Journey of a Marketing Consultant

Courtney Makara 0:23

Hello, I'm Courtney Makara and this is the Society of Marketing Technology Consulting Podcast. Smtc has joined forces with the MarketingOpscom community, but our mission is still the same to educate and support anyone involved in the MarTech world as a consultant.

Mike Rizzo 0:39

Hey, this is Mike from MarketingOpscom. If you're thinking about going into consulting, or you're already a successful consultant, join us online by becoming a member. As a pro member, you can join the SMTC and other private networks at marketingopscom.

Courtney Makara 0:55

In this podcast series, grant Gregorian and I interviewed guests on their journeys as consultants. We discussed all that it means to be a great MarTech consultant, from setting up their business or joining an agency, and how to find new clients and keep their existing clients happy. I hope you enjoy the interview. Today's guest is Andrea Lechner-Becker, cmo at LeadMD. Andrea, did I pronounce your name correctly? You nailed it. Woohoo, thanks, thanks. Yeah, so Andrea is joining Grant and I today to talk a little bit about Mops Consulting and her experience in that world. How long have you been with LeadMD? Let's start with a little bit of your background.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 1:34

Yeah, so I've been at LeadMD almost 9 years. Before that I worked at the Phoenix Suns it's a God, what was my title? An email database coordinator, which basically meant that I was in charge of loyalty and ticket sales on anything electronic, and so I learned how to use Eloqua in that job. Before that I was probably I don't know 26 when I started there. Before that I didn't even know marketing automation was a thing. I had used a combination of FileMaker and Constant Contact in previous jobs and the idea that I could set up an automation that when people clicked on something or opened it, I could send them something else or segment them in a different way that wasn't through spreadsheets and manually sending emails, was a total game changer. My little brain, my little 26-year-old brain, blew up and so I learned how to use Eloqua in that job.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 2:35

And then I found out marketing automation, consulting, was a thing which at the Suns I did a bunch of different kinds of things, but I really loved databases. I loved being able to segment based on very specific, intricate things. And of course, you know, when you're marketing basketball games and concerts like that's super fun, right you get to really think about, you have to think about the psychology of somebody who goes to a Garth Brooks concert and also only depends, like the Pacers sons game. You know it's like. What is this person doing? You know who are they. How do I target?

Courtney Makara 3:15

them, you can really visualize who your buyer is.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 3:17

Yeah, so it was really, really fun. And then I don't know if any of you have ever worked in sports entertainment, but they pay like crap.

Courtney Makara 3:28

Like pennies. Yeah, I've definitely heard that.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 3:30

Yeah, and so and I mean they get away with it because obviously it's such a fun gig and you get to go to the games and you get to meet the players, Well, and you have a cool story to tell at happy hour.

Courtney Makara 3:40

Everyone's like oh cool, you work for them, that's so awesome.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 3:53

Yeah, it's a great podcast intro and so and so I really fell in love with the idea of marketing automation in general and then I realized marketing automation consulting was a thing. So the Pedowitz group actually did work for us at the Suns and I realized, by talking to Jeff, that this was his whole job, right and to, and the job of all of his consultants was to do projects like I was doing every day, and I thought, well, that sounds fun, I want to do that. Um, Jeff didn't hire me, Um, I don't know, he didn't like me or like my skillset or something. Um, but uh, but so then I found lead MD, which is based here in Phoenix, which is where I'm uh based out of as well. Um, and so I really just started.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 4:30

I think lead MD at the time was, you know, Justin Gray, his brother, um, and maybe like two, three other guys. Um, so I was, I was the first woman and, uh, you know Justin Gray's brother, Ashton, taught me how to use Marketo, which is the only platform that we supported at the time. Taught me how to use it in like a week At the time. If you're a Marketo user, it's so long ago that programs had just been released.

Courtney Makara 4:59

That's about when I jumped in too. I remember using it for like a month or two, and then programs came out and I was like what is this?

