WFM Tools Magic or Sh*T Wrapped like Candy | Phil Bacon

Is your WFM tool all flash and no substance? In this hard-hitting episode of WFM Unfiltered, Irina and special guest Phil Bacon dig deep into the shocking reality behind WFM tool marketing. Phil, who’s seen it all—from engineering the tech to watching the hype machine sell it—doesn’t hold back in calling out how marketing has twisted the narrative around WFM tools.

Do vendors even know the products they’re pushing? Phil argues that many marketing teams are selling fantasies rather than features, spinning tools as miracle solutions while sidestepping glaring limitations. In this episode, we tear apart the illusion of "must-have" features and "effortless results" to reveal what's really driving vendor hype.

Phil shares jaw-dropping stories of WFM users held hostage by data, stuck with subpar support, and left with tools that serve no one but the seller. If you've ever questioned the endless promises in a product demo or left a webinar feeling sold but not informed, this episode is your wake-up call.

Ready to see past the marketing smoke and mirrors? Tune in to hear the gritty truth on how to choose WFM tools without getting duped.

Find out more about Phil at https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipbacon/

Watch, subscribe, and follow WFM Unfiltered for more no-BS insights: https://www.youtube.com/@wfmunfiltered?sub_confirmation=1

Thanks for listening.

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Transcript

Irina: 0:18

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of WFM Unfiltered. I'm your host Irina, and what an episode this is gonna be. I'm not gonna be easy on my guests this week, and I'm very excited about this conversation, because it's a topic that I'm usually Talking about and being very vocal about, but I cannot wait to introduce you to my guest, Phillip. So Phillip, Hey, how are you doing?

Phil: 0:47

Hi Irina. Yeah good thanks. Yeah.

Irina: 0:49

For now.

Phil: 0:50

Slightly nervous.

Irina: 0:51

Yeah. For now you're good. Maybe you're not going to end on this note, but before we start with our topic, would you mind introducing yourself and a little bit about your background? And most importantly, please tell everyone the story of where you're coming from.

Phil: 1:06

Okay. So yeah, my name's Phil Waken. I've been in and around marketing in various different ways since about 2001. I started in marketing because my, I was working in IT and the school I worked in said, oh, we have a website. It uses computers. So therefore it must be the responsibility of the IT department. At that point, I was hand coding websites, carried on as an effect, going through up until the point where I decided to go off to uni then came out of uni and ended up going into marketing with an engineering background, and it's like, Ah, okay I'm an engineer, and I'm a marketer. Great! But it does mean that I can communicate technical problems and technical offerings. In a way that other people couldn't actually understand, and where I'm, where we're geographically based we're on the Cotswolds, in the UK. If you have a map and look at the bottom edge of the Cotswolds, you'll realise there's only a couple of places, and that's why we say it's the bottom edge of the Cotswolds and not other places, cause it sounds much prettier.

Irina: 2:13

First of all, thank you so much for giving us the details of your background and most importantly, helping me out with the location because we actually rehearsed that before the recording and I said nah, there's no way for me. So if you want to keep the reputation your place, your city, just introduce it yourself. Thank you so much for that. And. I'm so excited for this conversation because I have been on a mission to give the real view on marketing and what's happening currently in our air with tech and all of the marketing offerings because Oh, hold on. I'm going to try to not start cursing right from the start, but Absolutely infuriating for me all of the absolute freaking bullshit that's coming from marketing, which is why you're here and you're going to be on the hotspot. Thank you so much for that.

Phil: 3:10

yeah, unfortunately, those are the words I used to my lecturer when I was at uni. In fact, marketing is just bullshit. And at university It was, because all we were doing was sitting there watching episodes of Dragon's Den. Or, in the US, Shark Tank. And that's all we were doing. And I'd been working in marketing for years by that point already. As I, this is, you're actually teaching us to just bullshit, not create technical solutions to actual problems.

