JP Clement is the CEO of boomtime. He has over 30 years of experience in marketing, digital strategy and product management for companies ranging from startups to global brands such as Madison Square Garden, General Mills, DFS Group Ltd, Johnson & Johnson and National Geographic. JP has worked for and helped companies in both B2C and B2B sectors, and founded three digital strategy and marketing agencies after working for many years on the corporate side of marketing. JP’s passions are analytics, digital products and creating the right strategy at the right time for the right audience.
Questions
Highlights
JP’s Journey
JP shared that he has always thought that marketing was kind of his calling just because the other choices were too boring and didn't really fit his personality. So he has been doing marketing, as mentioned, for a very long time. He went to college in Paris, France, as you can tell by his accent, and ended up in business school in the US specializing marketing, and then started his journey in marketing a long time ago in the US and he has stayed in the US since. And his marketing journey has taken him many, many different places, he thinks, without bragging, he has probably done every type of marketing by various to do, he started obviously, in traditional marketing, doing couple of things that you could do back in the days with traditional marketing.
He did consumer packaged goods marketing at the beginning of his career, then he moved into direct marketing, database marketing and catalogue marketing. And then he went to the internet side of things in 1998, so quite a while ago when people were still trying to figure out how to do marketing on the internet in a digital space. And he has been doing within digital marketing, probably every type of marketing, by various tools that you can think about. So, anywhere from influencer marketing to word of mouth marketing, to email marketing, and he can go on and on and on and on.
But in the past 10 years, he has basically worked on the agency side, actually, more than 10 years ago, about 14 years now. And before that, he worked on what we would call the client side, and employed a lot of marketing agencies. And when he was moved to the agency side of things, he was always kind of fascinated and curious about how he could make this marketing agency model work better for agencies. He’s very curious by nature, and he always like to figure out how to make things a little bit better, or significantly better. And he thought that marketing agencies were very inefficient, and very hard to scale. And so for about 10 years, he thought about really hard about how to do that. And he came up with some ideas but he started putting in place in 2018, so a couple years ago, and then he came across boomtime and really liked the way they were thinking about the scaling of marketing and it so ended up that the CEO of boomtime was moving on to another venture and needed to replace himself and hired him. So that's kind of where he is, why he is where he is today.
Me: Okay, awesome. That sounds really good, exciting journey. Thank you for sharing that JP. So we're pretty much still going through a pandemic. Where are you located exactly? You said you're in the US.
JP shared that they are in a beautiful and very empty New Mexico. He asked if Yanique was in Jamaica, to which she confirmed. He stated that the US is a big place, it basically touches Arizona, and it’s southwest. They have a border with Mexico but they're in New Mexico. And it's a very empty state. And they've been very impacted by the crisis, but their business was remote before the pandemic hits. And so, they've been actually as a business doing very well and they're very grateful for that.
Trends That Led to Your Success Regarding Marketing and Recommendations
JP stated that just to give a little bit of context, boomtime, they specialize in B2B businesses, so they're helping businesses that sell to other businesses, that's kind of their sweet spot, if you want to call it that. So, those businesses were especially hard hit by the pandemic, because the way they used to market themselves or sell was either on a one to one basis, by visiting offices, or companies or things like that, or by going to trade shows and conferences.
And when the pandemic shut down all these conferences, all of these trade shows, all these places where they would typically do their marketing as a business, their sales, these businesses which tend to be a little bit more conservative in terms of their marketing approaches, were really caught unaware.
And so, they (boomtime) have been doing really well as a business, because they have been able to reach out to all these businesses and show them the value of digital marketing in an age where face to face, in person meetings and trade shows, and conferences, as he mentioned, could not have happened any longer. So they've been doing really well that way.
So you're asking for pointers, but and this is one of them, you can do a lot of your marketing in a digital space without having to go into conferences and trade shows and those gigantic centres where people could aggregate and share germs and viruses.
