How Strategic Branding Helps Construction Firms Win Better Clients and Talent With Perryn Olson

Intro : 00:00  

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig into their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19  

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts, innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies to reach customers and prospects.

Our goal is to fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations. RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your direct mail into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. Today I’m really happy to get to learn from my guest, Perryn Olson. Perryn is a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer with AltCMO, and he focuses on the construction industry. 

He’s the author of The Construction Executive’s Guide to Brand Marketing, and he understands the industry’s unique marketplace and knows how to help general contractors and trade contractors achieve their long term growth goals. Thank you so much for joining me today, Perryn.

Perryn Olson: 01:37  

I appreciate you asking me to join you.

Rick Rappe: 01:39  

Well, let’s jump right in. Can you share a little bit about your journey and what led you to specialize in marketing for the construction industry?

Perryn Olson: 01:48  

A total coincidence and accident, really. So it actually started my career early on. My degree is in graphic design, and I started off as a designer, but I worked at a really small firm and that got me into sales, which got me into project management, which then kind of led to marketing strategy, which is kind of more of a knack for marketing strategy. And it was kind of a mediocre designer and made the transition about 22 years ago, I guess. And got more construction about 20 years ago, just through a referral from an IT firm.

And just they had a client that needed need help just communicating and marketing their company. And that led to another into another. And I’m the owner of the firm I was working at at the time, came, went to a conference, came back and was like, hey, we need a niche, we need a niche. And I just like first like, yeah, that’s that sounds stupid. I slept on it. 

The next day, I’m like, I’m in, let’s go. And so we started kind of just refining our own, you know, our markets. We were very much a generalist design marketing firm at that point. Got rid of working with doctors and lawyers. They just weren’t a cultural fit. 

And I started talking to the construction companies that we were working with. About five of the six were already the clients for sales and account can’t manage it. So I was talking to them. Is there just an opportunity for this? Is there a need? 

And they’re like, yeah, go. I was in my mid-20s and took it as a career opportunity and just did whatever I could to learn the industry and be a thought leader and just really help. And just that’s where the book came from. That’s where a lot of public speaking has come from. And I always love just educating and mentoring. 

And, you know, now it’s kind of that great role of doing both of those as a fractional CMO, doing things like this.

Rick Rappe: 03:25  

It sounds like there’s some advantages for you then, in focusing exclusively on the construction sector and becoming an expert in that particular area. You’ve talked about the importance of brand positioning for contractors. Can you elaborate more on how that impacts their ability to secure high value projects?

Perryn Olson: 03:49  

Yeah. So one big thing in construction most people don’t realize is it’s not just can’t get clients, it’s also trying to get employees. There’s a huge deficit of potential people in the workforce. So recruiting retention is a big aspect of marketing construction companies too. So and actually my early clients, the first few were actually only always focused on retaining and recruiting employees wasn’t really anything about clients.

So most of my clients nowadays are do a little both. But the positioning is really key is because you want to showcase that culture and really have a brand that works kind of like a magnet. You want to attract the people that are like minded and fit that culture and really repel the ones that don’t. And that’s a good sign of a good positioning is just it gives people, you know, kind of a stance on it. You know, it’s better to have 100 people love you than have 10,000 people. 

Kind of like don’t really care either way. And that’s what a good, strong brand will do. And we do that on the consumer side. There’s certain brands that we just love and we talk about and we promote and we share and there’s other ones we just don’t care about. They just don’t really have any impact in our lives, for better or worse. 

So it’s very the same way in the business business and in construction. It’s still a relationship. And we add the complications of construction is very much a team sport when it comes to it. It takes dozens of companies to design a building. It takes dozens of companies to build a building. 

So it is to me kind of the ultimate team sport. That and there’s just a lot of relationships in there and you got to intertwine. So you want to partner with those companies that fit, you know. And that’s where that positioning really helps.

Rick Rappe: 05:27  

Yeah. Would you include service companies like plumbing and electric and things like that in the construction industry that you’re that you serve?

Perryn Olson: 05:36  

Yeah, those are different trade contractors. I mostly work on the commercial and industrial side of those. There’s only the home service ones and some companies do both. Yeah. I’m currently working with a roofing siding company that does both residential and commercial, but they’re definitely in construction.

There’s just a different, very different way to market them if you’re doing home services versus commercial. Yeah, obviously the volume is different on, you know, much higher volume for home services. And you’re dealing with usually, you know, a household. Yeah, maybe an HOA or a co-op like a building co-op. But on the commercial side you’re dealing through contracts and negotiations and things like that. 

Much bigger projects with less volume.

Rick Rappe: 06:16  

Yeah. Do you work more on the you said you work more on the commercial side than on the direct.

Perryn Olson: 06:20  

To consumer side? Yeah, most of my work is business to business.

