The Art of Branding, Rebranding, and Embracing AI in Your Business featuring Mark Drager

Mark Drager [: 00:00:00

Your brand is nothing more than how you intentionally choose to show up, how you look, what you say, and how you make people feel. The greatest brands out there, who are the most effective, are probably ones most people haven't heard of.

Kate Volman [: 00:00:17

This is Lead with Culture. I'm Kate Volman, and on this episode we talk all about branding and why it's so important for your organization. I was joined by my friend Mark Drager, who is the CEO of SalesLoop, and he helps owners and their marketing team teams attract and close more customers, giving your company the compelling messages and eye catching marketing needed to generate more leads, beat your competition, pull prospects through your sales process, and sell more. So we get into branding, why it's important. What is branding? How it helps attract and retain your clients and customers. And at the end, we also get into AI and what that looks like on a branding front, as well as just organizations in general, how people are leveraging it and what people feel about it right now. So all of those things are discussed in this conversation. I hope you enjoy.

Kate Volman [: 00:01:13

Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mark Drager [: 00:01:16

Okay. I'm so excited to be here and, and finally on this podcast with you. We've been talking about it for a while.

Kate Volman [: 00:01:21

I know. Yes, Mark and I have known each other for a long time, but we recently reconnected and now here we are on. I got to be a guest on your podcast now. You're on this podcast. So exciting. So why don't you tell the listeners, who are you, Mark? What do you do?

Mark Drager [: 00:01:38

Who are you? Hello, everyone. I feel like I'm standing in front of a group now. Hello, I'm Mark Draeger. I am a brand strategist, and I help owners. I help company leaders. I help sales and marketing teams fix their brand, their positioning, their messaging, to be more strategic so everyone can go out there and they can sell more, they could persuade more people they want to connect with, form deeper relationships, or stay in front of the most important people, your employees, your partners, and your future customers.

Kate Volman [: 00:02:09

Amazing. And this is why I am excited to have this conversation, because you really help companies with their brand, and it's so important. And it's a term that I feel like is just thrown around. It's been thrown around for over the years. And I, some organizations really understand the value of it, and some just think that's for those influencers or those single people that are working to become an influencer online. So let's talk about why companies should care about having a strong brand in the marketplace.

Mark Drager [: 00:02:42

Well, listen, if you have more sales than you could possibly handle, and you have every role in your company filled and you just couldn't possibly grow anymore. Take anything else on or win over any clients or stay in front of past clients, then you don't really need a brand, right? You. You have things figured out. And I speak to business owners who have no interest in this at all, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if in any part of your business you are spending time or money or resources to try and influence people, persuade people, build a sense of credibility in front of them, educate them, engage with them, inform. You can call this communications. And in my background, I've done a lot of work with communications teams. You can call this recruitment, you can call this marketing or lead generation, you can call this your sales team.

Mark Drager [: 00:03:36

We even do this same type of work with large publicly traded companies. When you're doing investor relations, the truth is that anytime that you are hoping to get a message in front of someone and persuade them in some way that touches your brand.

Kate Volman [: 00:03:53

What is a brand? What you just described was, of course, people want to get in front of more individuals, except for, I guess, these people that you mentioned that don't care about it. But I would assume that the people that are listening, they care about building a brand that is not only helpful for their potential clients and customers, but also their people. They're people. So you attract the right people. So let's. How do you define brand?

Mark Drager [: 00:04:18

Yeah, I try to keep things really simple because I geek out over this. I don't know about you if you geek out and then suddenly you find yourself talking about all the little details, but let's, let's keep things really simple. Your brand is nothing more than how you intentionally choose to show up. How you look, what you say, and how you make people feel. Now, that's gonna shift or change depending on who you're speaking to, whether you're doing advertising, or whether people are coming to you, or if you're at a live event, it's always context specific. But at the end of the day, is your logo your brand? It's part of it. Or your colors, your brand? It's part of it. Your fonts, the photography.

Mark Drager [: 00:04:54

But it's also things like, if I were to show up on this podcast where I don't know if you're listening or if you're watching this on video, but if I showed. If I were to show up and represent my company in a suit and tie and polish shoes, that would communicate something, that would say something. Maybe I'm a little bit more corporate, maybe I'm a little more formal. If I showed up in a ripped t shirt because I'm out on the job site all day every day, and I have dirty boots and dirty jeans and I drive an old pickup truck, nothing wrong with that. That says something. You know the old saying, you can't judge a book by its cover. The truth is we all judge books by their covers. We judge everything all the time.

Mark Drager [: 00:05:34

And the thought that anyone would go to a library, go to a bookstore, go to Amazon, pick a totally random book and say, maybe dedicate five or 6 hours to it to see if you like it before you judge that book by its cover. No one is going to do that. No one is going to give it the time, even if it's the greatest story in the world. And so we judge books by covers, or we need recommendations, or we need to know who the author is before we will even go a little bit deeper. And all of that is brand. It's how you look, it's what you say, and it's how you make people feel.

