“What we found is that if we talk to the customer…it actually drove the conversion back up…The average answer rate for a ‘branded call’ is almost 30%.”

Alex Levin is Co-Founder and CEO of Regal Voice. He leads the GTM teams. Prior to Regal Voice, Alex was a product manager at Personal and Thomson Reuters, and then joined Handy (acquired by ANGI in 2018) as an early employee. At Handy and then ANGI Alex led growth and marketing. Alex grew up in New York and received his BA from Harvard.

Questions and topics covered include:

• The key differences between working on growth marketing vs product marketing
• The new challenges marketers face as they gain more responsibility in a company
• What is Regal.io?
• Defining “phone marketing” and at what stage in the buyer’s journey can it be used
• How can businesses best utilize phone marketing?
• Why should brands have conversations with their customers?
• The differences between phone marketing vs cold calling

And more!

Happy 3rd birthday to the podcast! It’s crazy to think that I’ve been hosting this podcast for 36 months now…

You can connect with Alex on LinkedIn here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexlevin1/

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Full Episode Transcript:

Alex Levin  0:00  

And what we found is actually, if we talk to the customer, which like, was odd, why would you talk to a customer right online, but if you talk to them, it actually drove the conversion back up in these more considered purchases, you know, things like health care, education, lending, local services, insurance, you’re not going to just get away with only having a Digital site, it actually is valuable to have these moments where a real human being is reaching out to the customer and saying, Hey, doesn’t have to be hard sales. But that feels real trust.

Kenny Soto  0:30  

Hey, there, you just heard a clip from the latest guest on the people’s Digital Marketing Podcast, Alex Levin, before letting you know Alex is I just want to say that I’m extremely grateful to every single listener, new or returning, that has joined me on this journey. With the people Digital Marketing Podcast, this podcast, as of this episode, is three years old. Back in 2020, I had a concept for creating a podcast, it was going to be an audio Journal of me sharing what I was learning throughout my career. And that was a horrible idea, mainly because I don’t have enough years under my belt to actually share enough information. But what I quickly discovered after pivoting is that people want to learn from other people who have scuffed their knees scraped, their elbows have a few bruises and war stories to tell and a lot of accomplishments. And Alex Levin is one of these many marketing experts that I’ve had on the show, where I’ve learned a lot and other listeners have also learned. And the goal of this podcast as with every single episode is the same. My job is to interview marketing experts to help you impress your boss and eventually become your boss become the CMO. And today’s episode is going to help you do this that with Alex Levin. Alex is the co founder and CEO of regal voice, he leads the go to market teams at Regal. Prior to regal voice Alex was a product manager at personal and Thomson Reuters and then joined handy acquired by ng in 2018 as an early employee, a handy and then ng Alex led growth in marketing. With over 20 years of experience, I just had to talk to him about what he conceptualizes as a new marketing channel, or in this case, an underutilized marketing channel that being phone marketing, essentially, how do you use inbound leads and activate them, convert them if you will, through phone calls. This is not cold calling, though. And we’ll dive into how phone marketing is different from cold calling, using regal voice and why the company exists in the first place on Episode 129, three year anniversary of the people of digital marketing. And without further ado, let’s tune in. Hi, Alex, how are you? Good. Thank you for having me. Awesome. So I always like to start each and every single one of these interviews the same way just so that I can get more context about you, but also for the listener so they can get more context. So my first question for you, Alex, is how did you get into marketing in the first place? Sure. So I went to liberal arts undergrad, and I studied psychology and philosophy, so nothing to do with business. And at some point, I think I read the sort of article from Marc Andreessen Software is eating the world and, you know, understood the point that every business was going to be a technology business, and I needed to go learn, you know, how technology worked, if I was going to go be a professional. And I started, you know, as a product manager, and sort of working for startups. And over time as they sort of went up. You know, I wasn’t the greatest product managers. So I shifted more into, you know, business and marketing, and learn that skill set. And, you know, I think I was lucky, like I worked for some folks who were really very talented. And, you know, who showed me the ropes and showed me how the different pieces work. And I got to be at some companies where we did some things really wrong. And so like, I saw what I didn’t want to do, and then follow some things that were done very well. And so over time, I’ve taken the pieces that I think work best and have used those more and more. Our current company actually is a b2b company. So we sell to these marketers and revenue generating teams at b2c brands. And you know, we help them a lot think through how they should be reaching out to customers in what channels especially how they should be using more conversational channels, or sales to drive more revenue than just sending you know, one way email or a one way text alone. So I still work a lot with these heads of marketing and you know, marketing teams, but I’m now on the b2b side, so I’m a little bit out of it. I want to ask my next question, because after seeing your career history, there are two areas of expertise that I think you could touch on. Within the marketing domains, you have brand, you have growth, and you have product marketing, between product and growth marketing, specifically to the experiences that you’ve had in your career. Let’s start off by just asking of both product and growth marketing, which one do you think you have most expertise in?

