Transcript

[0:00] We have definitely fired clients who, It makes the other relationships much clearer, like when things are right.
This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels, I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom podcast.
I'm your host Hamish Knox. Today, my guest is Janelle McGrath, CEO of MarketVeep, a Diamond HubSpot partner.
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I am ridiculously excited to welcome Janelle McGrath to the podcast today.
In addition to being a Diamond HubSpot partner, MarketVeep is a certified Best Places to Work company, Inc.
Best Places to Work, and Inc. 5,000 Regionals Fastest Growing Companies honoree.
MarketVeep started out of a passion for helping businesses reach a broader market, get more leads and improve their sales and marketing alignment.
Believes that people are the most important part of any business. The human factor is what influences her marketing method, her business philosophy, and her focus on company culture. Janelle, welcome to Full Frontal Freedom. Hello. Thank you so much for the warm welcome. Excited to be here.
So I've given the audience the 30,000 foot view of who you are and a little bit about your journey.

[2:13] Tell us a bit more of the story. Walk us through where you've been and how you got to where you are today.
Of course. So I started my first company when I was 18 in college.
And so by the time I graduated, I had a full book of business.
And so I've never actually worked in what I would consider a traditional job.

[2:33] And so it is a lot of learning as you go. And many of this 22 years of doing this.
And so after about 14 years, I realized that I was really unhappy.
I loved the marketing part.
I love the business part, which is what I went to school for and wanted to just become a consultant.
I said, okay, we're done with this one. I'm just, I don't want to have employees anymore.
And then life kind of changed. I got busy again. I started a consultancy and was busy within a year, had a business coach. And they said, you either need to stop bringing on new clients or you need to hire employees. And so I was very against hiring employees. And I have learned over time that it is not employees that make people unhappy.
It is making sure that you have a really positive culture and focus on really strong core values.
And so that's how we started with one and haven't looked back. I think we're up to 17 right now and growing and have a really awesome rockstar team that I depend on and I consider them my friends and some close like family. So I'm very thankful for them. That's amazing. And I appreciate where you're coming from that as an entrepreneur, when we start out, we're doing the work.
And then eventually we can't do the work and continue to grow the business.
And there could be that resistance of, well, what if they can't do it like me?
Or what if they aren't me? And I wonder how, aside from your business coach.

[3:51] Coaching you gently to get over that hump, how did you get around that they're not going to do it like me? Or what if they don't do it like me? So you could actually grow your team.
Yeah, I think part of it is just accepting and letting go and letting, like really spending time with people and aligning on those values and what the expectation is and you know, what you're expecting from the client side, right?
Like what the client should experience, um, and not making it a personal, like, you know, you're not doing this exactly perfect, but more like how that impacts the client.
And then from there, just, you know, making sure that there's safety protocols in place and processes that are built out around those moments of delight so that they don't feel.

[4:40] Forced, but it's just really interwoven into the culture.
I love that. I would love to understand what does a moment of delight mean at Marketfeed?
Oh gosh, a moment of delight. We talk about it all the time. It can be many things, but but just like boiling it down, I would say anything that somebody experiences that.

[5:00] They wouldn't necessarily have expected. It's not part of their scope, but it's something that went above and beyond that surprised them and just overall made them happy. Like our ultimate goal is to help businesses grow and indirectly make the owner have less stress. And so a lot of our delight metrics are around response time, simple basic things that I think giants like Amazon get get right all the time, but as a small business, really have to think creatively on how to make sure that those are injected into our culture.
Very cool. There's a book called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Giardin.
He was the general manager at a restaurant called 11 Madison Park, and they talk about creating legend moments.
And so it sounds very similar to what you're talking about. These moments of delight where when your buyer is out talking to their friends going, do you wanna know what Market Feed did for me?
Oh, this was amazing.
And then that person hopefully goes, oh, I want some of that.
Can you put me in touch with Janelle and her team?
So how do you see values translating? Cause you brought up values a couple of times just in the short window that we've been visiting today.
Tell us more about what values mean to you and then to Marketveep as a whole and how that supports keeping your funnel full.

