Moira Vetter with Modo Modo Agency

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by on pay. Atlanta’s New standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Moira Vetter with Moto Moto Agency. Welcome.

Moira Vetter: [00:00:42] Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] And I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Moto Moto. How are you serving folks?

Moira Vetter: [00:00:49] Yeah, so Moto Moto is a full service B2B integrated agency. And so B2B really is business to business means we’re serving really complex, large global organizations and we’ve got a whole lot of them here in Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:05] So what’s your background? How’d you get involved in B2B marketing?

Moira Vetter: [00:01:08] Yeah, so I have been in B2B marketing actually longer than I have the agency side of the world. I’ve been in the B2B marketing arena for many, many years. I started in sales, and so that was really a very interesting kind of foundation for becoming a marketing and, you know, agency person, because I knew what marketing needed to do for my business.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] So once you did that, then you went out on your own to develop an agency to help other folks.

Moira Vetter: [00:01:43] I worked in several agencies. You know, again, Atlanta is a real stronghold of business to business, you know, kind of global brands. And so I worked at other agencies, so I was in leadership positions. I came up in the account service function. And then after running a couple other agencies, I decided I have to do this for myself. So launched Moto Moto about 16 years ago.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:08] And then what were your first clients pains that you were able to solve?

Moira Vetter: [00:02:13] You know, it was really interesting. We started the company just before the economic crash in 2008. And so, you know, the first few years of the company were very much all the disruption that happens when, you know, economies are really rocky. So there were a lot of companies that changed hands. So we worked with a lot of private equity companies that were buying up middle market companies, and a lot of companies were reinventing themselves, maybe diversifying into other markets to try to figure out where the strong markets were in a tough economy. And honestly, that served us really well in the long haul because, you know, whatever the challenge is, companies, particularly large leading companies, are always looking to pivot. So when you think about what happened during the pandemic and even right now, the economy is kind of interesting. Again, you know, we really kind of we began at a time when we were, you know, reinventing ourselves alongside our clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:14] So when they’re going through some sort of transition, you’re a good partner for them to help them rethink that and to maybe change the strategy a little or help them kind of implement a new strategy.

Moira Vetter: [00:03:25] Exactly. And, you know, companies are always in a transition. It’s just when the stakes are really high and there’s a lot of, you know, global change, you know, not just like soft change management, like, well, we’re going to have to do things a little differently. But, you know, when the world is changing and whole industries are evolving, you know, companies need good partners who can be really smart, you know, nimble, flexible, have a lot of, you know, references in their history to draw from in terms of, well, you know, we’ve worked with companies that went through something, you know, maybe not exactly this, but, you know, similar pressures or changes. And so I think, you know, our clients really turn to us. It’s it is a partnership. You know, it is not simply a business relationship. It’s absolutely a partnership.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:17] Now, are there niches that you serve or do you you know, B2B is broad, so are there certain kind of industries that you specialize in or is it pretty much industry agnostic?

Moira Vetter: [00:04:26] Well, I mean, it could be industry agnostic, but there absolutely are some, you know, sort of pockets of strength. I think technology, again, a lot of this has to do with where we are, right? Atlanta is a huge market for technology, particularly payments and financial services. You know, we just really have a lot of depth in that area. And then also health care. Health care is such a it’s like an octopus, right? It’s a constantly changing thing. The ecosystem changes. There’s a lot of consolidation in the market with companies buying and selling. So that turns out to be, you know, a very interesting market. And then manufacturing, you know, complex goods and services, you know, in a, you know, maybe a vertically integrated supply chain. Right. Something that has. Million touch points. Those are all things that are difficult to wrap your head around, sometimes really hard to market if you don’t have the business background. And that’s where our strengths are.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:36] Now, when you got into this, how did you visualize building out a team and and going and, you know, being 16 years in now? How has the kind of where you’re at today, is it matching your vision of when you started?