Kate Volman [: 00:06:07

It feels so much like branding and culture are similar in the sense that you have to be very intentional about building it and creating that. So how does brand, what are the differences? Or how do they influence each other?

Mark Drager [: 00:06:22

And so with our approach, when we sit down with someone, your values, your culture, what you do as a company, everything, I like to say, everything within your four walls is everything that you need to develop a great brand. It's how you think, it's where you'll spend the extra time, it's where you'll invest a little bit more, it's your processes, it's your people, it's the systems, it's the R and D, whatever it is that makes you a little bit special and a little bit different, whatever it is that has your repeat customers coming back time and time again, that is the core essence of your brand. And so that is your culture, that is your vision. And so when we know your goals and when we know your culture and we know your vision and that secret sauce that makes your company stand out and be different, and once we list or figure out exactly who we want to communicate to, and once we figure out where are those people or how are we communicating to those people, and we have the context of is it competitive, is it non competitive? When you bring those three things together, you can come up with a really strong message, a really strong brand, really persuasive communication tools.

Kate Volman [: 00:07:30

What are some good brands? Because I know people are listening and they're thinking, okay, I need like, what makes a good brand? Give some examples of brands that we all know and love and they, and it's very clear who they are and they've done a good job.

Mark Drager [: 00:07:43

So this is a trap that most small medium organizations, we have worked with international firms, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, national airlines, NBA teams, pension plans with $650 billion of assets under management. And we've worked with really, really small companies, grassroots, pre revenue startups. We run into trouble. When we look at Apple, we look at Coca Cola, we look at any company that is an established player in the industry or is super well known because they have spent the last ten or 20 or 30 or 40 years building a brand. And so how they approach branding or marketing or advertising, we can't ignore that. If Virgin with Richard Branson wants to launch something new, they don't have to do the same techniques that you and I might have to with a business. And so we can look at brands and we can say, well, Apple, is that a good brand or a bad brand? Is Elon Musk. And what he's been doing the last few years, is that good for his properties or his assets? Is that bad for his companies? So I wouldn't really point to any of those large companies that are known for brand because that's where we as everyday business people, run into problems.

Mark Drager [: 00:09:00

The greatest brands out there, who are the most effective are probably ones most people haven't heard of. And that seems so counterintuitive, but you and I might have similar clients. And so if I'm working with, let's say, an engineering firm that does control systems for food processing and manufacturing, they may have the most amazing brand in their niche, they may be the best company, they may be super well known, but you go out and ask the average person and they would have no idea what you're talking about. And that's really my mission is to help those of us in business rethink brand from. We need to be everywhere all the time. We need everyone to know us to how can we make our brand the most effective possible to persuade or influence or frankly impressed the very small group of people that will actually help us drive business goals of some kind?

Kate Volman [: 00:10:01

Yeah, I feel like if you looked at those bigger brands, there would be some qualities that you could obviously pull from, but the strategy would be different in how you're actually putting, how you're actually going to execute it in that way. And I think as you're talking I was thinking about some of our clients because they have such a strong brand in their industry and because of that they, all these, all these industries that are talking about, it's so hard to find great people. We can't get people to apply for their jobs. And this particular company I'm thinking of, they have an overflow of applicants that are very qualified.

Mark Drager [: 00:10:43

I start off by saying some businesses are in that situation or maybe one part of their business, maybe HR and recruitment is that way, but maybe sales is lacking or what have you. That's a great example.

Kate Volman [: 00:10:53

Let's talk about the businesses that are listening. They're not the apples, they're not the targets, they're not the big brands like that, but they're, you know, they have their 300 plus employees, maybe a thousand plus employees, and they want to know, okay, I want to do an assessment. If I were to have Mark come in, how would he look at the brand, assess the brand and give them a score of like, you know, between one and ten. Like so they can kind of get an idea of like do they have a good brand or do they nothing.

Mark Drager [: 00:11:23

This is a great question. A few months ago we were going through a competitive situation, an RFP situation, and my client, we ended up winning the project and weve done some great work. They said where do you see the brand taking us over the next ten years? And I thought, well thats an interesting question, but the brand will not take you anywhere that the business strategy is not intending to go. The brand is in service to your business strategy. Its there as a tool or an asset. If you really want to break it down. It's like a capital investment that should last you the next few years because it's there to serve your business goals. So if your brand feels out of date, if it feels slightly embarrassing, if you feel like it's not competitive, it's not representing you well either where you are today or where you could be over the next 1218 months.