Alex Levin  5:25  

Yeah, I mean, start by saying, I don’t believe there is such a thing as brand marketing, that’s woman’s marketing. Okay. He’s telling you that is just, you know, should is a lunatic. You know, even the best brand marketers today, it is performance based, like in the end, like, there’s a number that they’re trying to hit within sort of the more performance marketing channels. Again, there’s less differentiation than you might imagine, between those things. So I came up more through the product side, where let’s say there was a funnel, right? And we’d say, hey, there’s 100 People who land on the page. And of those, you know, how many ended up buying the product online? And, you know, what are the things we can do from a product perspective, to change the questions, we’re asking them or the, you know, way that the information is given to them or how we’re presenting, you know, this product to them, so that we can, we can sort of maximize the sort of experience for the customer, and ultimately, the revenue for the company, you know, in the end, and as part of that, it wasn’t just about, you know, a website or even an app, it was also about email marketing, it was about SMS marketing is about retargeting. So that’s where I, you know, I learned mostly sort of middle, the funnels, sort of how I use marketing to move people through the funnel, top of the funnel stuff, you know, I learned after, and again, it’s, you know, as long as you’re quantitative and willing to be quantitative and sort of look at, you know, you know, how much you’re spending in certain places, and what it’s sort of getting you in terms of return, and you’re willing to sort of, you know, be a sponge and learn the world’s your oyster. So, you know, take, don’t take Google, which is the, you know, SEM, which is the main channel that people should be learning, if they’re sort of going to be a marketer at the top of the funnel. there’s constantly new things, there’s constantly new features, but if you’re willing to go and do the work to study, like, how it works, and how the tools work, and what you can do, and vary it and look at your results and keep iterating like you’re going to be successful. Sure, you know, your past experience will be helpful in a future experience. And if you don’t have a bad experience, like, go ask somebody else, like, you know, for at least a starting point, but the mistake actually I see is when people say, well, because I did this x way, in a past life, it should be done this way, in my new company, well, you don’t know. Right, there’s no way you possibly know, I think it’s fine. If you’re using your past experience or your opinion as a starting point, the mistake is when people use their past experience as a target as an ending point. Because until you’ve actually gotten iterated and tested and seen what works, the new company you don’t know, you know, maybe it’s very unlikely, but maybe Google sem doesn’t work at all and your new thing. So you shouldn’t be focusing on that channel, you should be focusing on other channels. I guess that would be my my take.

Kenny Soto  8:02  

I like thinking in groups of three. And I feel like this is a challenge to my own thinking. But based on what you said, perhaps a better way of thinking about marketing in general is not necessarily brand product and growth, but more so just the stages of the funnel, correct?

Alex Levin  8:20  

Yeah, I think if you’re if there’s one takeaway from all this is learn that learn how to look at a funnel in marketing, and learn sort of how to analyze that data and figure out where in the funnel? Are you seeing the drop offs? Where should you be prioritizing your time? So the math is very quick, right? So if you have, you know, 100 people landing on your site, only 1% give you an email address? Well, that’s a big drop off, and very small improvements that are going to lead to a lot of impact with the rest of the funnel, right? Mobile or another way, you know, let’s say you have a different company where you have very good conversion all the way through the end of the funnel. And then at the last step, you know, only 5% of people convert and you know, the benchmark is 50%. Well, that’s a huge opportunity. But you know, by understanding the funnel, then looking at what the size of the opportunity is, in each place, you’ll know where you should start how you should prioritize your time. You know, just because your title is marketing doesn’t mean you should be spending time at the top of the funnel, maybe you need to be spending in the middle or the bottom, depending what the opportunity size is.

Kenny Soto  9:18  

Every career path has trade offs. And even when taking those trade offs into account, there are huge benefits to becoming an executive. Specifically at your experience, it was handy. I saw that you went up the ladder, gaining leadership roles over time getting more scope of work, when it comes to the challenge of collaborating with other teams. Does that challenge change or evolve as you gain more scope of work as a marketer?