Irina: 3:40

Do you know what's my problem with marketing and maybe not with marketing because a little bit of a spoiler alert here. My university degree is also in marketing, which is why I'm so harsh on everyone,

Phil: 3:53

Mine's in engineering, not in marketing. I just did a marketing module and it's this is boring.

Irina: 3:59

But it's a great meat of this one. And the reason why I'm nagging so much about marketing is because I'm always saying, before. Everything else, I'm working in WFM. I'm a user, I'm a practitioner. And when I see absolute freaking bullshit coming from marketing departments, like throwing that gold dust in the user's eyes, like the newest solution, the next generation, this it's, and the title of our episode is Shit wrapped as a candy is still a shit. And I'm sorry to you, Philip, but a lot of the things are coming from people that how to put it politely, they don't even understand what they are selling or what they are wrapping as a package or as a marketing strategy. Which ends up misleading us as users. So I've been in a position a lot of time when we're especially talking about tech, when I'm getting those amazing promotions of a technology, and I go on a demo or, unfortunately, I'm in a position when somebody has bought that bullshit already, and I'm like, how the hell is that possible? Like, why? And they should start with you, Phillip. So explain

Phil: 5:12

Yeah, ease up. It's not always me. Sometimes it's my mate. So no, one of the key things that I personally push is that actually any marketer should be getting in there and using the product in the first place, and also understanding the marketplace. What is it actually that there's going to be a benefit at the other end of it? Because whilst we can sit there and list a whole bunch of features, a whole bunch of benefits, if those two things don't work and they're not communicated properly to the end user. You're not actually solving anyone's problem. And yes, you can launch a new product and say, it's the best thing since sliced bread. It's going to solve all of your problems. But if it's actually just version 1. 1 of a piece of software. All you've done is bug fix. That's not a new piece of software. You've just given it a new name to say that this is better than the old one. Just so you can sell more units. Actually, you should have focused on the fact that you need to improve the customer and user experience of that software in the first place, which actually would have made you more money at the other end.

Irina: 6:13

So what I'm hearing, and this is maybe where the root cause of my issue starts, is the lack of trust that we as users are having into marketing and all of those promotion systems, because we realize that what we're being told and what we're being sold, it's not what it is in reality, which effectively what happens is that We're starting to resent the product because we're always associating it with the dream that we've been sold, but with the bullshit that we've got. So how the hell does that disconnect happen? And I want to understand from from your background and from your experience and current career is. Why there is such a disconnect? Why don't marketing work with developers, product managers, consultants?

Phil: 6:59

absolutely should. This is one of our key drivers right now, is that actually everybody should be talking. We can walk into a company and go we'll look at the marketing. And they're like, okay, great. And I was like next thing we need to do is we need to talk to sales. Cause sales and marketing work closely together. Oh, okay, yeah, fine makes sense. We need to talk to product. Why? Cause product feeds into marketing. Marketing needs to feed back to product. Oh, okay. Then we talk, then we start working with the developers as well, because we become the first test user case, especially with software, because if we can, if we can't make it work, how are the actual end users going to make it work? I, this is one, something that happened a fair few years ago. I was given the instruction manual for a new system by a technical author, and I got to step three, and I had to follow it exactly. Knowing that I could actually build the system, set the software up, actually have it all up and running on my own. I had to build it step by step following the instructions. The instructions are wrong.

