Sam Olmsted
All right, yeah, so that way we can kind of just roll right into it. So, well, thanks for joining us, Jason. How are you?

Jason Gless
K.

Jason Gless
I’m doing well, how are you both?

Meara McNitt
We’re doing good.

Sam Olmsted
Yeah. So why don’t we just dive right into it? What, why is it essential for businesses to integrate a CRM with their marketing campaigns? And actually, why don’t we just back up and, and have you kind of introduce yourself a little bit and where you work and kind of what experience you bring to the table today.

Jason Gless
Yeah. So, uh, thank you, Sam and, uh, Meara for both having me here. I really appreciate it. Uh, my name is Jason. I work for DS Cooper. Uh, we’re an agency located really all over the Western seaboard. Uh, we all work remotely. I’ve been in sales for 20 plus years. Uh, and, and really, as I’ve learned, um, it’s not necessarily selling like we used to do where you’re selling door to door as much as it is finding the right fit. Uh,

really for your agency or for your company to, to know what to do and, and how we can help. So in my, my current role with DS Cooper, uh, is a senior growth officer, which is it basically really fancy words for saying, um, my role is to find the right people that we can help them and then be that advocate throughout the entire experience.

Meara McNitt
I like it. So, where do CRMs fall into this for you?

Sam Olmsted
Cool, very cool. Yeah.

Jason Gless
Yeah, CRMs are essential and there’s one that I’m going to favor heavily that I’ve used in many different instances in my tenure, if I may. And that’s HubSpot and really it’s providing the quantifiable analytics that we have to have. And that is at the end of the day, no matter where you’re at, does this spend make sense? And we need a way to prove that. And having a robust CRM to provide that.

makes a night and day difference.

Meara McNitt
Have you had experiences where a like account, like a client that y’all have comes to you and they’re like, I don’t think that the marketing’s working and you’ve been able to pull up HubSpot and be like, no, we can show you right here that it is.

Jason Gless
Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, uh, one thing that HubSpot allows us to do is managed by campaign. And so we create different campaigns that we then monitor and we will tag and draw in additional data from Google analytics, uh, from many other sources that all compile into one. And it really, if we had enough time, I’d love to have a little show and share. As my seven-year-old puts it’s not show and tell it’s short and show and share. Uh, but

It really puts the entire campaign right in front of you. And it says, based on this, this happened, based on this, this workflow happened, and it even can attribute sales to that. So this investment made us this much. Great question.

Sam Olmsted
Yeah, so when you start a campaign, do you work with clients who don’t have a CRM and then you set that up for them?

Jason Gless
So a lot of the times, and we’re 100% HubSpot agency, not to say if you’re not currently on HubSpot, we’re not gonna work with you, they’re not saying that at all. I have several great examples of us, in the discovery phases, which we get very in detailed on, what’s your business, what’s your plan, what’s your brand, how do you wanna grow and how do you expect us to help? Once we go through that, we come back with a recommendation and…

If you’re not on HubSpot, then it’s time to get on HubSpot, or we’re not gonna be the right fit. We have a team set up that will support us, everything HubSpot, versus a team that does all sorts of things across the board.

Meara McNitt
So do you think that HubSpot has a place regardless of your industry? Like can all marketers use HubSpot or is it really specific to just like e-com or like lead driving?

Jason Gless
Yeah, I have used it in several different industries from, um, she’s an international electrical company. I’ve implemented in as, as a consultant, I’ve implemented in a LND environment. I have implemented in an agency environment. And, you know, I think the support that we get is phenomenal.

Sam Olmsted
Cool. I mean, yeah, we use HubSpot at Online Optimism and it’s a great way to track leads. It’s a great way to just track companies and kind of have everything all in one place. Are there any other CRMs that you would recommend? And if so, why would they be better or different than HubSpot?

