Episode Transcript
Adam OLeary (00:01.728)
Welcome to simple wins the show where we talk to the architects behind the most successful B2B firms. We're currently in the middle of a massive project curating the 2026 B2B benchmark and we're looking for the high level strategies that actually work in today's market. And I knew I had to get Graham Arrowsmith on the mic to help us set the standard. After a 35 year corporate career Graham Arrowsmith chose to start his own marketing agency. He now offers a complete system to find
reach and convert affluent clients. Graham, a big welcome to the show. So excited to have you here.
Graham Arrowsmith (00:37.838)
It's a great pleasure and I hope I'm going to offer value to your clients, to your audience.
Adam OLeary (00:42.582)
Yes, you will. For sure you will and I'm so looking forward to this because you have access to data that most brands desire, which is information on affluent individuals across the world. So if a company accesses your data, how would they make the most of it?
Graham Arrowsmith (00:58.99)
initially the first thing is for us to help them with their ICP and making sure that they select the right data for themselves. So the first thing is to make sure they get the right type of affluent data. And affluent data is a bit like one of those sort of things that goes from affluent up to incredibly wealthy. And so basically it's selecting for their particular purposes which element of that. But how do you make the most of it? Well you make the most of it by choosing your
the way in which you're gonna get your communications to those individuals in a way that actually they're gonna respond to. you don't try to make the data do too much heavy lifting. The important thing is to get the match of their message effectively to the data itself. And I help people with that.
Adam OLeary (01:47.884)
So are you referencing mostly it's about finding your brand's positioning towards the people on the list, correct?
Graham Arrowsmith (01:54.415)
Yeah. One of the things that I do is I'm the one of the UK's, well, I think I'm the only representative of Mechlabs AI. So I actually, as a reseller, promote Mechlabs AI, which is a marketing platform. It's one of those things you can use one of the experts in there. There's loads and loads of experts, but one of the experts, I used it morning for a potential new client where we had a look at their ICP, their ideal customer profile. And just to make sure that the data selection that
they were looking for matched what I thought they needed. so it quickly analyzed just from their website, exactly what the ICP was. And we have a very specific methodology that we go through to actually identify an ICP and therefore how that messaging should match to the individual. So it's really quite a sophisticated thing. If it was just about, here's some data, go off and make use of it, that would be quite easy.
fairly ordinary, but this makes it extraordinary and what people want are results and so that's what I help people get.
Adam OLeary (03:02.728)
Absolutely, and so I think one of the big fears that any business would ever have is when they access data It's a bunch of cold leads I mean obviously what everybody wants is they want somebody knocking on their door saying I have a lot of cash Please take it right, but that's not the reality of the situation So how do we go about and take that data set that we now have and then start turning them into people who are interested in our offers?
Graham Arrowsmith (03:27.342)
Well, that's kind of what I said a little bit earlier, but basically one of the things that you would want to do is match your message and your call to action to that audience. But as I say, don't try to over emphasize the win. Get the small win. Get the, as I would call it, a micro yes. And the micro yes might be the sort of, it might be just saying yes to a download of something. So you start in a conversation.
with somebody. And when it comes to affluent individuals, they're really quite cautious and privacy sort of heavy themselves. So make it easy for affluent individuals to say yes to that sort of small next step, rather than expecting them to get the checkbook out on the first email that you send, which is, I think it's a sort of, I don't know whether it's a young thing, Adam, that might make me oldest.
But basically, think, you know, it's a bit like, you know, catch them gradually, show that you can be trusted. And there's a decent chance that your campaigns can produce the kinds of results that you're looking
Adam OLeary (04:41.361)
awesome and what are the methods that you've seen in terms of reaching out to these these individuals?
