In this episode of the B2B Marketing Methods podcast, host Terri Hoffman, CEO of Marketing Refresh, interviews Fedor Simic, the partnership manager at Databox. They discuss the challenges and benefits of digital marketing, focusing on the importance of analyzing marketing metrics. Fedor explains Databox’s innovative Benchmark Groups tool, which allows companies to compare their performance against industry benchmarks.
They also delve into Fedor’s personal background, sharing his journey from working in customer support to becoming a partnership manager. The episode provides valuable insights into how businesses can leverage data to improve their marketing strategies and achieve better performance.
Topics Discussed:
- Who is Databox
- Using marketing metrics
- The value of analyzing your marketing program metrics
- What are Benchmark Groups
To learn more about Fedor, connect with him on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fedor-simic/Â Â
To connect with Marketing Refresh, visit: MarketingRefresh.com
Full Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to B2B Marketing Methods. I’m your host, Terri Hoffman, and I’m the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let’s face it, embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join me as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders, and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys.
[00:00:28] Terri Hoffman: Everyone, welcome to this week’s episode of the B2B marketing methods podcast. I’m really excited today to have a guest named Fedor Simic with us. Fedor is the partnership manager at DataBox. , and for those of you who aren’t familiar, I’m going to have him explain what his company does, what his role is in the company, and we’ll, we’ll kind of unravel all of that through our conversation.
Some of the points that we’re going to be touching on is our marketing metrics, the value of analyzing your marketing program metrics– they have a software package that lets you do that in a very easy way with like hundreds of connections that they have to different software packages. We’re going to be talking about a new program that they created that is called their Benchmark Groups.
I’m going to have him unravel that. It’s something I talk about on LinkedIn quite frequently. But I thought it would be great to have Fedor on as a guest so he can dig in a little bit deeper and help my listeners really learn more about the value of those Benchmark Groups. So, welcome Fedor. It’s really great to have you on.
Thank you for taking the time to join me today.
[00:01:33] Fedor Simic: Thank you for having me here. It’s great to be here. Honestly.
[00:01:36] Terri Hoffman: Good, good. So let’s start by telling people something they would never know because, you’re in a totally different time zone than I am. I’m here in Colorado. Tell us about where you’re based.
Where do you work every day?
[00:01:50] Fedor Simic: I work every day from my grandma’s apartment, I live in a small city in Serbia called Subotica. It’s at the north of the country, so it’s really near the border to Hungary. So like getting to Hungary is like a 30 minute drive. Well, including the wait at the border.
But the reason that I’m working from here is I try to separate work from home. I got bored of working every day from my apartment. So I decided like, Hey, it’s time to either rent out an office or find somewhere else to work from just to like, have a relationship with work that i lacked. So grandma was really, uh, open and she let me move it and have my own room.
There used to be pictures of me when I was a kid in the background, but I changed them.
[00:02:38] Terri Hoffman: Oh man, bring them back. I think that would be fun.
That is super generous of her. Do you get like grandma lunch included sometimes?
[00:02:47] Fedor Simic: Oh, do we have to go there? Yes. Every day.
[00:02:49] Terri Hoffman: There you go. No, that’s, that sounds like it works well for both of you then. That’s fun.
[00:02:55] Fedor Simic: She’s trying to solve a huge pain point in my life. And that’s what have you eaten today? And why haven’t you eaten something? We go there every day, literally, that’s how our conversations start each morning.
[00:03:08] Terri Hoffman: That’s, I think that’s really sweet. That’s nice. So tell me about , how you got started at Databox because you’ve been there, what now, four or five years?
[00:03:18] Fedor Simic: No, actually it’s going to be three years in October this year. So only, only three years. And it’s funny, I was dissatisfied with my old job and I just started looking and out of the blue, I found Databox. Uh, I applied for the customer support role or no, actually it was technical support specialist because I have like a tech background, I guess I was a software engineer at a previous company.
And then I started off in customer support and after two months I moved into customer onboarding. So that was like my first time talking with people on calls. And then I went into account management and then around a year, maybe a year and a half ago, I moved into a partnership manager and. That’s where I am now.
I really like it. It’s a lot of fun. It’s super challenging and every day is different. Two things I really, really love, you know, because I, I don’t like smooth sailing. It’s boring. I just like being challenged, pushed and learning new things. And that’s what I do every day. So super happy here.
[00:04:24] Terri Hoffman: That’s awesome.
So yeah, this is fun for me too, because I didn’t really know much about your background prior to this role that you’re in. How did you make the transition from a software engineering role to a company that primarily focuses on like marketing data and marketing metrics?
