How to create a successful marketing hypothesis for your facility services company

A successful marketing plan isn’t just a great idea. Even better… a successful facility services marketing leader doesn’t just create cool things…

Marketing sometimes is just a bet, based on theories. Better said… marketing is the act of creating a hypothesis that supports your theory which will eventually impact your sales pipeline and directly grow company revenue.

So, how do you create a marketing hypothesis for your facility or property services company??

Easy… go back to your 6th grade science class. Or… just listen to this podcast :-) 

Transcript

So, you're probably asking yourself how to successfully grow a facility management company in today's digital age while still remaining profitable. You know that marketing should probably be in the mix, but you may not know the best approach, the newest strategies, or which digital platforms to market on. So, how do you use marketing to grow your effort business today? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

My name is Javier Lozano Jr., and welcome to the Facility Management Marketing Podcast. What's going on, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Facility Management Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Javier, and so I kind of had a hard time coming up with some topics recently.

There's been a lot of life-changing events going on in my life. I don't go too deep into my personal life, not that I don't want to, but I don't think some people really care much, to be honest, but just a, just, where are we at right now? Almost a month ago, yeah, almost a month ago, my wife's dad passed away unexpectedly. So it's been a very, it's been a whirlwind of events these past couple, past few weeks, and so it's been really challenging.

My mind has been kind of scattered a little bit everywhere, and it's not that, you know, like I don't have any ideas or topics to talk about. I write up all my podcast episodes, and this one has kind of been hitting a little bit hard because we're approaching the middle of Q4, and so we're, you know, rounding into Q1 of 23. And so, you know, what I want to do is, I've been listening to these podcasts, and it's brought up some stuff, and I'm like, you know, this is so true, this is kind of like my career almost. And so what I'm, where I'm getting to is, is that, you know, marketing isn't, isn't this whole fancy, it's not this whole fancy thing.

So if you're running like a facilities or a property management company, and you think that marketing is like this, like, oh, it's like, you know, this creative box, and you have to have all these really fancy ideas, and all this other stuff, it's not, it's not so much that. That's interesting. This changed as soon as I stepped this way more. I should probably start messing around with, with this mic more, because this sounds a lot better.

All right, cool. So if you're listening to this, and I just discovered where to put the mic even better to sound even better, I've got these headphones in, and so I'm like, ah, it sounds more clear. And so it's all about discovery, right? So what I'm getting to is, is, is this, is marketing isn't this like a whole like think box theory things like, hey, let's, you know, just, let's just come up with a really great ideas and let's just, just do them.

And there's a, there's a saying in the marketing world that, you know, it's not about the ideas, it's about the execution of what you come up with. And so, you know, like, I feel as though a lot of folks in every business kind of think marketing is like, come out with these really cool hats and a cool flyer and design something that's really catchy. And, and it's not that, okay. So what I'm getting to is that what I want you to think about marketing is a little different.

I want you to think about marketing more as like a formula of creating a hypothesis, okay? And that's it. That's all it is, is, is you're gathering, you're getting like literally think like sixth grade science, okay? And like how you learn about how to put together a hypothesis on something and like, you know, I think this is what's going to happen if I, if this, this and this takes place and this does this and whatever it is, you want to think of marketing as, as being like a hypothesis and that is going to help you, that's going to help you position yourself a little differently and be more successful as a marketing leader, especially in the facility and property management industry.

And the reason I'm saying this is, is this, is that it's, it's a little bit more of a fragmented industry, okay? A little bit broken. Marketing is not a very key position. It's not, you know, held with much prestige, if you will.

It's just like, yeah, we, we go to trade shows and we, you know, do events and it, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of strategy behind some of these things and I'm not knocking it, I'm just, I'm just saying how it is, okay? But to be successful in marketing, you have to come up with hypothesis and you might be asking yourself, well, how do you come up with a hypothesis? It's pretty simple. Like think about what you're trying to do, like what's the goal, all right?

And if your goal is to say increase revenue, which most, you know, most companies, the goal is to increase revenue, then what you're going to do is you're going to say, okay, I want to increase revenue by 10%, okay? So cool. That's going to come out to be like, let's just, I'm just going to be like, let's say you're a $15 million company, 10% is going to be like 1.5 million, right? So you know, with that, you're going to have to try to find a way how to create, you know, $1.5 million of new revenue.

And so some people get, you know, kind of scared and be like, I have to make $1.5 million of revenue. Well, it's not that you have to make $1.5 million of revenue. You have to create a pipeline that will deliver $1.5 million in revenue. Does that make sense?