Mark Drager [: 00:12:17

Well then we could go through and we could figure out what's good and what's bad and what we should hold onto and what we should ditch. But we're going to start with a conversation around those business goals, around where do we need to improve communications or advertising or lower the cost of certain actions or try and build engagement. We're going to have a conversation around all the areas. And this is why branding is a little bit challenging to talk about. But at the end of the day, it's there to serve the business, it's there to serve leadership or serve the departments. And so the first place we're going to start with is what's working and what's not working. What should we hold on to and what should we look to? Readdress? What should we honor of the past? Because even though maybe you're inside and you're like, I want to change everything that can hurt your business. You know, changing a logo that is well established can set you back.

Mark Drager [: 00:13:11

I heard Gary Vee tell this great story about Gary Vee comes from the wine industry and his dad owned a liquor store. When they became successful, they tore their liquor store down, and they built the liquor store of their dreams, and sales went down. Now, why would sales go down when you build a better store with a better experience, with better layout? Well, as people were driving by, they assumed it was under different ownership. They assumed that this change meant that they were now more expensive. And I heard Gary speak to the fact that he wishes he never tore that old store down. Now, they could overcome that. They can educate that. They can.

Mark Drager [: 00:13:48

They can prepare for the dip. But the truth is that McDonald's would be very foolish to change its logo at this point. And if you've been in business for five years or ten years or 15 years, and you're well known, we very rarely touch people's logos. We will address fonts, we will address colors. We'll certainly lift up photography and visualizations to explain different data points or how systems work. We'll do explainer videos. We do a lot of case studies, a lot of testimonials, a lot of social proof, but there are certain core elements where, frankly, it would almost be foolish to change just for the sake of change. And so if you were to sit down with me, if you were to have a conversation with me, the first place, I would start with what's happening in the business, what's really working? Well, what do we want of the things that are working? Well, what do we want more of, of the things that aren't working? How will we potentially address these things that aren't working? And then I would start to analyze if communications, if marketing, if advertising, if outreach, if recruitment, if these different parts couldn't be serviced by your brand.

Mark Drager [: 00:14:57

You know, it's. It's great to come up with a new tagline. That doesn't always help. It's great to launch a new landing page. It doesn't always work. And anyone in marketing or anyone in HR who's recruiting, we know this. And so I'm probably not giving you the five points to look at.

Kate Volman [: 00:15:13

But, yeah, Mark, come on.

Mark Drager [: 00:15:14

Conversation.

Kate Volman [: 00:15:16

We want the five points. But that's the thing, right? Like, people want to know. But it's interesting because as you're talking to, well, two things. One, about the wine store, I find that interesting because I almost is a little bit of its personality because it's the old store and it's got such a cool history. And I think that it would be sad to just tear it down for. Although it would be great to be able to. It's great that they were able to build their dream store. That's amazing.

Kate Volman [: 00:15:45

As you're talking, I find so many people probably think branding is the logo. It is the font, it is the tagline. It is the responsibility of the marketing department to figure those pieces out. Whereas what you're talking about feels very strategic. It feels like you're having conversations, high level conversations, with not just the marketing director, but with the CEO, with the HR director, with the leadership team to really drive that. And I feel like they're sometimes. Is that disconnect? Because the marketing team is supposed to just drive revenue and drive, you know, people into the store. So talk a little bit about when you're working with your clients, who is involved.

Kate Volman [: 00:16:26

What does that look like? Because it feels like an education to get people from thinking branding is just a logo to, oh, no, there's so much about it. And again, I'll bring it back to culture, because to me, you're describing so much of, like, what we talk about in building a culture.

Mark Drager [: 00:16:43

Yeah. We want to. We want to pull the essence of what makes you great and ensure that everything people see feels that way, that it communicates that way intuitively, directly, whatever it might be. So a lot of the team makeup depends on the company size. I love working with owner managed businesses because we can go straight to the top and we can have really great conversations. But here's an example. We recently did a brand refresh or revamp. Now, we did do the logo.

Mark Drager [: 00:17:07

We tweaked the colors. We replaced all the fonts, and that led to pretty much an entire rebrand. The only thing we held onto was the company name, and we updated the colors, meaning they had blue and yellow and they loved it. But they weren't the most modern blue, the most modern yellow. Now, you might say, what a. Like, what, what does this stuff matter? But here's. Here's the client we worked with. They are a nonprofit in the 60.

Mark Drager [: 00:17:32

I mean, they're nonprofits, public. They're in the $60 to $70 million nonprofit space they have 1400 staff. They're in 240 locations, and they're in childcare, afterschool programs, before school programs, and daycares. So they have, I think, close to 10,000 students in their programs. So certainly childcare, certainly nonprofit, but not the smallest charity or nonprofit in the world. And they're hitting their 50th year next year. Their logo, their brand was about 15 years in the market. And at the time when they came up with that brand, that's been 15 years, they were struggling to recruit because it was in 15 years ago, childcare services and aftercare services were very mom and pop.

