Marketing Agency Podcast Ep.1 | Rob Bynder, Bynder Group

Sunir Shah: Welcome back to another
agency connect one-on-one pandemic year three, I guess here we are a welcome. We have Rob Bynder from the Bynder group. I'm Sunir Shah, president of cloud
software association, CEO of AppBind. I'm so happy to have Rob here because he
has one of the more interesting stories. He's a designer, a pixel guy, and a
painter guy ended up in digital through a series of unfortunate life decisions. I'm sure. Please introduce yourself Rob. Rob Bynder: Thanks. Glad to be here and thanks for having me. My name is Rob Bynder. You got my name, correct. Most people call me binder, but
because you have AppBind that's right. So that's right. Yeah. So yeah, my background I went to art
school and when I went to college, I didn't even own a computer.

But it seemed like a good thing
to learn when I finally graduated. So I taught myself desktop publishing. I went through that whole that whole
crazy bubble in the early nineties, late eighties, early nineties of learning
desktop publishing, working with, illustrator 88 and cork express 1.0 wow. And what did that whole
process started doing? A little bit of interactive design, mostly
CD rom like CD rom interface design. I was working for a small agency that
was doing digital press kits for movies. And we were putting them on CD roms. Macromedia style back in the old days. And and that was really cool. And one day I went into my boss's
office and I said, you know I really think we should put these
press kits on the internet. Like, why are we making CD
ROMs and sending them out? And his reply was yeah,
the internet will never. It'll never work. It's too slow. CD ROMs are perfect. And a week later I got a friend
of mine called me with a job offer to art direct a startup website.

This was in 1996 and I took 20. Please tell me Sunir Shah: it was pets.com it was not, it was a it
was an odd little project. It was called celebrity sightings, which
sounds like a terrible URL, but it was. It's like teen beat. It was a teen celebrities. So it makes sense. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It was all the teen stars in the nineties. It was their fan club, took a huge
pay cut to start working on that website and and it was worth it. That, that project turned into
a the company we were working with, we were the front end.

We were doing the design
and our development company. We ended up merging to become
a full service web agency. And that was awesome. So that was like the nineties and
that was first-generation websites. We were designing very
huge, very expensive. E-commerce mostly e-commerce websites
for companies like Footlocker, like the Footlocker family of
brands and quite a few other. Really big projects. They would take a year and a half,
two years to build it was insane. They'd be like a million dollars, that
was really fun, but that crazy time ended in a crash as we all probably remember. And I became self-employed in,
in 2001 and I started freelancing as a As a web designer.

And at the time there weren't too many
web designers and nobody was, they weren't teaching in school, but I had
a lot of experience building these really, designing these very large
data-driven consumer oriented websites. And that was great. And I. I did really well doing that. And I did a little bit of other UI design,
but I was a, I was a very busy freelancer. And eventually I grew to the
point where I incorporated turned it into a real business and
started bringing on contractors. To this day we have been a remote
based contractor based small agency. So this is actually my 20th year. I can't believe 20 years
have gone by so quickly. Yeah. Memory lane myself. I remember my background, many
people don't know was in publishing when I was a teenager, really.

But that's the internet
gave me the job and that was worked at a newspaper as well. And I remember all these tools. But what blew my mind to I'm
younger than you slightly, but I grew up with the computers and
the publishing industry together. And maybe this has always what it has
been in my head that as much as you start with the visual side of marketing. But what has turned out to be the
case is marketing is mostly that. Side of things because we live on the
internet, it's a giant marketing machine and if you're not machine oriented,
then you're not gonna get the marketing. And this is where, I had this
epiphany over the holidays like what is this podcast going to become? I'm talking to digital agencies.

And if you can't get the digital
under control in 2022, you're not gonna get the agency under control. And I think a lot, so many of us are
struggling with the digital side. As much as we think we're experts. It's still quite a confusing
landscape in the subscription era. And that's what, let's get into it like,
so you are a designer, but now you've taken on a marketing automation, CRM.

Tell me a little bit about
the tech practices you're doing the clients you have. And then we can talk about. Who's your best. Who is your who's, what's been
your best experience working with the digital partners or ecosystem? Rob Bynder: Yeah, sure. So we my, my clients have really changed
over the years, but right now I'd say the last I don't know, seven or eight years. We've really been focusing on B
to B manufacturers, distributors a couple other they're all B2B. Everything is B2B. That works well for us. And I have clients, I have a very
large commercial Glaser based in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I have a lighting distributor, a
commercial lighting distributor. I have a commercial furniture distributor. Handful a handful of clients like that. We don't have a huge stable, so we
maintain about seven to 10 clients a year. For the most part. We expand into a couple other
complimentary fields like professional services or I do a lot of work
with a company called Semtech, which is a microchip manufacturer. And they that's really what
web design for the most part.

