A Conversation with Kevin Snow of Time on Target
Founder, sales strategist and podcaster Kevin Snow sat down to talk about his company, customers and business. We delved into the importance of 'niching down', selling, scaling, virtual business and pandemic business, email, marketing, social media, and the importance of a driving vision to growing a company.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
This is Dr. Matthew Dunn. Host of the future. of email marketing. My guest today is Kevin snow founder and chief sales strategist at time on target. Hey, Kevin. Welcome. Hey, Matthew, how are you doing today? No complaints, man, where am I speaking to you? Where are you?
Kevin Snow
I am about an hour north of Minneapolis in Minnesota.
Matthew Dunn
No, I actually have a University of Minnesota stamped on my bottom from being born there. Oh, nice. Awesome. I'd like Minnesota, but I don't like your skeeters.
Kevin Snow
No, they they're not out yet. But with all the hot weather we've been having lately. They're gonna be here soon.
Matthew Dunn
He's a they they will show up just as surely as spam in the inbox, right? Yep. That's for sure. Fill people in on on time on target, I had to look up what the what the definition of the term is. But that doesn't define with the company.
Kevin Snow
So it Yeah, it does it away in the originally when I launched time on target, I actually launched it as a public speaking training company, I was doing a lot of speaking at the time for an organization I was a member of but then also companies are starting to bring me in to teach people, specifically their employees, how to network and how to sell and do all that stuff. So I needed a company to so they can pay me. So I started time on target and the whole name was about the you know that that's a military reference, I'm in the military as well. And the references for artillery time on target is the synchronization of all your fires. So they hit a target at the same time. And I thought, all right, that's kind of a cool name for a company that's designed to help other businesses figure out how to sell more effectively. So they're all their sales efforts are achieving that goal. And that's really how I kind of got into that name.
Matthew Dunn
Got it. Got it. Now, you, you you yourself. In the services you
Kevin Snow
mentioned and specifically in the artillery, I'm not actually artillery, so but they have some cool terms. So
Matthew Dunn
we've been we've been throwing stuff at high speed at each other for Yep, enough decades to get it sexualized terminology, I know from from looking at your, your site and just voting up a bit for our conversation that you guys cover a fair range of services, CRM implementation, email marketing, and I'm going to guess just straight up sales effectiveness. Is that fair assessment?
Kevin Snow
Yeah, that's really a good assessment of what we do. We started out, I actually did a deployment after I launched time on target. I was doing some training and doing all that stuff was going great. Then I went to the Middle East, and I was overseas for a year and I came back and I had absolutely no clients. I had nothing in my pipeline for speaking gigs. And I really had that old shit. Now, what do I do moment? Do I grow up and just go get a job? Do I redo something, do I start over do the exact same thing and I did a huge pivot for the company. And instead of me being the product with this speaking and the training, I use pivoted into consulting, and going into businesses to actually help them rehab or fix sales programs. And specifically looking at tech firms that were that startup second stage startup phase, where they had revenue, but now they're trying to scale and helping them, you know, do the right things before they hired their salespeople. So they can onboard them, they could start selling faster. And over the years, the thing I noticed when I was working with all these clients as the one thing that they all didn't do well was sales process. None of them knew how to sell or what their process was, but then integrating technology. And I'm the I'm a geek at heart. So I was like, Alright, we're just gonna, we kept niching down and focus started focusing on how to use sales, automation, CRM, effectively. So the sales people are selling more and management knows what's going on. How do you use email marketing to help the sales people close business? You know, how many, how much time do salespeople spend trying to find a piece of collateral or some, some content to send to a sales to a client? Well, we can automate all that. So it's really helping them figure out those processes, and then use the technology correctly. So it all talks right to each other. And it's easy for the company to use, but then also helps the salespeople sell more. And that's and that's what we do now.
Matthew Dunn
You mentioned niching down like how down Do you niche Are you down to a handful of specific platforms on the technology side that you help implement or is it process and you're somewhat vendor neutral on the technology?
Kevin Snow
I used to be really vendor neutral as like, I used to think that was if you're going to be a consultant you know, and I want to come in and consult and advise and and i would outsource all the actual execution piece. And then the business owner and he got smart and said, well, that's dumb, you don't know how to do all this stuff in these systems. So now I partner with some specific client companies that do really good work that I like and are at the right point of development for the clients I work with, ya know, Salesforce is awesome. Not so much for a small business. Yeah, too much to admin. So I'm looking I use companies like on ontraport. So pipe drive, and some other ones in that, that scale. That work really great. Yeah, okay, I'll learn other ones, I'll totally can pick up systems pretty quickly. But it's gonna take longer. And I make sure the clients always understand that, hey, it's gonna take longer because I got to learn this thing that you're married to. Right? Or we can do this new one that works really great. It'll be done in half the time. So? Well, I
Matthew Dunn
mean, there are times that vendors you know, say they're offering technology vendors say their offering process in the box. But obviously, that's not the case, you wouldn't be in business.
