Design Pickle:

Jeff Walter (00:00)

Hi, and welcome back to the Training Impact Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Walter, and my guest today is Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle. He’s the Revenue Operations Leader at Design Pickle. As the Revenue Operations Leader, he specializes in architecting the systems, processes, strategies that power scale will go to market execution. At Design Pickle, he serves as a cross-functional leader driving alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success to reduce customer acquisition costs.

 

increased qualified demo volume, and improved funnel conversion rates. Wyatt, welcome to the show. Thank you for your time.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (00:36)

Absolutely, Jeff. Appreciate you having me.

 

Jeff Walter (00:38)

So, you know what, I’m always curious how people end up where they’re at. I ended up where I’m at by series of accidents, and here I am running a company, who’d thought. So how’d you end up as the vice president of revenue or the revenue operations director at Design Pickle? What’s the journey, how’d you end up there? And what does Design Pickle do? You guys don’t make pickles, I take it.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (01:01)

Not anymore. We used to send them out in the mail and they unfortunately explode if you ship them. So a quick tip for anybody sending pickles. So before we get into who I am, I currently work for Design Pickle. We’re effectively a creative design agency that supports people with scalable flat rate designs. So where people may hire an actual marketing agency or freelancer or a full-time employee to do creative design for them.

 

Jeff Walter (01:06)

Ha

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (01:26)

a flat rate solution to that where we can provide you with videos, slideshows, and any other graphic that you may need.

 

Jeff Walter (01:32)

And then how did you end up where you’re at? What’s been the journey for you?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (01:36)

Yes, many happy accidents, I would say. So on my way up as a professional, I basically came through with a marketing background and experience in sales operations. Effectively, if you mix the two of them, you get revenue operations. So I was working for an agency for about five years, helping people in the B2B space with all things marketing, revenue operations, and inbound strategy. And over time, I just decided that

 

I would love to work in-house and love to do more cross-functionally and decided to join the team here at Design Pick.

 

Jeff Walter (02:08)

So why design pickle? What is it about design pickle that tickled your fancy, as it

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (02:12)

I think the main thing for me personally and professionally is I like when people can have a clear split between being professional and being personable. There’s a lot of places where you have to be incredibly buttoned up at work. And honestly, I think as long as you are good at what you do and capable, you don’t have to be as stuffy as a lot of places would require.

 

Jeff Walter (02:34)

I would imagine at a design agency where creativity is the currency of the business, right? That having that more free flowing would, it’d be hard to be a button down type of operation where, you can’t let any personality escape because you have to be that corporate figure all the time. know, creativity doesn’t have, you can’t engineer creativity. ⁓

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (02:35)

it.

 

Hmm.

 

Absolutely.

 

Hey, I

 

may not be an artist, but I still work in creative when it comes to creative solutions. So I’m all there.

 

Jeff Walter (03:06)

So when somebody engages, one of the things we want to talk about is scaling. And I’m doing this workshop next February for the IFA on scaling franchisors. And I thought this would be really interesting conversation because we talk to a number of folks about a lot of elements of scaling. Usually you’re emerging franchisor.

 

You know, they came up with a great concept there that that that Uber technician, they know how to do that generally know how to do the thing really well. They, they created a couple of locations. They decided to go from that founder to franchise or model. and now there’s all these other things that they, they need to figure out what to do and how to scale without making the whole thing fall apart. and so, I, one of the things I thought was interesting when we first started talking,

 

was from a design perspective, when would somebody that was scaling a franchise, as a franchisor, when would they engage somebody like Design Pickle? When would be the right time to engage? guess would be the right question.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (04:10)

Yeah, so honestly, I think it’s all demand based. So you effectively have people that are scaling up a business and they’ll come up with creative needs. So often that’s things like I need a flyer, a billboard, a menu design. And those are just kind of individual things that you need to complete. At that point, you may not need a full time or even a freelance supporter. You just kind of need that one off request. But there comes a point where as a franchisor or as a business, you want

 

Digital marketing, you want to be able to run advertisements at scale. And at that point, especially when digital marketing comes into play, you need paid ads, video ads, designs, things for people to download and or use. And so at that point, you’ve grown to a stage where you have enough demand.