[6:24] So I'd say the biggest one is be human. And so really understanding that the person on the other side of that phone is truly just another human like you and setting expectations, making sure that they feel supported, things that we would be human in our normal life outside of business are really important.
And so we hire for those values and ask a bunch of really silly questions during our interview process to try to capture what somebody is like outside of just the interview to make sure that they will, that's really interwoven into who they are as a person.
But yeah, I think be human.
And then the one that we reference a lot too is build together.
So build together internally, but build together with a client.
So tons of collaboration. It's not a one-way street. We're not task doers.
We have not been successful with people who are like, hey, I want this one thing done, but then never talk to us until the next month.
It just doesn't work. And so we really have lots of channels in terms of collaboration, Zoom calls, and project management, and reminders, and really just make sure that everybody's aligned on the same page.
So build together internally, just like, again, response times is a huge thing.
Nobody wants to be waiting for anything.
Those are, I'd say, the two most prominent ones. I love that, and I'm curious.

[7:47] Would you be comfortable sharing maybe one of those interview questions that you alluded to? because...
Interviewing for values can be really challenging. Because in an interview, we're trying to sell ourselves to a potential employer and so we might end up saying something that we think they wanted to hear so that they eventually hire us.
Then when we actually are drawing a paycheck, we reveal our true selves.
What's one of those questions that you might be comfortable sharing with the audience to help uncover those values that you're seeking?
One of the ones I really like is, tell us the last nice thing that somebody has done for you.
It's not necessarily about a grand gesture. A lot of times it's the appreciation of the small things.
So finding goodness and even the tiny details.
Then the flip question of that is, what is the last nice thing that you have done for somebody else?
Really making sure that they're givers, that they are generous in spirit.
Again, would you not be looking for a super grand gesture to the second question?
At least something small?
It can be anything. We've had people say like, you know, my boyfriend came home and I had filled the fridge with his favorite seltzer.

[9:00] And I had to go to three grocery stores because he couldn't find it.
So just simple things, but like more like the thought behind it and how quickly, how excited they are, right?
To share that they felt good about doing this for somebody else.
Absolutely, absolutely. One of my former team members gave me a very lovely bottle of bourbon once.
And I was very grateful for the bottle of bourbon. And then they said, yeah, and I went to 21 liquor stores, and I ended up having to special order this from one of them.
And when I called to special order, they said, yeah, we have a waiting list for our next shipment.
And just even that, it was like, you could have told me the story and you wouldn't have even had to bring the bottle of bourbon.
I would have loved the story no matter what. because the thought does count.
Even if the action is not necessarily, we can't deliver on the action, because sometimes we can't, I really find that it's the thinking of others really gives an indication of the person.
How do you find that in your experience?
We've done a bunch of different things. During pandemic, we sent toilet paper.

[10:07] We have sent cards so that people could have coffee with each other. We had a pizza party.
We all went remote, couldn't have our normal Mexican restaurant celebration. So we sent everybody pizza so we can still collaborate. It's really thinking outside the box to, again, have delight, like surprising moments that, especially in a remote world, it's just very different. And we take the same approach too with our vendors, right? Those relationships and partnerships that we have, we've done. Remember we had a rep that we worked with and he had said that one of his favorite childhood memories was going into the woods and fly fishing for four days with his dad and then be completely remote. And so we went and we found nothing about fly fishing. Thank God for Cabela's. Went down the fly fishing aisle and made a care package, but yeah, it's really about thinking about what is going to make that other person very happy. And something that they love too, because I've also experienced where someone buys something that really they want, or they're using their lens, and that it's still okay, it's just not the same resonance as someone who knows nothing about a thing, in this case, fly fishing, educates herself at least enough so that they can put together something that that resonates with that other person.

[11:27] So are you completely remote these days? Is Market V completely remote?
We are. We had a beautiful brand new office, really bad year to move.
And then we, I said, everybody pack up, we'll see you in two weeks.
And 10 months later, we had grown and hired in like South Dakota.
We couldn't say to them, hey, you don't have to come in, but the people that live here do.
So we embraced it. and I think we're in 15 states right now. So all of us.
Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. I am curious about your values and how these grow beyond the team.
Because I know in my business, I have fired clients who misalign with the value.
So curious what your experience has been both on the vendor side, people you buy from, and then on the client or the prospect side, where maybe they misalign with your values after you started working together.
What's your experience in that regard?
To your point, we have definitely fired clients who are not a good culture fit.
Just for rudeness, even after conversations of, please don't speak to our team like that, that's not something that we say in a professional setting, having to have really difficult conversations with people.
But I think.
It makes the other relationships much clearer, like when things are right. We do, we use.