Rick Rappe: 06:24  

Yeah. In the direct mail business, which we are focused on, there’s definitely a lot of good direct mail programs on the direct to consumer side, but I think less so maybe on the on the.

Perryn Olson: 06:37  

I agree with you commercial side. It’s a channel a lot of people sleep on. It’s direct mail and I’m a big fan of like lumpy mail. Like something just stands out or, you know, oversized postcards and things like that. Yeah, not all my clients kind of go for it, but we have the right opportunity. We definitely do things.

And I’ve done some, you know, kind of silly and goofy things that are direct mail. Yeah. One year. Oh, actually, we launched the book. 

We sent out 100 copies of the book in the mail. I mean, that was initially lumpy, but it was thick. And the next year we sent out, I think, 200 poster tubes, and we could have done it flat. But we made the decision, let’s roll up the poster and put it in tubes, because people are going to open that versus if we send it flat and, you know, I’ll fold it up, less likely people are going to open it, I would think. I mean.

Rick Rappe: 07:21  

I would think for a lot of people that you’re talking to, maybe they’re not sitting in front of their computer all day. They’re not on their phone all day. They’re out in the field and working and like, you know, supervising things. But, you know, so maybe mail is helpful to break through and get to them, but.

Perryn Olson: 07:38  

Well, it’s kind of yeah. With the space I’m working at, generally the owners are in the office more and they’ve got a little office establishment, even CFOs and even my preferred clients now as a fractional, have a small marketing staff where they’re just a single marketing coordinator proposal specialist. So they’re generally still office bound, but they’re still just, you know, if someone don’t want to be office bound, especially, you know, the owner or some of the operations people that came from the field. Yeah, they sometimes feel like that caged animal in the office, but they’re still hard to get to, you know? And yeah, just sending a postcard or a letter a lot of times doesn’t cut it. So you need something unique.

Rick Rappe: 08:14  

In B2B marketing, those things seem to be kept out by a gatekeeper, right? Like someone’s someone’s checking the emails and filtering out a lot of stuff. We’ve had really great success with, like, you know, FedEx packages or, yeah, priority mail packages. Those types of things can really get through and make get somebody. But that’s in the category of lumpy mail that like you talked about.

Perryn Olson: 08:37  

Oh yeah. That’s what’s interesting. One of the benefits of construction is they tend not to work remotely. So if you are doing direct mail, you can generally find them at their office versus my own company. We’re distributed. So you send something to headquarters I’m not going to get it.

Rick Rappe: 08:51  

Yeah. That’s becoming much more of an issue with B2B marketing is like, how do you find their actual office address? I mean, because their, well, their actual working address, because the office address may not be where they’re actually working from. And so you have to actually have home and office, which definitely makes things a little more a little bit more complicated.

Perryn Olson: 09:09  

But it’s gotta get more creative, right?

Rick Rappe: 09:12  

Exactly, exactly. Well, it’s all about breaking through the clutter these days, right? There’s so many messages that are hitting people that we’re bombarded with. And so a lot of people are getting better and better at filtering out the marketing messages and filtering out the things that might consume their time. So they, you know, you got to get their attention somehow.

So yeah. We talked a little bit about case studies, and I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about the case of the SuperDroid robots case study that we talked about.

Perryn Olson: 09:49  

Yeah. So my last actually in-house job before as a fractional, and I jokingly said I was an internal fractional because I was the CMO for three companies and we had eight brands across those three companies, and I had a small in-house team, but we acquired super robots a few years ago and super robots.

Rick Rappe: 10:08  

Yeah. What is this? Can you pause and tell me what a SuperDroid robot is?

Perryn Olson: 10:12  

So weird. Robots oddly started in 2001. One reason we were able to acquire them was the founder. The husband and wife are retiring. You know, they’ve been doing this for so long, and the name actually dated back to the 70s.

So it was his early robots he built in the 70s Pre-star wars even. And the reason I knew that is because we have paperwork. When Lucasfilms decides to contact them with cease and desist for using the term droid or droid. Wow. That’s literally a thing. 

So that we had a they had to deal with early in their career and they’re like, no, we predate Star Wars, so leave us alone.

Rick Rappe: 10:47  

Maybe George Lucas stole it from them.

Perryn Olson: 10:49  

No they weren’t.

Rick Rappe: 10:50  

Not possible. Droid was already a word. I guess you’re right.

Perryn Olson: 10:53  

It was a word at that point. And the super became a Star Wars lexicon. Decades later. That’s in the kind of the middle, the. Well, the first episodes, one through three, essentially.

But anyway, one of the things we got them was superheroes. When they started in the early 2000, they really just kind of built anything and everything. And their big thing was you kind of figure out custom robots. They had a very affordable way to build custom robots for companies. So they had huge client names like NASA and GE and a lot of universities, and they’ve done a lot of movies, like a lot of the early robots you saw in the 2020 tens, a lot of the stuff they were building and kind of just, you know, they didn’t have their name on it. 