Andrea Lechner-Becker 5:06

Yeah, and so it was basically my job to figure out, because I was asking all the sorts of questions that I had been able to answer very easily at the Suns, like, okay, I send this email out, how many tickets do I sell off of this? And I was able to do analysis on how long people were keeping these emails in their inbox. It's an amazing amount of time, is the answer. People would click through on an email for the circus that I sent them 8 months ago to buy Suns tickets. I don't even know what is happening in that workflow, but it happened. So I was just used to all of this analytics. And then I came into B2B and nobody was doing that. I was like, wait a second, if we send this email out, how do I know if it impacted this million dollar sale? And it was like, well, that's complicated. And I was like, yeah, but that's our job, right? As marketers, I have to be able to tell my clients. Isn't my client going to ask that? It was like they're not really asking that yet and I was like, well, I'm going to be ready when they do, because it is going to happen.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 6:12

So my first year at LeadMD was basically just creating what we thought marketers should be doing. It was really just looking at what analytics they should be doing, and that's where really any of the things that we've grown as a consulting firm to support in terms of our implementations of Visible, as an example that was based off of a frustration that we felt in and of ourselves of not being able to give our clients the reporting we thought they deserved out of just Salesforce and Marketo, and so that's where I started talking to Aaron Bird, the old CEO of Visible, about the questions that our clients were asking that we just couldn't answer, and so that's super fun to be on such a cutting edge of a technology and a discipline like marketing operations that you can impact and influence the operations, that you can impact and influence the product roadmap of products that you're using every day Like, oh, what a great time to be alive. Yeah, but how many people are at LeadMD now? We're full-time employees of close to 50. So you went from five guys, maybe four, to 50. Can you? So you know a lot of people who are thinking about consulting or agency world, and that's one of the benefits is that there's more than you know, you're not alone, that there's a team. Can you talk about the dynamic of the team between five and now 50? And kind of, you've been there through the whole journey, so what's the culture like at five and you're the only woman, I'm sure that that means something. And then at 50, what's it like now? Can you talk through like the pros and cons or you know how it's changed? Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, when you're a consulting firm of five I kind of mentioned the Pedowitz group. I think you know Jeff has was in the game way before EliteMD was and he has a great network. He is a super smart dude and so I think we always set them up as like they were. And I do think to some extent, you know you kind of need an enemy, right, and I have nothing personally against Jeff Again, I think he's super smart, great guy but we were like we can do better work than them, like we want to win deals against them, right, and like. So we definitely like had this kind of like gritty, we're small but we're powerful, and like we can swing with the big boys kind of attitude, even though we probably couldn't write like like for sure, we didn't always know what we were doing. We didn't have people that were that had as much time in the seat as Jeff did. You know, like we definitely were like swinging above our weight class a little bit Right, um, and so when we'd land a customer that was in the fortune 500, like we'd take half Fridays off, like that shit was cold, um, and and that's sort of the culture that you have when you're like really small, right, like people are working like crazy and it just is it's, it has tons of energy and you only have like four personalities. So to some extent you know you're going to hire people that are exactly like you, that think really similar to you and have that have that desire. At that point too, I think I don't think we had anybody over 30 that worked for us. You know what I mean? We were super scrappy, small, young, really excited. We didn't have families, so we drank all the time. It was really really different.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 10:02

What happens when you get bigger? There's this point that happens, I'd say, probably around $5 million, in consultancies where you've built your business based on like 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, whatever really smart people, right, just being amped to be around each other to share ideas, to focus and grow this thing. And then this thing happens around the $5 million mark where it starts being like we need more people, we need more scale and training those people to do this job and we were talking before we even started that in a mops consulting firm, you have, you have the actual skill set of being able to do these things in technologies and be able to consult people on the right approach. Consult them on a tech stack, consult them on how to create decks that present what marketing is actually doing in terms of revenue, influence or acquisition or whatever. You're coaching them on all of those things.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 11:08

But when you're a consultant, there's all of this other stuff that you have to learn around the business of being a consultant. So there's the concept of billable hours and there's the concept of