But Sunir Shah: your clients are like
technically technical, but there require you for do internet marketing
because they're not, let's say marketing savvy is that right? Rob Bynder: Some of them are
quite marketing savvy and most of them are not at all. And we actually operate. As almost a fractional outsourced
marketing communications, strategic and tactical team, helping them
representing their full marketing effort. And that's a really interesting way to
engage with my clients because especially I think in manufacturing, I think it's not
the most sophisticated when it comes to um Marketing and digital for that matter. So the bar's kind of low and we
can hit a lot of really great balls quickly out of the gate for them. But it's also really fun to, to grow
those businesses with them and apply these best practices and great software
and watch that business transform.

And it really it's just that. That's I enjoyed that the most actually
is getting a company started off with doing real marketing and then
watching their reliance on these great digital tools like CRM, right? Like things that they may not be using
very well, really transformed the way they do business and growing with them. Sunir Shah: This is the thing, right? I think they're relying on you to take
care of the marketing for it, for them. And you're the expert, but what's the joy.

The joy has been their partner. Some people we say, a lot of agency
we're going to be your partner, but to be honest, if you actually truly
get to know your clients as people, it's such a pleasure in life to see. So like help. So many people established their dreams. That's what I always liked about being
a contractor, is seeing the smile Rob Bynder: at the end of the day. Yeah. I think, there's a lot of agencies
run around saying, we partner, we're your partner, we're your partner.

That's not really true. Partnerships are not just. One organization pays
another organization. That's not necessarily
a partnership, right? So I don't throw that
word around very easily. When it comes to my clients, some of my
clients are clients, some of my clients are partners and I've worked with
them for 10 or 15 years at this point. Either in their business or in
businesses that they've brought me along to after they've. Been crawling up their career ladder. So yeah those real client
partnerships are inspiring to me. I what's a valuable. Sunir Shah: For my little structure here. So what is the difference between a
ten-year client and a one-year client? Because so many agencies, I thought
I told you like the preamble.

One thing I noticed when the
subscription era is that the lifetime cycle of clients shrunk dramatically
to a 10th unlicensed error. We're both old enough to remember. It used to be like, and you've obviously
been successful having ten-year clients. So what is the difference between a
ten-year client and a one-year clients? Rob Bynder: I do have a sh
my share of one-year clients. And I would say my, my, my short-term,
my one-year clients are clients that are in capable of adopting to new
systems or relying on partnerships. My partner. To continue down their path. Theoretically, I don't mind bringing on a
client, building a system for them getting them started and then training them
and giving them the keys and moving on. And that might take a year or
maybe a year and a half, but it doesn't always work that way. And the longterm clients are the ones that
we really have been able to demonstrate. ROI, right? Like you could just run reports and you
can see exactly what we've been doing.

And you can look at the reports
and you can look at the data and say, this is where we were,
and this is what we're doing. Let's stay on the standup path here. Sunir Shah: I think that's the it, right? Is it chaos or order and really what
I've learned as clients are always anxious, you're not, it doesn't matter
what kind of contractor, whether you're doing digital marketing or an auto
mechanic or physician or a nail salon before a wedding, all you're trying
to do is bring things under control for that client and calm them down. Cause they're always anxious
if they're delivering and if you can continue showing yep.

Everything's under control,
return on investment because they're a marketing agency. Then you're winning. So w to get back on track, you're a digital agency, obviously
you started off not, you learned your digital as you went along. So I'm interested in your perspective
and been in for 20 years, who has been of all the digital, tech
companies or ad platforms, whatever, what has been your best experience? So far as an agency, as a partner, or
as a platform to work with, and why. Rob Bynder: So a long time ago when
I w no 15 years ago, when we started doing email marketing, along with web
design and email marketing, because that was the big technology at the time. I ended up partnering with a company that
that just wasn't that didn't pan out. They didn't realize the potential. I thought they were, I thought
they were going to be huge. And I was like, all right, I'm all in. Let's get all my clients.

Email marketing platform and
they just, they got acquired. They just fizzle out like that. It was just not, it was a poorly run
company for the most part, I think about, I don't know, five or six
years ago, I partnered with HubSpot. I did a lot of research and I I needed
a marketing platform partnership. That would give me the foundation
for not having to reinvent the wheel. Every time I engage with a client,
whether it was just web design or if it was web design and more and ongoing
marketing or whether it was taking over a marketing efforts they were doing. I did a lot of research into the
field and I decided, especially after my previous experience,
that HubSpot was a good choice.