But whenever they build a custom robot, they just the client wasn’t going to use it and sell robots themselves. They just need kind of a 1 or 2 of them. They would then kind of throw it on the website as customer or just a new robot model. So the company actually had hundreds of robot models, and they also did kits and parts and things like that, but it was very low margin. So one of the things we did is we came in was minimize the amount of models just to make things a little easier and efficient on the operations side, and then actually start attacking some vertical markets. 

So one of those, we’d already sold quite a bit of tactical robots. So like SWAT team robots was a big opportunity for us. High dollar low kind of low competition. There were some good competitors, but not a lot of competitors in that space. But trying to sell to SWAT team people is very challenging, I’ll tell you that. 

But the other one is just because we are also the other arms of the company. We had construction engineering, and so we were also trying to enter the construction space. And so we had a few robots we could use for just moving materials around. But one of the big ones we were pushing out through some new technology we developed was Realitycapture. So we’d go around a job site with 360 cameras on a schedule, generally off hours when there’s nobody working, and just to a 360 scan of the building for the call, progress monitoring and construction. 

So every week or a couple of days it would go out and just get a progress monitoring on what construction’s been doing. So that was a big piece, just kind of really moving us away from the high volume, low margin into more low volume, higher margin work and more proprietary things. We were building our own components, and those were some of the things that was helping build them. But when we took over SuperDroid, it was a website based only sales and no outside salespeople, no way to really kind of control the revenue coming in. So we hired our first salesperson, revamped the website to look more like a B2B company. 

They’re still kind of running more of the consumer model, even though they have these giant companies that they were working with. And so that was one of the big things. The first couple years, we didn’t really grow revenue a lot, but what we did was we stabilized the top end revenue to fix the bottom, the bottom line. So our margins are starting to tick up and they continue to tick up even though I’m not working with them anymore.

Rick Rappe: 13:48  

Well that’s great.

Perryn Olson: 13:49  

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 13:50  

So today, now working as a fractional CMO for other clients, what are some of the common marketing missteps that you observe in the construction industry, and how might companies avoid those mistakes?

Perryn Olson: 14:04  

The biggest issue they want to play it safe. They want to look like everyone else. Kind of a double edged sword I actually had when I was with the company, with our CEO, was one of those visionaries, very brilliant, very much looking in the future. And typically what happens in construction or the whole Arctic engineering construction industry is if you have a good idea, the principals will say, hey, is anyone else doing this? If you say no, they’ll say, well, good reason.

No, we’re not going to do it either. Well, this CEO, if you said no, he’s like, great, let’s do it. And that’s why a construction company bought a robotics company. It was one of those things no one else has done. And he had a vision where things were going. 

And they’re very much robotics are a huge part of where construction is going in the next 20 years. Yeah. So that’s one of the big issues in the space. Just everyone’s kind of look like everyone else. And that’s what leads to commodity. 

And this commoditization is what’s killing construction is you’re essentially disincentivizing anyone from being innovative. Anyone trying harder. It’s always about the low bid. You know, most people know construction is only about the low bid. So one of the things I always try to help my clients is, okay, how do we get out of that? 

One of the transitions that’s happened in the last 10, 15 years in the space is we do more negotiated work, which is not as much bid. It’s more traditional business to business, where a developer or building owner is going to talk to three, maybe five contractors and do a short list and just kind of talk to them. They’re not doing an open public bid with 30 or 40 bids. But even the public sector, there’s even more best value bids coming in, or they’ll do a best qualified and they’ll actually hold the price off, you know, so some of the you’ll actually submit a packet or qualification packet that will, they’ll get scored on. And then at the last piece they’ll take the sealed envelope with the price in it. 

And they divide the, the, the price by the score and they’re getting the best value. So that’s a huge trend that’s been going on in the last 15 years or so. And it’s getting the owners, you know, the public entities or the building owners think that a much better product in the end, much less contentious. It’s not really this race to the bottom anymore, but it’s hard for these contractors to make that transition. Like, I work with a contractor years ago when we were kind of starting this whole best value, and they were traditionally a low bid contractor, and they just I wasn’t even working on that bid because they thought they handled it. 

And I was going to talk to them and helping them, you know, debrief. It was in they’re just like, we don’t understand. We’re $1 million short on like a $10 million job. How do we lose it? We’re a million like we’re 10% cheaper. 

They couldn’t grasp it. But when I went through and helped them debrief it like they didn’t answer all the questions. They just totally skipped the entire sections. Like they didn’t even put — they tried their best, but they because it wasn’t in their mindset. They’re so used to that low bid mentality. 

They just didn’t know how to answer some of the questions just so they skipped it. All right, guys, if you can’t answer this question, you shouldn’t have even a bid on it. You know, a contractor that was actually much smaller than them actually won the job, and they just couldn’t fathom how did they win this? I’m like, yeah, because it was a public bid. You can actually go get their bids. 