Consulting Pricing and Specialization

Andrea Lechner-Becker 11:20

listen. As LeadMD, we've invested in our approach to these things, which has allowed us to scale, but customers still have to pay for that. Right Like, just because I can now get this thing done in 10 minutes, that used to take me two hours. It would take them 18 hours to do it. So charging them four is fair, even though it takes you 10 minutes. Right Like, like, there's all of those things and there's just that that, like training people and educating them on the business of consulting, that starts to feel like you know, like as you get more people that you're bringing into your organizations, all that stuff starts to feel really heavy. So is that? Is that literally how we should be thinking about it? So as consultants, if we cause that, I mean that is kind of a trap a little bit. As your experience and expertise goes up and as you figure out how to do things better, like you're right, what used to take you four hours or maybe even 10 hours could literally take you 10 minutes. That is absolutely true. That exists in real life. And so in that case, like you can't increase your rate you know whatever that number is 400 times, because then nobody will hire you, you know. So how do you? So what? The example that you gave was like okay, we figured out a way to take that, but internally the cost is now 10 minutes. Is that like some of the ways in which you can kind of start to earn more and kind of benefit from having specialization and benefit from having experience and expertise? I would certainly say yes, I do think that transparency with clients is very important. I have never hid from a client that I have invested heavily in one figuring all of this out and two training people who have it figured out so like that's why they came to you, exactly Because you want to be like. You want to tell them like hey, I've done this before like a million. I know exactly how to do this. I'm really good at this, so that's part of the value that you're getting. Right, and I think you know at the end, at the end, I say, like I'm going to bill you what I think this, what I've seen historically, that this has the value of, and if you don't want to do it, you can feel free to do it on your own Right. Like that's the great thing about this right. Like I think this thing is worth $2,000. Okay, andrea, how long are you going to spend on it? I don't know, and it doesn't matter because it has a value of $2,000. And the fact is is that if you tried to do this, it would cost you 20,000. Because not only it would take you that amount of time to do it, but the things that you would screw up along the way and have to go back and fix and the potential repercussions of that on your audience.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 14:20

Right, like most of the things that we do touch your customer. So like, yeah, you can go create your own subscription center. For sure you can. And if you already know all of the questions to ask as you're creating that subscription center, you know how to build those things out in the system of record. You know how to not get sued for GDR compliance. Like cool, you don't need me. Okay, I don't care, you know what I mean. I think this skill set that we bring from having done this thing a million times, it has a value way beyond how long it takes. So for sure, to your point, if you're new to consulting, the worst thing you can do is bill exactly what you spent on something you have to really think about what value that has for the client and that value is to some extent.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 15:07

how long would it take? them to do that? Are we talking price things Like? Would you then recommend like packaging things? It's like hey, you know what I mean, and then having that, Everyone loves a package, you know, I mean I think. I think for for any, you know, I think, certainly when you get into things that are more creative, right, so like, if we're going to create a sales playbook for someone as an example, like that has a ton of work in it. That's, you know, what we call go to market, work, right and so that that means interviewing people, it means figuring out, it means figuring out what your sales team looks like, right and like. There's just unknowns to stuff like that that are much, much more difficult to package. I still think you can get away with creating, you know. I mean, the big tip that I'd say, if you're like selling your own services, services is what salespeople call bracketing. So, um, bracketing is the exercise of saying this is between 10 and $20,000. How does that feel for you? Right. Well, we'll tell you oh man, that's like, that's cheap, oh, oh, did I say money. I, I, I. Well, it depends on what you you know like. Maybe I don't understand your ask, if you sound right right interesting. So there's just, there's all these like little ways that um you can, you can maneuver around. Yeah, I like the, I like the bracketing on the pricing side, where you're giving a range and then you're kind of like uh, figuring out what the right is, the upper bound or the lower bound of that. But I think it's probably also just as important to then have it on the back end in terms, of, um, like you bought a package that includes up to, you know, some boundaries, like yep, this is flat, but up to, and here's where it runs out this is the end of it and maybe even the minimum of some sort. That's like, at the very least, you're going to get these things right. Um, and at most you can squeeze out this much, um, like maybe it's in terms of hours or time, like we'll have three months and that's it. After three months we're done, or whatever yeah well, I think I think the other thing you know just from the original question of like, what changes between when you're you're five people and when you're 50, one of the biggest things is just the support for conversations like that. If either of you have ever sold a project where expectations didn't get misaligned, I'm in complete envy of you. I don't know that I've ever worked a project where my customer's expectation was perfectly what I delivered from start to finish. Like.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 18:00

The process of consulting around this kind of thing is fraught with areas of people missed expectations, people pushing the boundary, people just forgetting right, like, it's not always malicious either, for sure. I mean, people forget that you said up to three programs all the time and they're like okay, then I want to do this one, and then I want to do this one. And if you know, someone has to have that conversation of like no, we said three and you're at, and somebody also should be having the conversation of okay, you have three programs, we're at two, what's your last one? Right, like, doing all of those sorts of things, but that's, you know, asking one person to project, manage something, sell something, um, and execute on it and also think both very granularly and very high level, right, like like it's very hard to to be working with a client on optimizing their landing page design and then say, wait, who are we driving to this?