Moira Vetter: [00:05:51] Yeah, I think it’s you know, I have always been a lifelong learner, which is, you know, you’re kind of looking at how people have done things and what things seem to work. And then you’re also looking forward and, you know, kind of sniffing to see what what feels like it might work in the future. And, you know, we’ve always been there. We’ve we’ve looked at what other agencies do. We’ve looked at what management consulting firms do, because in many ways, we’re a consultancy. You know, in addition to being an agency. So I think large professional services firms, we’ve drawn a page out of that. And then, you know, some of it is really building alongside your clients. We talk a lot about co-creation and, you know, you can only learn so much from the past. You know, you can only look back and know what has worked for these companies and these environments. But if you actually look at your customers and go figure out what’s happening to them and find out the best ways you can compliment them and, you know, really fill the role to, you know, to plug the holes that they have.

Moira Vetter: [00:07:03] You know, that is the best way to kind of, you know, evolve your model. We also had a relationship with Gartner and their industry analysts that traditionally were technology analysts, but they also made an acquisition several years ago of the company that did Challenger marketing. And so they also cover the marketing ecosystem. And really looking at what Gartner analysts are seeing in the the marketing space, you know, given the evolution of marketing technologies, right, all the the marketing automation systems and all the ad platforms and everything that’s happening with technology and marketing, it’s created an opportunity for some of these analysts to not not really speculate, but, you know, research and talk to people. And they were already talking to large companies, you know, in terms of what solutions they were seeking and how they were solving problems. And so we also had a relationship with Gartner. So we were really, you know, in real time looking at what innovators are doing, not just, you know, historically looking at what did Madison Avenue companies do or how did other agencies scale.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:19] Now, you mentioned consulting as part of your service. How do you kind of differentiate consulting from agency work?

Moira Vetter: [00:08:30] You know, I don’t know that we differentiate it. I think I think the way we approach any way we help a client is very consultative in nature. So we’re not productized, we’re not selling sets of, you know, some companies you go to and they say, well, we have these three things that we do and you can buy this, that or the other. And we always start with what are your challenges, right? What is happening in your business, in your marketplace, to your customers, and where do you fit and what is difficult for you to do from a sales and marketing standpoint or what jobs you know, is your brand not currently doing for you that would raise your credibility? And then we talk about, okay, so if that’s the challenge, how do you solve for those things? And then you know what what services do you need to kind of help that? So, you know, I don’t think we find out if people want a consultant or want an agency. I think increasingly they expect that you can do whatever they’re going to need. So I think of it more as a style of approaching clients, the consultative side of the world.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:48] So you’re working kind of shoulder to shoulder with them to help them solve a problem of which your specialty is marketing and advertising.

Moira Vetter: [00:09:58] Yes, Yeah. And it goes broader than just the marketing and advertising from the standpoint of corporate communications and really complicated global companies. You know, it can include employee communication. So internal comms, you know, anytime you have a complex organization with complicated things, there are a lot of people that need to be on the same. Hedge to effectively do what you do, right, to deliver the goods, to support the things. And so, you know, I feel like that’s really what we’re trying to do is is help. Help our clients understand the best solutions, the best brand solutions, the best communications applications to bring and align all those stakeholders. Obviously, again, it’s a strange economy at the moment and so people are very focused on demand gen and you know, how do we increase leads or how do we get more quality leads in the door? But you know, we, we round the corner of the economy and, you know, even if you just go back nine months ago, people weren’t saying, how do I sell more things? They were all saying, how are we going to find new team members to be this company that we’re trying to be now? And so we did a lot of recruitment, marketing, and we did employer branding. So, you know, from our perspective, it’s just a different side of the brand story.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:32] So when you’re approaching whatever the challenge is, your methodology is kind of similar, that it starts by just asking questions about, you know, what is the outcome they desire, and then kind of drilling deep within that amongst, you know, around their culture and their kind of uniqueness.