Kevin Snow
Yep. Yeah, I, I have my preferred way to sell. And I'm sure that leaks into when I'm working with clients, but we spent a lot of time on the process side talking to their clients, and both ones who bought and then also ones who said no, and figuring out how they buy, because everyone's going to be a little bit different. And we want to make sure that when we create a process for them, it actually flows right for who they're talking to. Not just because it looks really cool on paper, and I can I can implement it really quickly increasing my profit margins. So we want we want, you know, we want them to come back in here and say, Oh, my God, we're still using this process. It's awesome. We love it.
Matthew Dunn
There you go. Now do you still work primarily with that sort of second stage startup that you mentioned,
Kevin Snow
I still do a lot with them. But I've also because of the automation piece, I now work with a ton of like coaches and people who are trying to change the business world. And so they're, you know, the entrepreneur, one, one person shop type of business, but they're now at the point where they need automation. They need email, they're doing courses, they're doing webinars, they're gonna have all this stuff going on. So now I manage their, their automation for them.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, okay. Okay, gotcha. That's interesting. Yeah, there are. The coaching is a big business these days. Yep. It is a lot of people doing Why is that? What do you think? Ah,
Kevin Snow
I think it's gotten to the point where people are, especially at least in business, they understand that they aren't experts at everything, and that there are going to be people out there that know more than them. So it's no longer taboo to ask for help. Yeah, yeah. It used to be very much like, Well, you know, if you ask for help, you're weak. Oh, no, that's not how it is in business anymore. You know, even the CEOs at the highest levels, they have coaches, they still have someone that mentors them. And they they talk about, Alright, here's what's going on. I think I really screwed this up. What should I have done? They still have the exact same conversations that new business owners do just set a different scale. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. That makes sense. And and I read, I made bits of coaches pitch for their business once, but they're like, Look, Tiger Woods has a coach. Yeah, I think you are.
Kevin Snow
Exactly. And it's, you know, and the cool thing is, and when I work with a lot of my clients, and we're talking about, you know, how either how to grow your business, how to develop that bigger how to scale, I always tell them, You need to be surrounded by people that are that step ahead of you, that you can ask questions of who've already screwed up all the stuff you're about to, and can either stop you from doing or help you fix it. And you got to have that board of directors in your in your world that can tell you the stuff that you don't know where your blind spots are, so that you aren't just like doing, you know, the three steps forward two steps back thing the entire time.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right that that makes a ton of sense, on what's changed from your point of view in terms of sales process in the course of the last year and a half pandemic period?
Kevin Snow
Well, it's got a lot more virtual. A lot more of what we're doing right now, a lot of people are on zoom, and it which is good, and it's bad. There are you know, there's some people were really awesome at the zoom thing, and they can do the conversations and manage it. Just like in person meetings, but there's a lot of people who can't and they are there. You can tell when I'm in different meetings, I can know who's Alright, so who's also looking at their email, who's also taking notes or doing other stuff and who's trying to multitask because they're like, Oh, well, I'm in another room. They won't know. Yeah, we know. It's pretty obvious when, when that's what you're doing. So that's that's a huge change. But I for my business because of what I do. Everyone was now trying to figure out their digital footprint right? They understood that All right, so I don't have foot traffic anymore. Now, how do I get my stuff in front of everyone? How do we build an email list? I had so many people coming to me that's like, Alright, I need to build an email list now. Like, awesome. We talked about this two years ago, you know, if you would have started then we would have been really good position right now to do all this cool stuff. Yeah. Now we're starting at square one with a bunch of other people. And you're gonna have to fight through a ton of noise. Yeah, so yeah, that was a big changes. Everyone realizing, oh, my God, I gotta have digital.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no option. And I don't think any going back, no matter how wide the doors go open now.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, that's Yeah, I think there's always going to be this hybrid now. And that's really what I push to my clients was like, hey, that's awesome. Your salespeople are out meeting with clients, you're having that face to face. But there's all this stuff that they shouldn't do, that we can use to get more content in front of your clients that's going to help them make decisions faster, and hit that next stage. And it's just people are now understanding like, Alright, this stuff actually works. How do I how do I use it now? And how do I leverage it so that I can continue to scale? And I have this fallback position, Lord, help us if there's another another pandemic?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, right. Right. Well, what what do you, you know, when you're when you're advising entrepreneurs, that I was gonna focus in on email a bit, specifically, on email as part of a sales process, let's say, What do you find to be effective? How do you help them approach that?
Kevin Snow
So it really depends on the type of business and where the touch points are really important for that decision maker? And understanding. Alright, so what type of content Do we need right now? So it could be let's, you know, let's take a refer first that comes out and puts shingles on your roof, they come out and meet with you. After you know, the first meeting, they take all the measurements and everything? Well, the first email we would send out for them is the Hey, thanks for meeting with us today. It's awesome to find out what you got going on and take a look at your house. It's a beautiful house, blah, blah, blah, will always include some sort of content on hey, here's how you pick a roofer. Right. most homeowners don't understand how to look at one refer and compared to another refer, yeah, they don't understand what a storm chaser is versus a local and why they're different and who you should talk to. So we'll give them that type of content. Here's how you make a good decision. Nice, and give them all that information. Next step in that sales process could be the proposal. So now the refers back, hey, here's how much it's going to cost. Here's what we're going to use. Let's talk about types of shingles and colors and citing and all that stuff. Yeah. Our next follow up for that would be would be testimonials. You know, here's a link to our testimonial page. Here's a testimonial from a client down the road from you. So now we're doing the trust thing. They've been able we taught them how to pick the right one, we gave them pricing now we gave them stuff to help them understand that we are the right one. And instead of the salesperson doing it all manually, it's all automated based on them finally finishing off their their specific meetings.