 

Jeff Walter (04:52)

And then that’s where, uh, that’s where y’all would come in, right? Is when it feels like the doing the one-off thing is just a little, uh, it, it’s like going back to the wall over and over and over again. And, with a new bucket, because you never know who you’re using and you’re like, okay, I want to start incorporating that into my business to scale, to help scale. And especially on the, uh, so what do you guys find is the most popular type of thing you’re designing?

 

for a growing business. Is it the digital content is the most common thing? I would imagine, I don’t know.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (05:27)

Hmm.

 

I would definitely say that it is. So in terms of who we work with the most, we work with people in the B2B SaaS space. We work with mid to enterprise corporations. We also work with other marketing agencies themselves. And so a lot of the time those requests come back to digital advertisements. So you need banner ads for Facebook or Twitter. Effectively just when you start to get social media involved in any of those platforms, there’s going to be a visual element of your brand and there’s going to be a need.

 

for that design.

 

Jeff Walter (05:57)

Okay. And, and so when they’re asked, when, somebody asks for these designs, what, and we can relate this to what you’re doing for design pickle. It’s usually within the customer acquisition cycle. I would imagine, you know, building brand awareness or, or, or, you know, top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, is,

 

How do they know they’ve been successful? How do they know, or how do you guys know you’ve been successful with a company like, know, what, what, how do you, you know, what’s the measure of success? How do you know you’ve hit the mark as it were?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (06:29)

Yeah, I think the two main measurements are either in time savings or cost savings, especially when I evaluate any service or tool. So in terms of something like time savings, ⁓ you’re talking about a franchisor, which is a single person who’s hyper specialized and potentially they have the time to create designs on their own, whether or not it’s to the quality that they like, that’s up to them. But it comes a point where there’s a million different things that they can do. So your options become.

 

Jeff Walter (06:41)

Mm-hmm.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (06:55)

Am I hiring a freelancer, a full agency, a full-time employee or a solution such as ourselves? so effectively just right there, it comes back to buying back your time. So being efficient with your hires or the team that you build up with you. And then from a cost savings perspective, especially when it comes to digital advertisements, there’s a lot of things you can do in terms of connecting platforms like Google AdWords for your display ads or a lot of the other.

 

Jeff Walter (07:22)

Mm-hmm.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (07:23)

social media platforms, but a lot of that comes into building the tech stack around you and having the proper attribution. So if you can connect things properly, there’s a better idea of is this worth my time and money? But until then, it comes back to an efficiency perspective of who you’re hiring and what you’re doing on a day to day.

 

Jeff Walter (07:40)

Yeah. So it’s interesting. You mentioned Google AdWords. I was talking to somebody the other day and one of things that they were saying, said, have you seen an increase in bot traffic consuming the ads? Is there anything anybody can do about that? Sorry, just coming right turn there. when you mentioned that, was like, you were talking about Google AdWords and its effectiveness and how to optimize effectiveness.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (07:54)

So yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (08:07)

And one of the challenges was, was like, hey, I’m spending all this, know, click per, you know, pay per click on what’s turning out to be just bots. ⁓ So not really in the design realm, but I was just curious if you had any thoughts on that.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (08:19)

Thanks

 

No, I mean, it’s honestly an issue that we see more and more frequently nowadays, especially in digital marketing. I think there’s three key ways to take care of it, and that’s through data enrichment, the way that you capture information, and then your follow-up process. So let’s just say I’m a malicious actor. I have a ton of bots come to your site. They either fill out a form or they click through your traffic. If you’re doing a pay-per-click,

 

Jeff Walter (08:46)

Mm-hmm.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (08:49)

You’re still going to be charged for their overall traffic. But if you’re doing things like paper conversion or form fill, then it comes back to how can you qualify that or stop them from submitting altogether? So we’ll give you kind of two examples of this. There’s a data provider called IP quality score, which can provide new address verification, phone number verification, and fingerprint verification. That information can tell you things like, are these people legitimate? Are they using fraudulent information?

 

Are they coming in through a VPN? Are they potentially a bot? So you can detect it off the bat. And then the other is kind of layering in something that only a bot or a non-human would do. So creating a form field that you have for a submission that only bots can see, but humans would never fill out naturally. And if it’s filled, you know the bot did it.

