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Event Replay: Executive Insights with Gradual: Generating New Business from Repeat Customer Buyers
Posted Mar 05, 2026 | Views 40
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Speakers
Irwin Hipsman
Founder @ Repetitos
Irwin Hipsman is the Founder of Repetitos, former Director of Customer Lifecycle Marketing at Forrester, a 4X customer marketing practitioner, and 5X Top 100 Customer Marketing Strategist and Influencer. He is the author of the 2025 State of B2B Customer Contact Databases Report and an expert in transforming a customer contact database into an advantage.
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Joshua Zerkel
Head of Marketing & Community @ Gradual
Josh Zerkel is Head of Marketing & Community-Led Growth at Gradual. A recognized leader in community strategy, he has built and scaled programs at Asana, Evernote, HeyGen, and CBS News that have driven millions in pipeline, global engagement, and cross-functional impact. He’s the author of The Community Code, and a trusted advisor to startups and enterprise teams building community-powered growth engines.
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SUMMARY
In this 30-minute Executive Insights with Gradual session, Irwin will walk through how to use the data and resources you already have to identify former customers, segment them intelligently, and nurture relationships that lead to faster, higher-confidence deals. We’ll explore how leading teams are generating 10 to 25 percent of new business from repeat buyers without adding headcount or new tools.
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CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:28:20 Josh Zerkel Hello everyone. Welcome to Executive Insights with gradual and today's topic generating new business from repeat customer buyers I'm Josh circle head of marketing and community here at gradual. In case you are new to gradual, it is the engagement and community platform that turns connection into lasting business impact and growth. Engagement beyond your product. Before I introduce our guest expert, a quick note please drop your questions in the Q&A and we will get to as many as we can today.
00:00:28:23 - 00:00:54:16 Josh Zerkel After our session ends, you will still be able to ask questions and share your thoughts in the forum AMA. We will share that link later during the webinar. Now, without further ado, I would like to introduce today's guest, Erwin Hipsley. Erwin is the founder of Rapid Tito's, former Director of Customer Lifecycle Marketing at Forrester, a four times customer marketing practitioner and a five times top 100 customer marketing strategist and influencer.
00:00:54:18 - 00:01:05:10 Josh Zerkel He's the author of the 2025 state of B2B Customer Contact Databases report, and an expert in transforming customer contact databases into an advantage. Welcome, Erwin.
00:01:05:12 - 00:01:12:01 Irwin Hipsman Great. Good to be here. Josh. We've been chatting a fair amount over the past month or two and now it's showtime. So very excited.
00:01:12:04 - 00:01:31:27 Josh Zerkel Yeah. Me too. This is a topic that I frankly don't know that much about. And so I'm really excited to learn from you and better understand how we, who are all customer facing, can really put this concept of repeat customer business into practice. So I will let you take it away from here. I know you have some some slides for us to go through.
00:01:32:09 - 00:01:52:28 Irwin Hipsman So, when we started this, we were working on the side. One of the ChatGPT side. Could you make a slide of, you know, repeat buyer program? This is what I came up with. And it's a reminder in my time before our story was there, I left there about a year ago, and was there about for three years.
00:01:53:01 - 00:02:14:24 Irwin Hipsman And when I did, the first thing I did when I joined Forrester, the lesson learned from the other places I've been at is I've got to clean up the customer contact database, you know, 15,000 names. You know what's going on with this? So I was the first person in this role, and the database, you know, was not, you know, like, most companies was not good.
00:02:14:26 - 00:02:40:20 Irwin Hipsman And so spending a fair amount of time cleaning up the database. And one of the things I learned was that, a good percentage, probably about 20% of the people in the database were no longer at their company and just start poking around like, where did these people go? And did they go somewhere? And, you know, all of a sudden I start realizing there's a whole group of people that are know us, no longer the company.
00:02:40:20 - 00:03:12:15 Irwin Hipsman And I start asking salespeople like, what do you do with these folks? Well, we just wait for them to call and they'll they'll call us up. And I've had one of the fastest conferences and ran into a guy who was an 11 time Forester customer. And I was like, and I said, well, as as far as to notice the other 11 times, like, no, once, like, did you ever get anything and welcoming you when you leave to the someone reach out, you know, I just call up and ready to buy them and it's just sort of taunting me like, oh my God, there's there's some there's something wrong here in that.