Moira Vetter: [00:11:50] Yes. But I also think that a huge part of our responsibility is not just asking what they want to accomplish, but challenging whether it’s possible to accomplish what they want to accomplish. And part of that is done by talking to the audiences themselves, right? Talking to those stakeholders. You know, I think you could just show up to somebody and say, Hey, what do you want to be known for? Okay, so we’re going to go tell the world that you’re that over and over and over and louder and louder until they believe it. And we we are more like the people that show up and say, what do you want to be known for? And they’ll say X and we’ll say, Well, you know, there’s already three companies that are known for that. Is it possible for us to talk to your customers? Okay, we’ll talk to whatever lost customer key customer, different subsets and come back and say, it’s funny, you wanted to be known for X, but but they all think of you as y and y. Seems like it’s even higher value. What if we framed your positioning this way? You know? So that’s kind of the way we approach it. And I think it’s critical to know what companies want to be known for and how they want to lead. But, you know, you have to do that in service to a market. And so we we frequently talk about we put market before marketing because we don’t want to know all the marketing activity you want to do first. We want to understand what markets you’re trying to lead in and you know how you’re positioned to be the best, you know, there. And then we can talk about the activity that will help reinforce that or, you know, expand your your reach.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:37] So when you’re kind of having these I mean, that seems to me a difficult conversation that not every marketer would want to have. You know, kind of just saying, well, you tell me you’re great at ABC, but, you know, I talk to your clients and they think you’re better at D.F.. Is that like, how do you manage that expectation? I mean, that’s a not everybody’s going to be like, Well, that’s nice, but we want to be ABC and we’re paying you. Like, how do you kind of manage their expectations?

Moira Vetter: [00:14:10] Yeah, if we do our job right, we are working with people that want somebody that’s challenging them. So, you know, there are a lot of people that, look, we’ve done our research, we know who we are, we know what we want to be, and we need somebody to help us get the word out, you know, and that’s one kind of people. And the good news is when that’s what you want to do, you don’t have to spend as much money on research. You don’t have to spend as much money on expertise because you’ve done a lot of that work and you really are looking for an execution partner. We are a thought partner with our clients and so the people that hire us are higher up the food chain, right? These are C-suite people usually or very high level VP’s who know what they know and know what they don’t know. And they’re looking for somebody that they can trust to come in and really help them find find out what they don’t know, you know, so that they can make bigger, you know, incremental impacts with the with the marketing effort.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:15] And that’s great. That’s great advice for every business owner to really be clear on who is your best fit client so you can serve them to the. Best of your ability. So by you positioning yourself that way, you can eliminate a lot of potential clients that just don’t fit that mold.

Moira Vetter: [00:15:34] Exactly. And and you know, the nice thing is, you know, we have a lot of partners. We’ve done what we’ve done. You know, we’ve got a great network and we know tons of people. So if we you know, and it’s very common that we talk to somebody and they say, look, we’re really just looking for these, you know, great designers or, you know, we have this great in-house team and we have an insights team and we’ve got great design. We just need good content. You know, if what they need is really singular, we know a whole bunch of people that are really great at the one singular thing. And we can we can make referrals because we also the last thing you want is to have somebody say, That’s nice, we don’t do that. Sorry. You know, we’re really interested in understanding the kinds of partnerships people need and the kinds of things that they’re trying to accomplish. And then whether it’s us or not, we want to put them in the hands of the best people to solve those kinds of challenges.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:32] Now, you mentioned some of the niches that are kind of sweet spot areas for you. Are those all like super large enterprise level organizations or can they be startups or funded startups? Like is there kind of a size component?

Moira Vetter: [00:16:46] Yeah.