So what I mean by this is that when you're creating a pipeline of revenue, it's going to be like, hey, we've realized that for every 10 leads that we get, we close one, just a random example. So we're like, okay, cool. And one lead closes at say $100,000, all right? Let's just, you know, play with the math here, all right?

Just kind of, you know, bear with me here, you got to work the numbers. And so if you close, you know, one lead $100,000 and you, your goal is to make 1.5 million. So you basically are going to have to, whoops, get 15 customers, right? So for every 10 customers, you get one customer.

So 15 times 10, you'd have to get 150 in the pipeline. Does that make sense? Based off of you selling $100,000, you know, service, does that kind of make sense? But then that's not, that's part of the hypothesis.

So what you're doing is you're saying, hey, the goal is to generate 1.5 million in new business. Okay, cool. So in order to generate 1.5 million in the new business, I need to build a pipeline that's going to allow my sales team to work leads accordingly to help them close. And so you start saying, okay, cool.

So in order for me to find those people, I'm going to explore, say, three channels, you know, or three areas. And when I say channels, I don't necessarily mean like, you know, like a TV channel, like I'm talking about, like, maybe it's a trade show, maybe it's email marketing, maybe it's paid search, maybe it's social media, maybe it's going all in on organic search, maybe it's content marketing, like, do you see what I'm saying? It's something, maybe it's podcasting, whatever it is, and sometimes it's a combination of all those things I just mentioned. But what you're doing is that you're building a hypothesis, and you're getting enough data and feedback and information to help you say, okay, I believe that in order for us to hit $1.5 million in revenue, I need to get, you know, I need to build 10 qualified leads into our pipeline.

All right. And so you might have to, you know, generate 100 leads to get 10 qualified leads to close one. Does that kind of make sense? So you're going to be saying, okay, I can do that once per month, I can generate 100 leads per month that are just like marketing qualified leads.

They're like, hey, these are, you know, these are legit names and phone numbers, and 10 of them are going to be like, actually a sales qualified opportunity or sales qualified lead. Like, okay, I can think about it like this. And then one of those is going to close at 100k and etc, etc, etc. So you start making these hypotheses based off of like these goals that you have.

And so what you have to do is you essentially have to get all this data. And then you're just going to have to make bets. And I'm not going to lie, like most of these bets that you're making are going to be blind. You're going to be like, I have no fucking clue if this is going to work.

But so and so has done this before, and I've seen them do it. And this is how they, you know, they structured it. And this company has done this. And so we've been doing this historically.

And so I believe by us simply doing this, this and this, this will allow us to generate x amount of leads, which will be then x amount of qualified opportunities, which then will result to one customer that will close at this price. And you make a future bet on just the hypothesis and you're like, that's how you do marketing. You have to, because a lot of the times the stuff that you're trying to do has never been done. It's never been like, like, like truly, it's never been done because, because in all reality, do you really want to replicate the same playbook that your competitors doing?

No, because how different are you going to be? And so, you know, this is, and I'm going to give you an example, like what we're doing at Ratmate in order for us to, I mean, I made a bet, I made a hypothesis, like, so this is what I was doing. So we, we, we switched over to a CRM called HubSpot. All right.

So if you listen to previous podcasts, you know that I love HubSpot, it's amazing. It's, it does a lot of tracking. I know exactly where my leads are coming through. I mean, I know a hundred percent everything perfectly, but for the most part, it's pretty accurate.

Right. So attribution is pretty solid. We work the leads accordingly. They get emails, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so you might see my dog in the background, I think he's just wandering and walking around. He's, he's blind. So he doesn't really know where he's at. So anyways, where I'm getting to is that we, we have a CRM and, and, and so I started evaluating the data.

So this is back in June or July. And then, you know, what, one thing that we did was we were segmenting our data very early of like, Hey, these are personal, you know, leads. These are commercial leads, personal meaning like a B2C and then commercial meaning like B2B. And we were segmenting them to two different paths.

So a lot of our sales team to have more strategic conversation with these people and look, all right, cool. This is going to work. And then from there, what I decided to do is I started evaluating the data. I'm like, okay, it looks like this channel, Google is giving us more personalization leads, which is not what we're trying to get.

And it looks like Facebook is giving us more commercial leads, which is what we're trying to get. And I was like, okay, let me dive in deeper. I'm like, Oh, interesting. The value of the commercial leads on Facebook, we're closing them at $185 per customer.