Mark Drager [: 00:18:20

It was very, a lot of, a lot of they were competing against boys and girls clubs, certainly, but there's also a lot of at home, a mom at home with an unlicensed daycare. And so what they were going for 15 years ago was, how do we make our brand look as professional as possible? We want to separate ourselves within the industry. I mean, my client is so large that they are working with school boards, they're working with counties, they are working with state legislators to try and change legislation. So they wanted to appear professional. Now, that's a great business reason. But 15 years later, once you're in market and you are professional, it doesnt make moms and dads, grandparents, kids look at it and go like, oh, my goodness, that looks so much fun, that looks safe, that looks affordable, that looks amazing. And so when they come to us and they say, hey, we want to look at this brand, we start by sitting down with leadership. So leadership were four or five different roles, but then they had a wider leadership team.

Mark Drager [: 00:19:20

So we started by spending a month workshopping with 23 leaders within the organization. And we do these two to three hour workshops. And what we started with is, well, what should the brand be? What should the company be? What should we be known for? We developed a series of keywords that we felt were descriptors. And then what we did was we went to three or four of their different groups. We went to their parents. We had 2000 respondents to a survey. We went to their board of directors. We went to their staff.

Mark Drager [: 00:19:50

Actually, there's four groups. And then we went to partners, the government stakeholders, school boards, partners. We worded the questions because what we wanted to see was whether the different groups looked at the company or the brand differently. So we asked the question, who is this brand for? Is this for parents because they're making a purchasing decision? Is this for kids because ultimately we give kids, or is this for staff? Because we're trying to recruit staff there were other stakeholders that we all agreed weren't there. So we put this question out and parents and staff said, this brand is for kids. The board of directors and stakeholders said, this is for staff. So, interesting disconnect here. So as we go deeper into the process, I can listen to the board of directors, I can listen to stakeholders, but they seem to be more focused on what is important to them, which is how do we build an organization that's professional, but parents who make the purchasing decisions and staff we want to recruit put children first.

Mark Drager [: 00:20:55

So right away there, just with that one piece of data, as we start to shape the brand, shape the look, shape the feel, we can say, okay, this should be for kids. Then what we did was we took all of these keywords that we came up with and we looked at their values, and we came up with a list, I think, of 30 keywords. We go out to the survey and we ask these different groups what is most important. Think about compassion. Think about, this is a semi public system. So there are things like identity issues. There are more conservative people because we have people coming from other countries, we have more liberally or progressive minded people. We can't make everyone happy.

Mark Drager [: 00:21:31

So we want to know, well, what's the difference between these different groups and how do they look at it? And parents came back and said it comes down to convenience, safety, and affordability. Okay, convenience, safety, and affordability. Gosh, we thought it was about compassion and connection and fun and education and like, all of these other things. So, okay, so we know now that our overall brand message should very much communicate, yes, safety. So professionalism and safety. And it should speak to fun and it should speak to playfulness because it has to live in this space. But we need to make sure that our messaging, again, what we look like, what we say, and how we make people feel, it has to speak to the convenience aspect, has to speak to the safety aspect. It has to speak to affordability.

Mark Drager [: 00:22:16

So we can't ignore those things. So as we go through our first workshops, that gives us the information we need. As we go out and do some research or some studies or some surveys, we get the information we need. And at each step, we went through leadership, 23 people. We ultimately looked at different brands and different classifications. Like, well, what does Mattel or hot wheels or Barbie? All these different online toys, they're very good at attracting kids. They look pretty wild. Now, if we look at some arts and crafts stuff, like Plato or some of the other programs, that's different.

Mark Drager [: 00:22:54

If we look at private schools for education, very, very different. Still, if we look at after school programs, cubs or scouts or YMCA or other programs like that, what do they do? And we ask the team, we ask the group, where should we be classified? Where should we lean on this spectrum from safety and education and conservative to hot wheels wanting to just have a blast with kids? And so as we work through this, and then as we work through iterations of what the logo could be, as we work through iterations of what the colors could be, of what it represents, step after step, after about eight to nine weeks, we arrived at two logos and it was do we want to go left or do we want to go right? And that logo that they wanted to go into. By that point, all 23 departments, all leadership, everyone was comfortable. Now I came in and presented to the board of directors because ultimately I'm going to do a better job of explaining what we've done, how we've done it than anyone else. So I put it in front of the board. They are very comfortable with it. But one board member, the chair, said, I would feel more comfortable if we did market research and we knew that parents were actually behind us. So that is a request we didn't account for.