00:03:12:22 - 00:03:33:20 Irwin Hipsman You get these people who are leaving and nobody's following up with them. And everyone just waits for them to call. And so literally the day I was going to present, I launched this program faster. The database was clean, well identified, a few hundred people that had left, and we started marketing to them. And I told everybody like, don't get excited.
00:03:33:20 - 00:03:51:09 Irwin Hipsman It's going to take 3 to 6 months before we get any repeat buyers. And literally within a month we closed three deals. And literally the day I was going to show the, the success of the of this effort was the day I got laid off. So I'll make an ad. I won't make an editorial comment about it, but, it was pretty ironic.
00:03:51:11 - 00:04:11:00 Irwin Hipsman So when I left Forester, I said, you know what? I'm just going to do my own thing. I'm tired of this. And and I focused on the customer, the customer contact database. Because the one thing that every place I've been at has been challenged with and nobody addresses it. And one of the first thing I did was a survey.
00:04:11:00 - 00:04:30:23 Irwin Hipsman So I reached out to 100 people, and I got about a hundred B2B companies to respond, around the health of their database. So it wasn't a pretty picture. You know, if this the score was 47%. So a failing grade, you know, if your kid's in high school, based upon how people answer the questions. But one of the questions we asked is, do you have a formal repeat buyer program?
00:04:30:23 - 00:04:50:02 Irwin Hipsman And only 12% of the companies had one. Now something else. Some of them said sort of. But most said, no, we don't we don't do that. Basically we just wait for someone to raise their hand. And I was at an event in Boston with, that open primary sponsor, Ed King, the CEO was there, and we chatted for half an hour, and he was saying, oh my God.
00:04:50:02 - 00:05:13:08 Irwin Hipsman Or when I, I have a dashboard on my, you know, one of my dashboards is, you know, is repeat buyers. So we, we keep we, you know, they track who's left, where are they going, you know, what are the opportunities, etc. and what he told me, which was I found really interesting because you would think that having lots of repeat payers would be a great thing.
00:05:13:08 - 00:05:34:05 Irwin Hipsman But basically what his analysis was, if you have less than 10% of your customers are repeat buyers, that is not good because it means, you know 20% of your customers contacts will lead you every year. Let's just, you know, at this point, that's fact. Whether you get laid off or they move to another company or they retire or whatever, but they are no longer at that company.
00:05:34:08 - 00:06:03:00 Irwin Hipsman So if less than 10% means very few, these people are going to a new company and buying people tend to stay in the same industry, similar roles when when they leave. So that's not a good sign. You know, 10 to 15% is really good. Superb is 15 to 20. If you're like more than 25, if you're depending on more than 25% of your business from your buyer, that's not good either, because it means you're probably not innovating because you're not getting new buyers in there, and you're too dependent upon repeat buyers.
00:06:03:02 - 00:06:21:26 Irwin Hipsman So that sweet surprise between 10 to 20%. And it's I sort of, you know, look back at companies. I've been that you know, everyone knew that you know, that you got repeat buyers. But you know, nobody kept track of it. But that seems to be, you know, just about right. As to, you know, what you should be doing as a, as a company.
00:06:21:29 - 00:06:38:09 Irwin Hipsman But the quarter what the, the key to it is having a clean database so that you can track, you know, who's left. If you don't know who's left. And all you depending upon is, you know, somebody calls you up in six months, says, you know, we're ready to buy. That's not a repeat buyer program. So today we're going to talk about a few things.
00:06:38:09 - 00:06:57:26 Irwin Hipsman One is the benefits of a repeat buyer program. Why are we waiting for repeat buyers to raise their hands. What's the waterfall mouth look like. And then, you know, how do you go ahead and not do this? What would you do next? So the benefits? There is literally no cost to doing a repeat buyer program. You've got everything in place.
00:06:58:03 - 00:07:17:16 Irwin Hipsman You've got, you know, builders who can, you know, reach out. You've got salespeople, you know, there's no software that you need to buy to do a repeat buyer program. It's just, you know, a lot of it's keeping track of, you know, if you've got a CRM system, you've got the beginning of a repeat buyer program. There's time cost, but there's you don't need extra budget.
00:07:17:16 - 00:07:20:28 Irwin Hipsman You don't need to hire anyone. There.
00:07:21:00 - 00:07:43:13 Irwin Hipsman The the the other benefits the the opportunity win. Right. You will you know. Well, when we go to the waterfall math you'll see that. But you know you will have a much higher percentage of win rate when it's a repeat buyer as opposed to a cold, you know, a brand new, brand new prospect. Once that repeat buyer comes on, you know, buys, they're going to onboard a lot quicker.
