and trying to uncover those influencers? That's also unique. [00:10:18] Lee Brumbaugh: What can you do-- So let's say it is a lot of word of mouth, right? And they, whether they found you through Vistage or through a friend or a peer or colleague, how do you enhance? what ways have, has your company found that you've enhanced kind of that word of mouth, so it's kind of that, that brand-- you, you reinforce what somebody said? [00:10:33] Lee Brumbaugh: Like how, what can you do to grow from that perspective? [00:10:36] Joseph Frost: Yeah, I mean, that's-- it's a great question because, um, a lot of times when you think about word-of-mouth, like what I need marketing for? If it's all word-of-mouth, I just need to keep doing what I'm doing. And the answer, yeah, you just need to keep doing what you're doing. But how do we make it easier for the salespeople to convert? [00:10:53] Joseph Frost: How can we increase those lifetime values? How can we find more of the right clients of word-of-mouth? a lot of it's just we think of it as sales support material. I mean, we, we need to be able to give the salespeople the tools to be able to understand the client's needs We need to nurture that process as much as we can, even though it's later in the, in the, funnels sometimes. [00:11:13] Joseph Frost: And we need to make, the client value the service more, potentially up-- look at pricing and competitive and, and understand that landscape a little bit better. How can we help with that? don't think it's-- The answer sometimes in a business owner's mind is: Well, no, I don't want to spend money, or I don't want to focus on word of mouth. [00:11:30] Joseph Frost: I want to go find more digital work. I want this to be easier, not reliant on it. And sometimes we're saying that's, that's the wrong path. Like, we need to take you as the business owner, make it easy for you to be more public. You might need to have more traffic on LinkedIn to your personal page because you are the figurehead, and, and marketing can enhance that to generate more leads for your salespeople. [00:11:51] Joseph Frost: We shouldn't run away from that. Just because you're hiring marketing doesn't mean that you're not still part of the solution. [00:11:56] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. [00:12:05] Lee Brumbaugh: So I want to switch gears a little bit there and, and we talked a little bit about, hit a little bit on messaging. So, obviously this is such a critical area because again, if people are finding us nowadays sooner, that messaging's got to be really good, right? [00:12:12] Lee Brumbaugh: So what does-- How do you help companies find-- What does good messaging, I guess, look like, and what does bad messaging look like? What are, So we've got a SMB owner that's watching today and they're a $5 million company, and they don't know if what's on their website really resonates with their target audience and their ICP. [00:12:28] Lee Brumbaugh: What's good look like? What's, what's bad look like for that, for that owner listening today? [00:12:32] Joseph Frost: Buyers want simplicity. They want to show up... You know, if you're thinking of the web conversion, which is just one small channel of the overall, marketing tactics, when someone gets to your site, you got about two and a half seconds to get their attention and make them decide whether they should stay or do something. [00:12:49] Joseph Frost: So it's all about, you know, having a very clear headline of who you help and what you do and what's next. And that section, that, that above-the-fold headline of the website's got to be pretty straightforward. It's got to easily defer the people you don't want because there's no- nothing, nothing good with a bad lead on your site. [00:13:07] Joseph Frost: And no matter what you think you want quantity, quantity, quantity, you don't. You want quality. So most business owners put a lot of jargony stuff in that headline, and they don't realize that causes confusion and chaos inside of the, the buyer's mind when they show up like, "Oh my God, what do you do?" And they like get frustrated and they might just leave. [00:13:27] Joseph Frost: they also have oftentimes a very generic, contact us type CTA, which is too open-ended. Like, I don't know what's going to happen when I contact them. Are they going to try to sales me-- sell me something? So having a very soft but clear value proposition for the CTA, very simple message about,that's outcome-based for the buyer. [00:13:47] Joseph Frost: Like grow your business twofold with our 10X plan. take the 10X test today or t-take the 10X assessment today and get results right now. You know, that-- I'm just making that up. But just something that simple, that's sometimes all it takes to increase conversions on your site versus trying to cram way too much in there. [00:14:04] Joseph Frost: And I think that's the problem we've had. The other thing to know about websites these days,it's turning much more into a generative engine optimization versus an SEO, search engine optimization. And that plain common language also appeals to the AI. So getting less jargony, more, focused on the problem that your primary problem your buyer has, and those come out in those buyer personas we do. [00:14:27] Joseph Frost: We understand what that trigger point is when they show up to your website, what is it that they're trying to solve for? That's the key. Finding that nugget, that insight can be a huge game-changer in messaging. [00:14:38] Lee Brumbaugh: Most companies don't have the bandwidth to build a high functioning sales department to allow them to meet the revenue targets with Sales Xceleration they don't have to. Our experienced fractional sales leaders consult and implement