Jason Gless
There are others and I will not speak negatively against any other. It’s just HubSpot for me, for us has been really the way of the future and the fact that we can pull in so many different data points and use it agnostically through the entire environment of any agency, any company. I think that’s what sets it apart. And just being associated with that part of it, I’m happy with it. There’s tons of different PM tools, there’s…

We use a very different PM tool. You can use HubSpot for PMing, but it just seems to work best for us. Hopefully that answered your question without skirting the obvious.

Sam Olmsted
Yeah, what PM tool do you use?

Jason Gless
We use ClickUp and I am 100% a ClickUp fanatic.

Sam Olmsted
Why is that?

Jason Gless
I think ClickUp is really, the fact that they’re up, their uptime is almost 99.999%. So it’s always available, it’s web-based. We can assign things, we can do a ton of different things. They’re always growing into something new. They’re always expanding. I spoke with them recently when we went to Boston at HubSpot Inbound 2022.

the amount of ideas that is coming down the pike is just invigorating. And the, we can actually invite our clients. We can invite our third party vendors, our partners, all within this PM system and give them the views that they need to be efficient. And for DS Cooper, that’s extremely important because we are 100% a row. So we’re results only work environment, which

To us, we don’t care if you’re in the Caribbean or in Antarctica, just get the work done and do it the right way. So having that robust PM software, that system in place, and then having those really, you know, the Wiki in place and how to do things is extremely powerful.

Meara McNitt
Okay, a row. Haven’t heard that term used before. Love the concept. Do y’all have set working hours or online hours? Or do people just, as long as the work is done, it doesn’t matter when they’re on.

Jason Gless
We have zero hours, we do not have a brick and mortar. GoRoe.com is, we were the first digital agency to be Roe certified, we absolutely love them, we have a great relationship with them. Sorry for the plug, had to. But again, there is no, there are maybe meetings, right? You gotta talk to clients, you gotta talk internally. But at any given time, I could have a senior marketing manager call me up and say, hey, I got a question on this, or what’s happening here? And we just chat like we all.

live in the same home. I mean, it’s amazing the way that our team operates.

Sam Olmsted
Does that cause any issues with maybe workplace boundaries or time boundaries for people that may have families or have other things going on in their lives? Or how does that kind of play into it?

Jason Gless
That is also a great question.

Jason Gless
You know, I, as a recent coach, soccer for my seven year old, and I’m gone during those times. So when I keep an updated calendar, people know I’m busy. If I don’t answer, it’s because I’m busy. But us as an agency, sorry, you may have heard my Pomski barking. He’s the guard dog.

Sam Olmsted
I think you may have heard mine earlier too, so sorry about that.

Jason Gless
I don’t know if you want to restart that question or not. Sorry. I don’t know if we’re allowed to do that or if I’m in trouble now.

Meara McNitt
Yeah, yeah, we can cut if you want to start it over again.

Jason Gless
We’ll answer.

Jason Gless
gotta give him a good stern yelling.

Meara McNitt
Ha ha.

Jason Gless
All right, sorry. I love the question we were talking about, Ro. Getting into what Sam asked. Boundaries, right?

Jason Gless
So boundary. Oh.

Meara McNitt
Sam, you’re on mute.

Sam Olmsted
Sorry, I was gonna restate the question, but I think we can just cut it from my question. So you can just kind of start.

Jason Gless
Yeah, and that work-life balance is extremely important. And that’s really what results only work environment does give you is so that I can go and coach my seven-year-old at a soccer game, at a soccer practice, and still come back and finish what I need to do the night before. And as long as you have that robust operating system, that CMS that is setting everything up for success, everything’s in there. We all know the due date. It’s not a surprise that, you know,

We need to brief completed this date. We need this sent out to this, and this. There’s no surprises there. And it’s the same thing that we do when we work with our clients, or we usually refer to them as partners. We’re working on an annual plan. When we have that, we’re down to a 90-day plan, and all this is spelled out, and it makes a world of difference. So there are no necessarily surprises. Things do come up where you’re doing a website launch, and hey, you know what? We need the whole team available and on standby, but that’s, you know, that’s.

part of the business.