Irina: 8:00

But that's not very typical. For me that sounds,

Phil: 8:03

typical, no. But marketers should be doing this. They should stop being just, oh yeah, look, we've got this thing, we've just been handed, it's just been handed off. There should be a lot more communication. I'm not saying that marketing should have a seat at the table for every single decision. They should be brought in at an appropriate point, so that they can actually feed in on product development. And then get the other end and be there ready for the end result. Same works, but it works both ways. Products should be there for part of marketing as well. Development should be aware of marketing. Typically developers tend to shy away from. Things going on outside because they have their box that they want to sit in. Yeah. Yeah

Irina: 8:51

thinking now what I'm seeing a lot in social media. And there is that absolute explosion about demos and masterclasses and webinars and posts and articles and you name it. And I started thinking while you were talking that one of my problems is that sometimes most of the times, articles and webinars are being driven by the marketing, but not only in the sense of marketing teams organizing them, marketing teams leading the subject matter topic with professionals that are doing the job. So my question is always That means that if I have run a little bit of a Google research on some kind of a disease, I can go and sit to have a competent opinion with the doctor and challenge the doctor and start telling the doctor did you check someone's fever or what are the blood pressure, what are the blood component, did you run the blood work? So it infuriates me because that kind of diminish our job. And also, I'm sorry to say it, but it gives more praise to marketing where it shouldn't be. And I think marketing is actually a brilliant profession, brilliant. And I know absolutely incredible marketeers if it's exercised correctly.

Phil: 10:13

So now we there's that crossover point of when do we actually bring in marketers? Maybe you actually need to bring in Specialist marketers within the company. So you have product marketers who only focus on one product. They are the product expert They're that height. They are actually a hybrid between product development and Marketing. They know the product inside out. They can communicate it properly. They can, they know the benefits of it. They know how to use it. They know how to show best way forward with it. They are the expert in that piece of software or a range of pieces of software for a particular vertical or something, but they are product managers with a marketing hat on essentially. They should be, and also they work with the marketing department. So you get the marketing department going out there going, Oh, we're going to run this webinar. Fantastic. We put, we're going to put a marketer on there to lead it. No. You're going to put a product marketer on there to lead it. That product marketer will have a reputation in their industry to make it right. The thing is that they don't, people don't do that. They just go, Oh yeah, we'll just stick Aaron on the webinar. He can run it. He knows how to turn the software on and he's got a prerecord, essentially what is one step away from prerecorded video of how the software works to make it, to show it off to the best of it. Not the worst of it. The worst of it is actually the fact that it's an actual pain in the ass to use. We've got a prime example of this that we fell into the trap with, in fact. Piece of software that was very much industry specific, specifically to the marketing industry. So CRM. Obviously there's CRMs across the board, but this one was targeted on marketing agencies. We had a very specific use case for it. I had to go through probably about half a dozen demos. When we were using HubSpot already, and that was fine for what, for part of what we need to do, but we needed something that could do something that HubSpot didn't, and that was fine. So we still use HubSpot for that. I'm happy with that. This other one, we moved over to that, started moving everything over to that after we signed up to it, because they said, yes, it can do everything we need it to.

Irina: 12:28

Okay.

Phil: 12:29

Got about three days in, came up against our first problem. It couldn't handle one of the core requirements. These are documented requirements. Cause the thing is, we've had to pay for a year up front as well,

Irina: 12:45

That's typically the case. Yep.

Phil: 12:46

exactly. So okay get on there, get on a call with their support. They're like, oh no, it's absolutely fine, it should do that, not a problem. You're just looking in the wrong place. Okay, I'm a technical person. I know how to drive software. Tell me where it is. We can't tell you that, okay? Get on a call with their onboarding team. Their onboarding team was actually a local UK based company as well. So I spoke to them, and they walked me through a solution to the problem. That means I've got to go and buy another piece of software. They're like yeah, you can't do it without that. That's not the software that we asked. That's not, that was not the requirement. I was, they demonstrated that it was possible, and they're like, Oh no, it's not possible. So you've got a marketer demoing a piece of software against a set of criteria that They've read and gone, we can show off one variable, which they did. What ensued was me having a fight with them for the next eight weeks to get our money back. We didn't Get, we didn't get our money back out of them.

Irina: 13:50

exactly.

Phil: 13:51

They point blankly refused, despite the fact that they missold it. What we did manage to get out of them was the money back to pay for the additional piece of software that we needed. To make it do what we wanted it to do.