I’m like, look, they answered the questions. This is they had relevant work and all these things.

Rick Rappe: 17:09  

It’s probably hard in the construction industry to and it’s kind of true in a lot of industries I would imagine where they’re selling B2B for the people to really know how to explain their value in a, in a really effective way. And I think you spoke to it earlier about the importance to align the marketing strategy with the company’s internal culture and values. And that’s how you’re able to sort of differentiate the company and make it sound better than the competition on, on some other basis other than cost. Right.

Perryn Olson: 17:42  

And one of the biggest challenges you see in the consumer side, but to me it’s almost a bigger deal in the business. Business you’re telling your buyer is not qualified to buy your products. Whether you’re a doctor, a lawyer, you know, an accountant, it construction, the people generally on the selection committee buying generally don’t know anything about what you’re doing. That’s why they’re hiring you. So you have to not dumb it down, but educate them on your value and explain the why.

Like one of the terms I keep seeing is called the curse of knowledge, because you’re so close to it and you’re such an expert, you are very knowledgeable and you’re not trying to knock it down a couple of pegs, like you’re not taking it from a nine to a six. You got to bring it down to like a two and not make them feel like they’re in kindergarten. But just understand they’re not a construction company. They’re not a marketing company. They. 

Yeah. This is you know, and you generally talk more, you know, where are they at now? What are the current challenges and where are they trying to get. They don’t necessarily care how the sausage is made.

Rick Rappe: 18:35  

Yeah. Yeah. That happens in the marketing world too for sure. I mean I think we as experts in direct marketing, we want to make sure that we sound like experts. And sometimes we overcomplicate things and explain things in a way where probably people are going, whoa, I didn’t understand that at all.

So yeah, I like that educational approach that makes a lot of sense, really.

Perryn Olson: 18:56  

Yeah. And it’s one of the things we struggle with as fractional CMOs is a lot of clients come in, are like, okay, what are you going to come do? I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know you. Like I know the space I know would have done before.

And I can give you examples and case studies and testimonials, but I’ll give you a framework that we’re going to follow. But I can’t tell you if you hired me today, that within 60 days I’m going to have this exact report. And if I did, it wouldn’t do you any good because it’s too generic. Yeah. So that’s one of the challenges a lot of people have in our space.

Rick Rappe: 19:24  

Well, I think explaining to those clients that about your — that you’re going to come in and do a very comprehensive audit of what they’re doing and that that comprehensive audit is going to lead to a series of actions and moves. But you don’t know exactly what those are going to be at this point. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s what we do in many cases when we get involved with somebody that has a big direct mail program. We’re already, you know, we’re coming in and looking at everything that they do, targeting creative offers and basically looking for opportunities.

And then we go out and maximize on those.

Perryn Olson: 19:59  

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 20:01  

Let me shift gears a little bit and talk about the rapid changes in marketing technologies and platforms. How do you stay ahead and ensure that your strategies remain effective in the evolving technology landscape?

Perryn Olson: 20:17  

So one thing is always going to be looking if you don’t need something. I’m one of these people that I get an unsolicited email. I still kind of review it. If it’s totally unqualified, I will call them out on it. But I usually call them out. I will respond to a cold email if it’s totally inappropriate, but sometimes they’re appropriate. I found her, you know, I find some recent tools just via Instagram and sometimes even just talking to peers, you know?

Rick Rappe: 20:43  

Yeah.

Perryn Olson: 20:44  

You kind of talk sometimes. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 20:46  

I’m compelled. I’m compelled to respond to emails occasionally and just say, man, you’re targeting is way off.

Perryn Olson: 20:52  

I’ve totally done that. I’m like, no need not apply. I actually got an email a couple weeks ago for a fractional CMO. I’m like, did you read what we do? Did you not see my job title?

Like just.

Rick Rappe: 21:03  

Yeah, there’s some really.

Perryn Olson: 21:04  

Bad like. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 21:05  

Email is a very polluted channel in my opinion. There’s a lot of things. Of course, that’s why we all have to have multiple filters on our emails so that we don’t get bombarded with all the weird.

Perryn Olson: 21:16  

Oh.

Rick Rappe: 21:17  

Totally. Right.

Perryn Olson: 21:18  

I mean, it’s the same in direct mail. There’s a lot of junk that comes through too. There can be a challenge. The challenge is there’s almost no way back. No one’s going to write you a letter back. So, like this, an inappropriate letter versus email is pretty easy to respond to. Yeah.

But no, it’s get back to your core of your question. I think a lot of it is just the constant keeping your eyes open and just having that network of people you can talk to. Like, I’ve got a good friend. She’s not quite a fractional CMO, more of a marketing operations consultant. So I will compare notes a lot of just, hey, what are you seeing? 