[00:04:40] Fedor Simic: That is a good question.
I believe it has to do with my computer skills. I would say, like, I was always on the computer. I was like a gamer when I was a kid. I grew up with video games. I was always spending time on the computer. And then like, That kind of connected with this. And I was learning marketing on my own. So I used to own a small e commerce store.
The drop of drop shipping a bit, it didn’t really work out that great, but actually managed to sell my store for around $400, even though I haven’t really invested a lot of money into it. I sold around a hundred products, which is really interesting. Without any marketing experience, like I didn’t know to run ads.
I didn’t know anything what I was doing, but I posted comments on YouTube and I got sales for that. I don’t know how it worked, but yeah, that’s kind of like my entry point to marketing. And then obviously like for working with Databox, I just learned this whole other part that I had no idea about, you know, before.
[00:05:43] Terri Hoffman: That’s really interesting though, because I bet it gives you a good ability to relate to some of your customers and the end users of your product who are also just starting to learn how to use that data and how to, how to analyze it and interpret it. Cause you’ve been there, like you’ve, you’ve had to start at that point if you didn’t, you know, have a marketing degree and work under somebody who was like a director of marketing or, or at an agency environment.
So I bet that gives you a great ability to relate to people when they’re at the beginning of that learning process.
[00:06:15] Fedor Simic: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It’s started with the data, you know, I just got access to all this data because our users connect all their data. Right? And I was just exposed to all this data and that kind of like, then I backtracked into, into each platform and I kind of like learn more about each platform, like Facebook, Google, Instagram.
Like I started learning through the data about those platforms and then just connected it through there. So it was kind of like reverse engineering. In sort of a way.
[00:06:44] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. I think that’s a great way to learn it. Why don’t we have you explain who Databox is? What does your company do? What are, what’s your mission at Databox?
[00:06:53] Fedor Simic: So Databox, the easiest way to explain is that we’re an analytics tool and we make it very easy for you to centralize all your data. Connect all your data to one place, then track it, visualize it, report on it, forecast it and benchmark it.
So we have a 100+ integrations and we made it really, really easy to use that data and report on it, put it on dashboards, visualize it. And then all the other things come as extra, like forecasting, benchmarking, generative AI to summarize your data and dashboards.
So it is, there’s a really small like entry point. You don’t have to have a lot of knowledge on using the tool, but you can get really into it, like go into the details really fast. So like, it’s, it’s a really easy tool to learn, but it takes a bit of time to master it because you can go really deep into the data. And do so many other things.
[00:07:53] Terri Hoffman: I agree. I’m very biased because it’s the platform our agency uses. It’s a service, but it’s really a support service to the marketing that we do is reporting.
Um, and I think if you have a marketing program without reporting in place, you know, you can’t improve something that you’re not measuring and tracking. And so the reporting is the key. It’s the underlying fundamental that you have to have in place. Our agency has tried, um, different platforms and we actually just made the transition to Databox last year.
And it’s, it’s to me, head and shoulders above the rest that are out there on the market and we’ve tried a lot of them. So we’re, we’re happy. We, we found Databox. Like some of the things that you can connect into it, that, if you’re in marketing, would be pretty obvious, but you know, you can track your website metrics, your social media metrics, you can even look at your CRM and connect HubSpot or Salesforce or other CRM tools into it, which I think is, is super helpful, but, the reason I wanted to have you on today is because I think one of the more advanced things you can do and the new program that you guys created is the benchmark groups.
So you’ve put together a whole certification program around that, but, you know, maybe you could just start by explaining why you created the benchmark groups and what the value of those, those groups is.
[00:09:17] Fedor Simic: Yeah, definitely. So we always had some form of benchmarking, right?
We had with Databox, you could do historical benchmarking, so you can compare your current results to your past results. That’s one form of benchmarking. But then. We didn’t want to stop there.
We wanted to kind of expand, not into like competitor benchmarking, because that you can only benchmark certain things that are publicly visible and to get into competitive analysis, but we wanted to expand into industry benchmarking, kind of offer more insights for companies so they could use our benchmarking tool, which is free that we build on top of our other tool. And our, the accounts are shared across the data points are shared across. So. We built that other tool so companies can have one place where they can get insights into how they should perform. Basically to be able to tell like, Hey, this is me and this is me versus companies similar to me.
So we’re building this massive data set where companies will be able to come and find where they stand, what’s going good, get ideas, what can be improved, what can be doubled down upon and just see how they’re comparing to a company similar to theirs, and then work on improving those metrics with Databox.