They're not for everybody, but for me, for
my business, they were really good choice. They're the biggest player in the field. They have the most resources I knew
there was going to be a lot of stability. I didn't have the feeling
that they were poorly managed. I was impressed with their management and
I really appreciated their partner program because as a small agency you know.

That's a huge investment of my
time and money to invest in, in a partnership with a software company. So I went with, I chose
HubSpot and it's been great. It's been great for me. It's really stabilized my business. Not only am I getting the resources
out of them, the technical resources and the methodology, but I've been
learning how to do sales better. I've been learning how to
run my business better. I've been learning how to grow my business
in ways that I didn't really think about.

So it's really nice to have this larger
community that that I could rely on. I think for for the kind of input
that I don't necessarily have as a solopreneur, with no partners,
no other people in my business. That's been really successful. I appreciate it. There, there are challenges
with HubSpot, for sure. With any partnership. Sure. But it's been, it's really transformed
my business and I'm really grateful Sunir Shah: I mean there's just people there but what they've
done as a company, I say that actually I'm wearing my inbound shirt today. There Rob Bynder: you go. Sunir Shah: But what they've done, what
I've always appreciated about HubSpot is they've viewed the agencies as people as
well, which so many software companies don't, they just view you as dollars. And HubSpot does invest time with
you about your business in a way that is industry leading right. Before that the only other company
I know who's done that as Moz as I suppose to the SEO community. And they, I'm from there others,
but like HubSpot, inbound.org and all their training about
how to even beat, what is it? Inbound marketing agency.

What does that even mean? Like the blog is amazing
and the events are amazing. I agree. So would you say that's like the main
characteristic, like how they've helped you understand what your businesses
are supposed to be as a business owner? Or is, has it, have they
done delivered other value? The product, yes, but like beyond that Rob Bynder: the product for sure. And as the product evolves, I'm adding
new business services along with. So now everything's about the
CRM and the sales tool and the content management system. And these things didn't really
exist even five years ago when I started my partnership. It's helping me expand my services and
become more valuable to my clients. But it's also the community, the HubSpot
community, you and I met through Hubspot. And I've made a lot of my friends. I know just through the community. Maybe I've never seen them in person,
especially over the last couple of years, but like I'm I, I do appreciate
the humanity behind the company. I, sometimes I feel like a number to
them, especially because I'm not a, super elite, double diamond Sapphire
partner, but I'm kinda just hanging on to keep my, my, my tiered partnership
with them because my model is not to just sell as much HubSpot as I can.

Although, I think they'd like that,
but I think they also understand that art, we have an overlap of
shared goals, but some of my goals are not theirs and some of their
goals are not mine and it still works Sunir Shah: that's the thing, you're, you
are a separate business and they are a separate business from you, but to make
a partnership work like any relationship, it's like any relationship you're
basically, I wouldn't say you're married, but it's like that, they have their needs. You're not going to be, you're not
the best agency from their point of view, but they still invest in
you because they care about you to appropriate levels, hopefully. And then in return you have your
own business in your own needs. They've also helped you grow
as an think about new stuff. So that's what is so amazing about, I
know I can gush it a HubSpot all day long.

It can complain about it too. It's like people, but it's
been such an interesting. It's such an interesting ecosystem,
definitely industry leading like the leaders easily for good
reason, but let's turn around. Let's get some, add some drama. No, but who has been the worst experience? You must have worked
with a lots of partners. Now you don't have to name and shame,
but I'm curious, like what kind of digital platform or tool has really
given you a hard time as an agency to bring things under control for you? Rob Bynder: Yeah.

Boy, there's a lot of them, because
There's just a lot of software companies out there and it's doubling every year. It seems like to me, early on, like
I mentioned I was with my partner. My, my first partnership was with
an email service provider and that was not a great experience. I thought it was going
to be a great experience. And then I watched all their
competition, just blow them away. Features and service and partnerships. And pretty soon they just they just
floundered and I just, I couldn't. And then I literally had to get
my clients off that platform at my costs, because I just didn't
want to work with them anymore.