What are the challenges and just what’s going on? And yeah, I think just don’t be close minded. I find a lot of kind of people become an old time marketer because they try to do things the way they’ve always done it. And like, you can’t like just what we did things a couple years ago doesn’t necessarily work anymore.

Rick Rappe: 22:06  

Yeah. Besides email and besides direct mail, what other platforms do you like lean to look to when you’re developing your programs?

Perryn Olson: 22:18  

For us specifically, it’s content, thought leadership. And one of the things that we’re seeing and we’re kind of actually looking to fight back against the the AI written crap, you know, there’s a place for AI and SEO, but we’re looking at how do we get more thought leadership from our clients and from ourselves, essentially counteract AI and try to how do you say something? I wouldn’t say.

Rick Rappe: 22:39  

Gotcha.

Perryn Olson: 22:39  

So that’s a big piece of it. And then just how do you build that referral network?

Rick Rappe: 22:44  

Yeah.

Perryn Olson: 22:45  

It’s a big aspect in business to business.

Rick Rappe: 22:48  

Yeah. We were — I was talking with a guest yesterday about the changes that are happening in the SEO world. I know it’s it’s, you know, we used to work really hard to get people to be able to find our websites and get to our website from search. Now, you ask a question to the search engine and it just answers your question, so you don’t even have to go through to a web page. Yeah.

I guess there’s still some links and things like that. But how do you think that’s going to change the SEO world?

Perryn Olson: 23:21  

It’s changing more because now you’re almost purely going after what your solution is versus the free solution. Like one of the strategies I had ten years ago was you want to answer questions. The people that are not looking for your service, they’re looking for an answer. You know, they might be looking for, you know, how do I grow in my business in this market? And they’re like, oh, I never even thought about direct mail.

And they’re now reading something on RPM’s book. Well, now that answer is going to come up in that AI generated piece and they’re not going to go to your blog post. So that’s not available. But what’s becoming more important is like the maps, like you’ve got to be able to pop up on those maps if you’re such a consumer based, because if you’re not, you don’t exist. And that’s the big thing I tell contractors all the time is like, if you’re not found online, you don’t exist. 

Like especially anyone under 40, you just — you might as well just not have a sign.

Rick Rappe: 24:12  

So in the area map on Google like you want, you’ve got to be you’ve got to own your local position.

Perryn Olson: 24:19  

Yeah. Which can be harder on the business to business companies because our geography is so much bigger. Like I’ve got somewhere because we do some SEO for our clients as well, because they kind of came to us like they’re either they feel like they’re overspending with SEO firm that doesn’t understand their industry, and they’re constantly just trying to train them on construction. Or we had some that like had in-house people overseas and they’re just like, I don’t know how to manage them. I don’t know how to like, are they doing a good job?

So as we were kind of just doing some basic audits, like guys, they’re missing, like some of the very basics. Like, I’m not saying they didn’t do any work, but they didn’t do some of the basic work. And so we’ve taken on some SEO with our fractional clients and now actually building out our own SEO offerings specifically for construction, partly because we know this industry so well, we can really optimize our onboarding and our process and understand things. But also we have new AI tools to where three years ago, not even just that long ago, you would have to like all the SEO tools, would just give you this huge list of like a thousand things to go fix. Well, then you got to go manually fix them. 

Well, the newer tools, we can just check which ones we want to approve and we hit go and it will automatically update them. So that’s taken a lot of just that manual work out of SEO and made things a lot streamlined. But there’s some stupid stuff that comes up with like my roofing client. One of the things that came up was like a blog post suggestion was like, oh, you do residential roofs, you should do doghouse roof. Like, why would I ever do a doghouse house roof, but like that doesn’t make. 

Oh, it’s because you’re thinking most homes. You know they probably ran a stop. Like 40% of American homes have a dog and you do homes, like get a dog house. I’m like, the stupidest thing in the world. Do I ask a human? But to a computer, it’s completely logical.

Rick Rappe: 25:57  

Wow. Yeah. That’s interesting.

Perryn Olson: 25:59  

So I still needs to checks and balances and we go through that. It’s done some other really weird stuff. Some of the suggestions we had for our own company one day was like, where I couldn’t even find the logic on that one. The dog house at least has some logic.

Rick Rappe: 26:11  

So yeah, really, what other roofs can we do? Yeah, I mean.

Perryn Olson: 26:17  

Yeah. So.

Rick Rappe: 26:19  

Oh that’s funny. What advice would you give to marketers who are looking to specialize in industries like construction?

Perryn Olson: 26:27  

Get in and just do it. You know, I mean, I started with a handful of clients and just started learning and found it luckily found an association called SMPS Society Marketing Professional Services, which is specifically for architect engineering construction industry. Most people outside of this industry have no idea. What I’m trying to always help people is if you’re in this industry, the architect engineer, construction industry, you should be in SMPS. It’s a huge amount of information and I learned a ton of both marketing, but also just the industry and the industry’s pains and stuff through that.