00:07:43:15 - 00:08:03:16 Irwin Hipsman They already know the product. They may not even need onboarding because they're ready to rock and roll. So they're going to get to value a lot quicker. Oh, and the other thing with with the the win rate, you're probably likely going to have a larger contract right off the cake. And that will then translate to the lifetime value of that customer will be larger over the over the years.
00:08:03:16 - 00:08:21:19 Irwin Hipsman So let's say the, you know, the average customer spends $30,000, repeat buyer might spend $40,000. So already it's larger. And then when you get in to renewal, you know, you start thinking about, you know, customer being with you for 2 or 3 years, that lifetime value will be higher as well. So let's go to the first one.
00:08:21:19 - 00:08:47:26 Irwin Hipsman Why do companies, you know, wait for potential repeat buyers to raise their hand? One of the silos and systems, the systems don't talk to each other. So if let's say somebody has left their company and the admin turns off their, their, privileges, is that going into the CRM system, telling the CRM system automatically that person has left the company, or they no longer have privileges.
00:08:47:26 - 00:09:05:02 Irwin Hipsman They kind of a do role within the company. They don't need the privileges. But is something signaling the CRM to say there's been a change in this person's status. Somebody needs to look into it. And then if it does, you know, and it turns out that somebody has looked into when they left their company, what happens next?
00:09:05:04 - 00:09:25:15 Irwin Hipsman So, you know, the systems don't talk to each other. All the silos salespeople are the worst. Because, you know, if if somebody left, you know, they have an account, that person's left and they go to another one of their accounts, that salesperson will be all over them. But they've gone to a a different vertical or a different geography salesperson.
00:09:25:15 - 00:09:46:03 Irwin Hipsman That job is not to generate leads for somebody else. They're not going to call up somebody and say, oh, this person's just left. You should give them a call. That's not their job to generate leads for somebody else. So they're there. If it's their lead, they'll follow up. Otherwise they're gone. And basically the add to is, well, we'll just wait for them to call when they're ready to buy.
00:09:46:07 - 00:10:05:07 Irwin Hipsman They'll give us a call and then so we'll sell to them. Well that's great, but that's probably 6 to 9 months down the road. And what if you can accelerate that by six months by, you know, by incentivizing them, by identifying them, incentivizing them and nurturing them. And the third is nobody owns it. So is this a sales on this?
00:10:05:09 - 00:10:26:05 Irwin Hipsman Does marketing own this? I mean, my perspective is marketing should own it because marketing is lead generation and these are leads. And, you know, marketing typically has a customer advocacy or customer marketing person on the team whose role this is to do. If you have a CSW ops person, that's another good place for it to to belong is with CSR ops.
00:10:26:05 - 00:10:41:24 Irwin Hipsman But there's got to be somebody who sort of owns this and keeps track of it and has our dashboard and be able to show at the end of the year, at the end of the quarter, hey, this is how many repeat buyers we got. And this was the average buying. It's just how long off the average sales cycle.
00:10:41:24 - 00:11:07:00 Irwin Hipsman You know, all those things that you look at, will look much better with repeat buyers. But if nobody owns it, then it's somebody else's problem. So the waterfall math. So let's say and this is based upon what the program we did a forester and also from talking about the king. So let's say you have you've identified 100 people who have left their company.
00:11:07:02 - 00:11:27:01 Irwin Hipsman Now, not all of them are going to buy, but 50 of them, half of them will land at an ICP. You know, some may. Let's say you don't sell to government and somebody goes to government. So half and half of those sense will land at the right place. 25 of them will the lead will be accepted.
00:11:27:01 - 00:11:51:02 Irwin Hipsman It could be like two junior of a person. Or it could be two senior of a person, and, you know, and, or they already own the they already have the product. So there's no reason to accept the lead because they, they're, you know, they already have the product itself. 15 of them, an option will be created and five of them will be close, one in a much shorter cycle as well.
00:11:51:05 - 00:12:09:02 Irwin Hipsman We talked about how in 30 days we closed three deals. So, you get that benefit as well, although we didn't track that, you know, as carefully. So, you know, if you compare that to 100 people who fill out an e-book, who request an e-book or attend a webinar, you're lucky if you get one closed one.