[12:52] Value system in terms of looking at clients during when we are considering bringing them on, and make sure like the point of contact, like we're talking to a CEO, but our point of contact might be somebody different. We want to talk to the other person that was going to be the point of contact. We have nine traits that we refer back to and make sure that we're aligned there. We had one this week that we turned down just for things like urgency, like unrealistic expectations. We've just learned that there are certain things that out of the gate, if you are already having these expectations that we're in the honeymoon phase, right? So it doesn't get better in the marriage if the dating isn't so great. Very true. Very true. How does the team respond when you fire a client or a vendor because of a misalignment in values?

[13:42] Oh, that's a good one. I think some level of relief, right? We've had some people say, I won't get into what they said, but just something that was very inappropriate and so it was an immediate termination. We've had people that have said things that inadvertently said them. We've had conversations and even after saying, please reword, remessage, still don't like those firings.
I think depending on the situation, the team has different feelings, but I would say usually relief that we have choice.
We don't have to accept being treated poorly or I don't want anybody to have to hate coming into work or be uncomfortable coming into work.
It should be a really happy place.
Absolutely, and as the leader, you're really setting that culture by not taking and not allowing you or the team to be treated in that matter, because if the team sees you or sees you allowing that, well, that's gonna create that negative consequence that you just said you don't want to happen. 100%.

[14:45] Janelle, as we are getting towards our end of our time visiting today, I got a few extra questions for you that I'd love to hear about.
So the first one would be, you can go back to younger Janelle, and maybe you're 17, because you haven't started your first business yet, You can pick however young and far back you wanna be.
You can say to Younger Janelle, hey, you're gonna be here in whatever time period, right?
You're gonna be the CEO of Market Feeb. You're gonna have all these amazing clients, this great team.
You're also gonna have a bunch of scar tissue and some bumps and bruises. Yes.
So what do you coach Younger Janelle to say or do differently to arrive at the same place, fewer bumps and bruises, less scar tissue?
Well, I'll speak to the scar tissue first. I wouldn't change any of the missteps.
I think that each one of them have impacted and really driven us in a completely different direction.
So I don't, as painful as they were, But it was a really good experience.
I definitely value each one of them uniquely. But in terms of my younger self, I would say it's okay And I'm so grateful that I could be a part of it. And I'm so happy that I was able to share that.
And it just gives you a sense of the beauty of what it's like to do a career.
To think of it as a team. It's a team effort. It's not... Even when we sell, it's a team effort.
I'm so grateful that I could be a part of it.
And I'm so happy that I was able to share that. And I'm so happy that I could be a part of it.
We partner with different vendors and it's very collaborative. Internally, there's constant And I'm so happy that I was able to share that. And I'm so happy that I could be a part of it.
Communication. And I just think back to those early days in another business where it was very Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you.
Transient and you didn't have deep relationships. And so spending the time to really understand and Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[16:12] And get to know people, know about their families, know about what makes, you know, what their fun activities and hobbies are, understand, you know, what their background is.
Really, I think just builds for a better day to day. It doesn't feel like work and it's not the people, it's the culture that you develop. So really focusing on that as opposed to just growth.
Amazing, what great advice. And what I heard you say in that scar tissue is those painful lessons bumped you into a positive direction. Would that be fair?
Yeah, 100%. Excellent, excellent. Not always as fast as I would like, but they do get there.
Also true, also true. So you are a lifelong learner. We share that.
What have you listened to, watched, read that has impacted you in a positive way that you'd like the audience to check out as well?

[17:06] I love the Amazement Revolution. I think his name is Shep Hyken, I believe is the author.
He has a whole bunch of series, again, around delight. And so it looks at big companies, little companies, and really looking at how simple things can be.
Doesn't have to be grand gestures. So things like, you know, American Express and all of these membership benefits, Ritz-Carlton, the big ones, but then there's also just local mom and pop examples that they give.
And it goes again around different core values. So definitely highlighted the whole way through, tabbed and go back to it regularly.
Very cool. Very cool. We'll certainly put a link to that in the show notes.
So last question for you, Janelle, what would you like to plug?
Do you have a bit of wisdom or a closing thought that we haven't talked about yet? The floor is yours.
Oh, gosh. I would say please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to see and hear your growth challenges.

[18:06] We do offer free assessment of process. Happy to take a look through.
And other than that, if there's anything that I can help you with outside of marketing or sales, please let me know. I'm happy to be a resource.
Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today. I had a blast and I look forward to carrying our conversation on offline.
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. You've been listening to the full Fun with Freedom podcast.
I've been your host, Hamish Knox.
Today, we have got amazing ideas and insights from Janelle McGrath, CEO of Market Veep, related to creating moments of delight and how we can use values to create a really powerful culture and say no to bad fit buyers and vendors.
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[19:28] Music.