Sam Olmsted
Exactly.

Meara McNitt
One thing that… Oh no, go ahead, Sam.

Sam Olmsted
I was just going to ask whether or not tying in your partners into your project management and your projects, allowing them to see things in real time as they get completed or as they’re assigned, if that jumbles up your workflow at all. I know that sometimes partners can be unresponsive or maybe less on top of the game than agencies are. Not to say not ours, of course.

So just curious about how that ties into your workflow process.

Jason Gless
So that is a very good question, a very loaded question. I can tell you from our side, usually it’s not us that we’re waiting on. Clients that we work with, our partners, they have a plethora of items happening. So the better that we can enable them with information, whether it be certain dashboards and HubSpot, sequences, workflows, et cetera, that we’re kind of behind the scenes pulling the strings.

or even for us, we have a dedicated dashboard for each one of our partners. It’s a read-only, they can log in at any time. Part of the onboarding that we do together is bookmark this specific page. Anytime you’re not sure what’s happening, you can pull up every single meeting agenda, you can pull up your customer value journey, you can pull up absolutely every piece of data that we have, which also then links back out to individual blogs that are waiting for pending approval or anything like that. We know…

our partners are busy. They have a lot of other things going on. So the best that we can enable them for success, that’s really how we’ve used that.

Meara McNitt
How much of this is stuff that Diaz and Cooper’s been doing the whole time and how much of this is like newly implemented especially since 2020? Cause I know a lot of businesses made changes in that time and I’m assuming y’all did too.

Jason Gless
Yeah. So DS Cooper being around for 20 plus years, there was, there was a brick and mortar at once upon a time. There was a time that big media buys were happening and radio and this and that, and even billboard. And really in the past year, we focused on EOS, which is a principle that we’re following strictly. It’s, really for us to narrow down, what are we most efficient with and what can we really help with? Let’s not be an agency that does everything kind of.

let’s be an agency that does a few things wonderfully. And so that’s where we really narrowed this down in focus. We’ve always done it in some manner or another, but really finding our expertise and how we can be most efficient, that’s where we wanna be.

Sam Olmsted
Perfect. I’m going to hop into some of the other questions we’ve got here. Can you tell us a little bit more about Diaz and Cooper’s Growth Partnership Program and how it works to design a business’s growth strategy?

Jason Gless
That is a phenomenal question, Sam, thank you. Mearan, not to say you haven’t had great questions either. I’m just, in general, I appreciate that question. So we pride ourselves on being different, and this is gonna be extremely cliche. This is one of the things we identified in our leadership meetings that we do all the time, but we claim that our people and our processes is what sets us apart from everyone else. Big deal, everyone says that. No, but seriously.

before you can even get an interview, we take an immense consideration about what happens and how you join the team. We’ve all heard the analogy that we need the right people in the right seats on our bus. DS Cooper has a mega yacht. We don’t have a bus. So we have a mega yacht as of now philosophically speaking, but hopefully one day we have a literal mega yacht. You guys come down, we’ll have the next podcast down there. And we looked first and again,

Credit needs to be due to Patrick Lansone. Well, I’m murdering his name now. I apologize. Anyway, the ideal team player, right? So we first identify, are these people hungry? Are they humble? And are they smart? And there’s a lot that goes into that. And there’s a lot of grading to understand, is this the right person for this role, for this team? And then…

are they going to be operating in their working genius? And it really identifies, you know, when we bring them on board, will they fit in that pod structure? Will they fit in where they’re going and how they can benefit ultimately our partners, right? Our clients at the end of the day. And then finally, can they function in a role? Are they able to wake up in the morning? You can wear pajamas, that’s fine. This is what I wore today. You don’t have to put on a suit. And can they function in that? Can they be accountable?

