Channel Mastery - Ep. 180: Scott Buelter, CEO of Ascent360

Ascent360

modern marketing segmentation, consumer relations, + behavioral data

featuring

As CEO and president, Scott Buelter guides Ascent360’s strategy and vision. His mission is to bring enterprise-level marketing capabilities to midsize businesses through a powerful CDP, allowing them to better understand their customers and achieve continual growth.

show highlights

We’re humbled to welcome back to the show, Scott Buelter, CEO of Ascent360 - a data-driven marketing platform that has grown tremendously in the past couple of years as a result of the pandemic directing more and more purchases online. We discuss the newcomers to the outdoor marketplace (hint: they’re here to stay!) and how you can create loyalty in the face of supply shortages and price increases.

In this episode, you’ll also learn how utilizing a tailored marketing strategy - using segmentation and behavioral data - can create personalized connections, leading to more faithful customers. Scott also gives advice on what customers small to medium-sized businesses should focus on, amid an increase in demand from online customers.

Today, customers are more willing to give businesses their information to build personalized experiences with brands. We’re excited for the boom that the pandemic has created in the outdoor industry and the shift to a more consumer-centric approach as the outdoor goods industry is reinvesting that profit back into their businesses.

Kristin Carpenter:
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Channel Mastery podcast. I'm super excited to have Scott Buelter of Ascent 360 back on the show. Welcome to the show today.
Scott Buelter:
Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
Kristin:
Here we are at the start of 2022. I think I had you on a year ago at this time, as well as times in between, but thank you so much again for being a regular guest on Channel Mastery.
So I would love for you to reintroduce yourself because we have some new listeners and then also just others who may need to be reminded about you and what Ascent 360 does.
And then, let's go into what you're seeing in your business and with your customer base at the close of last year, 2021, and what we're looking at going into 2022, and then we'll get into our conversation today
Scott:
My name's Scott Buelter, I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Ascent360, and we are a data-driven marketing platform. What that means is, we have software that pulls data into our platform that is useful for retailers, right. So this is point of sale data. It is analytic data off websites. It is email, click behavior, all that data in a really simple way, moves into our platform. And then we allow our clients to use that data to market.
And it really is all about smart marketing, right. How do you talk to a customer in a way that they want to be spoken to, right? How do you have authentic conversations? And that might sound like a buzzword, but it's really quite genuine, what people are missing and lacking in today's endless marketing cycle, is just, "Hey, this business looks at me like a real person." I'm not just a number. And they didn't just send me an email that they sent to a million other people that has all stuff that is totally unrelated to me.
So, that's the essence of the business. And 2021 has actually been a very, very good year. And that is partially driven by the pandemic. What we see in our customer base is, more business moving online, more business moving to buy online, pick up in store, or maybe even call the store. But what that ultimately means is a lot of data collection.
So, formerly large businesses used to only collect data. Now, small businesses, mid-size businesses all know who their customer is, what they're purchasing, and have the tools to use that data. So it's been a really good and interesting year for Ascent360, especially in the outdoor industry, the bicycle industry, and all those kinds of related industries.
Kristin:
So I have a quick question before we get into our question of the day here. How have you seen this newcomer in terms of the outdoor recreation enthusiasts from COVID? How has that informed the data across the markets you serve?
Scott:
That is a really interesting question. What we saw with the newcomer, was people who are not the traditional outdoor enthusiast decide that they want to do something in the outdoors, right. And it's all, if you will, very, very rational stuff. People said, "I need to spend time outdoors. I know that vitamin D is good. I know that UV rays kill the virus. I know that people say it's safe to be outside, but it's better to be outside not in big crowds. So why don't I start engaging in some outdoor activities like hiking and biking and running."
And that has effectively meant that those industries have been tremendous growth industries, right. It isn't the typical individual who's wondering what sort of carabiner they should buy or what 4-season tent they should buy. It started with people just being interested in getting outdoors, getting onto a bike, not even knowing necessarily what bike to buy, and buying one.
I think what is exciting is that we've not seen that consumer runaway yet, right. This isn't the typical, "Hey, it's January 1st. I need a gym membership. And okay, now it's February 4th and I guess I'm done for the year." Right. It seems that it's actually continuing, those consumers are coming back.
They are continuing to try to get outside. That may be an effect of the continuing pandemic that we all thought would've ended by now, but it hasn't seemed to.
Kristin:
I'm glad to hear that. I actually just did a show recently with Jason Blevins of the Colorado Sun. And we were talking about the growth that Poma and Grand Junction have seen in terms of building lifts. And then he got into a lot more information because obviously, this is his beat at the Colorado Sun, talking about just the record growth in snow sports and how the infrastructure of these rural towns were suffering to try and keep up with it.
So it's interesting to hear your take from the retail side of it as well. And also I'm sure a lot of the brands and retailers are really eager to understand how to serve this customer, which is what we're going to get into here today.