 

Jeff Walter (09:36)

So that gets you, if we’re looking at AdWords, so you’re still gonna pay for the click, but then your staff doesn’t have to, you don’t have to waste time and energy worrying about that particular garbage lead as a war. Is that, yeah.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (09:40)

Mm-hmm.

 

So you can effectively

 

handle this on either your website or the back end, but the two feedback elements that go to any of these digital platforms are the completed action and then what you are considering a conversion event. So when you consider a conversion event, it be once they fill out the form or once they fill the form and you’ve validated that they’re a real person. And so as long as you’re attracting them to the correct feedback loop, it means that they’ll search for more real people and fewer bots over time as it optimizes.

 

Jeff Walter (10:21)

And how do you, from a Google AdWords, how do you get that feedback? How do you get that feedback back to Google? Or can you? I don’t know. Not that I, you know, anyway, just any thoughts or ideas on there?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (10:27)

Hmm.

 

Yeah. I mean, if you’re incredibly curious on that, it comes back to Google click ID. So effectively you have cookies that people come into your website on and that includes the Google click ID, which is kind of a combo of what the action they did and who they are. I didn’t anonymized. And so after the conversion event happens, if you’re doing anything that’s code related, if you have CRM, if you’re using tools like Zapier and eight N clay.

 

Jeff Walter (10:41)

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (11:01)

You can send a web hook or the conversion vent back to whatever platform you’re using. It’s a bit tech related, but the short answer is some code or platform based based on how your websites configured.

 

Jeff Walter (11:08)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. Well, well, it’s, that’s interesting to, and the reason I’m going down that, like I said, you know, colleagues had, had, talked about that. And as, as I’ve been thinking about scaling, you know, scaling a franchise is really like three things that the franchise or has to help or provide a system for the franchisee. It’s, you know, finding customers, closing customers and servicing customers. Right.

 

That’s the core process. That’s, that’s the business model that the franchisee is buying into, right? Like a model of how to, how to attract customers, turn them into, you know, or attract prospects, turn them into customers and then service them afterwards. And obviously digital being digital marketing being a huge element of that first piece. And, you know, a lot of times you have these emerging, guys that are scaling there, they tend to be like I was saying earlier.

 

They’re the master chef, the master technician, the person that figured out a better mousetrap. They’re really good on the servicing side, in general. I mean, there’s all kinds, but they figured out a better mousetrap. But now they’re trying to, in a franchise system, and trying to scale it to that magic number of 100 units. Initially,

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (12:12)

Hmm.

 

Exactly.

 

Jeff Walter (12:31)

those first couple of units come in and they buy into the vision of the, that founder, right? Because, because she or he has, you know, they built a better mousetrap. can, they know it’s a better mousetrap. They want to be part of the better mousetrap. And so they, they put their money up and now they’re part of it. Right. They, but in building out that client acquisition, piece, especially that prospecting piece, when you’re at the top end of the funnel, you know, they’re not.

 

necessarily skilled in that and how do you, and neither are there franchisees, but you got to build out that system. And so one of the reasons I was, you know, most people that were the naive response, which would be my response years ago, I don’t claim to be an expert in any of this, would be, you know, you know, just run a bunch of ads, right? You know, like, and, and then I’ve noticed, like I said, and one of the gentlemen I was talking to, it’s like, okay.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (13:14)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (13:21)

That’s good, but we’re starting to see the efficacy that go down. And if you have a malicious actor that wants to consume your ad budget or digital ad budget, they just get a bunch of bots, consume your budget on junk and fill out a bunch of junky leads. so when you have this type of person, it’s not that sophisticated when it comes to cookies and the things you talked about. It’s difficult. It’s hard.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (13:40)

Hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (13:50)

You know, it’s a hard thing to do and you don’t want to waste that money either. You know, so it’s challenging.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (13:55)

Absolutely. I mean, malicious actors will literally just chew up your ads budget and they could be hired. They could be doing it for you to effectively be ransomed. Um, it’s a lot of reasons, but it’s something that you just have to deal with in the digital age. And I think, especially when it comes back to ads and what seeing what’s successful, um, we basically gone from the madman error of this advertisement feels good. So we’re putting it out to this advertisement is doing good. We can see the results. Um,

 

Jeff Walter (14:20)

Right.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (14:25)

So especially now that we can see the results, it becomes so much more important that you’re building things with consistency and through automation.