This is just looking at a high level and, but it sets you off in a direction, right? And then you would want to investigate deeper into the data and try to improve certain parts of each metric to get that ultimate boost in performance that you’re seeking.
[00:10:48] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Well, I immediately jumped into this program when I heard about it because when we’re reviewing metrics each month with our clients, one of the first things they ask us is they need, they need context, right?
So if we show them, Hey, here’s how your Google ads are performing. And we tell them, Oh, there’s a, you know, 3 percent conversion rate. Their reaction is, so is that good or bad? What does that mean? Give me context. Right. And that’s what I love about the benchmarking product is that it immediately provides them, as the client, with context, but it helps us guide the conversation and then make better decisions because we can see does this need to be improved? Does this need to be scrapped? Does it need to be built upon because it’s going so well? Like, have we stumbled upon a real gem here?
So the, the benchmarks I think are awesome because it gives you that context and it helps you see where you fit in in the industry. Like, are we doing okay? That industry differentiation is just so hard as marketers for us to find. We all Google search for it every single day. And I’m sure you guys see that, you know, how often people are searching for it. Yeah. Yeah. So how many, Oh, go ahead
[00:12:01] Fedor Simic: also helps you see what’s possible, not just what’s good and bad, but like, where’s the limit, what performance should we aspire to achieve? And it helps you a lot with aligning goals, setting new goals, and just helps you set your whole path to performance.
So, yeah, it helps you a lot. Yeah.
[00:12:20] Terri Hoffman: It plays into the strategy and your tactical like day to day decision making, which I, yeah, I think if you haven’t dug into the data as a business person or somebody who’s in charge of a sales department it kind of opens a new world to you where you might think marketing is just this creative field and it is, but there’s so much more to that if you have a digital marketing program in place that is way more about metrics and data and using that to make decisions, using that research. So I, I love it, but if you could, go a little bit deeper into how you, let people access these groups, because you have an entire section on your website.
If I were in a business role and wasn’t working through an agency or was working through an agency and I was just kind of trying to ideate, I feel like that section on your website just has tons of pieces of gold in it. Can you talk about that?
[00:13:18] Fedor Simic: So The truth is in the data. That’s kind of like what we’ve always been saying in the company. And this is all using data. It’s not you inputting your values for metrics. No, it’s basically pulling the data directly from the integration. So whatever you have in your Google ads, your account, your Facebook ads account, it’s being pulled directly into each group that you join.
And it’s doing the same for the other members that are in the group. So when you find a group, the best matches your space. So you can filter by industry, by business type, by company size, by revenue range, and you can find the group the best matches your business. And you can find integrations like data points that you want to benchmark for.
And then you can find a group, join it, and they will instantly. Tell you like, Hey, this is going on good that you’re maybe like in the middle, or maybe this is going bad, like, and then you just know what matters to you, which metrics matter to you, and then you can improve those metrics and get that ultimate boost in performance.
We also have benchmarks explorer, which is different to groups because there you can just pick metrics that you want, and then filter them and find, What metrics you want to see, compare against, and you can build your own report, but it won’t show you where you stand within those metrics. That’s the difference between the, the Explorer and the groups, but explorer, you can use without even signing up for an account. So like you can use it just off the bat. We have a, around 10 searches, I think. And then you can find what you want to look into, get insights and compare with your data on your own. So that’s an easy way to use, uh, the Explorer functionality.
[00:15:00] Terri Hoffman: So since you’re talking to your partners every day, so your, your partners are basically marketing agencies. Is that, is that correct? Is that pretty much the makeup of your partner?
[00:15:12] Fedor Simic: The people that we advise to build benchmark groups are agencies because they have access to their clients data. It’s not just their own company data, right? But any type of company can get value out of benchmarks.
[00:15:27] Terri Hoffman: Oh yeah, yeah. I agree.
[00:15:28] Fedor Simic: But it’s the agencies that bring in additional value because they bring in this large data set that helps not only them being able to tell like how their average client performs, but everyone else, because they benefit from having more data to compare against in these groups and explore.
So it’s just every additional company that joins adds value to everyone else. That’s how it works.
[00:15:51] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Yeah. So how, how do you guys go about building up the list of people who are connecting their data into that? Because that’s, that’s really where the value comes from, right? You’ve got to have more companies who are connecting their data sources into that? How do you guys work on kind of building up the group of companies participating in the in the groups?
[00:16:13] Fedor Simic: Do you mean like building each specific benchmark group or just as a whole?
[00:16:18] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, what’s your what’s your strategy? I mean, I already know the answer to this, but I want our audience to learn how they can kind of get invited into a group.
Like, how do you guys go about getting more companies connected so that the value of that benchmark data continues to build?