So Scott and I have been trying to get this interview together for some time. And when we first met, we talked about, well, inflation really should be something that we talk about. And so you've now expanded that to both supply chain and inflation, but I love the lens that we're going to look at together today, which is how these aspects are affecting the customer relationship with retailers and brands. So we're stepping outside of operations, everybody.
And we're going to talk about how this is affecting existing and new consumers to the outdoor recreation space. So I'd love for you to just give us your insights and what you've been seeing and thinking about for 2022 with supply chain and inflation and how it pertains to our customer.
Scott:
So, there's a lot of really interesting things that are happening, and I think it's worth reflecting on how we got here. And I think that you kind of got to break it down into, if you will, kind of the original sin and then follow-on actions, right. And if you will, the original issue occurred when the virus hit China and they started to shut down factories.
Those factories slowed production.It was starting to get hard to get goods out of China. And so you had, if you will, a very short-term supply issue and that occurred and, okay, we kind of know that it did.
And when I say it was short-term, what's interesting is that it's what happened after, that is a little bit more interesting and perhaps a little more complex, right. So, in a typical recession, you'll have incomes and spending decline, and that exactly the opposite happened in this recession, right. Incomes and spending didn't decline.
Incomes actually increased by government subsidies and spending increased as well. But typically, and this happened, is that manufacturers actually do slow production expecting softer demand, right. So when we fell off the cliff in March of 2020, manufacturers made the decisions that they normally would, they didn't order enough parts. They've got raw materials that they need to get.
So, they started slowing down a bit, making, if you will, good decisions of what was best for their business or at least what they believed was going to happen. And a couple of interesting things happened, right. One, is that because the consumer didn't have less money, they were trying to spend and spend in real ways, but they didn't have that much to spend on.
If you will break the economy down into goods and services, services fell apart completely, right. And that is travel, vacations, hair appointments, massage, and restaurants. The only avenue to spend money was goods. So, now what you've got and this is a little bit amazing, is that actually, the spending on goods is now actually 20% above what it was. This personal consumption of goods is 20% above what it was pre-pandemic, right.
The services sector hasn't yet even caught up, right. So what we'd say is that, now you've got more people spending more money on goods. We actually expect that to continue.
So, if you run a bike dealer or outdoor store, you should actually feel pretty good because it's probably going to continue into 2021 because there's just not enough money. There's not enough goods or services to buy for the outlet, for the money that's floating around the economy.
There's all sorts of other things, right. The Federal's are printed a lot of money, all those sort of things. But I don't think that's the important part. I do think that it's, now we kind of ask ourselves, "Well, if that's this situation, how do we think about it from a consumer marketing perspective when we think about, well, how do you actually talk to a consumer?"
You've got all sorts of new challenges you're facing, such as the prices have increased and all those sorts of things. So I don't know, it's had a relatively good kick-off to the challenge?
Kristin:
Yes, it is. And I also just want to say that consumers, whether they're newcomers or people we've been serving for a long time have become extremely adept at getting their needs met.
Loyalty's been up for grabs and they're just becoming incredibly scrappy when it comes to getting what they need. Let's talk about how the problems with the supply chain and inflation are affecting consumers because I think everybody is aware that inflation's happening because we're buying everything in our day-to-day lives.
We're seeing it. And then we've been hearing and experiencing firsthand the supply chain problem for a long time. Even my teenagers know about the supply chain problem and they don't watch their own news, but you get where I'm going.
I think everybody's on the same page, but what's your take on how this will affect consumers and their journey in 2022?
Scott:
Well, so one thing that we do see is consumers doing whatever they can to find products. So I was at the CABDA show somewhat recently, and I talked to a bike dealer, who said their online businesses exploded. And it's from people that are far away because they're looking for inventory and they can't find it at their local shop. So they're coming out to his shop, virtually, and getting it shipped. He even said some people are driving relatively big distances.
And I think a question of just from a marketing perspective that I would ask that dealer, who will remain nameless, is, is that the customer that you want? And is that who you want to sell your inventory to?
So what we do know is that that dealer and most dealers have a whole swath of new customers that have been part of this influx for two years. But they also have a very central core of consumers that are their best consumers, right.
So what we do know is, 80% of a business's revenue comes from about 20% of their customer base. And this is across the industry. It's across time. It's unrelated to the pandemic. So if you, in fact, have some set of customers who are your best customers, how do you consider serving them?
And how do you consider that in relation to consumers that are far-flung and are probably, what I'd call kind of one and done, right?
Kristin:
The challenge is, you're saying, maybe you bypass serving that far away consumer and prioritize your 20%, which makes 80% of your revenue, which is a very big challenge in the discipline.
Scott:
Absolutely. So what I would say is it's not a passive activity. It's not a, “hey, I hope they come in. And if they don't, what the heck, I'm going to sell it to that guy. Because, well, who am I going to sell it to? What if they don't come in?”. I would suggest making it a very active activity, right. If you know you've got 12 bikes coming in and you know who your best customers are, right. You know who purchased in the past.
And I would immediately create some sort of VIP list and tell them, "Hey, we've got 12 bikes coming in. We're really excited. These are the ones," or maybe you even segment it a little bit more granularly, based on whether they're road bikes or they're cyclocross bikes and that sort of thing.
And were you to reach out to somebody and tell them, "Hey, they're coming in. I will pre-sell them. I will get you on the list," or something like that. And even if they're not going to buy it, they're going to increase their loyalty to you. If in fact, they're realizing that they actually need a bike and then they buy it, that loyalty is just starting to go through the roof.
Kristin:
Well, I have to add something in here because I just had this happen yesterday. My shop at 2nd Avenue Sports here in Durango called and said that they had this SCOTT bike that I was looking at for Leadville and different things that I do. And I had already found something through the Mountain Bike Specialists.
At the end of the year, last year, they got a surprise shipment of a specialized bike that I was also interested in so I went and got that. But the fact that they called me meant so much and I was literally like, "Wow, that's really cool." And it wasn't an email. It was a, "Hey, we know you're interested in this," and I've been a customer of theirs for a long time. I totally just want to tell the world who's listening, that really works.
Scott:
That's amazing and it's so heartening to hear, and it makes you feel good. There is some element which may be what's happened is that that dealer has recognized that we're actually in a new normal, right.
We all keep kind of having this assumption, it's about to end, right. We're going to come back to a normal time, and more and more it looks like that's actually going to be pretty hard to get to.
We had probably 25 years, 35 years where goods became plentiful and cheap. Just about everything that was on the market was effectively going down in price. You could get whatever you wanted whenever you wanted.
And it was effectively a buyer's market for a really long time. It might in fact be a supplier's market or if you will, you kind of think of it from the housing industry and that may continue for some amount of time.
So if a dealer starts to say, "Well, I'm going to think about this a little bit differently than I have in the past. I realize that my product is more valuable than it was. I can't necessarily discriminate just on price, nor do I want to."
In some cases, people are just simply not allowed to increase their price dramatically based on kind of dealer commitments. But maybe you also just want to make sure that while you don't offend by enormous price increases, but the price is going up, the supply is short.
So, sell it to your local good customer, rather than the guy who is calling from New Orleans and will literally never be a customer again.
Kristin:
I love that. That's awesome. Especially for the specialty markets that we're looking at here, and that also really takes some of the sting out of the price increases.
Scott:
I think so as well. I do think, and we've all said this for a long time, is that, people will pay for good service. And if you have a dealer who knows the business, will offer information, and will treat you like an individual, in some cases you don't know necessarily even mind the price increase.
I actually did just have a derailleur hanger break. I went into my local dealer, they didn't have any, it's a very small part, but it actually turns out to be not too inexpensive. And they ordered me a new one. They called me the day that it came in. I came in. I have absolutely no problem paying a little bit extra for it. I'm actually glad how they treated me through the process. And what do they have? They've got a long-term customer in me, as well.
Kristin:
I've been researching for our call today, "Mike's Bikes" is one of your customers. Can you talk about how what you do has enabled them, because they were pretty good before COVID. Right?
I'm curious to know how did you sharpen what they're doing in terms of their customer relationships and the loyalty that they build?
Scott:
Yeah. I think there are a couple of pretty good ideas that bring all this together. One is, there's an idea that we all talk about, called segmentation. And that is, simply stated, some differences in individuals have pretty large differences in their buying behavior.
And we probably all know that. Age and income are real determinants of what someone will do. And so when you think about traditional segmentation and historic segmentation, it often looks like demographics and psychographics.
So you do know where they live, you know what gender they are, their age and their income, things like that, whether they're married or not. But first of all, that's actually not the most useful sort of segmentation for small and mid-size businesses. And it's also not necessarily the most powerful segmentation.
And I do think that Mike's Bikes, as an example, uses, if you will, modern segmentation very effectively. And that tends to be through the use of behavioral data. So what is behavioral data? Well, it is the consumer action data that they're taking. So if in fact they bought a high-end Specialized carbon road bike in the past, you've got a whole lot more information than their age or income or gender, right. You know something about them that's really substantive. And you can expect that the next bike they buy is probably not going to be a $600 bike, but there's a lot more behavioral data than just even the purchase, right.
It is, well, are they on your website, and are they looking around? And what are they looking at when they're on your website? Are they looking at mountain bikes, right? Maybe they're making some sort of change.
How much time are they spending on your website? And then if you do send them marketing pieces, how are they interacting with that? Are they opening it? Are they clicking on it?