 

Jeff Walter (14:31)

And I would, I guess on both sides of the equation too, earlier before we came on mic, we were talking about AI. And the other thing that strikes me is, and I’ve seen this on our own business with Google, trying to, the AI bots are getting smarter and smarter and smarter and trying to figure out how to separate them from humans.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (14:39)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (14:59)

It’s hard. It’s really hard.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (15:01)

Yes. I mean,

 

on both sides of the coin, positive and negative, it’s very hard how to filter things out. But depending on how you wield it as a business owner, can also be incredibly powerful. Anytime I talk AI and kind of the descriptions of what it can do, I like to call it the world’s smartest intern, especially from a business perspective. They can do data analytics. They can create content for you. And there’s a lot that they can do.

 

but it’s only as good as the instructions you provide to them. So a lot of people, especially in, let’s say the design space, will create a design or a draft using AI, but there are things wrong, things need to be changed, there’s quality assurance issues. So especially in the design space, it comes back to proper instruction and then taking it the next step.

 

Jeff Walter (15:47)

And, and, and, and I like that the it’s the world’s smartest intern. ⁓ but you know, an intern that doesn’t have a good, mentor, it’s just an intern. Right. So, so within design pickle, let’s get out of the, the marketing stream there and get into, the operations of what design pickle does. How do you guys see AI, especially since you’re in the content?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (15:52)

Mm-hmm.

 

That’s

 

Jeff Walter (16:10)

generation space, how do you see incorporating that into your business model?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (16:14)

Yeah. So in terms of incorporations of AI, there’s a lot that I do on kind of the backend basis and then what our front end client team actually does with AI. But I think it comes back to time savings and just improvement of the features available to you. So from my perspective, I work a lot with the sales team. And so a lot of their job is researching people prior to a demo call and following up with them via email.

 

the world’s smartest intern can do both of those things. And so it comes back to how do we save time to get people to do the more important part of their job? so especially in like the creative space, we do have competitors that are fully AI based. So there are people that are trying to sell that product from our perspective. we don’t want any of our, content to be fully AI generated. use AI tools to assist in the work and make it faster. However,

 

We want to make sure that the quality is there. We want to make sure the trademarks are there so that you can actually use this without any issue of coming back to you via copy.

 

Jeff Walter (17:14)

Well, that’s, that, well, I mean, that’s, that’s a whole, that’s a whole other interesting thing is copyright and the AI. I think the Supreme court said that a few, I think it was last year that AI generate content, purely AI generate content cannot be copyrighted or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was something they were, they were, were, I wish I would remember the case, but they were

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (17:33)

I’m not ultra familiar, but I wouldn’t be shy.

 

Jeff Walter (17:41)

Looking at there was a fair use case, right? Cause the, there’s a, you know, there, there’s the, is the, is the content that an AI consumes to learn a fair use, a fair copyright use, a fair use of that copyrighted material, right? Or is it, you know, like, know, you and I can’t buy a book, make a million copies on a copy machine and sell it. Right. That’s, that’s not for use, but we can buy a book, make a copy of it.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (18:04)

Exactly.

 

Jeff Walter (18:09)

for our own personal consumption, that’s the fair use. And I remember there was a case about that last year about AI and it was interesting because I think they had said that an AI generated thing cannot be copyrighted.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (18:22)

And

 

I think it’s probably back to what you said about training and trademarking. Training is just based on whatever information they ingested, which it’s not their original work. So it’s difficult to trademark. And then literal trademarks. If you find a McDonald’s logo or you find specific business logos in your image, is it under fair use? Are you using things that are copyrighted? And so if an AI generates that, you can still be in muddy waters.

 

Jeff Walter (18:27)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah. I, I tend to, I, I, my, my gut sense is, you know, AI, like every great technological leap is, going to be over-promised, undelivered, under-delivered, and eventually change everything. Yeah. You know, you think it’s a tsunami coming in, but then the tsunami tends to be just over-promised. But meanwhile, the sea levels are rising.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (18:59)

Yes.

