The future of compliant lead generation

Donnie Kenneth
Absolutely. Glad to be here.

Justin Ulrich
I threw the walks on the beach in there, hopefully you actually like walking on the beach.

Donnie Kenneth
It’s funny, I actually grew up on the coast, so I grew up on a beach on an island, so it kind of works.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, really? Where’d you grow up?

Donnie Kenneth
I grew up in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, so living on the coast in the south before I ended up here in the Midwest.

Justin Ulrich
Gotcha. Yeah, I live in Charlotte area, so we were just out in Outer Banks last year. We did a trip out there. It was a ton of fun. Cool area.

Donnie Kenneth
Yeah, it’s great. I miss it.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. Well, awesome. I guess to get started, why don’t we just talk a little bit about your journey real briefly and how you got to where you are and what it is that you currently manage?

Donnie Kenneth
Absolutely. So, I started off in the creative background, so you can imagine in marketing there’s usually two different areas people start from. One is from the creative side, whether it’s through brand management and doing the creative execution or they’re coming in from the business tactical side.

I started off early in my career on the creative side of the business, and as I would work through different companies, I found myself being more and more drawn to the marketing side of things and wanting to play a role in that business area. And when I moved here to Minnesota, sort of found a love for marketing in B2B SaaS world, so had been doing that for the past 11 years, and here at TE for four. 

And it’s been a real joy to be a part of a high-growth company and really help build a brand and make sure that it’s executing as best as possible across all of its audiences.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Yeah, I also lived in Minnesota as a side note. 

So what is it? Can you tell us a little bit about Total Expert? You mentioned it, you call it TE, just for listeners who may not know who it is. What does Total Expert do?

Donnie Kenneth
Yeah, so Total Expert, it’s funny, if you think about us from our financial services standpoint, we’re really the growth engine, which is the marketing engine behind the business. 

So we allow a business to go out and reach its end consumers, and not just do email marketing, but do actual true end to end lifecycle marketing for them, building those relationships. So it’s more than, quote, a CRM, because we’re not just helping you engage, we’re actually helping you know the full customer, attain the full customer, and then retain the full customer to really build that customer for life in financial services.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. You’ve got some really cool functionality in automation and stuff that we can talk to you maybe a little bit later. But I guess, you know, what are some ways that Total Expert helps to empower local marketing?

Since listeners of this are really looking for ways to engage with their local community, you know, expand their sphere, what are some ways that you guys can help with that?

Donnie Kenneth
Yeah, so I like to back up and really think about the first piece of it, which is, what is marketing? And there’s different ways of thinking about it. You can view marketing as putting your brand out there and just trying to sell stuff, which is like the most basic common part of marketing.

So if you’re somebody out there, if you’re a local loan officer, there is a method you could do, which is just go get leads and sell, get leads and sell, get leads and sell. You can do that in business. You can do that in other local marketing.

But that’s not really scalable, and it’s not really letting you build an authentic human connection. What Total Expert does is takes away some of that busy work, like trying to do the lead generation, trying to do the management, trying to orchestrate a full customer journey for somebody. Let’s take that, bring it into a system and automate it so that you as a marketer can spend your time doing the things that really drive those connections.

So when you have the system reaching out to people, building those relationships, getting the right information to them at the right time, it lets you then come in and truly understand how you can do that face-to-face marketing, that face-to-face connection, and then build that long-term relationship. 

So if I’m a local marketer, and I’m thinking about what am I going to do to be authentic, I always think that authenticity is critical in any marketing adventure. So if I’m a local marketer, I want to be authentic.

I want to be able to give my customer what’s the most real-time, real data that’s about them. So through a lot of the parts of the Total Expert ecosystem, which obviously Evocalize is now part of, and lets you bring in that data, whether it’s local data, customer intelligence data, and create the best marketing story for each of those individuals. And then once you get them, we help you maintain that relationship for life.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it is an interesting, you mentioned earlier, it can be pretty difficult to scale your marketing at a local level. A lot of times we talk on this podcast about being the mayor and trying to engage with as many folks in your community as possible, forming as many relationships as possible. 

