The Chat with Ellza Malok Pt3 - Understanding Customer Behavior & Speed to Lead

🎙 Episode Title: Understanding Customer Behavior & Speed to Lead

🗣 Guest: Ellza Malok

🎧 Host: Terry Wilson

📅 Series: Part 3 of the conversation with Ellza Malok

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

1️⃣ Data Overload: How to Identify What Really Matters

• Challenge: With so much data available, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
• Approach: Use a whiteboarding method (virtual or physical) to map out all data points.
• Insight: Unexpected or rare data points may hold key insights.
• Quote: “Sometimes those are the nuggets you should be looking for, but your bias says it’s just ancillary information.”

2️⃣ The Science of Gut Feelings & Decision-Making

• The gut feeling isn’t just instinct – it’s backed by neuroscience.
• Our gut contains brain cells that process information.
• Lesson: Don’t dismiss gut instincts outright; they often result from subconscious data analysis.

3️⃣ The Hidden Power of Anomalies in Data

• Key Insight:~50% of seemingly minor details turn out to be crucial.
• Example: Office return reluctance → Initially blamed on long commutes, but deeper analysis showed childcare drop-offs were the real issue.
• Lesson: The first layer of data isn’t always the full picture – keep digging!

4️⃣ Fast Decision-Making vs. Rigorous Research

• Terry’s perspective: Prefers to move quickly and pivot if necessary.
• Ellza’s view: Balance is key – small businesses can be more agile, while larger companies need structured research.

Ideal process:

1. Preliminary research– Identify early insights.
2. Test in small markets– Validate findings without huge risks.
3. Iterate & refine– Adapt as new data comes in.

5️⃣ Speed to Lead: Why Fast Responses Matter in Marketing

• Principle: “He who speaks first, speaks best.”
• Middle-of-the-funnel importance:

• Qualifying leads quickly improves conversion rates.
• Marketing teams should embrace “no“– it helps refine messaging.
• If leads aren’t converting, it’s a signal to adjust targeting or messaging.

Quote: “Marketing needs the same lesson as sales: it’s better to get the no.”

6️⃣ Marketing & Sales Alignment for Better Results

• Transparency builds trust→ If marketing delivers high-quality leads, sales teams will be more engaged.
• Marketing’s role isn’t just awareness→ It’s about qualifying leads and building pipeline.

🔹Key Takeaways:

✅ Unexpected data points often reveal the biggest insights.
✅ Gut instincts have a scientific basis – trust them when backed by data.
✅ Iterative research is crucial; don’t rely on a single data snapshot.
✅ Fast response times improve lead qualification and sales efficiency.
✅ Embrace “no” in marketing – it refines strategy and messaging.
✅ Marketing should own pipeline responsibility and work closely with sales.

00:00- Terry Wilson:

You know, there’s there’s it’s a world full of data these days. Um, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. How do you decide which data points when you’re doing these studies and reviews that really matter when it comes to understanding and influencing customer behavior? Or behavior in general. So not just customer behavior, but behavior in general.

00:21- Ellza Malok: 

Yeah, I’m a big proponent of, and I have a physical whiteboard, but we do a lot of virtual whiteboards for obvious reasons. I’m a big proponent of lay everything on there and see where we start to collect critical mass and identify things that we did not expect. Um, because one of the best areas as we go down this rabbit hole is we say, Oh, what does that mean?

00:45- Ellza Malok: 

Because sometimes those are the nuggets you should be looking for, but your bias is saying, yeah, that’s just, you know, ancillary information. It’s not important. Um, so we kind of put everything together and start to. Literally mirror board where the commonalities are and group them and then where the most rare ones, um, and say, this is where the critical mass is building.

01:06- Ellza Malok: 

But then these are the, just the weird things that we should at least reconcile, if not anything else. So, that’s how we go about it is we, we kind of take all those theories, put them together. And then, and then identify where, where our focus points are. That usually happens. Uh, our, our average research program is pretty long.

01:25- Ellza Malok: 

It’s about 6 months. So that usually happens when we 1st get ancillary data. And then we do all those pulse checks throughout to make sure that we’ve validated it. Um, because to your point, you could, you could go down so many of these, and eventually we will cover the vast majority of them that we think are viable.

01:42- Ellza Malok: 

And we have a kind of criteria checkaround. Should we go after something or not? Um, or are we, are we shooting from our emotional side instead? And, and sometimes that’s okay because actually the emotional ones sometimes tend to be, um, gut reactions. And I have to tell people, I’m like, we’re not actually trusting our gut.

02:02- Ellza Malok: 

We’re trusting the cells that live in our gut that are brain cells. So we should be, we should be listening to them a little bit. Um, cause we’ve got, we’ve got brain cells in, in actually multiple parts of our body that, that, um, according to research. So there’s something there about when people say, Oh, you know, you’re only trusting your gut.

02:21- Ellza Malok: 

I’m like, Sometimes there’s some cells working there, so we’ve got to listen to them.

02:26- Terry Wilson: 

There’s a reason for that. There’s a reason for that. Do you, how often do you find that it’s those, and look, I like the way you mentioned where’s the critical mass, where you’ve actually got enough data to look at, but how many, how often is it those snippets of, um, well that doesn’t make sense, or this little thing doesn’t quite look right.