And it’s constantly just kind of paying attention. And one thing I always try to look at is, you know, where does marketing affect the business? Where does the business affect marketing? Because they do go hand in hand. That’s where I think a lot of marketers fall short, kind of walk around with blinders on. 

And they don’t — they kind of think they’re thinking marketing is like how many visits to the website have, how many, you know, web inbound leads are we getting? They’re not really understanding the ripple effect to the overall business. Like if I drive another 10,000 clicks to my website, does that actually affect the bottom line? Well, only if they’re quality 10,000 clicks, you know. Yeah. 

So that’s one of the big things I think marketers start they don’t understand grasp the business side of yeah, you don’t have to be able to read a profit and loss statement, but you should understand where we impact revenue.

Rick Rappe: 27:44  

Yeah, well, it sounds like when you’re really focusing on aligning the marketing with the company’s internal values, you’re also sort of helping to guide the leadership team on how do we build a company that’s really going to be something great that we can talk about and promote. Yeah, right. So you’re somewhat inwardly focused as well as being outwardly focused. I mean, you’re kind of affecting maybe both directions.

Perryn Olson: 28:11  

Yeah. No. And it’s one of the first thing I do with any new client. I don’t even dig into history. I don’t just trade into ideal client profile.

And I generally want some people from operations there because I tell them the worst thing I can do is grow your revenue by bringing the wrong clients in. Yeah, because operations are going to hate and we’re going to kill it. You know, we don’t call it churn in construction, but, you know, we’re going to have poor retention. Most good contractors have a lot of repeat business because they’re bringing in like minded people and they like working with each other. So I generally go to operations like who are the companies you guys just love? 

What are the industries? What are the market sectors like? What are the people you like working with? Who are the ones you hate? Yeah. 

And you start building this ideal client profile and the ones that have the most specific, the longest. You start building, like a score sheet for them, the ones that have the most categories, the most descriptions generally do the best because we can then target those ideal clients. And, you know, I help them break it down to scoring. There’s this three points for ideal, two points for good, one point for okay. And then there’s negative points if they’re a bad fit. 

You know some stuff is obvious. Like we don’t want to work with somebody in China in construction. That’s a really bad fit. Yeah. You know but some of them are a lot more granular. 

Like, you know, I worked with one company. They’re like, I don’t want to work with decision makers over 60. I’m like, I’ve never had that in construction before. And it was — they’re a younger company and they’re like, look, our executive team is under the age of 40. So when we go talk to somebody in their 60 and they’re looking at us as their kids, they treat us like their kids. 

Really interesting. So like from day one, like they don’t want to talk to companies that are with a bunch of, you know, you know, baby boomer business leaders. It’s like that’s very cognizant of what you’re doing.

Rick Rappe: 29:51  

And that’s interesting.

Perryn Olson: 29:52  

Correct.

Rick Rappe: 29:53  

That’s interesting. I’m thinking about like startups that I’ve walked into as a marketing expert and I’m, you know, 55. So I walk in and here is a bunch of like, fresh MBAs and they’re all like 25. And I’m like, oh, okay, this is interesting. And I think they look at me as the old man and I’m like, okay, well, you guys are like trying to reinvent the wheel.

We’ve already been there, done that, and they’re trying to do it their own way. So it’s very interesting dynamic.

Perryn Olson: 30:22  

And it can be. But when you’re supposed to be the expert in the room they were having that trouble was they were just getting treated like children even though they’ve been doing this, you know, for 15 years or more. And some of them are second gen builders and kind of grew up. So they had more experience than was really listed. Yeah.

They just it was a shell and I’ve seen that on the tech side. I’ve worked with some software construction software companies. They’re like, yeah, we don’t want the older, they just don’t adopt us. I take too long, but.

Rick Rappe: 30:46  

I guess it would be hard if you were a young person and you were trying to be innovative and break out and do things in new ways and, like, kind of push the possibilities a little bit. But yeah, it’s also good to like, respect the experience and like, you know.

Perryn Olson: 31:04  

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 31:05  

And see, see what older people, more experienced people think and what they would say.

Perryn Olson: 31:10  

And the whole ideal client profile, it’s really interesting because I’ve worked with companies like, guys, the word is ideal for a reason. Who’s the best possible fit? It’s not that we can make this work profile, because that’s what most marketing has been for them in the past. So they’ve worked. Yeah.

You know, I literally had a CEO, one of my newer clients, where I was onboard him just two months ago, and I’m going through this and he’s like, this is marketing. I’m like, well, it is for me. Like. And he’s like, we’ve had marketing people for years, like decades. We’ve had Martin. 