Moira Vetter: [00:16:46] Yeah. We we do not do startups, so we have two sizes. So let’s call them the big boys, right? So billion dollar plus could be publicly traded or privately held, either one or Challenger. And so I mentioned Gartner before and it works the same in the Forrester network as well. There’s they’re constantly indexing the global leading companies, the people that are nipping at their heels which in Gartner world is is challengers. Right. The people that are mid market and really growing aggressively let’s say the the Inc 5000 right. Or the Inc 500 companies. And those are the areas that we focus on because especially where B2B is concerned, if you are a small, mature company that is, let’s say $20 Million or less, you probably don’t have any marketing budget. You may not even have a marketing department, you probably have not worked with an agency. You may be very focused on, you know, a sales model, right? Sales driven, you know, or a channel marketing, you know, where you work through ISOs or value added resellers and marketing may not even be on your radar. But once you get up into that 100 million, $200 million arena all the way up to the billion dollar plus, then your organization’s maturity has gotten to the place where you have a marketing function, you know, usually these days anyway. And this really did happen a lot in the pandemic. All of a sudden B2B CMO’s got their day right and people understand there needs to be more investment.

Moira Vetter: [00:18:42] You have to be able to be digital. You can’t solely rely on, you know, man to man selling. You have to have that kind of marketing sophistication. And also I think the evolution of account based marketing and a lot of the technologies that support that kind of key account selling, you know, in in our arena, there was a study that the Association of National Advertisers did with LinkedIn, and they have determined that in a business to business, an average business to business sale, there are approximately 17 decision makers that are a part of that. And I’m trying to get the right number. But it’s it’s you know, we used to always say 9 to 12 months, but I think it’s like 11 to 18 months to sell a really complex B2B offering, high ticket item sale. And so, you know, you you can’t just run any run one of anything and do the job. You have to be invested in marketing and invested in knowing what customers need to sort of move that large committee through a consideration cycle. And so that’s those those larger companies, you know, 2 million, 200 million and up. Those are the companies that we’re really working with because then we’re not there trying to defend why they should be doing marketing. They already know that we’re trying to really collaborate with them on the best ways to test marketing and the best ways to reach those audiences. To to make their goals happen.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:25] Now, do you have any advice for maybe business owners who are approaching the level that you can work with them, but they’re not there yet? What are some of the things they should be doing in order to get to that last level, the next level, in order to be appropriate for you as a appropriate client for you?

Moira Vetter: [00:20:45] Yeah. Um, I think, you know, and there’s a lot of talk about, um, you know, certain professions where everybody thinks there’s an expert and, you know, the real expert in whether marketing what, what kind of marketing works for your company is your customer, not some internal committee. So I think the kinds of companies that instead of spending six months asking everybody, do you like this one, do you like how do you like how this headline reads? You know, do you think we should go with this concept or that concept? The people that make that really personal and ask everybody for a long time need to stop doing that and quickly say, you know what, It’s either A or B, and we’re going to test it and we’re going to let the buying audience tell us. And that is something that you really see in those smaller companies. There’s still this very here’s what Bob wants it to say. Instead of let’s see what customers respond to or let’s see what customers that are repeat purchasers respond to or let’s see what the highest margin customers respond to most. And let’s, you know, do more of that. I think any of those things where you more quickly put something in the market and you test it so that the market can tell you that’s that’s really where you see that rapid growth start to take place.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:12] So getting real data instead of just all your smart folks in a room with a whiteboard.

Moira Vetter: [00:22:18] Yep, yep.

Moira Vetter: [00:22:19] You just have to stop That mean all those smart people should be talking to whether you have an inside agency, you know, with a lot of people have an internal marketing department and they’ve built what they call their own internal agency or an external agency. Let all those smart people at the whiteboard talk in advance of a concept being presented and then narrow it down to the two strongest contenders and then launch it in a test instead of, you know, sitting on it for nine months.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:53] So talking to your customers is an important component of your the way you go to market.

Moira Vetter: [00:22:58] Yes, absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:00] And do you think Go ahead. Do you think that people are just afraid to do that? They’re afraid of what they’re going to hear? Is that why they’re hesitant or are they just never thought of that?