Irina: 14:05

But that sounds like such a hassle that you shouldn't be in the

Phil: 14:08

Massively. What we ended up doing was migrating again. Migrating CRMs is a pain. A real pain. And let's make it even better, they are we've actually given up on that, but they held our data hostage.

Irina: 14:26

Ha! Okay. Yeah.

Phil: 14:28

They wanted us to pay to get out of it. So their marketing message and their customer service totally are at odds with each other. And that's another area that you have to remember as well, is that actually, customer service is a very key part of your marketing mix. And oh, marketing don't talk to customer service.

Irina: 14:47

Can I ask you a question here? Because

Phil: 14:49

Sorry, I get that ranty about that one.

Irina: 14:51

You can continue around, but I am also always trying to give some tips and advice on everyone that's listening to the show. So I'm interested in understanding from your perspective, how can we spot the bullshit? Because I have been on all sides of the business. I know that sometimes things are being, shaped in a way that they are not. And to your point, sometimes software is yeah, absolutely. We can do that. And then you're going through onboarding and it's there is seven workarounds before you actually do that step. But obviously vendor is usually not, how do I put it? It's not really in their interest. To directly start saying all of the flows because it's a cutthroat business. Everyone is trying to sell as much software as they possibly can. So how can we spot through that bullshit?

Phil: 15:41

First of all, it's looking at the reviews and looking at the negative ones. It's how they get handled. And I'm a big fan of negative reviews. So Because it gives you a chance to show off how well you look after people that are not happy. I've dealt with some that have been particularly bad in the past. Legally. Legally bad as well. And those ones didn't get dealt with openly. Cause they couldn't be. Those things that happened in them that we had to get the police involved and all sorts. So we weren't able to reply. But other ones, you can easily show off how well you can look after an unhappy customer and turn that unhappy customer up. into a hero for you. If you can look after them, they're happy. This comes back down to customer service, that customer service conversation with marketing. And all of that gets fed back to your product team, making things better. Clear technical descriptions. and clear benefit statements about how the software or hardware or whatever it is that you're marketing clear technical documentation, clear specifications and clear benefits. And we lead on benefits because we're in the UK, people want to know the benefits are, they don't want to know what the tech spec is. We work with companies over in Poland and Germany where everything is technical spec led because you're talking to a market who they just want to know what's happening and how it works. They don't want to know the benefits of it, they know what the benefits are of it by looking at the technical spec. Translating that into the UK, it's a completely different thing. And vice versa as well you also, you need to be communicating to your audience in their language. In the way they need to see it. You need options for the way that you present yourself.

Irina: 17:25

What's interesting that you mentioned here, and I started thinking about the reviews because this is typically one of the things, to your point, that a lot of vendors are using very smart. They are always boosting and asking people, okay, can you please rate us? Positive, which is, of course, it's the right thing to do. If people are happy with your product, they should rate you. On the other hand, I always said it there. So it's going to be people that hate your product or service and that love their product and service, and you can't be for everyone. My approach as a user of whatever, if I'm buying a, I don't know what, a book, I'm always reading the bad reviews first. There is any merit into that bad reviews and if it would work for me or not. And that's how I'm making a decision.

Phil: 18:11

I've, so recently, the t shirt I'm wearing right now is one by Built Different, a company who make t shirts and clothes for gentlemen who are of a reasonable stature. Chunky lads.

Irina: 18:23

And

Phil: 18:25

properly. They're not the right length, they're not the right width, the arms don't fit. These actually fit really nicely, they actually don't make you look awful. I went and read the reviews for them, and fours and fives stars across the board, pretty much. The UK and Europe. In America, all of it one star reviews pretty much, exclusively, because the sizing didn't translate. Because it's all in UK size, all in UK European sizing. Which doesn't translate into American sizing, cause there's two sizes different between the two countries. There's loads of complaints about it, but the way they handled it was, they sent new t shirts out. Problem solved. They've got a 100 day guarantee on them to make sure that you're happy with them. And that's including you wearing them and washing them. If you're not happy with them after you've worn them for three and a half months, send them back. They'll send you a new size.