Alex Levin  9:52  

Yeah, I mean just I’ll give you some like order of magnitude for my my experience at handy and then it became this company ng which is public. When we started we were by Only 50 people in a room million dollars in revenue. By the end we are, you know, 7000 people doing a billion and a half in revenue. So, you know, certainly like, I’ve seen quite a lot of different scale of how this stuff works. And you know, a few things I suppose to, you know, to come back to first is, what I try to teach people is the concept that, you know, the big companies teach you that the more people that report to you, the more produce hours wrong, completely wrong, shut that out of your head, like, the faster you get out of your head, the better. And I’ll tell you why. When people work for me, if they create a process where they’re intrinsically super important to the process, and like they are, they have to be involved, I can’t promote them. Right, because now they have to be in that seat, I can’t move them out. So that’s like a bit of a shock. When I first explained that field, they go, What do you mean, because I’ve done such a good job, you can’t promote me? Well, basically, like, because all you’re doing is making yourself completely necessary for this thing. What we try to teach people instead is how do you make yourself completely redundant? Now, it doesn’t start that way, right? When you’re given a new project, start by figuring it out, start by doing a manual, start by doing yourself start, you know, you’re gonna have to be smart figured out. But once you’ve figured out the solution, and start thinking about how do you make it so that if you are hit by a bus, so use the most extreme example, that process would go on without you. That means either using automation and using technology, hiring different people, you know, finding systems so that it says, or even if it is a manual thing, you’re documenting that as well as possible, so that if you were hit by a bus tomorrow could go on, because now you’ve set it up in such a way that I can promote you. And I can say, Great, you’ve made the so easy that I can hire a less talented person or a newer person, or let’s say somebody, we pay less for the job, because you made it simple. And I’m gonna give you the next big challenge in your career. And what what I mean by that is like with new challenges come opportunities for promotion, and more salary and more sort of new projects. So you should be looking for those challenges. So it’s, it’s a bit of a shift from thinking about world dominion, and how many people report to me as being important to thinking about how do I make myself redundant so that I can then take on the next challenge as fast as possible. The people that do the latter, and you know, are successful at it move up very quickly inside of organizations. I think in terms of like communication, the other sort of important thing to remember these days is, it’s not, again, good to have lots of people on your team. If you have one person doing a job and you hire a second, you don’t get double the amount of work done. Because there’s a communication tax, actually only like one and a half times the amount of work done. So you’re much better off having fewer people on the team getting more work done at some points impossible, and you have to hire, but as long as possible, avoid hiring people, because that communication text, you know, I think you can, you can sort of get very far with fewer people these days in marketing, because of all the sort of sophisticated technology that exists. To your point on, you know, what is the difference in communication, as you sort of become an exec, what I guess I’d impart is the same skills you need as an exec, you can practice early in your career, you know, maybe your boss isn’t asking you to sort of go and communicate lots of teams, but you still could go and practice it. Right? You know, if you’re on the marketing team, you know, how do you communicate with product? Right? How do you communicate with your customer service team? How do you communicate with engineering? Practice, you know, when you sort of then go back the next week and say, hey, you know, do you mind giving me some feedback about last week, when we were in this meeting? Did you understand why, you know, we’re doing this interest and what the goals are, that it was a clear sort of, you know, how we were going to work together. And if they’re going on, and you remember, we had a meeting, and you’re gonna sign a workout, you know, if they’re saying, Oh, it’s very clear, I get it, like, I bought, you know, I was really, you’re working on the right thing, we’re aligned to your thing, we’re going to do it, we know what the goal is. And then repeat back to exactly what you said, Cool, you’re doing very well from the communication side. And then naturally, what’ll happen is, as you’re unofficially being the one communicating with people, naturally, you’ll start becoming the official one that’s doing it. So I’m not suggesting you have to do the job before you’re paid to do the job. But I am suggesting that you can practice it. And you know, if people see the or keep people doing it, they’ll go, oh, great, we’re gonna give that person the next opportunity, because they’re already so good at this.