Matthew Dunn
So so that's that's where you start by taking CRM process. Yep. And and marrying it methodically designed to content. Exactly. Yeah. The job of managing all of that content, can can be daunting. How do you how do you help your clients through that maze?
Kevin Snow
So we have some clients who want us to come in and just build out the process and get everything started for them? And then they have some internal marketing people who can manage it, and they're doing their content for them already. Yeah. So and then that's awesome. Like, sweet. Here you go. Other clients are like, Hey, can you just do this all? And yeah, and just Can you manage this? Because I'm not going to do it. This isn't my thing. I want to be out on the top of a roof looking at shingles? Can you help us? And then we'll do that for a lot of our clients, we'll actually do the ongoing management and help them alright, so we have this going, it's running good. We'll work with them on their split testing, how do we tweak it, what's not getting click through is why not adding in more segmenting so that we're sending the right content to different types of clients. So we can be really, you know, if it's hail damage, we can send Hail Damage information, you know, we could get really specific, I just keep, and then we just keep helping them build out that campaign. So we're getting more and more ideal for what we're sending to that specific client. Gotcha.
Matthew Dunn
Gotcha. Um, do you go through the process of helping them on, you know, persona development, or in some some way sort of formulate what they need to know about prospects and customers?
Kevin Snow
Yeah, if we're doing the full process development for them, where we're actually helping them map out stuff and figuring out who we're going to talk to Hello, I'm usually have an idea of it, but they haven't gotten the full development or out of all right here is our persona. It's, it's a hail damage Harry, and you know, and all that that piece. And so for some of them, we need to do that because they don't understand who they sell to, and they're doing the shotgun effect with their marketing. So we help them dial it in others, you know, especially the ones who already have some in some marketing support in house that's doing some stuff for them, or they've been doing some social media ads, they already have a decent idea. So for those, it's more helping them tweak it and figure out how right so how do we get more data on them? How do we help you get a better picture? So that's what you're doing on social media is actually more effective. And it's more targeted, and working through all those tech pieces with their existing marketing team?
Matthew Dunn
I see. I see. Yeah. It's funny, you mentioned pick roofing is the you know, as the proxy in this conversation, I had an issue in my roof that I needed to have fixed a couple of years ago, called the roofing firm, were too busy, but so and so used to work for us, he's going out on his own, he does repairs, my whole interaction with him, which was great was text and a couple of phone calls. And the tail end of him patching the piece of the rough, um, you know, chatting with him as he's as he's leaving. And he's like, I'm just, you know, so so busy, was incredibly busy. But he was so busy, he couldn't get on top of his sales and marketing to be more effective and more profitable. That's like, the the threshold, the threshold for him, for him was going to be his hours in the day on a roof period.
Kevin Snow
Exactly. That's what a lot of entrepreneurs are at. They're bootstrapping their business. They don't have, you know, a $2 billion funding inject. Yeah, to be able to hire a bunch of people to do stuff. They're getting done from their work day, getting home, having dinner, play with the kids, you know, kissing the wife and then jumping on the computer and say, Alright, now I got to do my bookkeeping. Now. I'm gonna do marketing, I need to confirm calls for tomorrow. And they're working till midnight. Yeah, and that's the cool thing with email automation, and CRM, is you can do a lot of that automated, and you can figure out Alright, so what are the things that are taking up my time that I need to offload? How do we do it with systems? Right? And how do we, you know, I don't need to now confirm we can automatically send out a text confirmation. Hey, Matthew is going to be at your house tomorrow at 10am. You know, text text reply. Yes. For you'll be there no to reschedule and I'll send you the link. So there's all that stuff that now they don't have to do.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Which should visit out to the house when the guy's not there is a mighty big, mighty big waste of time and money.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, exactly. Or I have one friend who does paint sales right now. And he he gets addresses, and he gets in there the wrong address. Oh, well, yeah. So he gets to a house or like, No, you actually want to be a street over like, All right. So you know that those automated tools allow you to confirm all this data? And you know, start the pre sale piece is huge.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for efficiency, for profitability. For all of that stuff. It's interesting the way you the way you hooked text into that example, I've had a number of guests on this podcast, I'm talking from the text perspective. And you know, the focus, and most of our invites are about email marketing, but there's an overlap between those things. And it seems to be fairly consistently that text is more what I would call operational, I'm going to be there to operational message on Hey, do you want your roof fixed from the hail? Don't text me that I don't want to be I don't want to get that from you.