Graham Arrowsmith (04:47.406)
Well, for myself, we have three main ones and had a sort of embryonic fourth, but basically the three main ones are postal marketing. A lot of my career has been spent with direct mail and it's an incredibly effective method of opening a very trusted relationship with affluent individuals. Affluence tends to sort of correlate quite well with age. So, and the slightly older individual.
maybe 50 plus, was used to receiving a lot more mail than they are now. But getting mail that's relevant to them, that has a simple message and is not flashy, and try not to be flashy in your direct mail, that's one methodology. Another one is telephone marketing. And when was the last time you received a call when the person on the other end of the line called you mate?
you know, that's a straight, you know, move the phone down and, you know, stop the call. There are certain things you just don't want to do. And, you know, I'm not your mate, you know, but I will listen respectfully if you, if you're respectful with me. the telephone, telephone marketing can be a very effective way of discovering quickly what people want and how they would react to your offer.
a lot of people would expect and rightly so that email marketing is another form of a really good way of actually getting responses from affluent individuals. And I think it's question of how you use the ingredients of that to actually make the affluent market sort of say yes to those sort of micro yes steps. And then the final one that we're using more and more I think is to create custom audiences with meta products. So you take the email data and then you kind of
do some matching with meta and then you come up with a cohort of individuals who might well be of interest to you. So that's something else that we're doing increasing amounts with.
Adam OLeary (06:56.425)
That's awesome. That's really cool. And I like how you're actually using it from all these different touch points, too And as you know, this show is called simple wins because the best experts usually have the simplest solution What would you say is your signature simple win that one tweak you've seen work time and time again that a listener could execute this week?
Graham Arrowsmith (07:13.133)
That's a really good, and I knew that question was gonna come, Adam, but I had to think about that because it's a really good question. A couple of weeks ago, I released an article about identity-first chatbots. I hate them. I hate them because, and you know, affluent people hate them. There's a lot of evidence that says that if I give you my name and email,
Before you've offered any kind of value, I'm gonna be quite restrictive about what I'm going to tell you, how I'm going to tell you, the kind of conversation that flows. I provide what we call an agent delivery system, which you can immediately start talking to. There is no gateway to say, Adam, this email, whatever. What will happen during the conversation that will happen within the...
agent delivery system, which to somebody else would be called a chatbot, but it's way more sophisticated than that. But by doing that, by having an ADS or a chatbot type system on your site that doesn't put a gateway by saying, us your data before I'm going to give you value, you have an opportunity of finding some really rich information that within a very short period of time can make you, your understanding of your market.
that much more, but also it can convert into leads, which leads to sales as well. So I would say get yourself an agent delivery system and that would really help you convert a lot more, convert conversations into conversions.
Adam OLeary (09:01.951)
I love that. That's a really, really good use of being able to use that agent system. And I guess one of the things that I love is when people call out the fluff. What would you say that's one golden rule in your industry that most people think is essential, but you've proven is just a complete waste of time?
Graham Arrowsmith (09:16.557)
I spent a lot of my time, Adam, reading and following and actually at one point meeting Dan Kennedy. And he's kind of, and you've probably come across him, but he's kind of, I suppose the dirty secret is that most B2B people in the sort of area that I'm involved in, a lot of them will say that they'll use brand building as the way in which they should actually make money.
And I would say, as opposed to be thinking about that, especially if you're a small business, think direct response, be relevant directly to somebody and make their particular problem have a solution that you're offering in a way that they can say yes to. The brand building kind of comes later. Brand for me is only a set of experiences that you've had with a particular company anyway.
But the idea, I know for big companies, Dan Kennedy would call them big dumb companies, but basically big companies, they kind of, I don't know, they maybe have way too much money and maybe it works. But for me, direct response, communicating directly in the ways that I talked about a little bit earlier is the way to go as opposed to brand awareness campaigns, which maybe have clicks and likes and goodness knows what, but.
not money at end of it.