It’s like they’re always trying to essentially qualify a bad fit to be a Martin. I’m like, I’m like, well, this is going to be part of our basis for a marketing qualified lead is they got to hit some of these pieces. But I’m trying to build ideal client profile in our world is these are the people we can go pull a list of like 100 companies, run them through this score sheet, and then that tells our sales team these are the top tier targets. These are the second tier. These are the third tier and these are the ones that don’t fit. 

It’s kind of I don’t want to call it account based marketing to marketers because they’re going to be like that’s the tip of the iceberg. And it totally is. But it starts getting people aligned to eventually build out an account based marketing program. But it’s like revolutionary in a lot of business to business companies that are just doing that, going from making it fit to the ideal changes everything.

Rick Rappe: 32:24  

Most entrepreneurs, and I’m sure this is true in the construction business too, when they’re building their business, they have to say yes to a lot of things. And saying no is painful. I mean, it hurts. You don’t want to say no to anything when you’re just building your business from the ground up. Yeah.

So once these guys get a bigger company and have a marketing CMO or a fractional CMO, then they’re starting to get some size. And they do have to be more and more selective. And, you know, saying no to opportunities feels wrong to a lot of entrepreneurs. But it’s so important because then it allows you to focus on the things that are the right fit. So that makes perfect sense to me.

Perryn Olson: 33:05  

Oh yeah. And it’s — you’re totally right. When I started my fractional business last year and joined CMO, like, we took on some clients that weren’t the best fit, and we also taught us what was the ideal fit. But kind of contrary to a lot of fractionals is I like working with contractors that have in-house marketing coordinators, proposal specialists, a lot of fractional CMOs work with companies that have no marketing in-house. Yeah.

They want to be that person. They can manage the vendors. That doesn’t doesn’t just work with me. Like I just don’t enjoy it. And I like having those people in there. 

I do have some clients that I am the marketing department essentially, and I have a slightly different role, but they have less volume that we’re doing, you know, so it’s because they’re a smaller company and I’m only one fraction of a percent. Yeah. I have other clients that have 2 or 3 people on marketing that we can expedite things. And I’m more just kind of leading the ship and that bridge between the business strategy. And then I can translate that to the marketing strategy and planning.

Rick Rappe: 33:58  

That makes sense. Reflecting on your career, what’s been the most rewarding project or client that you’ve worked on?

Perryn Olson: 34:11  

I would say early in my career, a lot of the work I was doing was rebranding in websites about 15, 20 years ago was the next generation of builders, you know, the dads were the, the first or second generation, and they were kind of very skeptical of digital marketing. 15, 20 years ago. And I’ve had many conversations from them, the CEO, which is generally the dad. And they would tell me like, you know, son, we don’t sell buildings off our website. And my response was very blank like, but you lose them.

They weren’t understanding. Listen to the pre-qualification process that people would do when they referred to them. They’d go to the website and then leave. They’re like, oh, these people are crap and they move on. That’s how people buy, you know? 

And same with employees. I told you early on, like part of construction is also recruiting potential employees. So once you go through a rebrand or sometimes just the website, you know, within a week, a month, a couple months later, I would get a call from the CEO or an email and says, hey, all of a sudden we’re getting a lot of qualified, you know, employee, prospective employees. We’re getting qualified leads off our website. What changed? 

I’m like, we’re not really impacting SEO. We didn’t do it in a budget. It was just changing the positioning, professional looking website and just reflecting the company’s culture. And that alone was making moving. And that was really gratifying because you kind of had to stick up for yourself and back up that next generation that kind of understood the power of a website. 

And you even have some of the CEOs and some of the whole leadership teams. I remember one time presenting to a team and they literally said, well, I guess it’s just the website and marketing. You know what? Who cares anyway? Like that was essentially like, whatever, we’ll spend 40, 50 grand on a rebrand and whatever. 

If it fails, it fails. Like they didn’t understand the power of that. And I think nowadays, even in any industry, especially construction, we understand the power of a brand, the power of a website. And now we’re having those conversations of like social media. And now even I, the social media provide ROI for some companies, tremendous ROI, some companies not so much because they’re not doing it the same or they haven’t found that little that, that, that sweet spot. 

So that was really rewarding in my career. Just having those kind of like not I told you so, but it’s not kind of vindictive, but just more of I was able to prove, yes, what we do has value. And it was great because those people then would refer us. And I remember one of my kind of very skeptical CEOs referred me a couple of his buddies, and he’s like, just trust him. Let him do his thing. 

Like, that was so cool. It’s one of the coolest moments. It was literally, you need to talk to someone to let him do his thing. It’s like we.

Rick Rappe: 36:42  

We all need a wingman like that, don’t we? And in our career, somebody that’s like, okay, I know the guy that you need to talk to. But yeah, and his approach may seem whatever, but you should just really trust him because he knows what he’s doing. Yeah, I love those kinds of referrals as well. That’s wonderful.

