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Ruben Ugarte, Director of Home Services at ActiveProspect, recently joined Snoball's WOMM Podcast to talk about lowering CAC, improving culture between sales and marketing, and building a hyperlocal marketing strategy.
Podcast Highlights
Ruben starts out by talking about his experience in the solar industry, working in various roles from sales to marketing. He now works for ActiveProspect, a SaaS company that captures leads from a wide variety of sources. The company primarily serves businesses in the fields of financial services, insurance, and home services. Ruben works directly with many marketing teams, lead managers, and CMOs.
Ruben goes on to explain what really sets ActiveProspect apart from similar technologies:
“We're unique in the space, because we encompass lead management, compliance, and routing. There are a lot of different tools that do lead management or routing or compliance... We're the only brand out there that does all three collectively together.”
“Along with that, inside of our technology, we have this kind of marketplace that has all these various APIs that are data services. You can do phone verification and email validation. A lot of home service brands like to get a title on a property or square footage.”
He reiterates that the ability to take in data and optimize really sets ActiveProspect apart from other competitors.
Lowering CAC
Ruben talks about the importance of always reevaluating and trying new strategies to lower CAC. He talks about how this should be done on a daily, even hourly, basis:
“Optimizing consistently lowers the cost of acquisition. They’re doing this on the daily, they got daily KPIs, they got daily reports, and they are not waiting until the 15th or the end of the month to make a pivot.”
“They're doing it hourly. If they're spending money somewhere and not seeing the conversions, they're making alterations, they're making pivots, and they're making changes in real-time.”
He then goes on to talk about the importance of KPIs and data:
“So the more reporting and KPIs that you can have that are shareable across multiple departments, I think the better off the brand will be.”
Improving culture between sales and marketing
Ruben starts this part of the conversation by addressing the issues of finger-pointing between marketing and sales:
“For whatever reason, especially in home services, and I'm sure this is in other verticals, there always seems to be this like wall or finger-pointing between marketing and sales. So like, if you're not getting sales, the sales team is like, it's the marketing team's fault.”
“And then, you know, if you're not getting sales, the marketing team's like, oh, it's a sales team's fault. And it's kind of all this friction that can really hurt an organization or a brand.”
Ruben then provides the solution for companies who have seen this type of culture between their sales and marketing teams:
Be data-led and transparent
“The path forward is to be led by data and find the right KPIs. Discover the ability of marketing and sales teams to work hand in hand in sequence with each other."
He also talks about the importance of prioritizing “...the ability for sales teams and marketing teams to be accountable, collectively and not siloed. I really feel like that's a key ingredient in doing great marketing, because you know, you're generating these leads, you're bringing in consumers, you're bringing in eyeballs.”
“The ability for your sales and marketing team just to have a culture of transparency and success, I think that by far is one of the most important things that I've seen out there.”
He later talks about the importance of combined goals between sales and marketing to create more shared meaning:
“I would have combined goals between marketing and sales. I would bring teams together and have them share time. I'd have both teams educated on the lingo of the different departments. Sometimes marketing and sales have their acronyms or analogies and they don't understand each other.”
“But I think getting everybody together, getting both teams to understand what each team is doing, and having accountability and transparency, I think is huge. And, it could be as simple as holding meetings together. You’d be surprised how many brands don't get their marketing or sales teams together.”
Building a hyperlocal marketing strategy
Ruben goes on to talk about the importance of hyperlocal marketing:
“You can be hyperlocal in your community and not just engage with organizations in your community, but build your Yelp profile, your Google profile, all these review sites are core to getting started. You got to own your zip code. If you can't own your zip, if you can't own your immediate city or area, it's gonna be real tough to market to people that are outside.”
“Being able to target locally and then expand from there. I think that's the best formula that I've seen. I feel like a lot of brands get into lead gen and they start with third-party leads and then they're like, well try to sprinkle first-party leads. Or they're all about first-party, but they just disregard third-party. I think there's a balance there to be had.”
You can connect with Ruben on LinkedIn or learn more about ActiveProspect below.
About Ruben and ActiveProspect
Ruben Ugarte is a marketing expert with a background deeply rooted in the construction industry. His passion for solar and home services led him to excel in sales, installations, and marketing, contributing to the successful scaling of customer acquisition for various businesses.
As an advocate for consent-based marketing, Ruben is now a key player at ActiveProspect, an Austin-based SaaS platform. ActiveProspect's mission is to revolutionize customer acquisition by empowering companies to take immediate action on leads, ensuring legal compliance through documented consent, and providing valuable data insights and control to save costs.
With his extensive experience and dedication to cutting-edge technology, Ruben is a driving force in transforming the way businesses approach customer acquisition.