But that can be tough, considering each one of those things, it’s a very physical thing, typically, that you’ve got to go out and make contacts, shake hands, and it takes a lot of time, and it is very difficult to scale.

Your automations that you guys provide seems like a perfect solution for someone who’s looking to scale their ability to form those relationships in a way that seems very authentic and very natural.

Donnie Kenneth
Yes, and that’s what’s critical, is even if you look in marketing 15 years ago, there wasn’t a lot of automation or orchestration that lets you do anything at scale. And I don’t look at it as replacing people in the industry, I look at it as empowering people. We’re not trying to take anybody’s jobs away, we’re trying to let everybody do more with their time, and be more authentic and more real with what they do.

And that’s what the Total Expert ecosystem lets you do.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, one of the challenges I know that, especially in the mortgage space, is the buying cycle is such a long cycle. 

Donnie Kenneth
It is. 

Justin Ulrich
So to have tools where like, what is on average, is it like a two or three year?

Donnie Kenneth
It can be. It ends up depending, it depends on where they’re at when they start the journey. So I would even say, when we think about those relationships and you’re a loan officer, there are some individuals or some families that may be in a position of wanting to buy, but they’re not in a financial place where they can do that yet. So how do you then get them, but already start to build that relationship?

One of the things that you’ll hear us talk about frequently, if you look across our website or listen to our founder and CEO, Joe Welu, he loves to talk about the educate, engage, and advise strategy. And that’s what we let loan officers do, or anybody who’s in financial services. When you’re doing those outreach pieces, it isn’t just about getting that lead, it’s about that relationship.

And so you have somebody who, suppose they’re not ready, they want to buy a house, but they’re not financially in that place. You can actually start that relationship now. But again, like you said, it’s hard because if they have a two-year window of getting themselves to that position, you don’t want to lose them.

You want to become that trusted advisor who can then help them along the way. So as a local marketer, you already want to start building that brand connection. You want to put yourself out there as, let me help you now, get you in the right direction, and then when they’re ready, you have that trusted relationship.

That’s when you can then say, now they’re an active lead for me. Now I can start engaging, and now I can start building that face-to-face relationship and help them get their loan.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. No, that’s perfect. And adding as much value as possible. So if you have someone who, like you said, maybe they’re interested, but they’re not quite ready. Maybe they’re waiting on rates to change, whatever it might be. For that time, though, you want to make sure you stay top of mind.

So serving up whatever content you can that provides value for them to help stay engaged during that time is super helpful. If you think like community events, calendars, or like tips and tricks on prepping your home, like all sorts of stuff that folks can provide just to stay top of mind so when that time comes, they’re thinking of you.

Donnie Kenneth
Yep, they’re getting ready for it. And also financial education along the way. What are the things they can do to help themselves get in that better position? All you’re doing is you’re helping build your own customer base right there.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure, for sure. So one of the things that we recently announced our partnership together, which is super cool. We’re working together in conjunction with rebel iQ to create the industry-first kind of solution for full-on customer journey management from attracting new borrower leads and even referral partners to capturing their information and then engaging with them over time to eventually convert them into a closed loan.

Super exciting partnership. On your end, what are some things that you’re excited about with the things that we’re going to be doing together?

Donnie Kenneth
Yeah, so as I said earlier, TE is a powerful platform, but the real benefit of being who Total Expert is is that we have this amazing base, but we’re the hub of what your financial services ecosystem is when it comes to marketing and engagement. 

So by having partners like Evocalize and like rebel iQ, you can do some of that lead capture, but you can do it in a very personal, local way. So you think of us as like we’re the train that you’re really on, that you’re using to drive everything, but you’ve got to have those conductors who understand who’s going to get on when, who’s taking the tickets, and that’s what rebel iQ and Evocalize do.

It lets you do everything where you need to do it, make it very personalized, and then bring it into the system and move them along their customer journey through Total Expert.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it’s definitely an exciting time. I think if you think about the way that the portals function, they have these engines that are just cranking these leads out, and they’re able to resell them to tons of different folks. And we know that times are changing with new FCC updates, and we’ve got January’s coming in hot, and that’s a deadline for folks to get their CRM databases compliant with their leads.