Andrea Lechner-Becker 18:58

What kind of customer is this? Like like, who are we even talking to? And like, does this messaging make sense? You know, like it's just it's it's hard to do all of that at once. So I think what you find in very small consulting firms is people that are Swiss Arminius. They can do a ton of things really pretty good. And then, as you get to that $5 million mark, you start seeing that you need people that specialize in one thing or another, like project management. You need somebody to come in and do that strategic consultation and inform some of those middle pieces. And then you need somebody that's just like really, really baller at Marketo or Salesforce that goes in and does it. Would you say that that's partially what people should think of when they think about what they want to do. Like you know, I want to go into consulting, I want to okay, maybe I want to join an agency, or maybe I want to go solo. Like if you go solo to, okay, maybe I want to join an agency, or maybe I want to go solo. Like if you go solo to your point, you're doing everything. You're doing bookkeeping, you're doing sales and marketing and project management.

Courtney Makara 20:02

Upsell, cross-sell.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 20:04

Upsell, cross-sell yeah, you're the SDR and whatever, whereas maybe if you join LeadMD right, I mean depending on your role, obviously, but if you join LeadMD you can get pretty specialized. You could be the person who's just doing market out of very specific market, or just doing visible, or just. I'm a project manager and I have conversations every day, and so is that true? Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I think you know when we were in that between I mean, I guess even at like the five person mark when I used to go out and recruit, because that's another job that you have to do if you want to own your own consulting firm or you want to run your management team, you have to consult, you have to go recruit other consultants. But the thing I used to say is, like you are not going to find a more knowledgeable, more passionate group of Marketo users on the planet. We see more Marketo instances than and this was at the time. Now there's plenty of people who see a lot more Marketo instances than us, frankly, but at the time it was like, if you want to be a Marketo superstar, you work for me, me, and I will teach you everything that anyone knows.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 22:23

Cause, again, at that time too, like you know, I'm working with all like Cheryl, on nurture programs. Right, Like how nurture programs look today. Like I influenced that with Cheryl. So, like you know, you, just I. At the time we were so focused on Marketo that like, yeah, that's how I used to sell it. Right, Like, come here and I will teach you everything you ever want to know about working in Marketo.

Courtney Makara 22:46

That's a great uh ringing endorsement for your recruiting there Like come join, come join the rocket ship.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 22:52

Well, I mean, I think I and you know I'm, I, uh, I really am not. I don't mean to be arrogant at all, Cause, like now, you have so many Marketo shops that you can, you can live that same dream. So I think, and that's like what a cool opportunity for people that want to come into consulting Like, you don't just have us anymore, you have um digital pie, you have, uh, all my competitors keep getting acquired, so it's hard to know what name to give them, but, um, you've got them. But you just go on LaunchPoint and Marketo and look up service providers. There's a ton of us, there's a ton of individuals. It's a matter of time, Andrea.

Courtney Makara 23:28

It's a matter of time. It is interesting too, because I'm in Portland now. I'm from Seattle, so there's Pacific Northwest agencies that I'm very familiar with and fond of, but then, as we're meeting people through this podcast, I'm learning about you know agencies and, like the mid Atlantic or in the Midwest or the Chicago area, it is interesting that there really are so many out there.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 23:48

Yeah, there's plenty. So I think you know, now you're in a position, um, if, if you, if you have a little bit of a Marketo skillset, that you can probably find just a ton of people. And again, like we're always all hiring, like I, just a ton of people. And again, like we're always all hiring, like I, we just hired somebody yesterday Like this isn't a skill set, that is, um, it's not, it is in high demand. I should just get to the point Right. So, um, so you have, you know you. Then you can worry about things that are, you know, more interesting, like culture, and you can make sure that the leader is somebody that you really feel passionately about and maybe even like your friend from a mops community that you've just been slacking with or LinkedIn-ing with, you can now work with them. I mean, I think people have just really cool opportunities out there right now.

Courtney Makara 24:37

Yeah, I agree. I think it's such a fun career to end up in. I feel very, very happy to be in this little community of people. My last question for you is your current role is CMO, so you've transitioned. You're no longer consulting and client-facing that much. You're actually leading the marketing organization there. What is that kind of transition like and does that suit you? Do you miss the client facing side of things?