And that was, yeah, it was terrible. It was terrible. So the other ones that I come across
companies all the time now, I would say. I'm contacted several times a day by
companies that want to partner with me. We, you're an agency and we mix up
where, and we want to partner with you. And, I know they're using automation and
I'm getting these robot emails from them. I know what they're doing. And I can tell that it there's
not a lot of humanity there. There's not a lot of commitment
on their part to help me. Grow or to do or to provide me
with anything I really need. And even though, I've come across
a few platforms here and there that you're like, oh that's good. That's good functionality. And I think it's going to dovetail
well with what my clients need. Ultimately I may not even partner with
them, we'll just get one account going and I'll just move on because I just don't,
I don't feel like they're committed to.

In ways that I've come to expect
through my relationship with HubSpot, I did just start a new going back. I don't know, man. I can complain all day long, but I
know, I guess you do want to hear it. I just started working with
Leadfeeder and they're awesome. Like they've been really
good to work with. Just started a partnership with them and
it dovetails really well with what I'm doing in HubSpot for a lot of my clients. And just this week I had some
really good calls with them and we got one project off the ground.

And what made it work? Sunir Shah: Like why were they so great? Rob Bynder: I got the sense that
they understood my business and my. And made it clear that they had
a good tool that when appropriate would help me do my job better. And I felt like they were
listening to my needs as well as just telling me to sell software. I have access to them. I don't, they're easy
to get in touch with. They're very helpful. They're willing to jump on demonstrations
with me and sales calls with me and help me figure out how to sell better. And and that's just started, but
that was nice because I come across some other companies, maybe not
their competitors, but certainly maybe some HubSpot competitors that
are always knocking on their door. And I just I just get a bad feeling. I get a bad feeling from having
that introductory phone call with them, just yeah, you guys are just. You don't understand that, you
don't understand my business and you don't really care to. Sunir Shah: They probably, if they just
want you to sell their software, they don't care anything about your needs.

Rob Bynder: I don't Sunir Shah: know. I'll tell you a story about me because
I should be interviewing you, but I did this on purpose and this leads
to the last question, but my original headline for AppBind, I knew it was. But I just wanted to throw it out there. Cause I wanted people to get angry. Cause I want to hear what it was like. Cause I'm a troll, I'm a troll. So I'm originally headline on the
homepage was buy software and sell it to your clients, which is absolutely what
everyone, every SaaS company is pitching and is absolutely the wrong message.

I just, I cornered somebody at one
of my cocktail parties at Dreamforce. Remember. It was probably inappropriate that
cornered to him, but I bought him a drink. That's how that sits. Okay. Yeah. Who's friends of mine. It's funny. I like what's wrong with this message. No, there was no value in it. It was all risks. And I just feel so many of the
software companies are just trying to push risk down into your throat
so they can make their quota. And they're so afraid of you
as, at the same time, which is why they're not listening to you
because they don't know you at all.

And they have the reason why is
because they've been risked isn't and pushed down to them from the CX suite. And make more money. And I don't know anything
about these people do it now. And then just view you
as the customer channel. Cause they're so used to direct. So my last question, maybe you already
answered it with Leadfeeder, but like actually, maybe you have, but if
someone's, if you had to give advice to a software company, to emulate Leadfeeder
and be better how could they improve in, in talking with you rather than. Yeah, that's a good Rob Bynder: question. I answered that with Leadfeeder, but I
think like in a nutshell if I'm talking to a salesperson about a partnership,
it's not going to work, they're working on quotas, they're working on sales.

They just want me to sell for them. They're looking for a pyramid,
somewhat of a pyramid situation. If I'm talking to somebody
who maybe doesn't know. Skin in the game, as far as sales
goes, maybe they all do, but they don't, it doesn't feel like it to me
they're literally a partner manager. I think that's going to
be a lot more successful.

I feel like with HubSpot and with
Leadfeeder, I think my partner contacts are more concerned about my success as
a business and how their tool fits in. Then they are about selling
units, selling subscriptions. And and I think that
would be my suggestion. If you're going to try to build a
partnership program, treat your partners like clients solve their needs, listen to
what they need and solve their problems. Sunir Shah: Amazing. So how do we get ahold of you? Thank you very much for doing this.

So how do we get into. Rob Bynder: Of course. My website is Bynder
group.com byndergroup.com. Sorry. You can find me on LinkedIn at Rob Bynder. I'm one of the only BYN D E R is in the
country or in the world for that matter. And you could email me
at rob@byndergroup.com Sunir Shah: thank you so much
for being so candid and I love that you had such a long history. Coming in from visuals into tech, because
that is the journey that I've been on. Similarly, not quite
visual, but similar journey. And it's nice to talk to someone who has
experienced it alongside with me as well. So Rob Bynder: thank you. So thanks for having me Sunir.

I really appreciate it. It's great to talk with you too..

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