Kenny Soto  14:19  

This gives me validation, specifically, when you talked about making yourself redundant, because I’m currently facing that challenge. Right now, I’m an SEO manager. But I don’t want to do SEO forever. And I want to start expanding my area of expertise, probably as a product marketer. That’s yet to be determined. But now I’m seeing I’ve been conceptualizing just taking every single task that I’ve done weekly, monthly, quarterly, creating SOP documents with loom videos, recording some of the process, so that if I do hire a replacement, and I shift over to something bigger, the replacement knows exactly what to do there and during the first 3060 90 days, so I love that you mentioned that’s very important. Now When it comes to what you’re currently doing, can you describe what regal.io is?

Alex Levin  15:05  

Yeah, of course. So a lot of what we do comes out of our experience, you know, before at this company in the services based Handi, which then became part of NG. So just to give you the background, we were hired there to help rings for home services online so that in the same way, you go and buy a pasta online and a shirt online, you could buy a home renovation. And we we built a very sort of big top of funnel and had lots of people coming to the site had a very beautiful funnel. But what we found that was fascinating is actually fewer people converted online, the conversion rate online was lower than the old school offline conversion rate. And that’s like, very puzzling, because we thought we’d built this magic new mousetrap. And what we found is actually, if we talked to the customer, which like, was odd, why would you talk to a customer right online, but if you talk to them, it actually drove the conversion back up, and we, you know, go to interviews, customers go, what happened, they go, Well, now I trust you more, because you’re a real company, you talk to me, oh, like there’s this insight in these nor considered purchases, you know, things like health care, education, lending, local services, insurance, you’re not going to just get away with only having a Digital site, it actually is valuable to have these moments where a real human being is reaching out to the customer and saying, Hey, in our home service example, you have a house, you’re looking for a fence, tell me more, doesn’t have to be hard sales. But that builds real trust. And so we ended up building very large teams of 1000s of people working directly with customers to do this. And so a huge lift from it. And so that was the genesis of regal. So the problem was, there was no software that was targeted about that, there was lots of customer service software that was targeting, deflecting inbound, right, reducing the cost of talking to their customer. And there was lots of marketing software that use real time behavior to programmatically send a one way message meaning I’m telling you what to do, right, that’s what L is. But what we found was successful is this different mode. And so regels focused on is how do we use real time data in the sort of same way marketing products do. But instead of doing a one way, this is what we’re telling you to do, we want to create a conversation, we want to listen to the customer, and use two way channels. So we use SMS, we use a phone, and we use a little bit of email. But the whole point is, in moments where that customer is struggling online, in these key sort of times, we reach out to the customer on the right channel, the right message, engage them and have a conversation, we find that it drives much higher outcome. So we provide just the software. So I usually call it phone and SMS sales software, but you know, has a lot of the same concepts as marketing automation software. And then, you know, our companies are providing the or customers or providing people so one of our customers is, you know, sells things to pet owners. And you know, boy, I’m one of things I love is they get on the phone and they say hi, I’m your cat concierge. And you know how Sally doing today, I know and they make those really personalized call. So instead of a personalized email, this is a personalized conversation.

Kenny Soto  18:02  

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Alex Levin  19:51  

Yeah, think of everywhere you’re using email marketing today. So we don’t work with cold callers. So this is not about cold calling. Again. Think about email us the right parallel the right example, some point a customer is coming to sorry, an end users coming to one of our customers. So let’s say, you know, Roman is a customer of ours, guess, bro, today, somebody goes to row looking for a new sort of hair products. And, you know, they might, I don’t know very high in the funnel, not finding what they need. And normally you’d send them an email. But in this case, with rebill, you could actually engage them in a conversation, or maybe they’ll get all the way through, and they’ll put the thing in their cart, but they need to talk to a doctor to get approval. So, you know, Regal will be the tool the doctors using to actually engage with the patient, or to your point in month one retention, they’ll, instead of an email or an additional email, use regal or in cross sell, and they’ll sell other products or in Windows. So throughout the customer lifecycle, wherever you might have been using an email, you can use a call and the value is that an email gets like a 2% click rate these days, the average answer rate on Regal for calls for these brand new calls that are happening at the right moment is almost 30%. Average. So you get a 10x the number of people that engage with you. So if you know their high intent, right, and you want to be talking with them, and you know that you’re going to make enough money to make a $5 conversation just about what it costs worthwhile, then you should definitely be doing this. So, you know, if you’re selling pencils doesn’t work, not enough money. But you know, if you’re selling something over $100, for sure, it’s worth having a $5 conversation with them to say, Hey, what’s going on, you know, help me understand, you know, how we can make sure that you’re getting the information you need to make a decision, but wasn’t you need this product.