Andrea Lechner-Becker 25:02

Um, oh man, I'm going to tell you, I had this moment. I had this moment where I um, when I,

Navigating Marketing Challenges With Empathy

Andrea Lechner-Becker 25:17

when I, so I, I took a bit of a hiatus in 2018. I didn't work at lead MD for seven months and that was the separation between, like I was in delivery and then I became a CMO. Um, and I, and I came back after my graduation. I came back and I I was like adding things to my one pass, right, Like all of the tech, all of the logins that were now just for me, right, Like I was used to having a ton of logins in one pass for all my clients and all the stuff. And so now I'm just adding like 45 logins to like, and like five of them are just to do a webinar. Right, Like, I need all of these things to do this one thing.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 25:54

And I started actually having to execute on stuff, and I will. I'm 100% not shitting you. I was like I told people the wrong fucking thing, like all the time. Like this is totally unrealistic, Like this is not that, like that's not ever going to happen, Right Cause, I think when you're a consultant and you can kind of look at at things and say like, oh well, yeah, like you should roll this out and you should train your team and then you should hold them accountable, Like all that's super easy to say. Did you hear me? It was easy, Right Like, and it sounded like oh yeah, shit, that's what we should do. But then you actually have to start doing it and you're like oh my God, is this hard, Right Like it all sounds so easy and then you get into it and it's so hard.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 26:36

So, like a lot of what I do, even with the consultants that we have now, is I try to bring, I try to bring empathy to the real world marketer for them. So like they will say things to me, like we went through my Google analytics at one point right A few months ago and they were like, where are your goals? Like how, why aren't your goals set up? Right, Like such a consulting thing to say right, Like you should set up goals. And I'm like I'm like, yes, I'm aware I should set up goals. The problem is I have to actually set them up and then I have to be honest with myself. They have a package for that, yeah. But it really is like it's like okay, I have to set them up. And then you also have to keep in mind that, like, I have to report on them. Like, am I really like? What am I going to do differently once I set up those goals? And you know, like I'm a team of one, so like I have to also just bring a certain level of like, just common sense to stuff right. Like like, okay, I get that, the zoom webinar registration page is like ugly. Okay, I get it, it's ugly. I'm also one person, so I have to decide if me going in and creating a really pretty landing page is going to increase the number of conversions there to a point that's worth my time, or is it not Right? So, like, that's the nice thing about being a consultant is you can just, you know, preach the dream right, like there's always things you can be doing better and like here's what I think they should be.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 28:03

And then you get into the actual seat and you're like fuck that. It's just not worth my time. Yeah, I mean, that's part of consulting, is part of the empathy, part of it is listening for the context of the appetite you know, or their realistic expectations of what is you know should be done at that organization, at this maturity level, that size, their budget, whatever. So that's fair and to to bring to the team that empathy and kind of the voice of a marketer. I think that's super cool. Yeah, and like a real voice, right Cause, like it is hard to get your clients to tell you stuff like that, like you know, and just even like the approach of like why don't you have goals set up? I'm like, first of all, I don't like the way you asked that you know what I mean. Like you're insinuating that I'm stupid, Like that's how it feels to me.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 28:58

If, like, you're saying that to me right to me if, like, you're saying that to me, right? So, like, don't say it like that, you know, like, like, let's work on some different approaches, because that's a little smarmy and, uh, I'm not really liking you very much right now, um, so it's just stuff like that, but I, I do think you know it's, it's a really fun job. Um, I'm very, very blessed to be, um to have the job of marketing marketers two marketers, like I don't know it's, it's, it's pretty baller, so it's pretty cool yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. This was so great. We learned so much. Good Cause, I just will ramble, yeah.

Courtney Makara 29:36

Thank you very much.

Andrea Lechner-Becker 29:37

No, this was great your experience of, you know, being at a small agency, bigger agency and all the things that you mentioned about project scoping. It was super cool to learn about. And thank you for listening to this episode of SMTC Podcast. If you like this episode, please rate us on the platform you're listening to this. On the ratings help make the podcast better, make it easier for other people to discover it, and also be sure to subscribe, and if you haven't already joined the SMTC, by going to join SMTCcom and join as a member. It's free. We'll look forward to hearing from you. Bye, thank you, you.