[00:16:36] Fedor Simic: We first built the groups ourselves. We kind of like created what we call open groups. Right. So everyone, anyone can join, but like we hit a limit, right? We’re not experts in each industry.
We don’t have access to each industry. Like we don’t know people from each industry. And then we figured like, Hey, we could partner with agencies that are specialized in these industries, and they can bring this data set in, which will add value to everyone else. It will just enrich the data, make it more valuable for everyone.
So that’s when we decided to allow other agencies to kind of like build their own groups. We would call those group private groups because they, they kind of have the keys to the group. They can control who gets added to the group. Typically they would invite first their clients. And then if they would want to open it up to more people, then they would share a link so other people can join. They also control the members. So like they can add members, remove members, but if they don’t have access to the data, like the data source, they won’t see anyone else’s data, right? Even as the owner of the group, If someone joins through you inviting them, you don’t see their data. You just see them as a member of the group and vice versa. Someone else joining the group doesn’t see anyone else’s name who’s in the group. They just see, Hey, this is me against the group. And this is where I stand and that’s it. And how many companies are in the group?
So it’s completely anonymous. There’s no like infringement of the data. There’s no leaking of the data. It’s completely secure and it’s going to be accurate unless you have poor data management in your integration, which is not, not as often of a case, you know, it’s probably like one in a, or two in a hundred.
[00:18:13] Terri Hoffman: Right. Yeah. But I think that is, that’s been something that I’ve heard from our clients, and other companies that I’m working with who might be prospects of ours is they’re worried, you know, it, it can be scary to connect your data and then know that it could then be exposed and maybe shared publicly, because they might be thinking like, well, I don’t want to join because maybe we’re not doing that well and I wouldn’t necessarily want my competitors to know that or other people who are peers in my industry to know that. But yeah, like, I think what you just explained is a huge value point is no one else is going to see your name attached.
[00:18:52] Fedor Simic: Nope.
[00:18:53] Terri Hoffman: That’s a really big deal. Um, so why not, why not join? Like, what are some of the other reasons that it becomes difficult do you think for, for companies to join one of the benchmark groups?
What do you hear about that?
[00:19:05] Fedor Simic: I mean, when they want to join one of our groups. They’re more open to it. But like when one of our partners talks about their own benchmark group, they think, Oh, ultimately this is like a sales tool, like they want to sell me something or something similar, but that’s really not the case.
Like, as I said, even if they do join the group, you can only get value out of it, right? So like, if you join a group of an agency and you compare against their clients and you’re doing good, like that’s, that’s wind in your back, you know, you’re doing good. You’re working on your own and you’re achieving these amazing results.
Meanwhile, if you’re not doing that great, like maybe it will point you in a direction of what things you can improve to achieve better performance, or it can tell like, Hey, maybe I should work with someone to help me with achieve this better performance. Right? So I think there’s really no downside to it because you’ll just get answers, right?
Why wouldn’t you like to get answers?
[00:20:01] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. I completely agree with you. I do think that one of the things that I see holds,, companies back from joining is that they may just not have the logins to their own platforms so that they can connect to the benchmark group. And that, you know, that often presents a challenge, which I think is why your partnerships with marketing agencies has been really effective in helping to solve that because the people on like my company’s team or other agencies you work with, we can help get those connections made. And like, I know what, what my attitude is about it is, you know, I want the, I want the dataset that we have access to, to be larger. And if somebody in that dataset wants to talk to us about their marketing activities, great, but that’s not, that’s not something that we try to impose upon them by joining.
We offer it. And if they want to, they want to. And if that’s not something they’re prioritizing, like you said, at least they’re getting the comparisons of the data for their own marketing team to see, Hey, is this working? Is it not working? What, what do we, where are opportunities to kind of expand from here?
Right. Yeah. I think there’s nothing but positives to joining.
[00:21:15] Fedor Simic: And through the course, we kind of help our partners learn to host that free consultation calls. So like that’s an additional set of value that you can get. Like there’s no strings attached to booking a free consultation call to talk about your metrics.
You can only get more value out of it. Even if you don’t end up taking that agency as a partner that you want to want to help you with, you know? So I think there’s like, Nothing but value can get out of it, you know?
[00:21:44] Terri Hoffman: Well, so what are some of the successes that you’ve seen from the companies that you work with?
Are there some that come to mind where you’re like, Oh, this is a way it helped a brand by first joining one of our groups. What are some of those successes?
[00:21:59] Fedor Simic: Yeah, one really large success that I know is from one of our other partners who works with one huge franchise of mental health clinics.