Kenny Soto  21:35  

I want to make sure I’m adjusting this property. So Regal, in a sense, can help with that balancing act between inbound marketing and outbound marketing, at all stages, correct?

Alex Levin  21:45  

Yeah, everything we do is on inbound leads. And in the same way, you might use, you know, iterable, or Braves for email marketing, you know, companies are using regal for that phone marketing, so to speak, it tends to be a sales team, because there’s a team of human beings. But you know, in education, it’s called admissions or onboarding. in banking, it’s a teller or an advisor, right? In insurance, it’s, you know, an advisor or something like that they call it, they don’t always call it sales. But these are revenue generating teams that are trying to find opportunities where, you know, if they engage with the customer can drive a good ROI, meaning, let’s say 2x, the amount of revenue per call, so if it’s a $5 conversation, need to drive $10 in revenue, so to speak,

Kenny Soto  22:27  

Alex, what’s the biggest marketing challenge your team is facing this year?

Alex Levin  22:31  

On the b2b marketing side, so I should say, you know, we’re very lucky. We started the business two and a half years ago, and, you know, it’s sort of business exploded without any marketing, and with really very little sales. So we actually didn’t even hire a marketing team until the end of last year. So about two years in. So very new, I’d say, for us, the industry we’re in is, is newer doesn’t have a name, right. So email marketing is very, like you type in email marketing. And there’s four products that exist, and it’s a well known thing. You know, at this point, CDP customer data platform, well known things, you know, M particle segment, and whatever. But honestly, if you went back 20 years for email marketing, you went back 10 years for CDP’s. Nobody that wasn’t a well known industry. So we’re kind of at that stage where there are teams that are doing calls, and they need software like ours, and when they meet us, they get very excited about it. But I don’t know, like, if there’s that many people going out and searching for b2c phone sales software, that’s not like a common category of software that people are looking for. So what that means is that we need to do a lot of work much later in the funnel. So we’re finding people at conferences, we’re doing outbound people, you know, are having these teams and having these problems. But we’re not, you know, there’s not as much sort of inbound Google traffic, you know, you know, very high in the funnel doing discovery because this category doesn’t exist. So I’d say the challenge, the biggest challenge for marketing perspective is establishing that this is a software category and figuring out how to explain to people what they should be looking for very high in the funnel. We haven’t yet to do that. I get them early, but I think there’s time for us to continue to figure that out.

Kenny Soto  24:16  

It’s interesting, too, because you might have a small set of competitors, you have indirect competitors, but you have this product education challenge where some people made his conceptualize or may mistake you for cold calling services, which is not what you’re providing. So there’s that challenge that like a marketing and education standpoint, you’re also tackling you’re not doing cold calls, and it’s not necessarily as effective as or Regals. Providing.

Alex Levin  24:45  

Yeah, I’ll give you like the, you know, the, the sort of scale of the markets. There’s about 2 million b2b, b2b salespeople, and that’s a very well known space with company you know, Salesforce and you know, you have Gong and yoga have, you know sales loft, and you know, b2b, those 2 million people, there’s a lot of products in customer service, you know, the 16 million seats. And again, contact center software, there’s nice in Genesis and, you know, all in RingCentral, all these products. In our world, there’s actually 5 million seats. Not all of them are online yet, but it’s pretty big markets actually bigger than the b2b. But there’s just not software. And we’re the first ones really to say we’re building software just for this b2c sales use case. So these 5 million seats, so I think it’s, you know, it’s about finding the challenge from a marketing perspective is about finding where those people are, you know, how are they sort of doing their job? What are they reading? Where are they talking to? How are they figuring out what new software they need? What are their biggest pain points? And like, what are they sort of searching for? I think that’s the, that’s challenge of a marketer at this stage of company. And it’s a lot of product marketing, while we were writing out sort of long explanations of why this matters, and why we’re sort of building what we’re building, once you get very late in the cycle, and a category gets much more commoditized. And everybody knows what the moniker is, and everybody thinks about price, but we’re not there. Right? We’re very early in the category development.

Kenny Soto  26:09  

Let’s take a step back and talk about marketing in general, how has marketing changed from the started your career today? What are you seeing as like, the biggest innovations that’s happening just last year to this year?