And so, the digital marketing space is amazing for that, there's all kinds of tools and techniques that you can use that basically create the same amount of leads that you would generate at a trade show at a very reduced price, without the risk of getting infected by COVID-19 on top of it. And also, the beauty of digital marketing is that you can measure pretty much every single thing that that you do, which is not something that you can say of trade shows for instance, or conferences. They typically ask their clients, or prospective clients, what was your ROI on your trade shows? And they don't have an answer, because they never they say, “Okay, this is a place we have to be so we're going to buy our booth, we're going to send people there, and we're going to pay for all of that.” And then that's it, that was always seen as a cost centre and not really as an investment. When they look at digital marketing, they think of it as an investment, and they can prove to them that the return on investment on what they're going to be doing for them is much higher than they could ever expect from more traditional ways of doing marketing.
So, he’s throwing a lot of things at audience. But, they do a lot of education and they talk about how digital marketing can work for B2B businesses, how it can work actually better in this strange world that we live in today, and how they can achieve their sales and marketing goals through digital marketing in a very efficient and high return way.
How To Use LinkedIn to Drive New Business
Me: How can they use LinkedIn? They've heard a little bit about what you've stated as it relates to using digital marketing, there are lots of tools out there that can get your message across to your customers, especially in this space. But how do you use LinkedIn to get new business?
I have people sliding into my DMs sending me random messages about things that I'm not interested in, like, do I want to buy a cryptocurrency? And if I'm interested in stocks and trading, and that's not really my area of interest, so you know, just delete them every time I see them, and they're clearly looking sales.
But you really want to get people who are for your business, people who actually have the same interests, have a need for whatever service or product you're trying to solicit. But not just trying to slide into everyone anyone's DM and just become annoying.
So how can they use LinkedIn to drive new business?
JP shared that that question actually falls squarely into what they do a lot of and what they do the most of probably as an Agency. So they have a tool called Sales Connector that they use at boomtime that basically transforms LinkedIn into pretty much like a what they call it a virtual trade show. And so first, because of the people they're working with, those clients of theirs who are B2B companies, LinkedIn is obviously the prime social network for them and an amazing place to actually network and create those connections that can then turn into leads. But they use a semi-automated system to be more efficient, they create really advanced searches, they call them Boolean searches because they use and or not terms to create a very complex search. But that search identifies the exact targets that you're after as a business. And then they automate the connection messages, they have a way of crafting very interesting connection messages that get you about a 40% to 50% connection rate, which is really high.
But again, the fact that they were very careful about creating searches, but create a pool of targets that is very targeted but very specific to your business. And it's not going to be coming across as spam helps, of course, as well in terms of the connection rate. But they create those messages, and they have a style of messaging, but in a way it creates a more personal rapport.
Although you're trying to do business and you're a business talking to another business, in the sense you also are a person talking to another person. So they make their communications and their messaging very conversational, not salesy at all, and very human and very personal. And so, they created this and then they have all kinds of tools that helps them sort through those connections to decide whether a good lead or a bad lead and then send those connections to a business (CRM) Customer Relationship Management System. And so, create those integrations so those leads can be nurtured and followed up on and, and so on. So they have a whole system in place that helps people basically create those leads and generate those connections on LinkedIn.
App, Website or Tool that JP Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, JP shared that it's probably a very standard answer, and she has probably have heard that one quite a bit. But because they are remote, and they've had that new office for about a year and a half now, they are incredibly dependent on Slack. But he highly recommends it, it's a very well done product. If and when slack goes down, which doesn't happen very often but it happened about two months ago, or a month ago, it literally shuts down their business, it's their virtual office. This is where they communicate internally, this is also how they communicated with some of their clients and their partners via the guest feature. This is where they post all bunch of very important things for the running of their business, and how they keep in touch with one another.