Irina: 19:23

this is a great example also about relating to the negative or the positive comments because sometimes what people are very happy with, it's just not something that you need, but what they're unhappy with is exactly. Where you have the gap for yourself or your company or your role. And this is what you need to focus on. But the other thing is just to bring you back into the marketing stuff, because this is something that specifically bothers me a little bit about the industry is that usually marketing departments are having shit load of budget to drive All of their activities, while on the inside, what's happening is, Oh, we don't have enough support people, engineers, consultants, so we cannot offer you any support in the upcoming three months, and we don't know what to do and so on. But on the front side, it's webinar here, webinar there, conference supports this, that.

Phil: 20:23

disagree with you on that one. Marketing never gets enough budget.

Irina: 20:27

For what? For what?

Phil: 20:30

put it this way. Working for a company that was turning over 30, 40 million pound a year, With a monthly budget of two and a half percent

Irina: 20:38

And how much is the percent that you think it's fair for marketing?

Phil: 20:42

for what we were trying to achieve at the time. We needed closer to 10.

Irina: 20:47

And is that typical? No. Typical that you don't get enough budget.

Phil: 20:51

Especially when you look at companies who are startups, scale ups, you might get a bit more. If there's funding from outside, you've got to justify every single penny that you're spending. And everything's focused on ROI. And it's actually marketing doesn't always have an ROI because, or not not that's directly traceable. We're working on stuff at the moment where their sales life was five years. I can't prove something tomorrow that's. It's happening today. It's going to happen in 2029, and it's like, what do you want me to prove? You're going to have to keep me around for the next five years. Great for me, cause we're going to earn loads of money out of it. But, yeah, you can't, it's those trackable metrics there. Yeah, any company where they're not seeing they don't see marketing as an investment. Cause you've got different parts of marketing that you need to be thinking about. That's where you've got the awareness phase, which is huge. Most of the budget goes in, most of the budget goes into that, it makes everything easier. But people then go, oh no, we only want leads. How do you get leads? Oh, by ramming something in down somebody's throat. And that's why you get this pressure, almost pressurized version of marketing, where you're only highlighting the very positive bits, dragging people into webinars. I'm going, hey, look at this stuff. It's fantastic. But actually they had, nobody, they didn't know about the product yet. They've just been, they've had something flash in front of them and go, you need to do this. No. You've had no time to build up any sort of awareness. Let people naturally, want to come to you. So when you put something on, like a webinar, they naturally want to go on there and find out more about you. They're pre armed with questions as well. Questions that are valid. And that's when you need your product manager slash product marketer in the mix to do those presentations because they need to answer them on the spot. you get somebody in there that can't answer a single question on their own Every single response is, I'll come back to you. You've lost any credibility.

Irina: 23:02

think this is another thing that I typically see vendors tend to be not not reacting well on critical feedback. And for me, there should be absolutely critical feedback, but it's seen as, Oh my God, we should at any cost have only positive feedback because this is our reputation and stuff like that. And I do understand. And of course it's a very competitive. The tech space is very competitive space at the moment. But on the other hand, if you only see things going extremely well, how much of that is natural and how much that is being staged, so where is that

Phil: 23:44

I'd also argue how much that is actually driving any growth for the business. If you only ever see positive, how do you make changes to be better?

Irina: 23:52

Oh, that's a very good, that's a very good point.

Phil: 23:55

negative negative drives, drives growth and change. Positive only reinforces what you've already done.

Irina: 24:02

Okay, but that's a great way to look at it. But I feel like you need to have a certain level of maturity to understand. Okay. We really need to focus on that. And actually we can take this negative thing and spin it from marketing perspective is okay. We listened and that's what we have done rather than try to mask it and erase it. And nothing wrong is ever happening here.