So this is a great tool that kind of mirrors the functionality of those portals and puts a portal in your pocket so that you’re able to actually generate your own leads in a way that they’re yours. They’re not shared. You can get in front of folks as quickly as possible.

Speed to lead matters. You can then get to them as quickly as possible near instantly with those leads that we’re collecting. They go right into your Total Expert Journeys, and you’re able to engage with them right away. So it’s a really incredible solution that’s not been done yet in the industry.

Donnie Kenneth
It is. And you mentioned the rules that are changing and having to work through compliance. One of the things that I think people forget. So we backed up earlier, and I said we’re not a CRM. But in the mortgage world, we do tend to function as a CRM. 

So you may think, why can’t I go get one of these larger, I’m not going to name them, but bigger CRMs that people may be more familiar with and think, wow, I’m in a big company. I have access to that. They’re a known national big brand. But they’re not purpose-built for financial services.

So you have two things you’re working against here. One is the speed to deploy that system is massive. You have a very long runway to get it ready because while it may be powerful, it’s not built for the way financial services work, the way Total Expert, Evocalize, and other parts of our ecosystem are.

So that’s one piece. So now you have this long, it’s expensive, and you have this long runway of getting something set up. And then the real downfall, particularly at financial services, particularly with home loans, is that you don’t have the compliance factor built in.

As you said, there’s a lot of regulation. There’s a lot of things people have to do. One of the beauties of us being a purpose-built platform and working with purpose-built partners like Evocalize or rebel iQ is that all of that compliance is built in.

So if you’re working in a company and you have your compliance team saying, hey, we’re going to spend a lot of time checking on this, the good news is that by using Total Expert, Evocalize, using our ecosystem, you have that compliance built in. It makes their job easier and you have that peace of mind that you aren’t doing anything that goes against the regulations.

Justin Ulrich
A hundred percent. I mean, it is a massive, massive help. Like we mentioned, in January, times are changing.

A lot of folks have kind of been sleeping on this change and they don’t quite know what could potentially happen to their business. I mean, the ramifications are massive, could result in millions of dollars in fines for those who are outside of compliance. So this is something that everyone definitely needs to wake up to as we’re going into the new year.

Donnie Kenneth
Absolutely. It’s one of those times I’m glad I work on the marketing side and not on the legal side of the business. In any industry, I’d rather stay on the marketing side and not the legal side.

Justin Ulrich
It’s good. We spoke with Eric Troutman a couple months ago. We had him on a podcast or on a webinar and we were talking about the changes that were coming.

He said the attorneys are already, it’s like there’s chum in the water. They’re just circling, waiting, and they’re already chomping at folks. You see a huge uptick. I think this year was like a 40% uptick in noncompliance lawsuits over last year, something like that. The change hasn’t even fully taken place yet, which is wild.

Donnie Kenneth
Yeah, it’s going to gear up. I mean, it could be disastrous for somebody that’s not paying attention. So my advice to anybody is keep your eye on the ball and work in something that’s designed for compliance.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. Switching gears a little bit, we mentioned Total Expert Journeys. For those who don’t fully know what they are, can you give just a brief explanation?

And then I also, as I understand, maybe everyone that’s using Total Expert may not even have their own Journeys developed. So what are some Journeys that folks can create that you think really hit it out of the park?

Donnie Kenneth
Yep, absolutely. So first of all, again, let me back up and think about what marketing is. And when you think about email marketing as an example, there is the idea that 15 years ago in particular, digital marketing was a thing.

So you could say, I’m going to start. I built my list. I’m going to just do random emails. And it’s start with email one. No matter what they respond, like I’m making some leads in, next comes email two, next comes email three. And you’re putting everybody through that same marketing experience.

When you think about a journey, it is really thinking about from that first potential interaction and across all of the different channels that are available to you, what are the ways that I want to engage with these individuals? And as you learn, as they react to your marketing pieces, that then forms the next step. 