 

Jeff Walter (19:10)

slowly but surely and then one day you’re like, life is completely different than it was. We see that with the internet, it’s fascinating.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (19:10)

Mm-hmm.

 

And I think from

 

what you said prior to us hitting record, a lot of AI just kind of raises the scale or raises the waters. Like you said, there’s quality, there’s specific expectations. And as you deliver work, what you could complete in one hour can now be done in 30 minutes. So comes back to what quality can you add on top of anything AI generated.

 

Jeff Walter (19:38)

Yeah, it’s going to be really interesting. and I, I tend to look a lot at the past to figure out what the future is going to hold. And, and, and like one thing that was, that’s really, that’s really interesting is if you look at the beginning of the 20th century, when all the modern conveniences in your home came into the home, indoor plumbing, electricity, gas stove, you know, the stove, the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the clothes washer, all that. And, and it was.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (19:45)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (20:06)

And it was fascinating. And I think about this in terms of AI, and I know this sounds really weird to talk about dishwashers and AI, but the fascinating thing was how we as a society pocket the benefits of these improvements. an example that was used was when you look at all the improvements, say in the kitchen and other family things.

 

It created such productivity improvements that it allowed one of the spouses, you know, prior to that, somebody had to stay home and do all the cooking. It was an all day process just to put food on a table. You know, you didn’t have refrigerator, you didn’t have frozen. Like it was an all day process just to feed the family. So somebody had to do that. And obviously all the technological improvements, it frees up time. And, and now that other person can now go do other things with their.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (20:39)

Mm.

 

Jeff Walter (20:58)

They can work or anything else. But then the other interesting thing, so that’s one, and we all kind of get our hands around it. On the other hand, they analyzed clothes and laundry. And this thing I found fascinating. We spend just as much time today doing laundry as our great grandparents did 150 years ago.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (21:04)

Hmm?

 

Jeff Walter (21:20)

The only difference is they had two pants and two shirts and were washing the laundry constantly. And they would wear something multiple times before they cleaned it, which is why shirts used to have removable cuffs and collars. And today we have a closet full of shirts and pants. And we wouldn’t, most folks wouldn’t think of wearing the same thing twice without washing it.

 

And so we took all that productivity improvement and increased the quality. totally, we didn’t pocket any of the savings and free up time. We took it all and we’re just, we’re wearing cleaner clothes. Yeah, we’re always wearing clean clothes.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (21:58)

I think there’s,

 

mean, it’s funny that you draw both of those comparisons where you have the kitchen example and the laundry example. I think a lot of people do have a fear that AI is taking jobs or that it may remove some jobs, but it comes with any individual technology that instead of doing what you were doing today, you are now potentially managing that process or doing something additional on top of it. So you get people working in factories to things being fully

 

Jeff Walter (22:05)

Yeah.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (22:26)

mechanized. And so back to people are taking their whole day cooking. Now it’s just a part of their day and they can do other things. That’s what we’re seeing today. Same with the laundry example of we’re not going from two shirts to two loads of laundry where you’ve built something that can do so much more at the same amount of time. So doing more with your time is always what we’re looking for.

 

Jeff Walter (22:48)

Yeah. So it’s, so I think it’ll be fascinating to see how that gets played out. Cause it’s always, it’s going to be a mix of both, right? It’s going to be a mix of some of it’s like, Oh, we were doing this and now we’re spending half the time doing that. And, you know, which means we can either double, you know, take the laundry example, we can double the throughput because it’s taking half the time, or we can take the savings and go do something else. And when we throw it to the society,

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (22:53)

Hmm?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (23:16)

I think you’re going to have, like we have every other technological revolution, a whole bunch of displaced people because the, the economy is not going to absorb the multiple of the thing that’s being higher productivity. You know, if you have a tenant, you know, if you’ve increased productivity a hundred percent, you can produce twice as much for the same inputs, but unless people want twice as much, they won’t consume twice as much.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (23:23)

Hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (23:42)

Maybe they’ll consume 50 % more. So now you only need a two thirds of the people that used like that type of thing. It’s going to be fascinating. It’s going to be. ⁓

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (23:42)

Yes.

 

It’s going to

 

be very interesting. And I think displacement is the right word for it because again, it’s not taking jobs, but it is making things more confusing for a lot of people.