And they, they did some form of benchmarking before, but it was really, really manual. Like they were using a spreadsheet. You know how it is. It takes a lot of time. It’s prone to errors because you rely on everything being really, really accurate and then with manual entry, there’s always room for a mistake. Right?
So when they heard about benchmarks, they were really fascinated. So they build their own group and put. A hundred locations of that franchise and into the group. So they’re really able to compare and see the average performance across all the locations. Right. So, uh, that’s really an interesting case because that they had the same ad copy running for all the locations. Some were in cities, some were rural areas, but they, Everything had to be kind of like the same, tell the same story.
So their idea was to take a look at the bottom 20 performers in the group and see what’s going on with them. Why are they performing bad and who are they, you know? So they did it and they discovered that. The worst performers are actually rural areas. So that information gave them the ability to then drill deeper into the data and figure out that it was the ad copy that was kind of like not connecting as well with the people that live in these areas as it was with people that live in cities.
So they were able to use this, uh, that information to present it to their client and become more of a strategic partner in, it gave them Something that’s tangible. I would say, it’s not really tangible because it’s, it’s still data, but it’s something that doesn’t lie. It’s factual information.
They were able to present it to their client and get them to get them to buy into their idea of changing the copy. So they did and those locations got better performance, their CPC went down and them changing that and helping those 20 locations actually improved the performance of the whole group.
So now everyone, like the whole group’s performance improved, not just only those locations. So like it, it was just beneficial to them, you know, and to the client, of course.
[00:24:17] Terri Hoffman: Well, that’s crazy. And if you just think about that one example, there are thousands of businesses. franchises in many different industries who could benefit from that type of benchmarking, even if it, so it sounds like they were, they were not benchmarking against the industry. They were benchmarking all of their locations against one another. Like there’s so many different ways you can benchmark. So that’s, that’s a really cool story. Yeah.
[00:24:43] Fedor Simic: Yeah. Especially because they were running the same type of ads, the same creatives, everything was the same. Right. So just the location was different.
So that, that was really interesting. I was really, really, uh, excited when I heard that from the partner that they shared with that with us and how it helped them better help their client.
[00:25:01] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. And I, I know I’ve heard, um, just through the, the community that you guys have created of, you know, the partners like my agency who are in the program, a lot of times we’re sharing success stories with each other about, you know, we got a prospect to join. We were able to help kind of point out some areas for improvement, and then we were able to build a brand new relationship, you know, and get, get a new client as a result of the benchmarking process.
Let’s shift gears and talk about the other component to the benchmark groups, which are the surveys. That to me has a whole different set of value, right? And so talk about that extension of your program that you guys created.
[00:25:47] Fedor Simic: It kind of came natural to us because we were always running surveys, uh, as a company. We’ve run more than more than 2000 surveys so far now, it’s been part of our marketing for like five, six years. And it’s just a way for us to connect with people and then quote them in the reports that we were building and get all these insights into various different topics and various different areas of your business, like sales, marketing, finance. So like we were always doing it.
But then we figured we could connect it to the benchmarks because benchmarks leave one big question unsolved, right?
You look, get a glimpse into performance. You find out how, where you stand, what’s good, what’s bad, how you should be doing, but you don’t know what you need to To do to achieve that type of performance, right? You don’t have a benchmark for insights, for example. So that’s when we figured we can connect surveys to benchmark groups.
So if a benchmark group is around digital marketing, we can connect the survey that talks about digital marketing, what people are doing for the digital marketing. So we can find out both. And with that kind of connection, we can find out this is what a typical company should perform like, and this is what they should be doing.
So we’re trying to make the tool one huge data hub of not just performance data, but also insight data. So any company can come in, find out how should they be performing and what they should do in order to achieve that performance, so it’s just giving more and more in value to everyone, basically.
And everyone that joins helps everyone else, right? So like every new addition is just like, we’re not only helping ourselves, but everyone else is going to benefit from it, right? So that’s, that’s kind of like the whole goal that we have.
And why we decided to partner with agencies is because we’re not experts in all these different industries, right? We don’t have these connections. We have a list of people who subscribe to be, alerted of new surveys coming out, but that’s kind of it, right? Like we typically have a lot of agencies answering our surveys, but we don’t have insights into other industries, but our agency partners do, like they’re experts in manufacturing, they’re experts in healthcare, they’re experts in all these various industries, and they have connections so they can help us enrich the data. help their clients better, find out new things about their, their audience, and their audience can benefit because they can learn new things about their industry that , they haven’t had access to yet. And the best part is that this is always up to date. It’s not a typical report that gets published once a year and it’s outdated immediately, right?