Adam OLeary (10:48.548)
Totally agree with that there from from my standpoint I've always viewed it as it's so much easier to go deeper with an individual Than to try to mass target a hundred thousand people simultaneously It's just not possible
Graham Arrowsmith (11:01.677)
I've upset a lot of brand agencies, but you know, there's a lot more to me than just being anti branding. Honestly, I'm not anti. I'm just, I think everything is in its context. And I think for me, you know, direct response is the way to go for so much marketing. And I think it's been slightly overtaken by, by young smart things.
Adam OLeary (11:29.706)
Absolutely. And if you could just snap your fingers and give your clients a massive competitive edge by December, what would that edge be?
Graham Arrowsmith (11:37.675)
That's a really good question because December's, know, the better part of a year away. And I was thinking about this and one of the services that we offer, and you can get from other people, but basically is answer engine optimization. What does that mean? Well, basically your website at the moment is one of the things that large language models like chat, GPT, perplexity, Claude, you name them. There's a number of Gemini, all kinds of LLMs.
when they're looking for an answer that people are going to their LLMs and say, well, who's the best person to change my tires in this area? If you're the guys with all the tires, you want your business to be cited and certainly cited in the top two, maybe three answers, because they won't have any more than that. And if you're not cited, then the chances of you getting the business from that particular person
not very big. So the thing that I would recommend as the quick and effective win over the course of this year is answer engine optimization. The way that you, if you've never heard of it, then think of it as the evolving thing with search engine optimization that we've known about for, you know, 10, 20 years or so. What answer engine optimization is, is all about optimizing
this new way that people will get found. And if you can't get found by LLMs, then you'll have a harder future. But now is the time to get involved in it. They say that in 2028, which is a couple of years away, that chat GPT will provide more answers to sort of questions posed than Google. Now it's a tectonic plate shift. It really is.
difference. Now the way you get started is find out where you are now and you might be in a pretty good position and we have an AEO service which it costs 25 quid. It's the price of a prawn cocktail. So effectively what you can do is you can actually put your URL in there and it will analyze your website and it'll tell you these are the things you need to sort of change you know structurally with your website to get found.
Graham Arrowsmith (14:05.109)
And then there are other things that you can do over time to make sure that your website and you as a business are getting found by the people searching for your services. And there are certain things you should do to get found. that's, if you contact us, we'll be very happy to help you with that. But the first thing is figure out where you are now. And then by the end of the year, you'll be getting found.
Because if you implement it and we have an AI agent, you know, my age, I just find it hard, Adam, to understand everything. But the truth is, an AI agent makes it easier for you to, well, do it this way. So what does this mean? well, it means this. Do it this way, first, and then that way, second, et cetera. And it just helps. And if you have a young, clever thing, as I do, as I am, but basically you can do it really quite easily. But the truth is, get it done and act on it right now because it's...
As a marketer, if you don't do it now, in two years, in six months, in 12 months, you will be behind your competitors. And that's something that's, I can almost promise you, not that I want that to happen, but it will happen unless you make changes right now and make changes. The biggest thing you could do over the next year is invest in AEO, answer engine optimization.
Adam OLeary (15:27.838)
I love that. And Graham, where can people go to learn more about you?
Graham Arrowsmith (15:31.052)
Well, there are two ways, one which is our digital type service platform, is AO and agents and so forth, the things that I've talked about, that's microyes.ai, just as it sounds microyes.ai. And the other way for affluent data and data for affluent individuals right around the world, various campaigns is, this is harder to understand, is finally,
Fettled, so F-I-N-E-L-Y. Did I get that right? F-I-N-E-L-Y, Fettled, F-E-W-T-L-E-D.co.uk.
Adam OLeary (16:10.187)
Amazing, Graham. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you coming on. Absolutely, and everyone, thank you so much for listening, and seriously, if you need access to affluent data, if you are selling banking service, high-ticket type of stuff, financial, whatever it might be that you need affluent data, please make sure to click on the link in the description. Go give Graham a visit because he has tons of it all around the world. So guys, thank you so much for listening. I will see you on the next episode. Bye.
Graham Arrowsmith (16:13.973)
thank you, Adam. It's been a pleasure.