Kevin Snow
I think it's a little generational to you and I are probably in the same generation Gen X. And we, you know, we communicate email. That was a cool hot technology for us. And the habit Yeah, so we like getting all our stuff that way. My little sisters are millennial. They're much they prefer texting a lot of the times and I have some clients who do marketing through text about specific events, and hey, we have this thing going up. Amazon does it for their, their truck, their their truck that goes around. Yeah, it's like, Hey, this is for sale on the Amazon truck, click here, find out where it's gonna be in your location. didn't know that. That's interesting. So the goal is for your communications, you need to have multiple channels. Yeah, so that your prospects can pick how they want to communicate with you. Yeah, I love instant chat. For my online systems. If you don't have chat support, I'm probably not going to hang out with your business for a while because it annoys me to have to email and wait for you to answer. I want to chat with customer support when I'm in the system and I'm working on something and I'm fresh. Straight it Yeah, other people want to do, hey, I'm happy putting in a ticket and get to me when you are at that's how they like it. Some people want text, right? The goal is you give them options. And then they get to communicate how they want and get their speed, a resolution that they need. So they're happy.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, well, I'm going to take what you just said and formulate and sort of paint a picture, though, on the consumer of today, b2b, b2c doesn't matter. They're pretty specific about what they want. And it does create a bar of entry. For a business to hit, I mean, the number of the number of systems and skills and facilities and stack of content that you just mentioned, you know, chat, text, email, managing that methodically, ideally, single, single customer record that all those things dot into it, not something refernet necessarily learned how to do
Kevin Snow
know, most, most, most business owners haven't. And, you know, most business owners aren't even salespeople. They're just really good at a thing. And they're passionate about it. Yeah. So they're able to go do it, you know, that and that's why I work with a lot of tech firms. My I cut my teeth in the sales world selling long distance and data, so t ones, DS ones, you know, high end data, you know, frame relay, we I was selling the cloud in the 90s. Before it was actually a thing, frame relay haven't heard that. And so, you know, they're really good at business owners now that are starting these tech firms are really great technologists. They understand all that stuff, but they don't know how to sell. Yeah, and that's what happens with a lot of businesses. So you know that and that's where people like me are able to come in and say, Alright, so we're gonna help you, we're going to help you put these processes in place, you don't have to feel overwhelmed, it's going to be easy for you, if you want us help on the long term will totally help you on the long term as well. But, you know, that is the benefit of the outsourcing is you can bring in the expert, you don't have to spend your five hours at night reading about how to set up a chatbot.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Do you find? Do you find many companies that that you say, you know what, no, this isn't gonna work for whatever reason?
Kevin Snow
Um, oh, yes. So are we gonna start it's like, well, email doesn't work. Like Yes, email works. It has a 400% ROI. It's just nuts. You know, $1 is gonna generate you $40 over the lifetime of the email. So it's helped a lot of time is just education and getting them understanding. It's like, Alright, here target market right now are new homeowners. Gen Z, millennials. This is how they communicate. They don't want you telemarketing and calling them up. They want to get a text. They want to get instant messenger. They want to be on WhatsApp. You know, they're watching Tick Tock. So how do we do roughing Tick Tock ads for you? know, it's, it's, it's really helping them understand who their demographic is, now that it's changed. It's not. I tell one of my clients like this, all this. This all the time when we're talking about stuff. He's like, well, I won't do it that way. Like your clients? Aren't you like that? None of them were remotely like you. Yeah, so stop telling me you don't want to do it. It's what will they do? And he's like, Yeah, I know. I find so but a lot of them don't understand that. They think everyone's just like them. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah, it's a natural bias, I guess. But that's where that external point of view is probably really valuable. How do you yourself and your team how do you how do you keep up with the channels and the technologies?
Kevin Snow
So I my favorite thing is getting a new client that wants me to do something that I haven't done before. Because then I get to learn I'm like, Alright, sweet we're gonna build we're gonna build a shopping cart. Alright, I've never done this before. So now I get to do research. Yeah, so my my recent step in my business is I brought on copywriters and support people, okay, so that I could stop actually writing the emails and I could really focus on the strategy and the design and all that piece and then the support person to do the Hey, this is spelled wrong Can you go in and change that so now they can do all that 10 level entry level type support now that I don't have to say that it gives me more time to do that strategy piece but then also to learn the cool new stuff so we stay forefront and we're not using all right funnels are cool, well, are they really now anymore? It what's the cool thing right now that everyone's talking about and and really focusing on the new emerging technology and how we integrate it and you know, the, for example, Apple turning off tracking you ever
Matthew Dunn
been, it's been a subject of quite a bit of conversation in In a world in the last couple of days, what do you think?
Kevin Snow
So I, my personal opinion, is I would rather get ads for things I'm remotely interested in than just seeing random things pop up as ads. I'm Why are you showing me this? You know, that was the the how email marketing started with you just got random email ads for things that you're like, why are you sending me this? So I got stopped? Yeah. And that's what email is gonna go back to with if everyone turns off that tracking piece. Yeah. But I also understand people's like, well, I don't want you knowing everything I do. Got it. I'm in the military, I know how this tracking thing works. So but there's ways around it, you have to now get more focused on the conversion. And using that conversion at event to build your audiences. So like I had mentioned ontraport. Before that was one of my partners, they, the day that launched, they actually already had the ability to do that in their system, and then feed into the new Facebook system. So all my clients who had been doing the tracking just on visits, were unable to convert them over and about a less than a week everyone was converted over to the new system and have the other conversion going on are all their audience building being based on actual conversion
Matthew Dunn
events. So conversion events being clicked inside
Kevin Snow
chocolate cart, something, they actually did something where they had to opt in and give us info now we're all building our information off of those types of interactions, as opposed to Alright, so Matthew visited this page, and we have some information about him based on third party tracking. Now he visited this page, so we're going to target people that look like Matthew in our system. Yeah, yeah. People who actually do stuff, and we're able to send that to Facebook and say, all right, we want people like these. Right? So in the long run, it should end up being actually your failure. Facebook audiences should be better.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, that's interesting perspective. I mean, makes sense. But it's an interesting perspective. Maybe that's maybe that's a bit of payback for, for Facebook for Apple, having hamstrung them in the app world?