Phil: 24:24

Mid conversation with the product manager at the moment of an AI content tool. They presented it to me. I was like, okay, this is interesting. I'm They presented me with two parts to the tool. One part was content creation. I'm like, I'm not interested in that. It's got to be, it would have to be damn good to be able to make me interested in it. There was another part of the tool that was content curation, that could then go off across the whole of the web and pull together Useful stories that are going on in, for whatever your search term you're using. I demonstrated that to a client. They hated the content creation side of it. Absolutely loved the curation side of it. So they're in the same camp as me. I'm like, this is fantastic. I then went off and had a baby. I didn't, my wife did. Come back to the software three weeks later, they've got rid of the curation side of the tool and I'm like, what the hell's going on here? It's message the product manager. I'm like, what the hell? I, you haven't even told anyone this has happened. They're like, oh yeah, your feedback was that this part's really good. And I'm like, no, I feel, I told you this part is, this part was super valuable. I, yes, hide it, put a switch in there somewhere so that you can turn that, so people can turn it off. Who wants to just make generic AI driven content, but for people that actually want to be able to do this do decent content for marketing. Curation part helps with the ideation process, which means they can make better content at speed that's AI driven, but not AI created. And they're like, oh yeah. And that has been quiet on me.

Irina: 26:13

Okay. I think before we wrap up, I have one other final question for you for something that really picked my interest interest. And that's the role of marketing for the users and customers you already have. Because typically what happens in organization is when you have one, that customer all focuses on all of your prospects and this customer is no, no longer. As as valuable for you, if you will, and everything is focused on, we need to gain more business. We need to gain more business, but nobody is focused on the business that can go away from you. I can give you an example of something that I'm wondering, for me, it's a marketing initiative, but you can correct me if I'm wrong. I heard Couple of weeks ago about the case in the company where, you know, if somebody is having an anniversary, this is being celebrated by some kind of presence in the company. Someone that was in the company for many years did not get a single acknowledgement, congratulations, no gift, nothing like business as usual. But someone who was brand new in the company turned just, I don't know, let's say for example, one year. Got everything like communication across the board, balloons, gifts, and everything. And then I'm thinking, so your employee that it's proven that it's here and it's here to stay receives no attention and it's not worth your attention, right? But the new employee is oh, focus on this employee. So I was thinking, okay, so what the hell is going on? So I want to hear your opinion on this.

Phil: 27:56

Okay, so there's a couple of things that could be going on here. One, the person's been there for a while, might have already said they don't want to be acknowledged, and they just want to keep it quiet, because maybe that gives away their age a bit.

Irina: 28:08

Yeah, I, yeah.

Phil: 28:09

think my mum, for instance, she basically disowned me when she hit 40 because I made her look old. She has re acknowledged the fact that I am actually her child now that she's 60. Yeah,

Irina: 28:23

the years that somebody has been in the company, though. You can say happy anniversary, too.

Phil: 28:28

you can, but there's a, some people don't want it. In fact, we're working with a company at the moment who, there's certain people who don't want anything about them broadcast on social

Irina: 28:39

Okay, good. That's

Phil: 28:42

That's absolutely fine. I'm, it was like, it threw me slightly, but it was like, okay, fine. No problem. We'll make sure that we don't include you. Anything we, so we take photographs and stuff. I was also up there the other day, I took photographs and all the photos will get sent over to the company first. So they get to sign them off and anybody in those photos will be, get the sign off on them. So yeah, some people won't want to be acknowledged. Sometimes people forget as well. Let's say they've got a, let's say they've got an HR system and it's not been set up right and their their anniversary date has been set wrong and maybe they were oh yes, actually they've been, oh, they've only been there like five years and they've got the wrong month on it as well, so they get acknowledged at the wrong month. Maybe their policy, it might just be their policy to only acknowledge certain milestones, 1, 5, 10, 25 years. I know that I've worked in companies before where there's certain acknowledgements that kick in at certain times. So there's like an acknowledgement at 10 years, at 20 years, and at 25 years. And at that point, when I was there, nobody had gone past 25 years. Nobody had reached the next milestone, which would have been like 30 years. Cause the company hadn't been around it long enough to be there for 30 years.