Alex Levin  26:26  

So sort of my career today is more than last year to this year, yeah, went out. But where to start? So I’d say you know, when I, you know, I’ve been working what, you know, almost 20 years now. So, when I started work, you know, mobile was a new thing. So most of the traffic was desktop. And even on desktop, it was pretty, you know, people are lower internet speed. So there was much less capability in terms of what you could do. And in terms of channels, there was a lot of sophistication of sort of how you could personalize cross channel. So like, you couldn’t take what you knew in one channel and do something in another, you know, the spending is very separ. I think, obviously, mobile just accelerated. And so everything shifted to people being sort of mobile, and the ability to sort of use cookies and other things to track people across channels completely change was possible, then, of course, when Apple sort of shut that down, and as Google will shut that down, it’s a limiting a lot of that sort of cookie based, you know, third party data, which I don’t think is a bad thing, honestly. So the focus today, more than ever is on, you know, what do you do with somebody who is, you know, on their cell phone coming to your site? And, you know, what do you do with all first party data? Because there’s lots of it, you know, what are they clicking on? What are they telling your customer support agents, you know, when or, you know, where are they living, you as a brand are learning all these things about the customer, and the customer expects you, and really they do to use that to personalize how you’re engaging with them. And brands that don’t are gonna be penalized for it because customers are offended that you don’t listen to the fact that they polled somebody their preference, and now you’re doing exactly the thing they don’t like. So I think the the sort of shift today is to mobile first, first party data, personalization across channels, whatever the interaction is. And there’s more and more sophistication, or expectation of sophistication around understanding the ROI for each touch. So where it used to be on a really no, I spend this less money a month, and I get this many users that doesn’t fly, like you, you are expected as a marketer understand the dollars that I’m spending in this channel, what am I getting for those dollars, the dollars that are spending in this campaign? Within the channel? What am I getting for that? And you know, that way, you can see whether or not you should continue that campaign. And that’s hard, right? Because there’s a lot of interaction between channels. But that is the the expectation today, I’d say the last thing that has become more better understood today by marketers, which is sort of a shift is, you know, 2030 years ago, very, there were fewer small brands, just honestly, there were you know, even startups that wanted to break through spent enormous sums of money on like huge brand advertising to have the perception they were a big brand, even if they weren’t. Today, what smaller startups have realized is you don’t have to act like the big star, you don’t have to go. I don’t know, a sponsor f1. As an example, instead, if you pick your target demographic really intelligently so let’s say you’re a new food delivery company, you could pick one block and say within that block, I want to target certain types of people. And I’m going to show them Google ads, Facebook ads, I’m going to do door hangers, I’m going to do street team, I’m going to do direct mail, I’m going to do an out of home piece and I’m going to do over the top ads on there sort of you know, whatever tool they’re using to watch video, all of a sudden you can within that one block radius make people believe that you are the institutional player you because you’ve shown them your product 567 times instead of them just forgetting about it, they go, Oh, wow. You know, you know, who should I think about in my space for parking? Well, clearly this company is the parking company in my area. And even though you didn’t spend any dollars on an actual campaign, any dollars on normal TV, you created the impression of yourself being a big brand. And that’s a that ability to do that. And the sort of intelligence of these new b2c companies to ignore the national branding thing and focus very directly on how they hit their target customer eight times is a huge shift and, you know, provides a lot of value to brands and customers alike. You know, you can be in one region where, you know, some new company has come, and they’re going to provide incredible service to you, because they’re so focused on you in that region.

Kenny Soto  30:48  

More questions for you? What is one thing? And this is hypothetical? What is one thing you wish, every incoming marketer that comes into your team knows and understands.