Kevin Snow
Yeah, exactly. You know, that's gonna be a pain right away, because you're, everyone I've talked to has seen the cost per click, go up on their ads, but they're starting to see the conversion rates better. So as I think as it goes, the things are gonna start to even out, yeah, you're never gonna have the cheap ads we did before, where you could just have, you know, huge numbers, but I think you're gonna get better results. So it's gonna end up paying for itself.
Matthew Dunn
That's a good way to look at it. First party data is going to become much more vital asset. Yes. Well, yeah. And being effective at that, that that, that capture that management, that continued growth of the customer record.
Kevin Snow
Exactly. And that's a huge part I was that was just going through my head, it's like, how do you do the incremental profiling for that contact? So the first one is, I got your first name and your email? Yeah, I do a lot with that. How do I now get you to interact? So you give me more stuff? You know, what, what do though? What does that type of polling look like? And how do you do it? So people are excited to give you the info. So you can now do your segmenting, just with your info not having to pull in info from data conglomerates.
Matthew Dunn
It's going to I agree with what you're saying, I do think it's going to, it's going to push more of the responsibility back back to the to the other party in that first party transaction to the business themselves to being systematic about that, or buying or outsourcing the expertise to be systematic at that, because you can't go to an ad network and say, I want to buy everything about this, this set of people they won't be able to sell it to.
Kevin Snow
Yep, yeah. It's you know, I had a client a few years ago that that's all their business did was take data from multiple data holders, and put it all together into a big data set. So people can now pull in all this third party data for their ad campaigns. And like, those businesses are all just like, gotten, at least on the apple side, you know, you can still do it on Android, but I don't think that's going to be far, far. Yeah, we
Matthew Dunn
lived. There was a there was a strong, strong hint, floated at an email marketing strategy call yesterday that Google and Gmail may follow suit with how they handle tracking pixels. Therefore, for our business for campaign genius, real time content, we're doing some serious head scratching, because the delivery vehicle for pixels is the delivery vehicle for real time content. So there's things we've done that we won't be able to do. But that's you know, that's, I guess that's life in the walled garden.
Kevin Snow
Well, it's you know, That's a cool thing about marketing is it's not the same all the time and we get to look forward and say, all right, so, you know, video MTV when it came out the whole idea of video TV was this oh my god, this is amazing. And you know, anyone who had ties to that demographic who is going to watch MTV jumped on it right away. Well, now MTV is more how many times is MTV more of that? You know, they don't even show videos anymore,
Matthew Dunn
right? Yeah, TV is not music TV.
Kevin Snow
Exactly. Now, but now we get empty. We get videos from YouTube, we get videos through other Spotify is adding the video piece onto their platform now. So it's you know, it's really that's what's cool about what we do is we get to track all that and figure out Alright, so how do we use this? So how does this fit in? Do I have a client that this would be really cool for and they can take advantage of the new thing? You know, tick tock, you know, that is huge. The the apple voice thing I can't think of the name of it right now. The Apple only app where it was all just people talking in a room? Oh, clubhouse clubhouse. Yeah, you know, that was huge. I came out and just like the perfect time, yeah, everyone's second home and wanting to interact with people that they couldn't interact with. Yeah. So you know, it's all those little fun things. That's, that's cool. It's like, ah, sweet. I have a new toy to play with. How do we do this? There
Matthew Dunn
is there's a degree of fatigue, that I find myself thinking about fatigue being people going, I have enough passwords, logins, memberships, identities, addresses, etc. I saw a question. I think I'd read it the other day. So it was like, I think I'm gonna launch a social network around this topic. And I'm like, No, you're not. Right. We're because we're all up to here. With those things, it takes a lot of firepower or luck, for a clubhouse to break through and that may have been short lived Meteor We'll see. Tick tock, you know, great engineering, found a sweet spot. But it's not like you can name off dozens now of things that people will sign up, concentrate on spend time and invest themselves in etc. My response to the guy on Reddit was social networks are not built around topics they're built around people. And I've got enough of them Thank you.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, it's I tend to agree with you i it's because I've been on all the tertiary fringe social media ones clapper and you know, all those me We are me way however you pronounce it. And they're okay. But it's, you know, it's there's nothing new about them. That's makes me like, I want to be on here all the time. All the time. Yeah. And for someone to come into the market with the social media platform that's going to disrupt the market. There has to be something new. Yeah, there has to be something cool that you're like, Oh, my God, I've never seen this before. Yeah. And everyone runs to it. Yeah. And I don't know what that is right now.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Arguably, club club. I mean, it. One answer is it's about the stuff you leave out. Right. Snapchat said we'll leave out the ability to save things. Yeah, they got imitated clubhouse said we'll leave out looking at stuff. It's audio only, like, okay, and it's live. Okay, that's kind of that's kind of interesting. But there's, there's only a finite number of those jobs of how we function as human beings. So I suspect, I suspect we'll poke down all those alleys. And then we'll have dominance in each of those niches or maybe duopolies or so or just a handful of companies. And that'll that'll that'll kind of be that.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, I think so. There's no clubhouse was awesome when everyone's sitting at home. And we have a way to have conversations and interact without taking up real estate on your screen. Yeah, cuz you didn't have zoom open. Yeah, yeah. Well, now now what happens when everyone is back out and about and driving and doing stuff? Yeah. And you have like real people you can interact with on a regular basis. Are people still going to go to club houses? much? The new the
Matthew Dunn
new social network? It's called a beer garden. Yeah. Which to be true. After a year and a half of this isolation crap. I can't wait to go to a brewery.