your sales strategy, infrastructure management, and team development. [00:14:54] Lee Brumbaugh: Discover how we deploy these proven sales solutions to address your sales challenges. By going to our website, filling out the contact form, we'd love to hear from you. [00:15:07] [00:15:07] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And I've seen that too, especially with the call to action. If it's not, if it's not clean, you've got 15 of them all over the board, you're just confusing the buyer. It's got to be clear, and it's got to be something that they know they're getting the insert results they want. [00:15:19] Lee Brumbaugh: If they want-- If it's the type of business they need a quote, then they need a quote. If they need to be in contact with a sales rep now, then, you know. So it's got to be clear of what that end game looks like. [00:15:35] Lee Brumbaugh: You mentioned a little bit about SEO declining and kind of where that's heading, and we all know we're all in ChatGPT and, Claude and whatever we utilize, and we're using that more. [00:15:39] Lee Brumbaugh: And there's arguments of how far it really drives decisions in B2B, but we know it's gonna shift there, right? We know it's gonna continue to grow. If you're that business owner and you're thinking, "How do I show up? How does Sales Xceleration show up in ChatGPT when I'm looking for a sales advisor?" What are the things that they can start to think about to implement as they prepare for that enhancement of where kind of the marketplace is going? [00:16:01] Joseph Frost: there's a lot of resources out there. You know, it keeps growing and growing, and growing, and assessments you can do. You can put your website in, plug it in, and get a, an AEO res- report back that tells you how you are positioned and what you need to do to improve. And a lot of it is You know, more of the traditional on-site SEO work that you need to do. [00:16:18] Joseph Frost: You got to have good, clear meta tags and descriptions. And some of it's you've got to have plain language, not jargony language that we talked about. there's other things like getting on listings and, and, um, writing comparison blogs versus, uh, different ways to try to educate the AI, AI. There's no s- there's no silver bullet yet. [00:16:37] Joseph Frost: There never is. I always thought SEO is such a slippery business model because you just never... In that business, you have, you have to wait six to eight months before you see any results. But meanwhile, pay me $5,000 a month, and that's just always been like snake oil, in my opinion. It's hard to find good providers there. [00:16:55] Joseph Frost: And when you do, just hold on to them. I feel the same thing's happening with AEO. There's just so many people out there promising, "I can get you in, found inside ChatGPT. I can get you found inside of Claude. This is how you set up your site." And some of it, you know, is traditional SEO optimizations. [00:17:10] Joseph Frost: Yeah, that's going to benefit you. You should be doing some of that. Some of it's just snake oil, because the reality is the AI is changing so fast, it's always the next best guess. There's no way to know what it... It's not an algorithm that you can figure out and reverse engine like a search engine. It's actually guessing. [00:17:25] Joseph Frost: You can't, you can't deprogram it. You can't figure it out. So there's no right or wrong answer there that I can really tell you. [00:17:34] Joseph Frost: But bigger picture, I see the market diverging into two very distinct different, uh, directions. There's going to be the AI-to-AI market, where you're going to be asking your AI to go out and find me a fractional salesperson, and there's going to be a fractional sales AI that's going to be responding to that, and they're going to just be bot-to-bot. that is, that is going to happen, [00:18:00] Joseph Frost: and anything in that space is a race to zero margin [00:18:03] Lee Brumbaugh: just going to go down to zero. It's going to be everything in that space is going to be commoditized. And then there's going to be the human-to-human market, and it's everything else. [00:18:11] Joseph Frost: It's the things that we think are high value, trust related, uh, services that I don't trust my AI bot to figure out for me, that I want to talk to human for because I appreciate that service level better. And that human-to-human market as a fractional, I've, I've been telling my CMOs this, if you're tactical in your, like, value proposition, I can help you with some of your SEO and your social media also, and be a strategic marketing leader. [00:18:37] Joseph Frost: you're moving towards this one market where it's bot-to-bot and you'll be replaced. But if you're focused on I'm a strategic marketing leader, you're-- my value's in decision-making, leading a team, wisdom, expertise, that can't be replaced. And that's where you stay in the human-to-human market. [00:18:53] Joseph Frost: So then as a business owner, if I'm looking for, you know, a $10,000 to $15,000- a month fractional, I'm not trusting my bot for that. I'm going to the human-human market for that. So then as a company, those are the two places that, I think the market's heading. And if you're investing a ton of resources trying to win the AI war, you're just gonna be diminishing that over time. [00:19:15] Joseph Frost: If you start thinking about how do I position my business to be more human-human oriented, that can't be replaced. What are the event-based marketing that I can start doing? Maybe I should do an annual conference, a quarterly conference. Maybe I should invest more dollars in my outside sales force to go visit clients and build relationships because I know that we can convert