00:12:09:05 - 00:12:20:09 Irwin Hipsman So, you know, the math is just it's just with you. The deal will be larger. The deal will happen faster. They'll onboard quicker.
00:12:20:12 - 00:12:46:22 Irwin Hipsman So what I suggest people do is first you got to assess the health of your customer contact database. So pick 200 people at random and look at you know it's one. And go to LinkedIn profile. And first of all do you have their correct title. Because when you first met them they filled out that they fill up that e-book request or attended a webinar with their manager.
00:12:46:24 - 00:13:15:17 Irwin Hipsman Maybe now they were senior director. So do you have their correct title? When we did a survey of the B2B customer Contact Database Health survey, 57% of people said that they could segment customers by titles, which sounds pretty good. That should be 90%. But that's easy because you know their titles. But if nobody's going in and checking on people's titles and you've got a lot of out of date titles, and then the second thing is, what is their role?
00:13:15:19 - 00:13:38:19 Irwin Hipsman Are they the main point of contact, an admin, an advocate, an active user, a typical user, an inactive user, that gets only 38% of companies could could identify the role of that person. And that becomes really important when you're thinking about a repeat buyer program, because I would argue that if somebody is a specialist or an associate, probably not a candidate for repeat buyer program.
00:13:38:22 - 00:14:00:10 Irwin Hipsman I would also argue anyone below the purple line. I'd probably also argue if they were an inactive user, like they've never logged in to the product. Probably not a potential repeat buyer, but you know, if you get somebody who's a VP or director and they were the main point of contact or an active user, you know, those are those are high profile people that you should be going after.
00:14:00:10 - 00:14:22:02 Irwin Hipsman You become a repeat buyer. But if your contact database isn't in good shape, then it gets really, you know, you could see that, oh that person left. Oh. But they're you know, they're associate, so why am I bothering? Well, no, they really are director at this point. And you really should be bothering. So, you know, the health of a database is, you know, it's really critical to this.
00:14:22:04 - 00:14:39:27 Irwin Hipsman But if you do that sample of 200, you'll see where you're at. And it could be your database is great and you don't need to do anything. On the other hand, what I have found for all the companies, I mean, what I do for a living is I help clean up customer contact databases. The norm is 20% of the people in your database.
00:14:40:00 - 00:15:03:27 Irwin Hipsman Customer contact database will no longer be at the company. So you've got 10,000 names and some of them are like, they've got had three jobs since then, but and then 30% of them you'll have the wrong title because nobody really keeps track of that. And 40% of them you'll have the wrong location, particularly because of Covid. You know, people moved around a lot.
00:15:03:29 - 00:15:20:17 Irwin Hipsman You may never have updated. You may have a lot of blank fields, frankly, from where the person is located and the people who really know need to know about location is field marketing needs to know where people are located and legal needs to know, like why does legal need to know where people located their email privacy rules?
00:15:20:17 - 00:15:40:09 Irwin Hipsman By country Canada. Germany. By region. Amea. By states. California, Virginia, a few others. And you want to be in compliance with email privacy, you know, email privacy rules. So legal will be very happy when you tell them. We now know where everyone is and we can, you know, we can, abide by, you know, email privacy.
00:15:40:11 - 00:16:01:28 Irwin Hipsman So there are a lot of other people within the company who need to know, who need to be able to trust the customer contact database. Certainly sales, needs to be able to trust that as well. So, you know, by doing the sample, you'll see, oh, we have 15% of our people know of our of the people we looked at donating work at the company anymore.
00:16:02:00 - 00:16:22:01 Irwin Hipsman Now let's update the title on Lo and location while we're at it. And you know, and then you'll see what shape for ten. And if it's in bad shape, go to your demand, people. Your ops people say, fix this, and they'll say that's a really low priority. We'll work on it in six months, or you come to me and I'll get it done in two weeks for you.
00:16:22:03 - 00:16:46:17 Irwin Hipsman So another thing to ask is what percentage of the business comes from repeat buyers? I would start with I would, I would do I would ask two different people the same question. One is I would ask the ops people, you know, you know, rev ops people or, and they'll probably won't be able to give you a number, but they might be able to give you a gut sense of it.
00:16:46:19 - 00:17:00:19 Irwin Hipsman Then I would go to some salespeople and say, what percentage of your folks are repeat buyers? They'll be able to give you that anecdotal. They won't be able to give you a hard number because they're not going to go to a database to figure that out. But they'll say, yeah, like I have for those for those deals this year.