Kevin Snow
Yeah. Are the Minnesota State Fair? You're from here. So you know, huge State Fair. They did a kickoff summer event over Memorial Day weekend. Yeah. And it was sold out. record numbers, I'm sure record numbers of people they brought in like their other top number. Their top food vendors. They brought in some people to you know, sell state ferries stuff. They had a couple other like the big slide and a few things open. But it was literally just people getting out and being able to eat food on a stick and drink beer and actually interact with people interact with each other. Yeah, yeah. All the tickets sold out and it was it was everyone was smiling and happy and it was awesome. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
I was just at a panel discussion about video and email this morning, which I want to chat with you about. But the the the long running conference the Oh, I'm blanking on the name festival of email that Andrew Nellie Bonner put on. They had a live session and I think they felt that they might have felt and will have to say, they might have felt they were going a bit out on a limb and having a live segment to open it in Miami. This is the beginning or end of last week, sold out instantly. Like people like no, I'm ready to get on a plane and get to Miami. And it wasn't it wasn't hundreds because that would have been irresponsible. But the seats that they did have available got snapped up super fast. Yeah, we did. My one of my clients, we launched last March, a virtual networking organization called success champions networking. And we had originally planned we were going to do a summit event in April that was supposed to be live was gonna be in Dallas, Fort Worth area. But obviously everything started locking down in March. We're like, well, this is now off. We actually still held it in October with a live and a virtual version. So we did a hybrid event. We sold out the live event we had you know 100 people show up. Wow. And in a hotel conference room big one of the big ballrooms. Yeah. And people were like, hell yeah, we were granted this is Texas, but they're like, yeah, we're tired of being at home. We're definitely doing this. We're doing the live thing. So yeah, yeah. Awesome. Granted, this is in Texas.
Kevin Snow
I would not have I would not have been able to do that. If I held it in Minnesota people should have I probably had protesters. But Texas like yeah, we're gonna let's go do this thing. Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Well, we'll we'll start restructuring the rules, rules and expectations as as we're as we're, you know, emerging in balancing the need to reconnect live the need depth there live. Yeah, yeah, I
Kevin Snow
love zoom and the virtual thing because now I do not have to drive to meetings. Awesome. But there are there is a lot of positives about the real person to person be able to shake someone's hands and interact and, and read body language much better.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. I just had that conversation with my wife last night. About the handshake. I said, You know, I think the handshake come back and she was more on the cautious in Well, I don't know, it's actually never been great from a healthcare perspective. And I said, I don't really care. Yeah, like, I really don't care. I know something about someone much differently from that moment of contact. Then Then I you can't get that on zoom. And you can't get there from bumping elbows. Sorry.
Kevin Snow
And we're a tribal species. Yeah. Are you know, we did not grow up as lone humans wandering around. We're always in tribes. Yeah. So that interaction and shaking hands and hugging and everything is is key to our district. Mental psyche? Yeah. Let alone our ability to communicate. So
Matthew Dunn
yeah, yeah. Communicate connect all that other stuff. Yeah, we're we are wired to be together. And I think we're all pretty much fed up with not
Kevin Snow
Yeah, yeah, totally. It was funny at the beginning of everything, the memes are coming out and I'm a high see on the disc profile. So I'm, I'm the introverted Leave me alone, and I'll recharge and then I can go out and people more, but all the memes are like alright, introverts go check on your extrovert friends. They're not doing so well. Right now.
Matthew Dunn
That is at that is absolutely. And I don't think I've done that profile, but I'm pretty sure I recharge just fine by myself for my extrovert friends. We're going bananas.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, totally. I had friends like Alright, so we're gonna have a zoom happy hour. Like a what? Yeah. We're gonna have a bunch of us up, jump on zoom. And we're gonna drink beer together. Okay, yeah. Be alone and socialize. Awesome. I'm in.