Alex Levin  31:02  

I mean, basic math, I mean, it’s, again, it’s you don’t also know calculus is not that but definitely understanding this sort of basic funnel and basic math and a little bit about statistics, and what, you know, confidence intervals are like, that’s quite helpful as a starting point, because you’re gonna have to understand those concepts. And it doesn’t mean you have to be the like the person who loves math, but you have to, like, understand it well enough that you can go and run these experiments. I think the other thing that I look for, or the other thing that I see correlates highly with people doing very well, is just the desire to learn their desire to be a sponge, when you have two people that are equal skill, and they’re both doing their job very well. But one person just has an innate interest in things the person with the innate interest does better. So like the example I sometimes give is, at at the last company in home services based, we were looking at whether we want to move into the, you know, the sort of laundry, you know, world whether we wanted to sort of offer local laundry service. And I don’t know, we told the team about it. Most people come back on Monday talking about their weekends, and whatever. And one of the people on my team comes back goes, Alex, you wouldn’t believe it. I spent the whole weekend in a laundromat. And it’s so fascinating, I feel well clearly thought that fascinating, but they found it interesting to learn about it, despite the fact that it might not be the most interesting thing. Or you know, that person just to pick on them again, you know, they didn’t know SQL. So they taught them, they bought SQL for Dummies, and they taught themselves taught themselves how to, you know, do SQL queries? You know, whereas other people go, Oh, I don’t know how to do this shrug. I’m going to wait till the data team gives me my answer. This first one figured out because they wanted to know the answer for themselves. So don’t you know, when you’re running against roadblocks, don’t look at it as an opportunity to just like shrug your shoulders and go home, look at as an opportunity to learn? Do you hit the same exact roadblock three times you should be going and figuring out how to do that, even if it’s not your responsibility? Because it’s clearly a sign that it’s something that’s valuable for your career. Now, it’s entirely your choice, your boss not gonna tell you to do that. You You need to decide, is it something that you want to learn about?

Kenny Soto  33:06  

My last question for you, Alex is also hypothetical. If you can go back into the past about 10 years, knowing everything you know, right now, how would you specifically accelerate the speed of your career?

Alex Levin  33:18  

Yet, in my case, there’s a specific thing. I’m from New York, and, you know, our company is based in New York. And, you know, I stayed there a lot in, you know, at the end of my career, I probably should have gone to San Francisco, I had the opportunity to go work for Google. And some of these, you know, Facebook, some of these companies very early. And I didn’t want I think just it was a new thing further away. And it’s always a little bit scarier. And I think to this was how stupid saying it now. But I remember thinking, Oh, Facebook is a billion dollar company, they’re pretty big already, or a Google is $100 billion company, they’re pretty big already. We’ll look, you know, all of those companies have about 10x, or, you know, 100x in size. So there was much more opportunity than I imagined. So I think, you know, the way I encourage people to make decisions today is, especially early in their career, is look at, you know, what is a company, it’s very high growth, where you’re gonna have a boss is going to look out for you and make sure that they put you in the right place. And you know, you’re going to make enough money to pay your rent. I’m not saying like, don’t negotiate for a salary or negotiate, but don’t, that’s what we should be optimizing for is who pays you the most you should be optimizing for, you know, where are you going to be in a high growth place, we’re gonna get the opportunity to move up. Because if you get that opportunity, your salary will move up much faster, because you’ve sort of gotten the opportunity to move up. So I think early in my career, I didn’t take some opportunities that I should have. That would have certainly accelerated that faster.

Kenny Soto  34:46  

If anyone wants to say hello to you online, where can they find it?

Alex Levin  34:49  

Sure. So obviously go to regal.io or just email me at [email protected] You know, if you’ve got a business in you know, b2c health care insurance lending local services, education If you have a phone sales team, you definitely should be talking to us instead of using your your current customer service contact center software, if you don’t have a phone sales team, right? That’s a greenfield opportunity, a whole world of opportunity, as long as your LTV is over 100 or $200. And your CAC, you know, let’s say is over $100 You should be looking at phone sales of the channel because it’s probably more efficient than the other places you’re spending money.

Kenny Soto  35:24  

You’ve heard it here folks. Thanks, Alex, for your time today. And thank you to you listener for listening to another episode or the people Digital Marketing podcast. And as always, my only ask is after listening to this episode, please rate us on Apple or Spotify five stars ideally. And as always, I hope everyone has a great week. Bye. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the people Digital Marketing Podcast featuring Alex Levin. On the next episode, we will be learning from one of the best marketing experts out there, the Chief Creative Officer of ClickUp Melissa Rosenthal. Melissa was gracious enough to spend some time with me on a Friday evening so that I can pick her brain when it comes to all of the hilarious and witty commercials that click a pas on LinkedIn. Yes, you heard that right. I consider them to be commercials just because of how innovative they are. And they give me that commercial vibe that I’m not seeing from other b2b organizations. They are shipping out creative assets week over week at a rapid pace. And I needed to understand how was she doing that because working in b2c myself, I can learn a lot from this amazing b2b company. So if you’re interested in learning about how to scale b2b creative, Melissa Rosenthal is the expert for you. Don’t forget to subscribe and thanks again for listening