00:17:00:19 - 00:17:22:18 Irwin Hipsman Out of the 20 I closed triangulate off of that. What does Rev Ops tells you? What are you oh, handful of salespeople tell you that will begin to tell you like, oh we actually do have repeat buyers. So we're not in that under 10%. We're not in that over 25%. We're more likely not 15 to 20%, range.
00:17:22:21 - 00:17:46:22 Irwin Hipsman Now with that, with those with that piece of information, the number of repeat buyers you have and the health of your customer contact database, you can begin to start thinking about, well, what would a repeat buyer program look like at my company? So think about why people buy, they buy because of the brand. Do they trust the company, the brand, the solution?
00:17:46:25 - 00:18:05:05 Irwin Hipsman You know, meet our needs? And does it generate value? So as you look at those, you know, when you go back to this prior slide, when you look at those, you know, main point contact admin advocate and advocate. You know, active users, typical user. How do you begin to triangulate on the ones that really make sense to develop a repeat buyer program for.
00:18:05:05 - 00:18:29:09 Irwin Hipsman Because if you went to said everybody who's left their company, we're going to treat as repeat buyer, no, they're not. So those main point of contact. So person who you know the business relationship they they get the brand solution value your your admins, the people who are in the product every day or your customer champions. If you've advocates, they probably also get the brand solution value, maybe not as much as the main point of contact, but they probably get it.
00:18:29:11 - 00:18:46:26 Irwin Hipsman Your active customer, just the person who goes into, you know, the platform on a regular basis. They probably don't care about the brand. You know, somebody bought it. They trust the brand is good enough for me. They certainly understand the solution because they're in it, but they probably may or may not understand the value. That's a little bit on the company.
00:18:46:26 - 00:19:08:12 Irwin Hipsman You know, Customer Success, other parts of the company to let people know what the value is, not just the main point of contact, but even those active customers, you know, what is the value that you're generating from it? Because if you think about it, these are your potential repeat buyers down the road, and you're doing your company disservice by not letting not just telling the main point of context and you admits with the value.
00:19:08:17 - 00:19:30:07 Irwin Hipsman But those active customers was, you know, working, working on identifying what is the value to that your inactive customers, they don't they don't I don't know the brand solution or value because they've logged in two years ago. And you know, they still have a username password, but they never use it. The executives or the decision makers, they'll probably know their brand.
00:19:30:10 - 00:19:57:01 Irwin Hipsman The person who, you know, purchase who signed off. So not the main point of contact, but the person who signed the contract, assuming it's not procurement, they'll know the brand. They'll probably get the solution to some degree, because somebody explained to them, you know, you need to sign here because this is what solution does, you know, they probably don't fully understand it, but enough to go, you know, a it and the value, they probably should understand the value.
00:19:57:01 - 00:20:16:25 Irwin Hipsman They don't really need to care about the solution. But who really knows about brand. But they should know about the value. Which goes back to what I was talking about earlier with those active customers. Part of, you know, keeping, you know, letting customers know about what's happening with your product. It's not just around product update, but, you know, how do you tell, how do you inform your customers?
00:20:17:02 - 00:20:41:00 Irwin Hipsman What is the value that they're getting out of the product? The main point of contact admin champions. They all know the value, but there's a whole other group of people, particularly those active customers and executives who may or may not know the value. And that would be part of what I would do was, you know, as a repeat buyer program, restart the repeat buyer program before the person leaves the company, not wait till they've left.
00:20:41:02 - 00:21:05:10 Irwin Hipsman So the person who signed the contract left the company. We should be going after them. Well, but if if you've if you've never communicated with them during the two years, you know that they were with you, then you know, it's a tough sell. So that repeat buyer program starts before the person even leaves the company. So step one, is to one is to identify who are those.
00:21:05:10 - 00:21:29:27 Irwin Hipsman Repeat. You know who's left the company. So we talked about you know, how to do that. You know, I can talk a lot more about, you know, once you've got people's LinkedIn profiles, how do you then, you know, keep track of it. The key is LinkedIn profile. I mean, that's there's no gold standard, but that's as close as you get to, you know, knowing when people leave, clearly somebody may know like a customer success manager may know or an account manager may know.
00:21:29:27 - 00:21:47:22 Irwin Hipsman They should go to the CRM and say, no longer a company. So begins to trigger what the next step is. The next step is to incentivize them. So at Forrester, we were lucky. We had a very easy incentive in that we have can't you know, as I had content so we could send people notes saying, hey, we saw you left your company.