Moira Vetter: [00:23:09] I think, yeah, there’s a lot of things, you know, sometimes in large organizations, you know, existing customers who certainly in B2B are your best customers, salespeople and account managers can be very proprietary. And I understand that, right? You don’t want you don’t want to get any surprises, right? You think everything’s going great, and then they tell others that, you know, something, something should be different. But particularly in B2B, again, you’re not dealing with unlimited audiences. You’ve got usually finite audiences that hopefully have some infinite areas of need and you know where you can come up with recurring revenue and you owe it to yourself to be talking to them. And the best companies that I know, the senior executives are going and talking to those customer. And there’s a culture of, you know, visiting right along, even as an example, you know, in the consumer marketplace, you always see, you know, people in the malls, right, talking to doing man and woman on the street interviews. And you know what what you see a lot in the B2B world is you will have companies that have a customer advisory council. And so you might have, you know, your top 20 clients and you do you put together sort of an informal board with that customer advisory group and you bring them together, You maybe bring in an outside speaker so they get some value add and they’re learning. And then also you often our clients will be, you know, sharing product roadmaps with them and saying, Hey, we’re thinking of going here. What does that sound like to you? Would you change that? Or which of these things are most compelling to you? The companies that want to be and are the leading companies are not afraid to have that conversation. And, you know, we like courageous people. And sometimes working with somebody who can have an outside in perspective or have some of that data makes it easier to be courageous because you’re not guessing.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:22] So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Moira Vetter: [00:25:27] Uh, what could we have more of?

Lee Kantor: [00:25:30] What do you need more of?

Moira Vetter: [00:25:32] Yeah, I think. I think we need more people that are willing to do that. Ab testing I’m talking about. So as an example, for many years people have been putting in place account based marketing software or trying to better connect their their marketing automation systems between their sales and their marketing groups. And they talk a lot about testing and they do a lot of research. And at the moment of truth, it seems to me that often what happens is we have two really great ideas that we would like to test, and somebody just decides we’re going to go with the one we all like the best. Instead of testing. I still feel like there’s not enough testing happening. There’s a there’s a lot of talking about testing, but there’s not enough testing. In my early career, before I even worked in the agency world, I was a sales person first and then I did direct response newsletters. And you want to talk about old school? It was number ten envelopes. And you know, you were testing the headline on the outside of an envelope and you would be blown away at, you know, everyone would say, there’s nothing creative here.

Moira Vetter: [00:26:58] You’ve got you know, one of them has a buck slip, one doesn’t or they’re all in number ten envelopes, but one has this headline, one has the other. But the beauty of it was you really were controlling your variables. You always just had one thing that was different, whether it was a headline or an insert or the offer you were testing. And so you got so much valuable data on not only what people want, but what they will respond to or respond to quickly. You know, what will make them be repeat customers. And I do feel like that there needs to be a lot more of that, especially in a world that we’ve just gone through the last three years where nothing is the same as it used to be, you know? So there’s a lot less reliable, there are less reliable models to turn to because so many things have changed. And the way you quickly find out what works best when you’re in a state of constant change is to test.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:00] Yeah. And it’s so much easier to test things nowadays than it was back then.

Moira Vetter: [00:28:05] It really is.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:06] And it’s funny that you mentioned that because it’s so much easier and yet it seems like we’re doing it less or we’re not thinking that’s important. Whereas back in the day, especially in that world of direct response, they were testing all kinds of crazy things that people would think would be, you know, irrelevant. But they were wanting to know, you know, like you said, from the font to the color to the, you know. Exactly. So it’s and now it’s so easy to just test everything and and people are hesitant. I attribute a lot of it to the fear of they’re kind of afraid of what. Might bubble up out of this.