This is continuing to be improved, to be, uh, enriched. So like every new person that joins, that takes one of the services, joins one of the groups is just helping more and more people, not the, not just themselves. And that’s what I really love about it. It’s just, it’s just giving, giving like each person joining gives value to themselves, to others.. Just helping each other. That’s kind of like our main goal. To just help each other. That’s our main goal. …
Yeah. It’s like teamwork.
[00:28:55] Terri Hoffman: I think you really, you really hit on something big there because as marketers, we, we all know the trusted sources year after year that are going to come out with that annual report. And we wait, we know when it’s coming out every year and we wait for it to come out. We all download it the same day. We all sift through it and dig out the nuggets because it’s so important for us to be able to say like, are we doing a good job with our clients? Are our clients getting the most value they can get out of working with us and the ability to access that data on a regular basis basis and see how it’s changing because the platforms change, right?
Google changes their rules and their algorithms and each social platform does that, and if you’re not keeping up with that monthly and quarterly and, um, having to wait until the end of the year, oh my goodness, it, it really does make a big difference for us when we’re trying to manage strategies and budgets and programs, and that’s not a knock on what these companies have been doing before.
I mean, that was, that was the way to do it. Right. But I think you guys have just helped to evolve that and bring it forward in a big way, which is super helpful and very appreciated by agencies and marketing departments. Yeah.
[00:30:11] Fedor Simic: And even if you participated in one of these reports and one of these surveys, you typically would have to wait several months, even, even longer to get insight into the whole report, into the data, everything like there was just like, Hey, you take this survey, then you wait, you probably forget about it. Right. And then you get an email like, Oh, the report is out. Like. What is all, what is all this about? You know, you have no idea.
But with our surveys When you complete it, you get access to the preliminary data. So you can instantly see the data that’s here already. And you can come back to that data next week in a month, in two months, or like in worst case scenario, when the report is out in like three months, but it doesn’t stop there.
It’s always going to live. It’s always going to accumulate more and more responses and just enrich the data, you know? It’s instantly accessible, which is a big difference, to the other types of reports out there.
[00:31:01] Terri Hoffman: Well, and another area that we haven’t really talked about much is budgeting.
On a more strategic marketing level it’s a big stress point, you know, for our clients. They’re not sure how to approach it. They’re not sure how much, if there’s like a rule of thumb, they should be following, but the number one thing that comes up in any conversation we have with a brand is how do I prove an ROI?
How can I take something to my board, or my investors, or to C level leadership, and show them. That we’re getting a return on the money that we’re spending on marketing. Like how, how does that get, get tracked and measured? And so I think even on a strategic budgeting level, there are ways and, pieces of data that you guys are helping to gather that as marketers, we can use that to put together an ROI and a business model that the leadership teams can use. To me, that is very, very valuable data because at the end of the day, if you’re spending on money on marketing and you can’t track what it’s doing for you, why are you doing it? That’s a fail. Why are you doing it? You can’t improve something you’re not measuring, , or tracking. Don’t remember which wise person said that, but it wasn’t me. I’m copying that from someone else, but it’s, it’s so important and it’s so skipped. I mean, just basic things like going to a trade show, maybe you spend 50, or 60, or 75 thousand dollars on that and you don’t even know what it did for you. Right. If you’re not tracking that it’s, it’s just a big lost opportunity for companies.
Is there, is there anything that you want to make sure that we emphasize about the benchmark groups or surveys that we haven’t covered already?
[00:32:39] Fedor Simic: I think we covered a really good, good portion of it. I don’t know if there’s anything that I would add. I think we, we did a good job.
[00:32:46] Terri Hoffman: Well, if you are an agency or a freelance marketer and,, you’re interested in, in the program, you definitely need to go to their website and check it out.
They do offer a certification for the benchmarking process, and he Fedor is one of the people who teaches the course. It’s all all delivered online. It was really helpful for me and my team to go through that process.
[00:33:07] Fedor Simic: Glad to hear it.
[00:33:08] Terri Hoffman: Okay. I have some fun questions to, to end off the conversation. If you’re open to these, let’s see.
[00:33:14] Fedor Simic: I’m always open to fun questions.
[00:33:16] Terri Hoffman: He’s like we’ll find out, Terri. Let’s, let’s go for it. Yeah.
[00:33:19] Fedor Simic: Let’s do it.
[00:33:20] Terri Hoffman: Okay. What is your favorite trip you’ve ever taken?
[00:33:22] Fedor Simic: It’s the hard one. Actually it was, it’s a trip during COVID when everything was shut down here. We had a lockdown for, I think, three months.