00:21:47:24 - 00:22:05:15 Irwin Hipsman Here's, you know, some content that we think would be valuable that's behind the firewall you don't have access to anymore. We can give you 90 days of access to or behind the firewall, or here's ten reports we think would be helpful as you interview. So you can go into the interview really smart. But other companies have events. So it's usually $1,000.
00:22:05:15 - 00:22:22:11 Irwin Hipsman Well give that person a ticket. Don't give him 50% off. Give him a ticket to the event or you still have a community gradual, you know, don't kick them out of the community since you know, because they're no longer company. Let them know. No, you're still you're still welcome the community. We hope you participate in the community. You know every company know you.
00:22:22:18 - 00:22:43:04 Irwin Hipsman If you're Salesforce, you can't give somebody Salesforce. You know, here's our CRM. Play with it for six months. You know but every company has something that they can most company. It's something they could give to a somebody who's left to incentivize them to continue that relationship going. If they're an advocate, have them continue to advocate for, you know, what's wrong with that?
00:22:43:07 - 00:23:03:29 Irwin Hipsman And then the nurturing you need to communicate with people, with these people differently than a prospect or a customer. If you just send them the prospect emails, they're going to say, this is weird. It's like they're treating me like a prospect. I know this company. If you treat them like their current customer, you talk about the product updates and you know, you know, whatever.
00:23:03:29 - 00:23:22:13 Irwin Hipsman It's like, well, I'm not a customer anymore. So it's a little bit of an art, and science is how do you communicate with with the people who know you? But they still but they no longer have a relationship with you. So, like, the roommates moved out of the house, do you stay in touch with the roommate or now, or was a direct relationship?
00:23:22:13 - 00:23:44:23 Irwin Hipsman I'm done with this person, but the nurturing has to be. It has to be. You know, you have to thread a needle in that. It's meant to be sort of prospect communication but not prospecting type of communication. So, you know, and if you have a customer webinar, invite them to that customer webinar. Don't fight them to a prospect webinar.
00:23:44:29 - 00:24:00:00 Irwin Hipsman They don't want to they don't need to go to a prospect webinar. So that is pretty much it. And I know we want to Josh, want to ask a few questions. We've got about five minutes left and, we'd love to hear for any questions from folks.
00:24:00:02 - 00:24:19:16 Josh Zerkel Thanks, Aaron. That was awesome. You know, it's interesting. It strikes me that in speaking with you and prepping for our chat today, this is the first time I've ever actually heard anyone formally talk about a repeat buyer program. Why do you think so few companies have this sort of formal program? Because as soon as you explain it, it seems totally obvious.
00:24:19:21 - 00:24:36:12 Josh Zerkel Like everyone who works in any sort of marketing or sales capacity knows it's way easier to buy to a sell something to an existing customer than to someone new off the street. And you and the companies work so hard to get those people in the door. It makes sense to continue to keep them close.
00:24:36:12 - 00:24:59:08 Irwin Hipsman In my department, it does befuddle me. Why? You know, companies spend so much time marketing to people who are never going to buy. And here's somebody who could potentially buy who you just say, well, we'll wait for them to, to when they're ready, they'll give us a call. It's amazing, you know, you want, you want, you know, you don't want them to, you know, if you if you start communicating with them, I would suggest starting.
00:24:59:08 - 00:25:16:04 Irwin Hipsman Wait about 30 days. Don't reach out to them immediately. But if you find out somebody has left, you know, wait, wait a little bit for them to get their feet wet. But I wouldn't wait six months either. So I think 30 days is the starting off point. And.
00:25:16:07 - 00:25:31:28 Irwin Hipsman But I was going to say, yeah, I would just, I would, I would start there and you, you want to be top of mind because at some point they're going to go to somebody and say, oh, well, I think we need this product. Like what was something just like it. And then they ask, well, it's not just like it.
00:25:32:05 - 00:25:53:12 Irwin Hipsman Okay, let's look around. What else is there? And you start, you know, you know, getting, you know, the competition gets in there. You don't want the competition getting in there before you get in there. For a repeat buyer, that would be just be that would be like malpractice. From a marketing, a sales person to that they've already talked to one of your competitors and they viewed you as a private company.
00:25:53:12 - 00:25:55:02 Irwin Hipsman Just no excuse for that.