Do they have the responsibility? You know, and that is, is what really sets DS Cooper apart from a lot of other companies, not just agencies that I’ve been a part of. Um, but then knowing once we have the right people on the yacht, now we can go sell, sell a seat, right? We can do anything. We have the right team. And, and for us, a minimum engagement looks, looks like 14 months at a minimum. And we’ve had people actually shy away and that’s fine. They’re not the right partners for us.

Jason Gless
when we said onboarding takes approximately two months. So that’s too long, we don’t have that time. Well, that’s all we have. That’s one thing we don’t, one thing we can’t replicate is time. So we have to make it worthwhile. And these first month or two, first two months rather, that we’re setting the standards, we’re defining the buyer persona or personas, we’re defining the customer value journey. These are, it’s really the foundation to success that we wanna build upon.

Once we have that, we can go in and make an annual marketing plan that has to have the smart goals, which everyone sure knows is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, I believe. Making sure at the end of the day, at any given time, one of our partners says, hey, Jason, what are you guys doing for us? Well, let’s look at these three to five smart goals, and these are the benchmarks we’re going after. Are we moving the needle?

If not, well, I guess we’re doing something wrong, but usually it’s yes, we’re moving the needle. Now that’s a very strategic level. Then we get more tactical, right? And that’s where we break down 90 day sprints. And we’ve got some really neat graphics on a growth guided expedition, and we’re climbing up the mountain with you and we’re training you. But again, that’s where we go from the strategic to tactical. And we’re engaging on many different levels on how we can help with that.

Again, it goes back to the people that make the difference. We have that dedicated pod structure where we have a senior marketing strategist or marketing manager kind of leading the entire pod, supported by a project manager, an inbound marketing coordinator, an entire HubSpot tech team, HubSpot developer, UX, UI designer, copywriters, et cetera. So again, that’s what really sets us apart. And then of course, being in that sales role, I think it’s only important I speak about myself more because that’s what we do in sales.

is I also fall into that client success manager role. And our senior marketing manager, ever since we’ve worked together, said you cannot give out your personal cell phone. It’s not allowed. For me, I’m just the opposite. I will talk to a client at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night because they’re having a bad day, they’re not sure what’s happening, just don’t call me to execute things. I’m not a copywriter, I’m not a developer, I have ideas, they get forward down there, but you know what, if something’s not working,

Jason Gless
call me, let me know. And that’s kind of the relationship we have with everyone we work with. So again, very long story, but hopefully that sums it up well enough for you.

Meara McNitt
Okay, so I have a question. So you’re building your yacht. You’re casting the people that are coming on the yacht with you. How long does the process look like to figure out if someone fits with y’all’s everything that you have to make someone fit?

Jason Gless
So we’ve narrowed it down and we have two quizzes that every possible shipmate would have, I don’t know, essentially an employee, right?

Jason Gless
what they fit, where they fit, how they fit, right? So what is someone’s working genius? Are they humble, hungry and fit based on questions that are very well designed? And then from there, we talk to them. And it’s a matter of just having an open discussion. And it’s not necessarily that we’re having grilling questions, but we wanna talk to figure out who they are, what they are as a person. And that really are, those really are the main things that really qualify.

the right people to be part of the team. You know, we’d rather go through 300 interviews and get three qualified people than just hire three.

Meara McNitt
Sam, do you have a question?

Sam Olmsted
Sorry, no, I was just gonna say that’s a great point. I would love to kind of be a fly on the wall during your hiring processes, because I think, you know, we always talk about culture ad and what people bring to the table, but it’s also, it is important that people are comfortable working in the environment that you lay out. I mean, this whole row thing, the whole idea of completely remote, and it takes a lot of accountability, I would assume, and a lot of structure and personal.

structure as well as professional structure. So I think it’s really interesting that you all do that and it’s obviously been successful for you. I’m gonna ask another question about CRM. So how great of an impact does utilizing the right CRM provide a business? And just kind of talk us through why it’s so important. You had mentioned a little bit earlier, but if you could give some sort of concrete examples of what really

pushes the needle for these companies that come to you.