Mark Drager [: 00:24:04

They spent a little bit more money. They hired a market research firm, they went out and we looked for 3000 respondents and it all came back positive. So now they have that assurance, they have that insurance, they've covered their butts, so to speak, because we now have market research that says even the parents out there or the decision makers out there who do not know our brand all like it, they all believe in it. And then we can go into the actual branding work. We can come up with new Facebook banners and we can come up with new social templates and new letterheads and new business cards and all this stuff you would think would go to the brand. Then we can do their new annual report, we can do their new posters. We did launch videos to make sure that everyone was comfortable with the brand, what it represented. We're now moving into overhauling their website over the next year.

Mark Drager [: 00:24:52

So that is a very kind of real world case study of how we start and go to the end. But as I'm speaking to this, I'm sure you're like, it's hitting you. This is so much more than a logo, even though at the end of the day it's about the logo, it's about the brand. But we need to win everyone over. We need to manage expectations. We need to make sure everyone's comfortable with it because they can't afford to mess it up.

Kate Volman [: 00:25:16

Yeah, well, and it is, it obviously is more than the logo. But when you get that final outcome, I was thinking too, once that is completed, well then who's responsible for maintaining the brand? Making sure it, it stays true in all of the marketing, whether it's advertising, social media articles, everything, that I would assume that if someone's investing this much time and energy and resources into creating this kind of brand, that they would want to make sure that it stays consistent throughout.

Mark Drager [: 00:25:52

And that is marketing departments, in this case, marketing department led it. It's the marketing department's request. And now we've worked with this client for seven or eight years, and we've been talking about this for three years. So it's not like it just happened. It's not like it typically happens. But if it wasn't for the very strong business reasons, and again, we didn't really touch the colors, we tweaked the colors, but we also wouldn't have really touched the logo if it wasn't the main business reason behind it. So at that point, we go back to marketing. But it is a very challenging environment from a recruitment point of view.

Mark Drager [: 00:26:26

So we have been running for the last two years recruitment campaigns because up where we are, up here in Canada, afterschool programs is licensed. You have to have staff members who are licensed staff members. And so all people, all competitors are competing for the same pool of talent. And it's, and fewer people are going into the industry. The group of possible people you can hire is shrinking year over year over year because more people are exiting than entering. And so a big driver of this. Yes, marketing is the one who owns it. But a very big driver behind this was in fact the recruitment side of things.

Kate Volman [: 00:27:04

So that's interesting. Well, it feels like if the organization is this intentional about creating that kind of brand, you're going to attract the kind of person that cares about the work. Like they trust that the leadership actually cares about the organization enough to do, to create that kind of culture, to create that kind of brand. I mean, I would assume their culture.

Mark Drager [: 00:27:27

Is, I mean, yes, yes and no. There are some very strong realities. They have to operate around split shifts, which is a challenge for recruitment. A lot of it has to do with semi part time because it is during summer holidays, there's no pay. So I mean, like any employer. Yes, for sure. I mean, they are a very, very good employer. They try to be as people focused and value focused as possible, especially since they are, I mean, they're a nonprofit focused on childcare.

Mark Drager [: 00:27:53

So they are all people who really deeply care. But like any employer, you're going to run, you're going to bump into the pay levels or the pay levels, and are they keeping up with inflation or not? The talent pool might be shrinking or you're competing against other people in the market. You have the realities around shifts or around compensation. And no matter how much everyone cares, at the end of the day, you still have to pay people very, very well. And so they have very real recruitment business challenges, just like any employer would do us. And if you're listening, you've probably run into the same types of challenges. So the brand and all of this work we're doing, it helps with that initial impression. It helps elevate them against their competition.

Mark Drager [: 00:28:32

It helps us go to market with something that can last for the next five or ten years. And really, actually for them, it's professionalized. Something that felt a little bit under budgeted, a little mom and pop, and we've now really gone in and really, really professionalized it, which is going to give an impression for someone who on the recruitment side or the hiring side, you know, when you're looking at this company and you're not quite sure who they are, I mean, do you want to commit your days, do you want to commit your career, do you want to commit your years to working for someone if they look a little sketchy or a little old school or a little out of touch? I mean, some, I don't know how judgy you are, but at the end of the day, like, you know, if you're listening, your employees probably still love Apple and they probably still like to buy name brands and they still care which car they drive or where they live. And so we are trying to compete against all of these other brands in everyday life and very rarely will someone look at your company and go, well, they're pretty good for filling the blank.

Kate Volman [: 00:29:32

Yeah.

Mark Drager [: 00:29:33

Oh, they're really good for laboratory services. I mean, what a great laboratory services brand. I mean, that just that kind of stuff doesn't happen.

Kate Volman [: 00:29:41

No, it's all about the vibe. Right? You keep, as we're talking about logos, I'm thinking about some of the logos just in my local community, like the businesses that I love. And some of them, their logos are so good and they're very unique and interesting. I just was interviewing a local coffee shop and they have a really unique logo. And I was like, where did that even come from? And it's just like, it's cool. Like, right when you see it. And then there's some that you're like, eh, I mean, it's not the. It feels outdated, right? Like, it almost feels like when I walk in there, I think, oh, my gosh, I love this place.