Matthew Dunn
Let's go. Yeah. And and, uh, pallid substituted best. We tried a few of those exhausting in a peculiar way. Yeah, yeah. Like, just like, okay, it was nice to see everybody but my head hurts. And I'm tired of staring at the little squeegee heads on the screen. And yeah,
Kevin Snow
same. No, totally. I completely agree. Yeah. Know what, you know, oh, well,
Matthew Dunn
what you get What you're going to do. We had, we had to adapt. we dodged an artillery shell slash bullet. If this had happened, even five years earlier, the infrastructure for making the rapid shift to digital wasn't ready. we lucked out. We really lucked out.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, there was no one was using video or doing any of the digital pieces the way they were. No. So our way they are now. So yeah, it would not have transitioned. Well.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, you know, cloud was just cloud was, you know, just starting to form on the horizon, so to speak. I mean, I know it's been around for a while, but the maturity levels were such that video file storage collaboration, did it keep going down the list you like? Well, we thought it was gonna take us two years, but we did it in two weeks. And guess what? We made it work? Yep. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So what, what next on the horizon for time on target? Where are you taking the company,
Kevin Snow
I want to continue to scale. So you know, the next step is going to be, you know, full time employees that are actually doing working with clients. And I'm not just contracting out the support piece, or the copywriting. They're now you know, full time and doing stuff. And, and, and that's, that's gonna be the next big step, because I want to be able to focus more on the business development piece. And obviously, the scale, I need more revenues, so I need to sell more I can do that. If I'm doing the cool stuff that I started the business to do.
Matthew Dunn
Now you get to eat your own dog food. Yeah,
Kevin Snow
exactly. You know, so my company's scaling, the virtual networking thing is scaling. So we're at the point now where I start bringing on full time people and figuring out how to pay them, so that I can keep growing and keep this going and help people so Right,
Matthew Dunn
right, well, let's say your timings good. Yep. Yeah, I think they'll be I think there'll be plenty of appetite. And, you know, obviously, you know, more than a bit about how to help yourself scale. So that'll be it'll be an interesting challenge, you'll have to you yourself will have to go No, can't you right, got to stay at a particular piece of it.
Kevin Snow
Yeah. And that's been my biggest thing is like, do I really want other people touching these things? I'm like, No, I don't, but I need to. And yeah, I need to have these people doing this. So I'm not and that is totally The biggest challenge for any entrepreneur is letting go of things. Yeah. Yeah. Trusting, trusting that it will turn out okay.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, no, I would as you know, as, as a fellow entrepreneur, I, I would agree, there's, there's stuff that I know I will not turn loose of. And I know, it puts a cap on some as some dimensions of the business and, and there's, I hit a point where I'm like, okay, I would actually prefer to keep the responsibility because I like doing that or because I think it's worth doing it the way I do it, or bla bla bla bla bla, but you you got to look in the mirror, when you have that conversation with yourself.
Kevin Snow
And it's understanding, you know, what is your vision for the company? Yeah, initially people start with Well, my vision is I want to make x revenue, ale, annual revenue, monthly recurring revenue, whatever it is, but is that really the vision for the company? Yeah, I look more Alright, so what am I able to do with it? And what is our output and how what is the impact we're having on our clients or on on the world in which is you know, if I can grow my time on target piece, where I can funnel that in to scale success champions networking more with my business partner slash clients, so we can help more people network more effectively? That's awesome. You know, that's, that's achieving the vision for the company, man. Do I need to have, you know, do I need to have a 400 person agency to do that? No, I don't think so. Nor and I'm pretty sure you don't want a 400% age. I suspect so. Yeah. So you know, there are people Gary Vee likes it. I that's not my thing. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. And and having worked at large companies in a military, large, large, large organization, like different thing, like Dunbar's numbers, very realistic thing, like, yeah, there's a ceiling where you go, Oh, geez, who are these people?
Kevin Snow
Yeah, totally. And for me, if I can do you know, five to 10 million in annual revenue with 10 to 15 people with a perfect time, that's gonna be awesome. Because that will give me freedom to do what I need to do and keeps I can pay my my employees really well. And I can then work on other stuff that has a big impact. So
Matthew Dunn
nice. Nice, great thing. Well, if if someone's hunting for your company, Kevin, they go to time on target with dashes in between the words right, correct time dash on dash target Comm. We've got a dash in our domain, and I'm used to it but I see people fumbling I'm like, sorry, all the other URLs were
Kevin Snow
taken. Exactly. I wanted the other one, but it's gone. Yeah. I get emailed about once a year. Would you like to buy this URL for $15,000? No, no, I'm good. Thanks.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, so cool. Well, let's
Unknown Speaker
wrap up. My
Matthew Dunn
guest has been Kevin snow founder of time on target, Kevin, pleasure speaking with you and thanks for making the time.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, it was awesome. I had a great time. Matthew. I love doing this. So
Matthew Dunn
I'll cut the record by record Okay. Hey, good stuff, pal. Cool. Awesome. Now that was a lot of recording has stopped. Your podcast audio only or audio plus video,
Kevin Snow
audio Plus video. Okay, so we have YouTube channel. Yep. That's on Donnie Bolivians. He's my co host that's on his YouTube channel. But then we have the audio on the on Apple, Google Spotify everywhere.
Matthew Dunn
All the usual suspects a lot of a lot of podcast material out there these days as well. Now
Kevin Snow
Facebook has it. That was our conversations like now what do we do? Which one do we focus on? We want Apple rating Do we want Spotify? We want YouTube watchers, but how do we do Facebook? How? Yeah, drive everyone everywhere? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, it's tough. It's tough and and just a management, you know, the content and the content and brand management in those channels. Like, it's a bit of it's a lift? Yep. So a lot of work. Yeah.