And after that, you know, being locked up for three months, you want to go somewhere, but you can’t visit other countries. So we actually went camping down South into our national park called Tara. And it’s the first time I ever went camping and it was for a week long trip. So it was just so much fun and I fell in love with nature even more and camping even more. So I tend to at least go once a year for at least a couple of days. Just hang out by the fire, talk stories, cook food on the grill. So, uh, that’s, that’s probably one of the best trips I ever had. I’m going to travel more now, so I might have an update to this story in the future.
[00:34:10] Terri Hoffman: Well, good. You, I, I’ve seen you post pictures on LinkedIn about hiking and camping. So you, you’re a hiker too, right?
[00:34:18] Fedor Simic: I wouldn’t really call myself a hiker, but I’m not opposed to walking a lot.
[00:34:23] Terri Hoffman: Okay, got it. Well, that’s good because that’s what hiking is.
[00:34:28] Fedor Simic: Yep. I’m more into camping and if it takes a longer walk to reach that good spot, I’m open to it, but not really looking for it.
[00:34:37] Terri Hoffman: That’s funny. Okay. Well, I hope you’re a music fan because my next question is about music.
If there was a musical group or artist who you’d be able to see in concert, and this, this group or person can be dead or alive, this would be like your dream concert.
[00:34:53] Fedor Simic: Oh, it’s it has to be Linkin Park. I grew up with them. I I’m so sad that I never attended one of their shows, you know, but yeah, I’m now hoping to attend the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. Two weeks ago actually attended one concert and it was the first concert ever attended. It’s like a bigger show.
It was a singer from Kazakhstan. I think no one ever heard of him. His name is Dimash Kudaibergen. And he is just out of this world. He’s probably the best singer on the planet and no one knows about him because he just doesn’t sing popular music, but the way he sings, it’s It’s mind boggling. So if anyone is interested, go check him out.
I don’t think anyone has heard something similar in their lives to this guy.
[00:35:38] Terri Hoffman: Wow. What kind of music does he sing? Like could you even categorize it or is it so different?
[00:35:44] Fedor Simic: He sings as deep as Pavarotti and as high as uh, Celine Dion, probably even higher. So he sings opera. He sings like Celine Dion songs.
So it’s really strange, you know, his concert is not that, fun, you don’t go up and dance and stuff. But like, when you’re you’re just listening and not believing what you’re hearing. That’s how I would explain it.
[00:36:10] Terri Hoffman: Well, I think I need to go find him. That sounds pretty interesting. I love music. I like listening to all kinds of different types of music, too.
[00:36:16] Fedor Simic: Really?
[00:36:17] Terri Hoffman: Mm hmm. Yeah.
[00:36:19] Fedor Simic: I would love to hear your answer to that question.
[00:36:22] Terri Hoffman: Who I would see? Oh, well, the Beatles would be my answer. That because it’s somebody I never saw. Um, I still have a chance to see Paul McCartney or Ringo star. And I would like to do that because the chances are probably running out.
I, the best one I’ve ever been to is we saw the U2 concert in the sphere in Las Vegas last October. And that was, that was amazing. It was so good. I love U2. They’re my favorite band. Other than the Beatles.
[00:36:48] Fedor Simic: I can only imagine how good that was.
[00:36:50] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, it was really good. Yeah. I think a lot of people your age, like my kids, hate YouTube because of the whole iPhone thing where they put all the music on people’s phone and took up space, but I, they’re my favorite.
I absolutely love them. I have you know about this scandal?
[00:37:06] Fedor Simic: No, no, that was first time hearing.
[00:37:09] Terri Hoffman: i’m gonna say it was like maybe 15 years ago When they released their album, they thought they were doing a nice thing and for free put it on the new iphone software release And it made everyone under the age of 20 furious because it took up space on their phone with music they’d never heard of before.
[00:37:28] Fedor Simic: So they got something for free. Why, why were they so pissed off? Come on.
[00:37:32] Terri Hoffman: And it’s U2 on top of it. I’m like, it’s a good album.
[00:37:36] Fedor Simic: That was interesting.
[00:37:37] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Next question is about a book. I don’t know if you’re a reader or not, but do you find yourself like recommending a book to people that has really helped you or, and it can be business or personal, you know, any genre?
[00:37:52] Fedor Simic: Yeah, there’s two books that are kind of related to business and mindset. The first one I would recommend is Cold Star Problem by Andrew Chen. I really liked that book, gave me insights into business and how big companies grew and became huge companies that I just wasn’t aware of. It tells the story of Uber, of TikTok, Instagram, so like Facebook as well. So it just like talks about how they leveraged network effects and how they exploded into these mega giants. And also like some, um, negative effects of network effects as well. So it’s, it’s really an interesting book.