Kate Volman [: 00:30:18

It's so amazing. The owner's amazing. It's a beautiful place. The vibe is awesome. I go, your logo does not reflect your vibe in here. I'm curious how AI has impacted branding as we're talking about logos and taglines, because I know there's a lot of AI platforms that people can go and get a logo really quick or get a chat GPT to write them copy for their website. Like, how is that impacted the branding business?

Mark Drager [: 00:30:45

It's helped. I mean, so. So before AI, there was always overseas services. You go to fiverr, you can go to 99 designs. There have been logo builders for a very long time. I started my firm in 2006 and there were logo builders online back in 2006. So I love it because most of it is pretty terrible. Most of it is very, very average.

Mark Drager [: 00:31:06

You know, when I speak to business owners or I speak to people getting into business, I learned this lesson a really long time ago when I launched my company 2006. I spent the first three or four years trying to be just as good as everyone else in the market. Like, you know, those companies where you look to, you're like, we're just as good as them. Like, hire us. Like, we can do what they can do, we're just as good at them. And if that's the case, I realize there's no reason to pick you if you're just as good as them. You need to be different, you need to be unique, you need to be better. And so I tell people, getting into business, it's not about being just as good as everyone else, it's about leapfrogging that and trying to figure out how you are going to be better.

Mark Drager [: 00:31:40

AI and a lot of these services are nothing more than trying to level you up to whatever the standard is. And if you're really, really bad, it's awesome that they're going to get you to whatever the standard is as fast and cheap as possible. That might be what you need. We use a lot of AI in our business now. We are professionals who are using AI to help us with efficiency. So we still know what good and bad is, we still know what right and wrong is, we still know what appropriate or not appropriate, effective or not effective. If you are not able to judge that, then you're going to do something, you're going to think it's awesome, and it will level you up. And if you want to be just as good as everyone else, then that's awesome.

Mark Drager [: 00:32:22

If you want to be better or if you want to be different, or if your business goals require you to attack something that's a little bit more challenging, a little bit harder. And I don't know about you, I've been business for like, close to 20 years. It's always harder than I think. Skating by and kind of just getting by never really gives me the results I'm looking for. Half measures do not deliver half results. They, in fact, usually do nothing. So that's the way I look at it. Like, I cannot wait for everyone to get on AI and watch all of the results tank and watch them blend into the vanilla of everyone else in the industry.

Mark Drager [: 00:33:02

Because for those of us who are willing to put ourselves out there, invest a little bit more time, a little bit more effort, or do something truly unique, it's going to help us stand out even more. And I'm excited about that.

Kate Volman [: 00:33:14

Yes. No mediocre mark. We do not like mediocrity. I hate that. I definitely am not a fan when we see mediocre work, but it's true. I think it's interesting how some people, some people seem to be afraid of it. Some people are excited about it. I think when leveraged the right way, it can be really powerful tool, and it's fun to talk to people like you who are like, guys, this stuff has been around for longer than you think.

Kate Volman [: 00:33:39

It's not as new as some people think, right? I mean, if you're in the tech world in any way, you know that this isn't as obviously higher levels, of course. But I think it's funny that, uh, there have been things similar.

Mark Drager [: 00:33:53

Here's a test. Here's a test for everyone. If you haven't done this yet, I. I want you to think about your area of expertise. Something that, you know, something that you're really good at. And it could be work related, it can be a hobby related, it can be anything you want. The other day, I was putting in a clothing line from my wife. We've been in this house for a long time.

Mark Drager [: 00:34:12

We didn't have a clothing line. I'm putting in a post. I'm putting in the wheel and all of that stuff.

Kate Volman [: 00:34:17

How nice.

Mark Drager [: 00:34:18

And I was thinking, gosh, I don't know what size post to put in. Should I put steel, should I put wood? Should it be six by six, eight by eight for the height and whatnot. Because I know that for a post of this kind, lateral force matters a lot and so I don't want it to bend, I don't want it to sway. And Google doesn't help me, I can't find any details on it. So I go to chat GDP, I go to an AI and I try to have it help me. And again, I challenge you. If you go to chat GDP for anything, you know, ask it a question and you will see very quickly it either gives very high level generic answers or it's wrong. It's just wrong.