Irina: 29:55

Okay.

Phil: 29:55

That side of it. You start off the question around customer acquisition, and then moving them into, once they're a customer, they get ignored, almost. They're not seen as valuable.

Irina: 30:10

Yep.

Phil: 30:11

That's wrong. You are right, it's quite, it is very common, but it is the wrong way to look at it. A current customer should be nurtured just the same as a potential customer should be nurtured. Different messaging, but they need to be nurtured as well, because actually, one, they come up for renewal, and they need to make sure that you've communicated well, and they feel loved and engaged. At renewal point, there's always the opportunity for upsell. Periodically, through their lifecycle with you, there is opportunity for upsell and cross sell. Your cost per acquisition, let's say your cost 1, 000, your software costs 10, 000 a year. Their average lifetime with you is three years. Okay, you've made 30, 000 out of them, it's cost you 1, 000 to get them. While they're with you, you could have sold them another package, which would have given you another 5, 000 a year. It's not going to cost you anything to acquire that customer. You've already got them. The profitability per customer is higher if you look after them and Maintain the relationship with them properly.

Irina: 31:21

And hence, my problem is that usually what happens is that I don't know, your files are being ran and you're seeing, oh, you know what, customer A is going to be having their contract expiring in two months. Now is the time where we show up and start asking them about renewal. And then for me, and I'm always thinking from the shoes of a customer, let's say my mobile banking, what have you, it will annoy the fuck out of me if you have ignored me throughout my entire existence with your company. But then at the moment when I'm supposed to sign again with you, you're like, Hey, thank you so much for being a part of, from our family. And let's meet up to, to agree on the upcoming contract renewal.

Phil: 32:08

I'm going to give you an example of a company and I'm going to name drop. And I know you told me not to, I'm going to give you an example of one that is doing very well at this.

Irina: 32:17

Okay, then you can.

Phil: 32:19

So we migrated our CRM to Zoho earlier on this year. Our onboarding experience was fantastic. It took them two and a half months to get us on board because of the problems we'd had with our previous company. And they held our hands all the way through it. We were on calls with them every week to get it through. And I was expecting that to drop off afterwards. No, I get a call probably once every three weeks from our account manager, just checking in. Literally, it's a 30 second phone call. If I had a problem I've got his mobile number, and I can phone him if I've got a problem. And this is a, Zoho's not a small company, it's a decent sized company with a large amount of staff, and a large amount of customers. But I get a phone call once every three, maybe four weeks. We also have multiple products with them now, because we bought into their CRM. Okay, pretty good, does what we need it to. Then we start getting phone calls from them, making sure we're okay. When we needed to do something a bit more interesting with forms for the website. Something beyond their marketing module, as a stand alone piece did. They've got a forms tool, makes really nice forms. Oh, I'll tell you what, we'll buy that. It's not significantly expensive, but we've just added another product on. We needed a, we needed a passive management tool. Our one was failing miserably, as in, it just fell over all the time and didn't work. So I thought, what's the point of this? So I binned that off and moved everything over to Zoho Vault. Because, oh, it works, and we've got a good relationship with them, and they like, and we like them, because they've spent time looking after and nurturing that relationship. Now this is where marketing and sales have to work together really closely, because sales should be looking after their customers, but they need marketing to give them the support to look after them. Talk