It may be you realize that they prefer texting. Guess what? We have two-way texting through Total Expert. So if they’re responding to your text, then you can now continue through that text conversation and not try and keep pushing them down the email journey.

So you learn about how each individual responds to your marketing channels. You also learn what their responses are. So as they begin to engage with things, it may change the way you move them through their marketing path.

You may build a journey that says, you know what? We’re going to start with rate education. So you have a group of individuals that you know are going to be looking to buy in the next six months.

Let’s start educating them on rates and what we think rates are going to be doing for them in the next six months. As they make decisions, you may guide them into a place where you’re nurturing them because of the way they’re responding. You then let them have a nurture path where you can continue to educate and get them ready in a longer time.

You may have some that because you’ve now realized that they’re getting a better rate earlier and you’re able to, again, that personalized part of that customer journey, you’re able to make sure that you’re getting them in faster. So it really isn’t just about a standard waterfall effect of one email, two or three email. It’s going across all the channels. How do I engage? How do they respond? And how do I automate all of that?

And so with Total Expert, obviously, it could be complicated because a financial journey can be massive. We have tons of customers that do some amazing job of building their own very complex journeys. They have great marketing teams.

But one of the other benefits of Total Expert is we have our own expert content team. And so that means that when you buy Total Expert, you may be a small mortgage brokerage firm and say, I don’t have a big marketing team, but I know what I want to do. We actually have some pre-built journeys that we could then deploy into your system and help you do those things faster.

So it isn’t just the system. We have some of the piping and the plumbing already built for you. But it’s about, again, understanding what is the group of customers you’re going after and what are you trying to do with them? So let’s build a journey for that purpose.

Justin Ulrich
So for those who are listening who may be Total Expert customers, I know you guys have thousands of them. You’re massive. So if they’re listening and they don’t necessarily have journeys set up, how do they get started?

Donnie Kenneth
Oh, reach out to your customer service manager. Whoever is working with you. Anybody at Total Expert would be very happy to quickly connect you. Again, like the email marketing is great, but using the full omni-channel journeys, that’s what we do. Check out the website. We always say that.

I always go between two things. From a brand perspective, we have two things we love to say. We’re the customer-for-life company because that’s what we’re doing, not only building our own customers but helping you build customers for life.

But we do that by delivering the perfect customer journey. And if you’re not doing that in Total Expert, you’re not using the power of the system. And anybody from the company, reach out. We’d love to get you started on that.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Very cool. So switching gears a little bit.

So one of the things I reached out when we were kind of going back and forth before getting in the lab here, asked you a little bit about yourself, what do you like, whatever. You mentioned that you have an affinity for Muppets. And what is it that draws you to Muppets?

Donnie Kenneth
Oh, this is funny. So there’s two things. By the way, my team and anybody who knows me is probably laughing hysterically while watching this right now. So there are two things. And they’re actually both. I can bring them both into the business world, and it starts to explain a little bit about me and how I work.

The first piece is, and it applies directly to marketing, as I said earlier, authenticity is critical. I think that as a brand, whether it’s a business brand or a personal brand, you have to show up as who you are at any point in time. 

If you’re watching this on video right now, you’re probably looking at me thinking, this dude has tattoo sleeves and a bit of a mohawk. That doesn’t seem like a VP of marketing at a software company. But the reality is…

Justin Ulrich
In mortgage.

Donnie Kenneth
In mortgage, especially. I can scare the bankers when I go out. But the reality is, this is me, and it’s who I am. And I believe that – and anybody to show up and be the best you can be, you have to be authentically yourself. I do it here at work. I tell all my employees to do it.

And when you think about the Muppets, they’re authentically, they’re characters that never deviate from being who they are. Whether it’s wacky or weird, they don’t try and fit themselves into anybody’s box, which is awesome. And the second piece of it that I always, I love.

And by the way, I’ve actually used this answer in a job interview before and got the job, was when you think about being in the creative world. So anybody who’s worked in the creative world, and even in the marketing world to an extent, you can have individuals who may be a little wacky, a little weird. And in the marketing world in particular, things don’t always go as planned.