higher, and that can't be replaced. [00:19:37] Joseph Frost: Like, what are the service offerings and products that you can build that are gonna be mostly human-based, that can't easily be replaced with AI? And if you can think that way long-term and invest in that way, I think you can-- you're gonna, you know, be a part of the winning side of the equation, at least at a higher margin side of the equation than the commoditized business. [00:19:54] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, it's really well articulated. And we, we get that, you know, a, a lot, you know. For- fortunately for us when you're trying to make a decision on, you know, Tom the sales rep, is he out making calls or is he playing golf? There's, there's obviously some, some human component. But even from a, you know, it's interesting from like an existing account management standpoint, there is so much that you can take of here's our client base and having triggers of is this client at risk? [00:20:17] Lee Brumbaugh: Who are the clients we can expand with? Like that expansion side. But at the end of the day, it still comes down to, okay, we know who's at risk or who we can expand with, but it still takes a relationship to do that. We know who is our ICP, who we should target, who, what, who will take our message and actually buy from us, but it still takes that human interaction, as you point out. [00:20:36] Joseph Frost: So bridging that, that balance is, is I think critically important. If you ignore that, I, I think you're suggesting it's a slippery and dangerous slope, and I would agree with that, Yeah, and we're fully embracing AI, so I'm, I'm not suggesting anybody avoid it because it's a race to the bottom. But just know that that's where certain work is headed, certain products and services are gonna be completely diminished over time from the AI. And, and if you're in that potential gray area where your business could go one way or the other, just know that you should try to move now, pivot towards more of a human-centric business model. [00:21:08] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. [00:21:09] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, you mentioned, you mentioned AI and what your, what your team is doing. I know that there's a lot that you're doing enhancing in your own products. Sh- fill us in a little bit of where you are with what yorCMO is doing on the AI side and how you're bringing that to your clients. [00:21:22] Joseph Frost: Yeah, we've been looking at AI for several years and, we're in the process of becoming a Claude-certified company. All of our CMOs are getting Claude-certified just because it's such an important tool for every professional to have. And at some level, I think most of us by now have been using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Grok or some sort of tool to help us with, with writing, with thought leadership or ideation, et cetera. [00:21:45] Joseph Frost: That's super important, and it makes a, makes a smart person smarter and a dumb person dumber, I think, depending on which-- how you use the tool. Where we saw the opportunity was How do we build AI into our service offering that adds value to our clients, without becoming value-added resellers of AI? [00:22:04] Joseph Frost: And that was our challenge because it'd be very easy to say, "Hey, we've got this cool content marketing AI, and we're going to sell it to you. And, uh, as yorCMO, we'll set up, and then you just have this tool to operate." And there are people that are doing that, and it works just fine, but we didn't want to be that company. [00:22:21] Joseph Frost: That's-- We're, at the core, we're strategic marketing leadership, six fundamentals of I-- uh, of marketing. That's our IP. How could we build AI to support that initiative? And what we discovered was there's an opportunity for companies to integrate a hybrid of a, a CMO-led strategy with a core set of AI execution tools that are driven from the client's data, historical and real-time, the CMO strategy, and our IP. [00:22:52] Joseph Frost: So we built what we call the, the CORE Growth System. It's the CMO Orchestrated Revenue Engine, and it consists of a, a searchable vector database that has all the client data and all the real-time data that's relevant to the client going into one database. That database then is run through, our IP, the six fundamentals of marketing, and works with the CMO to build a strategy. [00:23:15] Joseph Frost: And that strategy then outlines the tactics that need to be, executed on to, to reach that strategy. And the tactics then, as the CMOs, we decide which ones make sense to be agents. So we bring in those agents, and we plug them in, and which ones still need to be human, which ones still need to be vendor, which ones still need to be insourced. [00:23:34] Joseph Frost: and so that's the growth system that we build. And when it's up and running, it's always on, it's always learning, it never forgets. It becomes the one source of truth for all of your marketing data, all of your strategy, all the tactics, what's working, what's not working, and it continues to learn. It's a continuous learning. [00:23:53] Joseph Frost: When it's time, as it is often with a fractional, to move on, now we've hired a full-time person to replace us, that engine stays behind with the full-time team, and they have access to everything that's strategic we-- strategically that we built. They have all the data that w-- is in there. It keeps running. [00:24:09] Joseph Frost: The CMO can come back and check in on it from time to time if it needs a tune-up or they need some help. And that's what we've built, the CORE Growth System. And to make it a little bit tighter, we're building it