Moira Vetter: [00:28:44] Exactly. Well, you know, and I recently I had somebody say something to me and it was a prospect. It’s not a customer. It was a prospect we talked to. And I haven’t heard this one in a long time, but I remember we used to have one of my agencies. We had we would work with the sales teams and you’d have the person that would say, Well, we can’t offer that because if we do, we’re going to end up getting ten times the inbound call volume and we won’t be able to keep up with the demand, right? It was I remember there was a whole period of time where everything was, if it works, we just won’t be able to keep up with the demand. And I’m not saying it’s not, you know, a wonderful problem to have, but I don’t think it’s the it’s not usually the the key use case. I don’t think people should stop. I think they should be delighted to find out that. Okay, we broke the phone system because we had so much demand. Right. We have a phone system.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:47] Right. Let’s solve that problem. That’s a better problem to solve.

Moira Vetter: [00:29:50] Exactly.

Moira Vetter: [00:29:52] Or broke the Internet, Right. We had so many people hit the site, we broke our server and we had to upgrade to a better, you know, environment or any of any of those things. I think those are better than trying to control demand.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:07] So now you’ve written a book and you’re writing a second. Can you talk about the importance of having a book or the process that you went through in your first book?

Moira Vetter: [00:30:16] Yeah. I’m going to say, first of all, the importance of having a book. Ricky Steele, who’s sort of an Atlanta legend, likes to call a book his $8 business card. And, you know, it’s it’s kind of in many regards, it is a way to prove you’re credible in something. For me, I think doing the first book and for anybody a first book is do I have enough information in me that’s useful? You know, can I can I go through this process? And once I got through that part and went, Oh, I can write a book, it can be good, it can have good information, I can support it. Once I did that, I was like, Wow, why didn’t I write it about this? Or now, you know, some new dynamic we were seeing. And so, you know, I’m writing something more holistically about the brands that we serve. My first book was more about the entrepreneurial process and going from the very beginning of a business through scale, you know, either to going public or selling or divesting, you know, maybe to private equity. And that’s whole middle ground when you’re scaling up and you’re getting investors. Because I have worked my whole career with a lot of companies going through that pursuit. But what I thought about after the fact was, so people think I’m a startup person because it was about starting and scaling.

Moira Vetter: [00:31:53] And I think, you know, really where we work more is not on that start startup side of the business. It’s in that scale maturity and sophistication, how to how to stay out of air quotes, maturity, how to move into constantly being an innovator, you know, and you know, the 100 year startup, not a startup. And so, you know, I think that, you know, one thing I will say, I also write and I am a writer, you know, I was a contributor to Forbes and wrote over 200 pieces for Forbes. And the one thing that gets me and it’s just not for me and I’m sure it’s for a lot of people, but there’s there’s a huge group of people that are like, get a ghostwriter, man. You know, you get somebody else to get these ideas out of your head. And for a lot of people, it’s about sharing what they know and they can’t write, but they want their knowledge in a book, right? And so that is a wholly different exercise than for me writing a book, which was I want to put the words down that represent what I know and I want to write it in an engaging way that I think will entertain people and educate people and intrigue people. And so for me, writing a book was literally about writing it, not getting the content on the page.

Lee Kantor: [00:33:26] Right. So that’s much more personal and it’s much more difficult.

Moira Vetter: [00:33:32] Yeah.

Moira Vetter: [00:33:32] And make no mistake, it is in service to the audience, but it’s a different exercise. Writing for an audience, you know, then just satisfying them with information.

Lee Kantor: [00:33:48] Well, if somebody wants to connect with you or somebody on your team and learn more about Moto Moto or the books, what is the coordinates?

Moira Vetter: [00:33:56] Yes, the coordinates would be. So we are. Moto, Moto, Agency.com. And of course, we’re on LinkedIn and Twitter and I. Linkedin is where I live. So that’s that’s the best thing now for the agency folks. We’re also on Instagram and that’s very fun and entertaining. But if you’re a C-level business executive, hit me up on LinkedIn.

Lee Kantor: [00:34:21] Good stuff. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Moira Vetter: [00:34:26] Thank you so much. It was great talking to you today.

Lee Kantor: [00:34:28] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.