Kevin Snow
My My question is, are people going to go to Facebook to listen to their podcasts or just use the app that's already on their phone?
Matthew Dunn
I'm, I'm sanguine in many ways about Facebook. But it's it's, it's a fair thing to say, you know, they're there yet to knock off every semi successful thing that comes along, means kind of a mediocre company in long run to me, like, they're kind of aiming to do everything, as well as they can get away with it, but not anything particularly well right now.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, exactly. I think there's gonna be some people that do it. I am a podcast host and I haven't even been on Facebook podcasts. See how it works? So I, I don't think a ton of people are going to use it. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna let people know what's there. So they want to listen to it awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's
Matthew Dunn
like It's like, you know, fridge Benny, if you if you know, it grows your audience there. I years ago started winnowing down. I think I check Facebook, maybe once a month, reluctantly now, and what and I'll actually drop activities if they say our group is on Facebook, and like, yep, too bad. Um, but and I know that's got a cost. But I just, it's such a it's at least 15 minute rabbit hole, just to go check. And I don't want to spend the 15 minutes anymore.
Kevin Snow
So the I actually do the bulk of my prospecting in Facebook groups. Do you really? Yeah. So I find for my avatars, my my persona, those types of groups that they would be in? Yeah. So I do a bunch that are all focused on software as a service companies and how they're growing and yeah, all that piece, but then I have other ones that are entrepreneurs, business owners trying to figure out the damn thing. And I use those as my perspective field. Fascinating. And I and I don't spend I spend maybe 1520 minutes a day going in and replying to comments and liking things and making my own posts in there to get engagement. Yeah. But other than that, it's, you know, watching who's interacting, and then people either reaching out, say, Hey, I saw your comments and the post in the gorilla group. Can we talk more or people reply needs like, Oh, that's awesome. Can we chat? You know, I'd love to pick your brain about this. Now I get to get on a call like this and have that conversation, Brian and see, are they actually a prospective client? Are they just someone who's trying to get stuff for free? Who are they? And I get a ton of business from that way? So I don't do I don't do like the public Facebook hardly at all, much of my partner's chagrin. He's like, you need to post our stuff, like offline, but the group stuff I'm on all the time.
Matthew Dunn
Interesting. Interesting. And we have to, you know, our our target market being email and CRM platform companies, they're elusive beasts. Yep. You know, there's there's a lot of them, but there aren't that many of them.
Kevin Snow
So there are I found in the some of the software as a service or groups. There are a bunch of people out there who are like building email marketing systems and no DRM. I'm like, at every time it was like, so I'm, we're getting ready to launch a new CRM and like the new CRM,
Matthew Dunn
a new CRM really, do we need one? Are you crazy?
Kevin Snow
What really cool thing do you have that none of them else have? Yeah. But there's a ton of people out there that are launching that type of software system because they think they can do it better. So Wow, fascinating there. I
Matthew Dunn
mean, last time, I looked at that big martec map there were like, over 500 CRMs Yeah, that thing gets bigger. They can't do it on a page anymore. No, no, it's just like, and and you got a magnifying glass to try to see the logo is right. Yeah,
Kevin Snow
I would. I'll do that. Y'all use their map. Every once in a while. I was like, Alright, here's why you need me.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, there you go. It's like yeah, the spaghetti connecting all those that costs you money, dude.
Kevin Snow
Yep. Exactly. And not have them do like the zippier thing for free anywhere is you know, has to be on their paid plan to have access to the API's. So yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. And, and, and frankly, knowing you start xAPI hearing enough, you know, speaking as a software developer, you start Hearing enough stuff together. You're doing your own piss poor software development. It's gonna bite you in the ass.
Kevin Snow
Yep. Like, huh, yeah, at some point that'll I'll have an API dev on staff that can actually write the Yeah. Yeah. Everything that go between the systems. Yeah, we can manage it. But that's, that's gonna be a highly skilled individual. Or it said,
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, it's a daunting lift. And then, you know, we've got I think we have over 100 API's tied into campaign genius. You know, where do we get weather data? Where do we, where do we unencoded a user agent string, blah, blah, blah. And then he's like, we need to monitor all of these, don't we? Uh, huh. There's a bit yeah, buddy.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, exactly. I don't want to do that. No, I I can write some HTML and some script for some websites and stuff. But that is about the extent of my coding capability now
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, it's a it's a lift and it's you know, it's always more complicated than it looks. Well. Super. Super talking with you, man. Really? Really was.
Kevin Snow
Yeah, I had a this is the schedule said half hour. I'm like, oh, we're already at like 247
Matthew Dunn
I know. I was watching the clock. I'm like, ad seems to be rolling for him. We'll we'll wrap it up somewhere that hopefully didn't tie you up or something. Nope.
Kevin Snow
Nope. It's all good. I love it. When the conversations we don't want to end them because they're going well, so
Matthew Dunn
to cool. Well, I'll keep in touch. We'll get the you know, get the media back in your hands. So more content for you to post and see where we go from there. Fantastic. Cool. Thanks. Thanks, Matthew. Bye.