So Slack, supercritical for them. Zoom, obviously, they wouldn't be able to live and work without Zoom both internally and externally. And they're big fan of Zoom, and more specific to what he does and what his sales team does is Pipedrive. So Pipe Drive is a CRM Customer Relations Management System and it's similar to things like HubSpot and, and salesforce.com, and things like that pardot. But it's way more visual and way easier to use and quite a bit cheaper to some of it. And so they wouldn't be able to survive as a company without PipeDrive. So highly recommended it as well.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on JP
When asked about books that have had a big impact, JP shared that he doesn't read a lot of business books. He doesn't necessarily believe in them that much, or trust in them, but it's just when he reads, he tends to read fiction. But there is a book that has had a big impact on him, especially because as in his career, he has helped a lot of startups. He has worked with several startups, he has run several startups himself, he has started several companies himself. So there is a book, he can't remember the exact title, but it's about the business model canvas, or BMC. And there are several books about it, but the seminal book, and he can visualize it, but he honestly can't remember the actual title, because there is a subtitle to it but it was published probably 10 years ago, or maybe 7 years ago.
It's an amazing book that kind of gives you a way to think about your business, it doesn't necessarily apply just to startup, especially interesting for startups, but also for existing businesses that are launching by reinventing themselves or rethinking their whole strategy. And it's an amazing book that kind of simplifies the whole operation and strategy around the business to literally a one page summary, very visual, very simple, but incredibly powerful tool, and especially because the process that they take you to get to that one page is amazingly helpful he thinks for companies, and he has used it many times. But if anybody does a search in amazon.com, or on Google for business model, Canvas, they'll find the book. And it's very highly recommended for businesses. Applying The Business Model Canvas: A Practical Guide For Small Business by Steven Imke
What JP is Really Excited About Now!
JP shared that there's a lot of things going on right now. He took over boomtime not too long ago, and made a lot of changes and they are evolving very rapidly and growing very rapidly as a company, as an agency. So he constantly has projects in place to try to help his people be better at what they do, give them the tools that they need to improve their performance. They educate also, as he mentioned, also, their clients a lot. So he has many, many of these from a professional standpoint, like things in place to help and actually one of the core values that he tried to sneak into their company, into boomtime, which didn't exist before is this idea of the fact that educating businesses and people within these businesses is the best way to unlock potential. And this is kind of the mantra that they've been repeating to their clients, to themselves, but they really pay a lot of attention to. They see themselves not just as a vendor that provides you digital marketing services, they see themselves as a company, as a group of people that not only help each other learn and get better what they do by do the same thing for the people that they are in contact with their customers and become more of a partner and an educator for these businesses.
So their core value says, “We are curious, we learned, we educate.” and it goes internally and externally. And this is something they've been working on constantly, it's a daily thing for them which has been a huge dividend. And he’s very proud of what his team as reacted to that very, very well and they're all putting in the same way and unearthing a lot of improvements to how they do business, how they deal with one another from an interpersonal standpoint at work and how they impact their clients.
Where Can We Find JP Clement Online
LinkedIn – JP Clement
Website – www.boomtime.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity JP Uses
JP shared that here is a quote, actually a little personal note, he’s a big fan of watches, and mechanical watches, and he tends to collect them until his wife tells him it's too many watches and he needs to sell some of them. But that's another story. But one of the watchmakers that he really like is Oris, it's a Swiss watchmaker.
And they have a watch, a special edition watch they release once in a while, and it has a quote in the bag that is amazing. And it's from the first African American diver in the Navy that rose to the rank of major or like a very high rank, one of the highest ranks. He was like a Navy deep diver; his name was Carl Brashear. And he has a quote that they engraved on the back of these special edition watches, which he thinks is amazing. He said, “It's not a sin to fall down. It's a sin not to try to get up.”
Me: Don't get discouraged by falling down, just make sure you get back up.
JP agreed and stated that make sure you try as hard as you can to get back up. And that's the sin to him was, you will get down at some point, you will fall down and the sin is not to try to get up by any means possible.
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