02:45- Terry Wilson: 

I wonder why that is. How often is it those things that you find come to be the major driving force?

02:53- Ellza Malok: 

the reason why we actually do that model, and we split our resources that way, is because I would say close to 50 percent of the time, those ancillary pieces are actual, are not ancillary. They are actually part of a bigger picture that we’re not seeing. So, Um, I would say, you know, if someone were coming and say, well, how much percentage of things that were critical mass were actually, you know, the, the, the things that helped you formulate the strategy and the complex and impactful way and versus the ancillaries.

03:25- Ellza Malok:

I would say they’re pretty well tied. And, um, often, like I mentioned in the RTO program, we kept seeing just a couple of random ones and like, I have to make multiple stops or, um, you know, I have to go this weird direction or whatever. And I’m like, what, we went through the multiple stops route. And then as we went through the secondary round of, of asking people again, what they mean by these things. We realized they were actually tied together. We just had only a part of the narrative of the whole. So that actually is probably more common is it’s not that that one particular thing was the silver bullet. It was just, we had to zoom out. Further to realize that we can collect those into a bigger bucket

04:07- Terry Wilson: 

You’re right. Interesting. Interesting. Look, uh, Research, uh, for me is one of the areas that, um, I enjoy it, but I also find it, what’s the word, I get bored easy. I’m, to looking at the same thing and digging down deeper and deeper, I tend to get bored easy. And I’m one of those people that, not necessarily through ego, well maybe it is ego and I’m just not.

04:32- Terry Wilson: 

denying that it’s like, okay, I’ve seen enough. Let’s move on. Um, I have such a bias for action that I’ll see what I think. Okay. And there you go. This, I’m going to refer back to it. It’s got feeling once you’ve got intuition says, yeah, okay, I’ve seen enough. Let’s move forward in that direction. Um, it’s almost probably a little bit of that fail fast mentality where let’s move on.

04:51- Terry Wilson: 

If it doesn’t work, then we can come back and go from there. But you know, your, um, it’s okay to do that when it’s, when you’re a smaller business and there’s less at stake and you can move fleets. you know, very, very fleet of foot and move quickly from, from, from side to side, so to speak. Um, but when you’ve got a larger midsize, you know, large midsize organization, then you don’t want to be making too many of those little mistakes along the way that can have big impact.

05:18- Ellza Malok: 

exactly and you can I mean you can parse Our six month one is probably the shortest one. We have the 12 month marker, which is our ideal because those allow us to say Preliminary and for information go test it out in the field and then we can continue to iterate While we’re still running our double blind throughout it. Um, and, and often to your point, what happens is like, let’s go fail fast and cheap on a couple of things and, and move forward. And I think that, um, uh, I just read an article around how. Smaller size companies are actually going to be at a significant advantage in the next decade because of their ability to be nimble and move versus being a large ship that could potentially run into an iceberg and can’t pivot fast enough. So there is something about just the, the method in which we also recommend how often those companies take that is. Not as often as we would like, um, to say, Hey, here’s some preliminary information, go test it in a very small market and then come back to us. We already have all your data. So we know the market that you’re going to look into.

06:33- Ellza Malok:

So we can, you know, we can take it with a grain of salt when, when the information comes back. Um, but that’s kind of like ideally, you know, if, if everyone follows the process on, on creating those. Cause. I don’t see research as a, as a single point in time when you are. When you’re researching, you’re kind of, you kind of have a layer of it across. When you, when you take information, you,, you apply it, you create a strategy around it, and then you put it in the market. You should all, you should consistently be researching your, your analytical phase of, let me see what’s going on. That’s a research initiative and we like to be there. We call them pulse checks after our, you know, perception program or what have you come in. Um, if they don’t want to if a client doesn’t want us to be there throughout the entire process, we’ll just do a pulse check to say, let’s just kind of, you know, go to the doctor really quick and see, see how you’re doing, get a quick physical, um, around it to make sure you’re headed in the direction. Um, and transparently markets are changing so quickly that something that was true eight months ago may not be true today. So, but you have, you have enough of the foundation to know, how do you discern if, if I should be worried or not? And that’s kind of the beauty of having that initial phase. And that’s why we always start things in, in that research first model.

07:58- Terry Wilson: 

I guess the point that jumped on my mind while you were talking about that was the, where you’d done the research on why people weren’t coming back or didn’t want to come back into the office, what the reluctance was, and you said there’s so many stops. Well, that was the first layer.

08:12- Terry Wilson: 

And then you were able to dig down deeper and say, okay, well, tell us more about that.

08:16- Terry Wilson: 

So what I was saying was that where you’ve got that layer of research that’s ongoing, and then you’re able to dig deeper when the example you gave about people wanting to come back to the office and they’re saying they’ve got too many stops, well then you can dig down deeper and that’s where you got those insights about actually it’s the child care and child mining, uh, you know, drop offs on the way through the issue.

08:35- Terry Wilson: 

I, I get it, I get it. And I guess that’s why, uh, organizations like yours exist so that I don’t have to sit there and try and do research for six months, which would drive me crazy.