Jason Gless
Sure. First off, it’s a massive impact. It’s night and day. We’re not operating, it’s 2020 something. It’s not 1998 where we have paper documents, Excel spreadsheets that we’re tracking this. And so I would love to paint a picture of a real life example, without sharing too much information. But when we, when we started engaging with this partner, originally, they had a very, what I would consider a dated web platform.

Data web platform is someone that, it’s a platform that you have to code. You have to go in there and you have to know HTML or CSS, and you have to be able to do that yourself or have a department that you pay for to do that. Additionally, how do you measure analytics? Well, did we get a sale or did we not? There’s not enough analytics to know if anything’s working in any quantifiable way, right? And then when you’re using an Excel document to track your sales or to track your contacts or.

Hey, I contacted this person on this date, put an X in cell E12 or whatever. You know, that’s very antiquated. And when you send a proposal to someone via a Word document versus a polished PDF or something that you can track, you know, those are things that are not reflective of a 2020-something company. And keep in mind without going into detail, this is a very luxury brand that we’re working with.

This is the best of the best. These are people that attract really the only most discerning customers, right? So the big change is what did DS Cooper do? What did DCA do? That’s how we refer to ourselves, DCA, DS Cooper Agency. First we merged the entire website to HubSpot. So we went from a platform that was heavy code based and we brought it into HubSpot within a matter of weeks.

This enabled the client and for us, we wanna teach the client, the partner, on how to do this themselves, not to handcuff them into having, you have to know code to update your website. You have to reach out to us or else. No, no, no. We don’t wanna be bogged down with those basic things. We’re the bigger strategy, not change the steel on the website. So we train them, we teach them, and we give them the GUI to do that, right? The Graphical User Interface. And then even further,

Jason Gless
we connected an online chat bot that connects directly to customer service. And they actually had a sale within the same week, which was pretty massive. So in the first week, they were starting to reap the rewards. And then on the back end, with what a CRM can really do, specifically HubSpot that we love to use, is we start creating and implement different workflows, right? So lead nurturing and generation and

How are people visiting the website? What forms are they filling out? And let’s get into lead scoring and let’s make sure we’re attending attentive to these individuals more than the others and having their sales team create sequences and When to call when to email when to follow up and it’s all measured in there with a Literally a nearly unlimited amount of dashboards that now the sea level goes. This is great. I can track where this dollar goes I now know where my ad attribution comes from and then

What was really powerful? Well, before you get to that, we also did a customized drag and drop proposal. So now the customer service can go in and just grab stuff, put it in there. And now they have this beautiful document that they can send for a proposal. We built an interweb for their customers. But the biggest thing is when the leadership team could see within HubSpot, and it was a literal aha kind of moment. Wow.

this person went to our website three times on these days. This person did this on our chat bot. This person interacted for so long with this page. Sales was able to reach out to that person and actually make a sale because of that. So it’s a huge, huge impact. You know, you’re getting the ease of use, you’re getting those quantifiable analytics, you’re getting different sales features, you have the web development. Again, in case you can’t tell, I could probably talk for a long time, but it is.

extremely important to me.

Sam Olmsted
I think it’s sort of like working on a flip phone and then realizing what a smartphone is and seeing all the capabilities, all the features, all the functionality, and just bringing your business into the modern kind of CRM age of what you can do. So that’s really cool. We do a lot of that as well, yeah.

Jason Gless
Sam, it’s like going from printing out MapQuest directions or highlighting a map route to having a smartphone that guides you through the entire thing.

Sam Olmsted
Yeah.

Sam Olmsted
It guides you through and it tells you when there’s traffic, tells you when there are cops on the road, it tells you all this different stuff that you thought you had to just guess the whole time.

Meara McNitt
Honestly, what a good analogy because literally the other day I was like, how much better would life be if everyone used Waze to give everyone the information? And I agree, how much better would life be if everyone was using a good CRM?

Jason Gless
I agree.