So when you think about watching the Muppet show, I always am like, you know what? Kermit’s kind of my hero because he takes this band of completely wacky people. Things always go wrong, but at the end of the day, you have to push through and you have to make the show go on.

And that’s how I view anything. Mistakes are going to happen, but you learn, you push through, and you bring everybody together as a team. No matter how they fit together, the show must go on, and it will be great in the end. That’s how I lead at work, and it’s totally my Muppet show philosophy for being a leader.

Justin Ulrich
That’s awesome. Yeah, we obviously grew up with Sesame Street and seeing Kermit. Hi-ho, Kermit the Frog here, Sesame Street News.

Donnie Kenneth
You know what? Again, it’s authentic. I believe in showing up as who you are all the time, and if you are, then people are going to love you, and you’re going to do your best.

Justin Ulrich
That’s awesome. No, that’s great. I tried dropping it into AI with a prompt to turn you into a Muppet. It didn’t quite get there.

Donnie Kenneth
I mean, it kind of works. I’m not wearing the glasses today, but typically I am. It’s kind of fun.

Justin Ulrich
I was like, man, he’s not wearing glasses, and he’s much larger than a typical Muppet. This thing had like a beanpole neck. I’m like, dude, I got to get this dude jacked. It was tough. It was tough. 

Donnie Kenneth
It’s pretty awesome.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, man. Well, hey, before we jump off, I just wanted to give you a chance to give someone a shout-out. Do you have anybody that you can think of? Maybe it could be one of your clients or whatever who’s doing their local marketing really, really well.

Donnie Kenneth
Oh, that’s a tough one really quick. Wow, one of our clients. They all do such great work.

I’m going to jump in and say it’s actually one of our banking clients that does a lot of work, but Dart Bank, I feel like. So obviously, we’ve talked a lot about how we work on the mortgage side primarily, but we do work with banks and credit unions, and we’re moving into that space. Also with insurance, by the way.

And when I think about local marketing, Dart Bank is doing a fantastic job as one of our early bank customers. When I see what they’re doing, they’re coming to Accelerate which is one of our annual conferences. They’ve been there the past two years.

We’ve actually given some awards just for the amount of work that they’re doing with a small team. Again, small team, small local bank, turning out an amazing amount of progress, like generating leads, converting people. They’re just doing a really nice job.

You can tell that there’s, again, authenticity in what they’re doing. So I would say shout-out to the Dart Bank team.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Good shout-out, Dart Bank. Good job. Good job. Keep it up. Keep it up.

So before we jump, I just wanted to give a quick shout-out again to folks, just inform them around our partnership that we have going on. As mentioned earlier, Attract, Capture, Convert, it’s a full, complex lead gen solution that’s super sophisticated, but we make it so simple. It’s like within less than a minute, you could actually launch your ads.

So easy. It’s crazy. Automatically build your rebel iQ landing pages, automatically drop leads into your Journeys within Total Expert, and then it even pushes them into contact groups that we can then retarget with more and more marketing.

So if you’re listening and you’re a Total Expert customer, go to evocalize.com/total-expert to check out this combined solution. You can actually activate your free account right then and there and just see how easy it is to create your campaigns.

You only pay for when you launch campaigns, so it’s a really cool program. Do you have anything else you want to close with, Donnie?

Donnie Kenneth
No. I’m just going to say I think you mentioned it earlier, but we recorded a great webinar with the Evocalize team. You should absolutely go and see it.

Seeing the demo, as Justin said, like things happen super fast in there. When you watch that demo in progress, it’s almost like magic across the screen, but I swear it’s real. We didn’t make anything fake and animated. It’s actually a great demo. It’s a great webinar. You should go and check it out. We’re excited about you guys being a part of our ecosystem.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Thanks again for listening. Donnie Kenneth. I’m going to start calling you Donnie Kenny. Thank you so much for joining us in the lab, my friend.

Donnie Kenneth
Awesome. Excited to be here. Thanks.

Justin Ulrich
You bet.

As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com. 

If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook @Evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize. 

And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.