08:47- Ellza Malok: 

I mean that it takes a certain level of rigor for sure. When you, when you go into those modes and, um, but we chunk it out in ways Um, we white space some things as well. So sometimes it’s like even just having that information and then letting your brain parse through it is important because the back of your brain is starting to kind of figure things out and, um, You know, if you, if you’ve ever watched like a murder series or, you know, a true crime podcast, it’s like, you know, they kind of pushed it aside and then like three months later they came back to it and then they had an aha moment. It’s not that the aha moment was so obvious. It’s that the back part of your brain was thinking about it for such a long time. And then it moved. And with the second time you reviewed it again, the front part of your brain kind of figured it out and caught up with it.

 09:40- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah, it’s fascinating. Fascinating. Look, aside from rigor, there’s a certain level of expertise to do market research properly. And that certainly is not my area of expertise.

09:53- Ellza Malok: 

Yeah, it’s, um, our team does a phenomenal job of just even removing the bias from that. And that’s important in these.

10:06- Terry Wilson: 

I just wanted to jump back to this whole speed to lead in, in, uh, the CIA factor or intelligence using the fast responses.

10:16- Terry Wilson: 

And, and, you know, he who speaks first speaks best. How do you see that principle playing out in marketing, especially when it comes to capturing potential clients early?

10:25- Ellza Malok:

I think that, um, in marketing, a lot of our opportunity comes in at that middle of the funnel. And, and I’m, I’m not entirely sold on the funnel model because I don’t think that’s necessarily how we go into it, but it’s easy. Methodology that, that CMOs understand, um, you know, you, you’ve done the due diligence of getting them to build enough awareness of the organization. And now you’re in this mode of, are you interested? Are you not, where do you fall? You know, what’s, what’s your level of interest. And I think that you can use those to actually just cut from the clutter. And, if you don’t see if you’re working on a particular campaign that has brought in. A set of leads that may not necessarily be marketing qualified. It’s a great qualifying model to kind of say, Hey, here’s some information. Does this interest you? And I, I think actually a lot of marketing departments are worried about hearing no. And I actually think no is a great response because you can move them into nurture and you can host them there and, and, and continue to tell the narratives and stories that you need to tell to move them into a further point rather than having a polluted set of clients that receive the same thing and then your conversion rates drop because of it. You, you, I, I would much rather, and I’ll speak for myself that focuses more on a relationship driven model. Um, I would much rather someone say, Hey, this is a, This is really interesting, but it’s not something that we would have the budget for, you know, I don’t have the authority, any of the bant elements for it because it’s such a incredible waste of time. And I, I think that is 1 of the few resources that cannot be replaced. And if you’re down to a quarter, you’re down to a quota for the year. You really want to talk to that. So that speech lead around, like getting the response and getting the answer around it, I think sales has some training mechanisms, you know, from Sandler and some value selling and some of these other mechanisms that, that train around, like, you know, It’s better to get the no.

12:41- Ellza Malok: 

I think marketing needs the same lesson in many instances.

12:45- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And so that the speed of that response and getting those answers allows you to effectively will qualify. Put put those prospects or that prospects that wherever they might be in their buying process into the right stage of your funnel if you want to call it that

13:04- Ellza Malok: 

Yeah. And if you’re getting too many no’s, then maybe there’s, there’s something in your messaging or the way that you’ve positioned the product or solution to say, well, we’re getting a lot of no’s. So I’d rather, I’d rather get the no and then inquire why right away if I start to see a pattern, but it, it kind of removes, it puts back accountability in the process, which is something I’m really big about it. It kind of says. They said no. And why did they say no? And then if you start to see that pattern, then you say, well, hold on a minute. Does that mean we don’t have the right buyer if we’re getting constantly? I’m not the right authority because then that’s easy. That’s, those are pivots and those are pathways rather than kind of staying in the state of ambiguity that I think, I think that middle of the funnel really has is, you know, there’s, there’s somewhere between interested in consideration. And in my opinion, if they’re considering and you’re selling something that has a salesperson attached to it, there should be a salesperson assigned and having actively having a conversation. If they’re an interest, you want to get to a tier of interest. I go back to like my quadrants of four, like. You know, anything below it, anything below a three is, is nurture or, or investigate why three and above four obviously goes to a salesperson.

14:21- Ellza Malok: 

Three continues to like, uh, offer them some high value. Um, cause it, it gets you to that. It gets you to much more of a real estate of where pipeline is. And I think that as CMOs who are not necessarily tied to a number, it’s a great way to build trust with your sales counterparts.

14:41- Terry Wilson: 

because ultimately the end objective is to build a pipeline.

14:44- Ellza Malok: 

Yes. And you’re just transparent and honest about it, which I think is, um, a great way to kind of support your, your, your sales team around it. And, and, uh, as, as someone who used to do that, you’d get, you get a lot more ideas bought in when when you can kind of say, Hey, that didn’t work, we’re going to try this other thing.

15:07- Terry Wilson: 

Yeah.

15:07- Ellza Malok: 

to try it? Yeah, of course we would do.