That's what it's costing us, $185 per customer on Facebook. And then on Google, it was like almost twice as much because we were spending more money on there. And we have a way to sift through more B2C customers or prospects in order to find someone to buy. And usually you would find like a B2B customer or prospect in there that you could potentially close, but you have to do a lot more sifting.

I was like, Hmm, I think what we should probably do is I got a hypothesis here that if we start shifting budget, so we're spending $10,000 on ad spend, and I want to say like seven or $8,000 was towards Google and two to $3,000 was towards Facebook. I was like, I wonder if we basically flipped the script and reversed it and just basically said, Hey, $7,000 is going to be on Facebook and $3,000 is going to be on Google. And so we didn't make it that big of a drastic change. So I kind of put some numbers together, then I went to our agency and I'm like, all right, this is what I'm doing.

I have a theory here. All right. And the theory is, is that we're going to get more higher quality leads on Facebook. And so I want to start shifting budget from Google to Facebook and evaluate how that does for the next, say, two or three months.

And so I made a future bet. And this was tough to sell because we were getting two to $3 leads on Google, like automatically. But the challenge there is that we were spending so much money in there. Who cares that you're getting two and $3 leads if you weren't closing them, if they weren't qualified leads, if they weren't really our ICP, our ideal customer profile.

And so that was something that I had to have a conversation very deeply with my CEO, Chris, and explain to me like, listen, Chris, I know that it's great getting two and $3 leads. And that's amazing. But that doesn't mean anything. Like we can't determine, like our company and me as a successful CMO can't be judged on me generating MQLs, marketing qualified leads at two and $3.

I need to be judged on like a number that's going to be closer to the revenue number. And so what we did is I was like, I'm going to shift budget. I'm going to say we're going to go 50-50 for this next month. We're going to do 5,000 in Facebook, 5,000 in Google, and then we're going to continue to shift.

And then it's going to go 60-40 and then 70-30. And then it went to like, now at the moment, it's at like 75-25. Okay. So what happened is this, this is crazy.

Okay. So I made, and this is me gathering data. This is like, all right, I'm like, you know, breaking out my dashboard. So I have these like this, like on HubSpot, you can create these dashboards, these report dashboards and I'm breaking things out.

I was like, all right, MQLs, SQOs, customers, and then I'm breaking them out into like B to B and B to C prospects, and then breaking those down as well too. And then I'm like running, I'm like literally calculating, you know, numbers. I'm like, okay, we spent X amount on this channel and this got us this many people. And then we spent X amount on this channel, got us this many people.

I'm like, man, this is crazy. Like the numbers speak for themselves. But I didn't go in there like, I have a gut instinct that I believe. Now I'm not saying that you sometimes, I'm not saying that you can't use your gut, but the thing is that you can't quantify your gut.

Do you see what I'm saying? Like it's hard to quantify my gut and say, hey, we're going to make this change because my gut instinct says this. It's easier for me to say, hey, historically speaking, we've been getting. The first one is that we are making more customers from here at a lower cost per customer, but this channel is giving us more leads, but it's costing us almost twice as much to close that customer.

It is making our sales team have to sift through more leads and it's making it challenging for them. What I did is we started shifting that. What happened is that our lead volume dropped dramatically when we started making that shift because there are a few things that happened. We basically freaked out the algorithms on both Google and Facebook because we were pulling budget from one and then inserting more budget into another.

That was one, and we were not just increasing budget, we were like, alright, and on top of that, we're going to increase our budget by 100%. Not only were we spending $10,000, but not only did things change, we upped it to $20,000. It was a 100% increase, so then everything freaked out. Our cost per acquisition, our cost per lead, went through the roof where we were paying $2, $3, $4, $5 per lead, and all of a sudden it was like $10, $12, $15 leads, and Chris was freaking out.

Then I'm like, look, I'm telling you it's going to work, just trust me on this, and I had other metrics to measure it. I was like, our ROAS, our return on ad spend, is showing this. Even though we're paying $15 for this lead, it's showing that we're closing these guys at a higher rate, and no other campaign is remotely close to this. He saw that and he's like, oh.

Then what he started doing, he started digging the numbers even deeper and deeper and deeper, and he's like, our net ROAS, so not just gross, like after we pay everybody and all that other stuff, was still profitable. He's like, this is really amazing. Where I'm coming from on this, and this is where it's going to help you as a leader in the facility and property management space, is that in order to be successful as a marketing leader, you need to make hypothesis on something. If you're going to go explore a channel to start marketing it more, you need to make a hypothesis on like, hey, this is a hypothesis, this is the stats, this is what I think is going to happen, and it's based off of this, this, and this.