more specifically by industry because certain industries have agents that make more sense than others. [00:24:25] Joseph Frost: So we wouldn't want, you know, that accounting firm that does some outreach on LinkedIn may not m-- have the same requirements as that retail company that needs to do much more AdWords or,display ads, et cetera. So we have different agents, core groups of agents that are built by industry that come with the CORE Growth System [00:24:43] Lee Brumbaugh: Very cool. Way to get ahead of this. And obviously it's interesting of how you've built in for not only for the now, but the future of the company, how you can be an extension. Great way to still help that company grow even if you're not a part of it, and be able to utilize it to their skill set. [00:24:58] Lee Brumbaugh: Especially if lo-- and not know the industry piece. So that's interesting 'cause I think you, you're spot on. There's big differences in that learning is, is a critical component of it, so... [00:25:07] Joseph Frost: Yep. And our CMOs, they've been doing this by hand for years. Now we put it in a tool that's scalable for them. So now a fractional CMO that, you know, might be able to handle a couple clients can handle maybe five or six clients with the Core Growth System, and they're not necessarily spending as much of their own time on it, but the system's making up for it with, uh, reducing the CMO's time and able to allow both the client to get access to, uh, to service at a different price point and the CMOs to s- also grow their practice without having to put as much time into it. [00:25:38] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. [00:25:42] Lee Brumbaugh: So last question for you. Again, you're that $5 million company. You feel like your marketing is not working for... I actually love-- I was looking prepping for this. I love your website of where it talks about, you're that founder. If the vo- if marketing is the founder, like you're... [00:25:54] Lee Brumbaugh: This, we're the company for you, right? So if that's that situation we just described or the you're that founder and they're saying, "Marketing is really me. If I went away, we wouldn't have a marketing guiding." What, what's that last area that they should be focused on? What's the... any aha moment for that type of business owner that's listening today? [00:26:14] Joseph Frost: Well, almost every founder-led marketing, uh, founder-led company that also does marketing has-- and is, is currently suffering from some sort of PTSD from marketing. They've been burned so many times by agencies. They've made so many bad hires. They've chased too many tactics and shiny objects, and they're just frustrated because nothing's working or what's working has got them where they're at and where they are, and they can't go to the next level. [00:26:41] Joseph Frost: And I see that all the time. And today, you know, fractional is a solution, so is AI. So the people are-- It used to be fractionals versus agency. Now it's fractionals versus agency versus AI versus hiring in-house. And I think the bottom line is you've got to find somebody that you trust to take over marketing, or you'll always be the founder-led marketer. [00:27:06] Joseph Frost: You, you can't hire an agency without still being in charge. You can't use AI without still being in charge. You can't hire, non-strategic thinking marketer without still being in charge. So you can't get rid of that burden unless you actually hire a C-level strategic marketing leader, either fractionally or full-time. [00:27:24] Joseph Frost: So you want that, peace of mind. You've got to find someone you can trust, that you can turn marketing over to, and that's, that's what you need to look for, whether that's with a fractional or a full-time, that's really the only way you're gonna get out of that seat. And that once you're out of that seat, then you have permission to focus on the things that really matter to grow the company. [00:27:44] Joseph Frost: Marketing needs to support that growth. But if you're still dealing with website issues, if they're still calling you when the website goes down, you're in the wrong seat. [00:27:53] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. You know, a lot of alignment on our two companies because again, it's-- it usually starts with that founder who eats, sleep, and breathe the business. They did the marketing at the start, they did the sales, and they've tried to scale. Now they're wearing so many different hats and they're being pulled into different ones. [00:28:06] Lee Brumbaugh: And at the end of the day, they're not being allowed to be the visionary, which is which is what got them to be where they are today. So, and I think fractional makes so much sense in those types of situations, so. [00:28:15] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, Joe, this has been great. Thank you, uh, thank you so much for, for joining us today. [00:28:19] Lee Brumbaugh: A lot of insights I think that the SMB space owners listening today will have clear takeaways. Thank you for all you do and the partnership that you've had with Sales Xceleration. We truly appreciate yorCMO. And, uh, again, just thank you for joining us today. [00:28:32] Joseph Frost: thank you, Lee. Really appreciate being here and sharing what little wisdom I have, uh, to the SMBs, and hopefully someone took something away that is of value. That's, that's always my goal. [00:28:43] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, thank you everyone for joining another episode of Sales Against the Odds. Join us again in two weeks where we'll have another thought leader who will challenge the way of how we think about growing our business. Thanks, Joe. Bye everybody.