Meara McNitt
I feel like even as a consumer, it’d be great if companies that I was into could see what I was doing and then be like, hey, we could tell that you had questions about this. Let us answer them. And I’d be like, oh, great, yeah, that’s exactly what I needed.

Jason Gless
Miriam, can I jump in on that? Cause that’s a phenomenal point. Am I allowed to go off script? Is that okay? I love it. So one thing that we love to do is when you have an opt in audience, right? And this is all done in HubSpot is you can send them a form. You can send them information that says what most interests you? Is it A? Is it B? Is it C? And then you can take that within HubSpot.

Meara McNitt
Yeah!

Meara McNitt
Welcome to Online Offscript, that’s what we do here.

Jason Gless
and you can segregate those individuals into ABC pods. So we know this group wants information on A, this group wants information on B, this group wants information on C. Why is that important? Well, what if your company is selling, I don’t know, pens and pencils to sweatshirts and sweatpants? Some people want pens and pencils, some people want sweatshirts and sweatpants. I work from home, so I’m more partial to sweatshirt and sweatpants side of things.

giving those people the right information is huge. Not to mention a smart content capability that if I know you’re a Mac user versus a PC user, I can deliver different content. So I don’t mean to derail you there, but it’s just to me that is what’s fascinating and getting the right content to the right people makes a night and day difference.

Meara McNitt
Yeah, and when you know when iOS was making all of its changes that change how we could track people and people were like, oh yeah I’m so excited. I was like no I’m gonna start getting ads that don’t matter to me because before they could see what I want is known I was like, oh here are the products that I need and like it’s not out the window But it’s definitely harder for that to be functioning

Jason Gless
Very much so.

Meara McNitt
So we have time for one more question, and I wanna wrap it up. So what I’ve gathered today is that DCA is very forward thinking in being a row company. And part of the ways you’re able to do that is by utilizing tools like ClickUp and HubSpot to remain organized, structured, and highly communicative, both inside and outside of the team. Is there anything else that you would want people to take away about DCA or how they can also be a row?

company.

Jason Gless
I can say in general, a lot of people are scared of the idea. A lot of people are scared to allow people to be adults. Uh, you know, and people in general, they want to do well. If not, they’re not, they’re not going to continue in that realm of whatever they’re doing, whether it be business or personal. And, and I think the biggest thing is what we pride ourselves in is we respect who we work with. Um, we have discontinued relationships. Based on.

our partners or clients wanted us to be order takers. And we are not order takers. We are at a strategic level there to help move that needle forward wherever that gauge may be. And that’s really the most important thing at the end of the day, right? That’s what any good marketing agency would want to do. So it’s really just being cognitive of yourself, your workspace and just waking up knowing the right thing.

You know, as part of the leadership team, that’s what we empower into every person that’s part of the DS Cooper team, and including our partners.

Meara McNitt
All right, Sam, you wanna wrap us up?

Sam Olmsted
Yeah, sure. Before we go, Jason, I just wanted to ask if you could let us know how we can find DCA, how we can find you, if there are any social media channels to call out or upcoming projects or things that you want to discuss.

Jason Gless
Yeah, so DSCooper.com, you can always look us up. You can always find me on LinkedIn. You can find us on LinkedIn, on social markets. I plan on getting out to as many as possible events in the next couple years. It’s great to be able to see people, to shake hands again. So definitely I’ll be out there and happy to be a resource and point people in the right directions. If you have questions on any of, you know, we talked about ClickUp, we talked about HubSpot. If you have questions on that, I’m happy to.

share how we use it. I do that with a lot of other folks, so we’re happy to be a resource.

Sam Olmsted
Thank you so much, Jason. It’s been really informative. You seem like you really know your stuff and DCA seems like a really innovative company. So really appreciate your time and thanks for joining us.

Jason Gless
Yeah, thank you both for the opportunity.

Sam Olmsted
Perfect. Yeah.

Meara McNitt
All right, now don’t leave.