I think we double down and we go into this channel. That's what you do. When you do that more often, you become more successful. We went from, let's see, I want to say like 3,800 leads in July to roughly 4,000 leads in August to like 4,500 leads in September.

I don't even know if these numbers are right. Well, now October ended out to like 5,300 leads, 5,600 leads in October. That's our second highest month to date, and we're getting higher quality leads. The leads are costing us less and less and less for the past three months.

They've been going down. The leads are costing us more the past couple of months, but now that we've switched and the algorithms are understanding what we're trying to do, and we're optimizing ads, and we're getting better creative, and we're driving the right ICP to our website, we're getting higher quality leads into our funnel. Then when you get higher quality leads, then I can start building pipeline. Then I can say, hey guys, when we spend $20,000 per month in ad spend, this is how much pipeline it generates.

Of that pipeline that we generate, we typically close at this rate. When we close at this rate, then that means that we're going to have X amount of new revenue in the next two to three months. Now we can make future bets. Then that way, I'm able to say, yeah, I can help increase our sales revenue by 10% because of this.

Because $20,000 of ad spend gets me 5,500 leads, and those 5,500 leads become down to like 2,000 SQOs. Of those 2,000 SQOs, we get 150 new customers every single month. Then 150 new customers generates us, I'm just going to throw a random number, like $10,000 per customer. That's $150,000 right there.

Do that for 10 months, that's $1.5 million. Do you see what's going on? In order to be successful in marketing, you need to be willing to make future bets. I'm not saying make shit up, but to a degree, you are.

Really, that is a hypothesis, but when you create a hypothesis, you're doing it with data. It's data-driven. It's really important to understand that you can't be like, well, it feels like, or you can't have your sales team like, well, it feels like, or the conversations are like, okay, that's great. Quantify that.

Usually, when I push back onto the sales team and I ask them to quantify it, it becomes more challenging. The thing is that how do you quantify feelings? You can't. If you're like, well, Javier, that's just not right.

Okay, it may not be right, but I can't go to our investors like, well, I feel as though we did a good job, and so you should give us more money. That's not going to work. You're not going to be like, yeah, we should totally give you more money because you felt like you did a good job. It doesn't work like that.

When you start quantifying these things and you create a hypothesis and you have a theory, then you're able to go out there and make a future bet, and that future bet is going to help you hit your revenue goal that you have for 23. That's how you do it. I'm not saying that's all I do as a CMO. But that is a big piece of the marketing strategy that we have at our company.

And that is something that is missing in this space, in the facility management space, is that there aren't enough companies making future bets. And they're not creating hypothesis. And the reason I'm saying this is that, A, I don't see a lot of ads from these people. B, I don't see anything different.

Everyone's kind of doing the same playbook. C, I don't see any true leaders. It's like clicky. Okay, and I'm not knocking people.

I'm not knocking your company if you listen to this. I'm just simply saying like, if you want to dominate this space, you need to start kind of really digging deeper into numbers and start making bets on something or a channel that you're not thinking is going to deliver, but you know it's been successful in other industries. Start a podcast. And you're like, well, how do you quantify that?

Pretty simple. You do a podcast for 12 months. You interview a bunch of great people. Randomly, you do it on schedule, like my podcast, two podcasts per week.

And I've been doing that since January 11th of 2022. Okay, two podcasts a week. That's what I've been doing. You start doing that.

And then whenever people, you know, and you interview people or you have your own topics and you just, you know, you do whatever the case is. And as you start getting new business in, you start saying, you tell the sales team, you're like, hey, make sure you do self-attribution. And that's just like, hey, how'd you hear from us? And they say, oh, I listened to a podcast.

Then guess what? Maybe the podcast works. Like it's really that simple. Like don't overcomplicate this shit.

And if you're like, well, that's just too much extra work for the sales team. Really? To ask them to just say, how'd you hear from us? No.

That should be part of the conversation. And that's going to give you a better opportunity to kind of like, hmm, this hypothesis is working. Like I made a hypothesis about this podcast. And this was my hypothesis.

All right. I was going to launch this podcast and I was going to see how it would perform in 12 months. My goal was not to gain any business or anything like that. My goal was to create an audience.