What’s one tool or software that you can’t live without in your work?

Perryn Olson: 37:08  

Oh, just a CRM. I’m amazed when I meet companies that I’ve worked with billion dollar a year, contractors that don’t have CRM. It’s like, how do you manage life? I remember just my life doing little sales 20 years ago, 15 years ago, whatever. Before I started doing CRM, it was full of sticky notes and emails and, you know, just theorem is just the go.

I tell people all the time, if you’re solo by yourself. But you want to freelance. I will use like a free HubSpot account just to manage the basics.

Rick Rappe: 37:40  

Yeah. We are becoming experts in HubSpot, which is definitely a learning curve, but it’s paying off, I hope.

Perryn Olson: 37:49  

There’s some good industry CRM, but I generally tell people, just start on HubSpot for free. You can do the first upgrade and just get your feet into CRM because HubSpot is so easy to use. Yeah. And then you kind of figure out what you want and what you don’t want and things like that. And I’ve had clients stay with HubSpot.

I’ve had clients then move on to something like Projectmates or Builder or some other construction focused CRMs. Yeah, but it helps them just kind of get started and just start getting the data somewhere and centralized. Because that’s the other thing is there’s turnovers natural in business. Whether you’re the CEO owner is going to retire or die or just, you know, what have you have a mishap. But generally it’s the salespeople that, you know, all their contacts are in their phone. 

Will they leave? What happens? All that business relationships that you paid for? Yeah. Some of the relationships are going to stay with that person, but all their contact to like you should own that as a company. 

And that’s one of the challenges a lot of companies I find have is they don’t institutionalize some of their processes. Everything is very much like a maverick type system.

Rick Rappe: 38:48  

Yeah. In the construction and trade industry, I’m sure that, I mean, most of these companies are geographical, right? So they serve a certain number of a certain area. And you probably have to focus on building the prospect list within that area and figuring out what’s the total addressable list of companies, and then making sure that you kind of continuously market to those companies. Right.

Like people never really you can’t really stop marketing to those people. You have to just keep figuring out ways to nurture, nurture, nurture.

Perryn Olson: 39:19  

Yeah, you definitely nurture because eventually that go-to resource will fail and they’ll say, all right, they’re done, you’re up and you want to be in front of them. You want to be that next man up top of mind.

Rick Rappe: 39:31  

Yeah, for.

Perryn Olson: 39:31  

A lot of construction is very geographic, but you’ve also got more your niche, you know, your trade contractors or some general contractor that have a specific niche and they’ll travel. Yeah, I’ve got a client that’s got like four big rig drills that they just kind of strategically place around the United States, and they’re working through different contractors and utility companies that they do work for. But most of the work is, I would say 80% of the industry is probably location based.

Rick Rappe: 39:57  

Interesting. What area of the country do you focus on as far as clients, do you work mainly in your own geographic area, or do you work with companies all over the country?

Perryn Olson: 40:08  

I prefer around the country. Okay, so I’m in New Orleans, but I do actually have two clients here in New Orleans now. But that was kind of a happenstance. But two reasons why I like working nationally is one is I can work digitally, and I don’t have to worry about travel time. That has an impact on, you know, my day.

But also just there’s a kind of more of an inherent level of expertise when you’re not local. Yeah. When I started knitting in construction, I really struggled to sell construction marketing locally. It was so easy to sell nationally. Like it was just a weird thing was like, if I could touch you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. 

It’s this weird phenomenon, like. And when I work with companies out of town, I generally ask the marketers, I’m like, what have you been trying to get done and approved for years that you can never get done? And they’ll tell me something like, why do you care? One kid, I’m like, I can get it done. If it makes sense to the strategy, I can work it in and I’ll make them feel like they were the right one. 

I won’t say I came up like, oh, Simone had this idea. I think it’s a good one. We should do it. And they’re like, how did you do that? Like, because there’s this weird perception of, you’re an expert, I’m paying you. 

You’re not in-house because you’re paying you separately, but also you’re further away. There’s this whole like 100 mile thing. I’ve heard even further. This client I’m thinking of is a thousand miles away, and they just have this. You have a higher level of expertise the further away you are. 

I don’t know what the human psyche has never figured out the psychology of it, but I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

Rick Rappe: 41:31  

Well, this has been really great. I really appreciate you talking with me today. How can people get in touch with you if they’re interested in learning more or working with you on their particular challenge?

Perryn Olson: 41:42  

Yeah, that’s what you please find me is LinkedIn. I’m the only person there, probably the only person in the world as far as I know. So that’s it. Or if you want to check out the firm or Altissimo altcmo.net.

Rick Rappe: 41:56  

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today and I appreciate it. And we’ll talk to you again soon.

Perryn Olson: 42:01  

Yeah, I enjoyed the conversation, Rick.

Outro: 42:03  

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

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