Mark Drager [: 00:34:58

Now, if you don't know anything about it, a lot of people don't have deep knowledge and so they're using this tool to try and help them get general or introductory stuff and that's great. I do it for a lot of research and I ask questions and everything, but because I have tried to get it to do some work that I know very deeply a few times and every time it comes back wrong, I have to assume that if I ask it any specific question for anything I don't know, it's probably also coming back wrong. And so I don't know enough to know if it's right or wrong. It looks convincing, it looks correct. But in the back of my mind I'm thinking every time I've asked it a question for something that I have ten or 15 or 20 years knowledge in, it's not giving me the right answer. And so I would challenge you to go home or if you're listening in front of your computer right now, do a search on something that you know deeply well and see how correct it actually is.

Kate Volman [: 00:35:56

Some people are using chat GPT as their Google. Like they've replaced it.

Mark Drager [: 00:36:03

Yeah, because Google, we can talk about SEO strategies and all kinds of stuff, but Google has kind of spent the last year and a half not doing very well. So Google has gone to hell. And that's why Google search, like, like I said, for the clothing line thing, I started with Google, all it did was try to sell me clothing lines. It didn't, you know, in the old days, there used to be stuff. The old days, look at how old we are. You go back five years ago and if I wanted, if I wanted to ask it a question about lateral force on a post for a clothing line, I probably would have ended up somewhere. Now, another little trick is you can add Reddit to anything that you want and it will send, it will send you to a Reddit article or post where people are talking about this, but that doesn't mean that they're the authority or know what they're talking about. So the reason why we're all turning to chat is because most search is simply just trying to sell you something at this point.

Kate Volman [: 00:36:53

Oh, well, it's funny you mentioned Reddit because my brother in law is, he's on Reddit all the time. And I would always laugh because I'm like, what? I'm never on it. I don't even know what you're talking about. And then I went, I started using it, or I started, when I would google something, I would find Reddit threads and I would go onto them. And like you said, they might not be the experts, but it's definitely people that have had a lot of experience in one or two things, and they have, and they share it. They're very open about sharing what happened for market research.

Mark Drager [: 00:37:24

So Amazon reviews, YouTube comments, and Reddit threads, we use that for anyone we're looking to target or anyone we're looking to go after, because right in there are their words, their adjectives, their keywords, what they love, what they hate. It's all there. People will tell you way more than you can find out from any other source. And even though it's non scientific and it's anecdotal, if you collect enough of that, and then here's the real trick. You take all that stuff and then you load it into chat gdp or another thing, and then you say, hey, this is research. Now I'm going to interview you as if you're one of these people and you can start to ask it questions and it will respond from being trained on the results of your target audience. Do you follow that?

Kate Volman [: 00:38:07

Oh, yeah, that's, that's cool. Yeah, I've had friends of mine that have put in, like, they'll, they'll basically tell it to look through all of Marcus Aurelius's quotes and data and stories. And then they say, I want to talk to Marcus Aurelius, like, ask questions. So they're just playing around with things like that. Like, how do you talk to people from beyond and being able to hear what they would have to say? And then I had actually, I know some people are creating platforms where they put everything that they've created and that they know all of their videos and articles, and now they're giving their clients an opportunity to basically, like, chat, quote unquote, with them, but it's like an AI version of them. That's nuts. I think that's wild.

Mark Drager [: 00:38:58

No, there's some cool stuff that's happening and all of that stuff is amazing. So that's where you start to get more. If we want to leverage this for business, you're going to get more into like marketing automation, you're going to get more into sales automation chat. I think all of that stuff's amazing. The only thing I would say is if you are going to go ahead and scrape all of your posts, all of your videos, all of your transcriptions, if you're going to do stuff, you're going to load it in and you're going to allow for a chat, I think that's amazing. I just don't think it can or should replace human connection.

Kate Volman [: 00:39:25

No, no, it should not, Mark, because.

Mark Drager [: 00:39:29

Imagine you doing this podcast with an AI version of I would never want.

Kate Volman [: 00:39:34

To do that, nor would I ever really want to have a conversation with someone that's not them. But it is them. I don't think. I'm not there yet, but, you know.

Mark Drager [: 00:39:44

I ran into this. I have a staff member, they work with us for the last few years freelance. And English is not their first language. They're european. Very, very knowledgeable. But they moved here, I think, when they were in their forties. So communication has always been a challenge. Super knowledgeable, super, super deep, but hard to figure out what they're talking about.

Mark Drager [: 00:40:07

And I just trust them. But we spent a lot of time trying to decode what's going on to make sure I understand them and they understand me. And then on the last project we started working with, I had all of these really detailed questions and the responses were amazing. And I was like, oh my goodness, what's going on? So I took the responses to an AI checker and 90% of the responses was AI. And I was torn. I was torn because I was like, okay, so this person, I'm going to go back to, this person knows what they're talking about. They went to AI to help with their communication skills. Then they read the responses and I could see that some of it was corrected and adjusted.