00:25:55:05 - 00:26:17:18 Josh Zerkel Yeah. This this is so interesting. One of the challenges, I think, in you alluded to this a bit is people move around. It's hard to keep track of them, LinkedIn being the gold standard of people announcing like, hey, I've switched jobs, I've gone to XYZ company. How do you stay on top of the motion of people across all of these companies, other than like sitting up an entry for someone to post an update their way?
00:26:17:20 - 00:26:40:01 Irwin Hipsman You know, the way I work with clients is let's first do the the basic cleanup. So you've got 10,000 people. You know, and we talked about, you know, those inactive users and the specialists. Let's let's sort of ignore them for the moment. But you know, we've got 5000 people that are our main point of contact. Admins, champions, frequent users.
00:26:40:01 - 00:27:10:17 Irwin Hipsman Let's zero in on that. You know, we will update, you know, the, the database and provide the LinkedIn URL. That's the key. And then once a month you can, you know, for a 10th the cost. We can go in. We've got the LinkedIn URLs and we can do the two the quick update. So the benefit of like of LinkedIn is it's as rapid as you can get some of the other tools out there.
00:27:10:19 - 00:27:33:03 Irwin Hipsman I mentioned Apollo and zoom in for a great, fantastic, but at lags. So for a repeat, you know, repeat buyer program, somebody said, well, I've got we use Apollo. Well, it could take them six months to identify that person and then it's too late. That's why you want to use LinkedIn. And, you know, it gets really easy, like on a monthly is certainly no less than a quarterly basis.
00:27:33:06 - 00:27:47:06 Irwin Hipsman That should be, you should go through everybody who's moved move. I would argue a monthly basis probably. Right. But it's so cheap. Once you've got the LinkedIn profiles. Now, why wouldn't you do it on a monthly basis? I mean, literally pennies a name.
00:27:47:08 - 00:28:03:02 Josh Zerkel Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think just making sure you have people's LinkedIn profiles staying on top of of building a process that you do this regularly, putting the wheels in motion, it just sounds like it would compound so dramatically over time for very low investment.
00:28:03:04 - 00:28:23:29 Irwin Hipsman Yeah. And the other thing, the other thing just drives me crazy is up. Somebody will sign up for an e-book, and I'll and most companies insist I have a corporate address. I would argue take whatever address they want. You want their Gmail address because when they leave, you can get you can get their corporate just down the road when they leave.
00:28:24:01 - 00:28:40:24 Irwin Hipsman You don't want to be sending emails to them or asking them to connect on LinkedIn. You want their their Gmail address, and that's what you don't get from the Apollos and Zoom's of the words you don't get the Gmail address is my understanding. You get your corporate address. If I, hold on to their Gmail. Hey, I do.
00:28:40:26 - 00:28:49:11 Irwin Hipsman When I talk to people, they go crazy. I say, let's keep both. It's like, why should we keep both? When they leave the company, we want to be able to communicate with them. So yeah, if.
00:28:49:11 - 00:28:50:09 Josh Zerkel It's the only way.
00:28:50:12 - 00:28:55:11 Irwin Hipsman Email, hold on to it. Don't overwrite it with their corporate email address.
00:28:55:13 - 00:29:11:22 Josh Zerkel Well, this is great. Erwin, I want to thank you so much for this really interesting conversation and I've learned so much myself. This is pretty amazing and I wish this had occurred to me earlier, but I'm glad to hear from the expert. Erwin, where would you like people to find you online?
00:29:11:24 - 00:29:32:22 Irwin Hipsman Well, they can certainly connect with me on LinkedIn. Or when. Harassment. I'm the only Erwin harassment on the planet. Or my website has also lots of resources. The the access to the B2B customer contact database, health research, other things I'm doing with customer lifecycle marketers, executive engagement. So repartee dotcom, is the place to go to learn a lot more about what we do.
00:29:32:25 - 00:29:50:26 Josh Zerkel Great. Well, Erwin, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you for joining us, Leon. Behind the scenes. Thank you for making sure the show ran smoothly. I invite all of you to continue the conversation in the AMA thread before from Erwin is in there as well to answer your questions and we will see you at a future event or see you in the gradual community.
00:29:51:02 - 00:29:52:03 Josh Zerkel Thank you all so much and again.
00:29:52:09 - 00:29:54:10 Irwin Hipsman Great working with you. You've been a pleasure.
00:29:54:13 - 00:29:56:25 Josh Zerkel My pleasure. Thank you so much.
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