Irina: 34:19

This is an amazing example. And to your point, I think when you establish that relationship and there is an active communication going on, you build that trust. So you're just, I'm in safe hands. So you have that additional product or service or what have you, I'm going to go to you because I know that you're going to get the job done, or at least you're going to be open and you're going to check in on me. And that is, this is the massive difference rather than. Constantly putting it on the customer. I'm sure that if you have an issue, you're going to call and then I'm calling. We don't have anyone available to help you out now, but I think we have given a lot of advice on vendors out there, how to better their marketing sales, organizational efforts. Do you have any last advice for people like me? Practitioners, users that are in a position of having to buy now a solution or that are struggling with their current vendor, what can they do? What can they look for? How they should approach that?

Phil: 35:22

to current users. Talk to current users. Get real users out of them. If you can't get a current user out of somebody, Don't. Just move on. You need that inside experience to see how people have actually got on with them. That, that experience of Zoho, we'd had that experience already because client had Zoho. So we knew how they would be, cause I was already getting phone calls from Zoho about the client, on the client's behalf. So I knew that we'd get a little, they were going to get a little bit more attention. I didn't realize quite how much. But. Yeah, speak to other users so that you know what you're getting into, cause, yeah, okay, a grand for a piece of software isn't too bad. A couple of grand, it's okay. Numbers start scaling up, and we've used software that's 15, 20 grand a year, and been thoroughly disappointed with it. We have one piece of software that actually, they turned around and dropped us as a customer. Because they couldn't support us. Which was particularly epic. Basically, the deal that had been done was co We were costing them money to have.

Irina: 36:34

Oh, okay.

Phil: 36:36

And we got I got a phone call to say, Phil, we have a problem. We need to renegotiate your contract. And I was like, it's mid contract. What's going on? Why? And they said, they gave me the reasons, and they gave me the clauses for getting out of it, if we wanted to get out of it. And I was like, Sorry, but we're not tripling our spend. And they're like, sure, we understand that. And they let us go quite happily and we've got, still got a good relationship with them. But it's, look, it is, it's that level I'd still recommend people go to that company. Yes, they've tripled their bill, but we were a heavy user. Like for a normal user they would be, we would've been, they'd been fine.

Irina: 37:16

I think mistakes are, we're humans and even in organization, in business, mistakes happen. Again, even in that situation, as long as you approach your customer and you're open and honest, you provide actually some sort of actions. You can either double, triple, or you can leave and that's fine. Then at least you're prepared what to do. And I would like to end on two final notes. One of them is I would really like to urge vendors to revisit their marketing strategies because what You might not acknowledge as a marketing industry is that especially in WFM and in contact centers in general, we are literally fighting for budgets. And we're so scared not to make any mistake because a single mistake with choosing for the wrong type of software for our business kind of absolutely sabotages our role in the organization. When your stakeholder starts mistrusting us, we lose our position. It's very likely that from now on, everything that we have as an idea is going to go south and people are going to reject it. So a single bad marketing decision from a customer side is basically very bad for our position within the company. And this is the reason why I would urge marketing to be maybe a little bit more Honest in their approach or to rethink their strategies and to work better within the organization. And on the other hand, thank you so much, Philip, for joining me. I know that I have a very strong opinion, but having that said, marketing for me, it's a great profession. We just need to start understanding that it's not only about advertising stuff and saying that everything is brilliant and everyone, everything is magnificent and this is the best solution out there. We just need to know that in the end we're working with people and even behind everything there are people and we need to be honest about what can we help you with. So thank you for being on the hot seat. I know I'm not being easy on you, but you've been amazing.

Phil: 39:27

that was so much easier than I thought you were gonna go on me. I thought you were gonna go way harder

Irina: 39:32

Oh no,

Phil: 39:33

this time.

Irina: 39:33

Next time, I'll play right for this one. Then thank you for being the guest on the show, and I'll wait for you on another episode where I'll be a bit harsher with you, I promise.

Phil: 39:45

Bye.

Irina: 39:46

Bye!