In terms of kind of like mindset and just growing as a person. I’m now reading ultimate power by Anthony Robbins. Actually my sales coach, Rick, he recommended that book to me. I was very skeptical. And, but as I read it, it’s really awesome and I’m hooked on it. So I got to finish that one, but I really want to have myself in mental space where I can just like digest all the content, make notes.
That’s how I read. So I don’t read that often. I don’t read every day because I just don’t have the mental bandwidth for it. So I put aside time on the weekend to do it, but then I go for like 60 pages or something and just digest it properly.
And yeah, my favorite kind of like fantasy book is obviously Harry Potter. I read it three times when I was a kid, I was really hooked on that. I read. One whole book in a day. So I, when it came out, it was the order of the Phoenix. That one was really good.
[00:39:19] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. That one is really good. Oh my gosh. Look out because when my team hears that you’re a Harry Potter fan, they’re all gonna hit you up about that. We have a lot of Harry Potter, fanatics at Marketing Refresh.
[00:39:31] Fedor Simic: Ooh. I, I go, I went down the rabbit hole of Harry Potter. I even played that new game, Hogwarts Legacy. And it was awesome. It is the game I really wanted when I was a kid and I got it when I was 30. Better late than never, right?
[00:39:44] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, yeah. This is my last question and it’s about work. So what, what is your favorite job that you’ve ever had?
[00:39:53] Fedor Simic: This one that I’m doing right now. If I had other favorite jobs I would still probably be doing them, but this one is my favorite because it just keeps evolving. Even though my Kind of like on paper role doesn’t change, what I do evolves and change and I get to make decisions that kind of like change my role as well So like it’s constantly evolving doing different types of things different activities Marketing kind of like a bit of sales talking with people on calls meeting new people networking.
It kind of like ticks all the boxes. I didn’t even know that I had those boxes, but it Started taking them as I, as I started working here in this role, you know,
[00:40:31] Terri Hoffman: that’s an interesting comment, but I think that’s why when you’re at the earlier stage of your career, it’s important to try different things because you may not realize that something is ticking that box for you or that you even had that box.
Like you said, that’s, I love that. That’s fun.
[00:40:47] Fedor Simic: And if someone is some a person that tried different things, that’s me. I tried like almost everything. I was a bodybuilder. I was a fitness coach. I, uh, did a bit of like I wouldn’t call it modeling, but I like, uh, photograph shoots that I did that as well.
I also played tennis. I had a band when I was, I was a waiter at one point I worked in a casino store. So I tried like everything, literally, it’s crazy.
[00:41:17] Terri Hoffman: You were probably stressing out your, your family and friends there for a bit.
[00:41:22] Fedor Simic: Yeah, I was considered the black sheep of the family and now we’re at a point where everyone comes to me for advice. I have no idea how I got here.
[00:41:30] Terri Hoffman: Well, it’s trying all those different things. I’m sure you, it sounds like you gained a lot of really pretty cool life experiences. That’s interesting. I, and you know what I love about doing these interviews with our guests, just about everyone has said the job that they’re doing now is their favorite job.
The only person who didn’t say that said being a dad is his favorite job. And so, you know, That one’s, that one’s kind of hard to combat. That was like a winning answer for sure.
[00:41:57] Fedor Simic: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
[00:42:00] Terri Hoffman: I’m glad to hear you like your role so much. I might have the same answer for you in a couple of years.
[00:42:05] Fedor Simic: Not yet.
[00:42:05] Terri Hoffman: Stay tuned.
Well, thank you so much for joining me today and kind of sharing what the, the program that you’re managing is all about. If people want to get in touch with you directly and hear more, what is the best way to, for them to connect with you? We’ve got. You know, people who are in sales leadership roles listening, but we also have other marketers listening and so how could, how can people connect with you directly? What’s the best way?
[00:42:30] Fedor Simic: LinkedIn is the easiest way. It’s probably the only social media tool I use. I have LinkedIn, I have Instagram, but I don’t really use it. So LinkedIn is the way to go.
[00:42:39] Terri Hoffman: Okay. So for our listeners, we’re going to be posting several links in our show notes. We’ll have a link to the Databox benchmark groups and the Explorer tool as well. And then we’ll have a link to, to Fedor’s LinkedIn as well.
Thank you everybody for listening today. Thanks again for joining us and I really appreciate your time.
[00:42:58] Fedor Simic: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. And I look forward to connecting with everyone.