And my hypothesis was, is that if I did this for 12 months, I would gain enough traction and interest that people might be like, huh, this guy knows what he's talking about. I should consider hiring him or I should consider using him as a fractional CMO. So let me just say this right now. I'm very happy with where I'm at.

OK, like not going anywhere. OK, but if you're a customer that I'd be wanting to work with on the side here and there for fractional services, we wouldn't have a conversation. But you know what? You wouldn't have considered me if it wasn't for this podcast.

The other option is this. You're like, well, well, maybe he has courses. Yeah, that's something that we're working on as well, too. We're developing courses as we speak.

And you know what? You can buy the courses. And those courses will teach you all these marketing strategies that I'm teaching you guys. And then you don't have to pay me anything.

You pay the course fee and then you just implement it into your business. But you never would have considered me if it wasn't for this podcast. So my hypothesis was, is that this podcast would be the low barrier, the lowest part of my value ladder. It's the free thing.

And then the next level would be like courses. And then the next level would be like fractional services and stuff like that. And that's pretty much it. And it's all side gig stuff.

Because I mean, I have a full time job. I coach my son's basketball team now. I'm a full time parent, husband, all that stuff. So, you know, what I'm saying here is, is that you sometimes have to make future bets on things that you're not you're not really sure of.

But you have like a theory. And the only way to come up with a theory is to see what else other people are doing. Be like, huh, let me see if I can model that to fit me or my business or my industry or my space or my company. You see what I'm saying?

And you do that and things change. So, so far, my hypothesis on this podcast has been right. So far, my hypothesis with the marketing strategies that I've implemented at Ratmate have been right. Now, have I made mistakes?

Hell yeah, I've made mistakes. But I and I try to make this a very, very clear point to my team as well, too. So like our director of sales came up to me two days ago, had this idea. I'm like, yeah, I like it.

You know, it was like an outbound idea, you know, outbound strategy. I go before we even try to implement any of this stuff, like we need to like build this out. This is not something that like you just go on the cusp and then just just do it. Like you have to build out the strategy correctly.

And the reason I'm saying this is because if if you just start throwing money into something to solve a problem, it's not going to make you more money. You have to build out a strategy and how it's going to work, the layers to it, the pieces to it, so that when you execute it, it's going to work. That's why I started off this podcast that like ideas are great, but execution is even more important. So my hypothesis would not have been a great hypothesis if I didn't execute upon the upon the idea.

And so I had to execute it correctly, and I ended up executing it correctly, but because I laid it out the way I wanted it. And then I had the right team to help, you know, basically run with it. And I gave the right data to the team to continue to optimize these ads even more and more and more. Does that make sense?

So that is the difference. So, yes, it's, you know, all kind of like making shit up, but at the same time, it's like calculated. And so that's what you want to do, right? So I hope this was helpful.

If you have any questions, let me know. So three things at the end of my podcast, I always ask is follow us on or connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn.com slash hobby or slash in slash hobby or Lozano Jr. All one word.

Rate this podcast for me. That would be super awesome. Give us a five star on Spotify or on Apple podcast. And the last one is share this podcast with somebody else.

Like our podcast is growing. We're like on the verge of breaking 2000 downloads, which is kind of cool. OK, like we've only been around for 10 months and this podcast is about to break 10,000 or 10,000. That'd be awesome.

2000 downloads. Like that's really, really awesome. Like that excites me a lot. And so it's because of you guys that are listening.

So, you know, if you're if you've been a listener of this podcast, thank you so much. Like, I really appreciate you just listening and and and trying to learn from me. If you're new, I welcome you to this podcast and I hope that you're finding value out of this. But other than those two things, I appreciate that.

And if you have any other questions, hit me up on LinkedIn. Happy to just kind of answer questions. But I'll talk to you guys later. All right, guys.

Thanks for taking a listen to our facility management marketing podcast secrets. This is your host, Javier Lozano Jr. One other ask I've got for you guys is to subscribe to our email list. You can go to BoulderMediaSolutions.com slash email.

And that way you can get updates on some marketing trends that I'm seeing, some strategies that I'm executing. And more importantly, I'll be actually launching some webinars and training that's going to help your company use marketing strategies to essentially grow your business. We'll be doing some training, offering some courses, that sort of stuff. So you can always unsubscribe to that email list.

It's no big deal. It's not going to hurt my feelings. This is more for facility managers and facility management companies that want to grow their business by using marketing. All right, guys.

Thanks a lot. Have a great one.