Mark Drager [: 00:40:47

I don't know what to do with this yet because one, I love the fact I can understand what they're trying to say. I love the fact that it's being communicated really effectively. I can see that they went in and actually edited or corrected the AI responses to make sure it was accurate and responding to my real questions. The end result is much better. The end result is better all around. Yet something within me is like, it feels like it's cheating somehow. Do you know what I mean? But the old system wasn't working very well because communication wasn't really that great and the new system seems to be working much better. So I think I have to adjust, and I think we might all have to adjust how we think about AI and how we think about responses.

Mark Drager [: 00:41:28

Because this just hit me last week where I was really struggling with, like, is it cheating? Is it not cheating? I mean, the end result was there. So I think I will have to learn to let it go.

Kate Volman [: 00:41:40

Yeah. And I think it's a process. It's going to be a process for a lot of people. You know, I think for some people they're very hesitant and they have a lot of ideas around it and we have to be very open minded and curious about what it looks like for the future and how people are going to use it. I know as an author, it's very interesting to see how people are using it in the writing process. And now I know when you upload, if you upload a book now to Amazon, it'll, it actually asks you now, was any of this book written with AI? Is there any, or even when you post, when you upload a YouTube video says, is there any portion of this video that basically asking, like if it was a generated like a person or is there somebody talking that isn't really talking, but it looks like they're anyway, so the world is changing and we just have to change along with it, I guess. We'll see what happens. Mark, you are so awesome.

Kate Volman [: 00:42:36

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I feel like we, we went on branding and now we're ending on some AI. But I think it's so fascinating. And obviously every industry is kind of looking at what that is. I was just talking to an architect the other day and he was just like, oh, yeah, that's, everyone's talking about AI. I'm like, yeah, every industry, everyone seems to be talking about AI and how people are using it. So it's an interesting conversation.

Mark Drager [: 00:43:02

Well, I don't think it should be anything we fear. So I know that it's an election year. I know that everything feels polarized. I know everything feels crazy. Inflation, cost of goods, everyone's getting squeezed. It feels unsettling. And we're told by the media, we're told by social media, we're told by everyone we speak to that the wheels are about to come off the cart, right? We are at the end of something. A little hack.

Mark Drager [: 00:43:27

Maybe it's not a hack, but I've spent the last two years reading a lot of history, reading biographies from the founding fathers understanding what took place in the 1860s, seventies, eighties, nineties in terms of the economies. The great Depression. Right? We know the great Depression is the 1920 919 thirties, but before that, there was a great depression in the 1880s and 1890s, Britain went through a 20 year recession. I mean, there have been some really, really challenging political, economic and social things that have taken place in the past. Really challenging business environments that people have been operating in, a lot of change, a lot of tech over the last 150 years. And you know what? We're here now. It's like we live in this window and we think that somehow we are facing everything for the first time. And we're not.

Mark Drager [: 00:44:18

We're not. I was reading a biography about Rockefeller that was written in 1994 by Ron Chernow, speaking about an event that took place in the 1870s, I think. And there was this page where if I just replaced the technology from the 1870s with the technology of today, and I replaced the gold standard or whatever it was that was the issue with the stuff were facing today. This page, written in 1994 about something in the 1870s, would 100% speak to the current environment. Were in that moment. I was like, you know what, its okay, its okay, its okay. Right? Were going to face AI, were going to face competitive situations, we're going to face global economies, we're going to face all of this stuff. And a lot of it is outside of our control.

Mark Drager [: 00:45:05

But there are a few things within our control. And so if I wrap this in a nice little bow, perhaps the things we can control again are how we show up and how we look and what we say and how we make people feel. And so if we can do that more effectively, we can do that time and time and time again and tailor our message and tailor the impact for each person we're speaking with. We are going to see greater results.

Kate Volman [: 00:45:30

Boom. Tied up perfectly. Thank you so much, Mark. We appreciate you. And where can people, what's the best way for people to connect with you?

Mark Drager [: 00:45:40

You can check out our website, salesloopbrand.com. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, and so if you want to find me, you can find my name probably in the show notes. And then if you want to listen to our podcast, How to Sell More. We are the sales podcast for non salespeople.

Kate Volman [: 00:45:55

Love it. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for being here, Mark. So good. So good to see you, as always.

Mark Drager [: 00:46:01

As always. Thank you, Kate.

Kate Volman [: 00:46:05

I hope you enjoyed this episode. I told you we got into all the things. So I hope that you are looking at your branding with fresh new eyes thinking about ways to maybe you need a little bit of an update around some of your colors, or maybe, maybe you just want to be a little bit more intentional about your branding, what that looks like, and how it helps to impact your culture, how it helps to impact driving more sales, bringing in new business, and also really just creating that great culture where your team feels like, hey, we're building something really great together. We're really proud of our brand, and it makes sense to the people that are outside looking in and making them really excited to work with you. As always, thank you so much for listening. And until next time, Lead with Culture.

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