So Mike's Bikes is using all of that data together to make good, targeted, segmented messages that speak directly to individuals. And I'll give you a couple of examples.
They do think about customer marketing versus prospect marketing in a real way, right. So if somebody signs up on their website and says, "Hey, here I am. My name is Scott Buelter, and I've just given you my email address." That's a huge queue that they're interested in your business somehow.
If in fact that person is also wandering around the website and looking at very specific bikes, that is another queue that they're in the market for a bike. So you already know all this and what they're actually doing is creating automation.
And if you will, customer journeys. So the automation is the trigger point of saying, okay, they've signed up, they're interested and they're looking at bikes. Now, let me send them a browse abandon email, and a browse abandoned email is what it sounds like, right. They were browsing, they abandoned, they didn't buy anything. So now follow up with something, and the journey starts following up with them around that topic. And they do a great job of that.
And they've got a lot of automations that put five or six of these together, that ultimately end more often than not in that customer engaging and then making a purchase.
Kristin:
Can we say for our big takeaway today, that the way segmentation has been deployed has changed from 2020 to 2022 because of the COVID consumer and their lack of loyalty, their open mind to get solutions, et cetera. And then also their loyalty in terms of their identity as a mountain biker or cyclist in this case.
What do you pontificate in terms of how segmentation will continue to evolve in 2022?
Scott:
Well, I do think that those ideas will continue to accelerate. So, let's look at the restaurant industry for a second. Who in the restaurant industry was doing customer marketing at all, two years ago? Only the largest chains. And even then only the high-end large chains, because nobody had any customer information.
And you didn't really know your customer and you had no idea who was loyal, but they seemed to come in again and again. That has changed completely, a 180-turn.
Most restaurants now have a very good idea of who their customer is. They are ordering online. They are giving them their personal information and they don't mind doing it.
Now, there are intermediaries, like Uber Eats, that maybe are collecting the customer information. But I think that the restaurant has realized that, “hey, I've got loyal customers, they're actually spending a lot of money with me. And I'd rather not have that all go to Uber Eats, I'd like to have that come to me.”
So they're very engaged with this idea. I think that one of the key changes there is that, if a restaurant would've asked a consumer for their email address two years ago, the consumers are like, why in the world would I give you that? And what are you going to give me in return?
That's no longer the case. And I think that same idea exists in retail certainly and all sorts of types of retail. They don't mind anymore giving their information. And that actually does mean that they're actually very receptive to starting to build a relationship online.
Kristin:
I think that people, i.e., us as consumers, we see that as a way to maybe make sure that we're going to get what we need when we need it. I hate using the word frictionless, but it really does take some of the friction out of it.
When you have this active relationship, you're going into a restaurant or a store, but you're also getting their emails, it feels like you're going to be prioritized when it is time to go in and experience that in person. I have a feeling that's only going to get more strengthened as we get through 2022.
Scott:
I think though, too, and the only other thing that's worth mentioning here is just how technology has changed, right. If the pandemic actually happened in 2002, we would probably all still be struggling to work somehow, because you just couldn't work from home, right. The tech wasn't good enough, bandwidth wasn't good enough. And you couldn't get it done. I think the same is true for this entire topic.
The tech to pull all this data together and actually get web analytic email tracking data, 15 years ago or 10 years ago was really, really hard. And it was only for big companies. Today, it's 45 minutes of work and all of a sudden you've got that data flowing into a platform like Ascent360.
And so sometimes when I say these things, it probably sounds complicated. And maybe on the tech side, it is complicated, just like Zoom is complicated, but for the user, the average small business is executing on these ideas very well.
Kristin:
Well, that's awesome. And it's also great to hear that things are going so well at Ascent 360, because it shows that the customers within outdoor bikes, snow sports, and our sister outdoor recreation industries are doing well as well, and they're investing in their businesses, they're trying to be more consumer-centric.
All of these things are hugely positive as we're going into 2022, because ultimately, we're going to get a whole new competitive set, I think.
If you look at e-bikes, for example, are we ready to compete with Tesla? I don't know, but taking steps and managing that gap with tools like Ascent 360 is super meaningful. Tell us where we can learn more about Ascent 360.
Scott:
I think the best thing to do is, either head to our website, which ascent360.com or send us a note, right. My email is SBuelter@ascent360.com or there's lots of other people that you can connect to at LinkedIn, but feel free to send me a note. I'm more than happy to talk and discuss what can work best for you. I try to make it as simple as possible.
What I do know is that we've got hundreds of clients that are doing this stuff successfully. And that's actually, I think, a really exciting thing to be able to say out loud, that this is something that people are doing so successfully.
Kristin:
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. And Scott will be back every quarter this year to give us his take on what you're doing with the aggregated data and your direct relationships with so many important retailers and brands. Your viewpoint is really valuable to us here at the Channel Mastery podcast.
Thank you so much for your time!