 

Jeff Walter (24:01)

So, I think the, know, switching on to personal thing, I think you nailed it. It’s coming. The technological wave always wins. You’ll go back to the dawning industrial revolution, the steam engine, John Henry in the mines, you know, going back 150 years on that one. Electricity, automobiles, plane flight, television, radio, like…

 

mainframes, internet, you just name it. You do it better, faster, cheaper. But I think the trick is, like you said, is how do you use it as a tool? How do you become that master carpenter that can use all the power tools instead of the carpenter that’s still relying on a handsaw, hammer, and screwdriver? And I think that’s challenging, but it should be fun.

 

So how do you, know, switching gears a little bit back to the scaling things. I told you I like to go down where rabbit holes. ⁓ but bringing it back to that, you know, I’d be curious, so you’re in revenue operations, right? So you’re creating the systems that the, of the marketing and sales funnel of from awareness down to conversion.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (24:58)

Great tangent.

 

Jeff Walter (25:16)

If I look at those emerging franchisors and most of them are those skilled artisans, right? The people that figured out the better mouse box, mousetrap. What, think one of the things when I look at scaling, it’s about, you know, automating processes that you can then communicate to a franchisee or a partner and then have the processes and technology and then the training,

 

to enable them to do things that they’ve never done before. They’ve never ran a digital marketing campaign or anything like that. From your experience on the revenue operation side, if you were one of those franchisors, or if you were consulting one of them, and they wanted to put in a marketing system and they’ve never done that before, what would

 

What would your suggestion be in terms of how do you start? What do you do first? What’s the quick start guide to building a repeatable, scalable marketing lead generation engine?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (26:07)

Mm.

 

Yeah. I think in a lot of ways you either pay for things with money or with your time. I tend to be the type that likes to get incredibly educated before I leap. So in my opinions, think certifications and learning and knowledge can definitely help you in figuring things out along the way. But kind of the quick start guide to that comes back to how do you use a CRM? So choosing something like HubSpot, which is easy to use.

 

has a lot out of the box that can explain marketing to you is a good place to start. Additionally, there are marketing agencies that can not only support you with the actual efforts, but provide you with some of the learning and the strategy behind things so that you become more of a partner than just a client. So in my eyes, I think that’s kind of the two quick starts aside from learning the things on your own.

 

Jeff Walter (26:59)

Okay. And then if, and then if you were to engage this on a HubSpot, get you it’s a tool, but it’s got a built in process and education built into it. So you would be a strong advocate of actually going through the education. Uh, you know, and then there’s guys like me that are like, I’ll get around to it. I just skip it and I’ll figure it out. And then I ended up spending twice as much time figuring it out. Um, to your point, I tend to be one of those people. Uh, but

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (27:09)

Mm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (27:27)

But get in, do the education so you save yourself time, so you can be more efficient so that you can actually set up these systems on what a CRM does, which in my estimation is kind of more the lower end of the funnel, more of the sales processes. I mean, it can go upstream into the marketing, but then what would you, if you were looking at an agency, and again, I’m thinking of I’m emerging, maybe I got a dozen locations, half a dozen franchisors.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (27:43)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (27:57)

You know, I’m, I’m going to go into the Illinois or the Chicagoland area of trying to, you know, get franchisees in this city, that city, this region or whatever. What would I look for in an agency and what would I need them to do? Like, like, you know, how do you know, what, what would I, what would, what do I do?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (28:13)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, I’d say that scaling, I mean, in general is just the combination of consistency and automation. So what I would look for in anybody who’s looking to partner with me is being able to build that form of consistency. If you have, if you’re a franchisor with a lot of individual stores or a lot of different branches to franchisees, if they’re doing their own individual process or using different product or changing ingredients,

 

There’s a lot of things that can basically be broken from what your brand actually is. So consistency becomes incredibly major. So in my eyes, I would look for any business, whether it’s ourselves, where you can basically go to a platform that all your franchisees can pull from and have a consistent brand voice and imagery and everything that you need in one place. Or again, come back from a top-down perspective of strategy and teach people.

 

How do we be consistent to these things so that we can grow not individually, but as a team? I think especially from a franchisor perspective and a lot of different places, you really start at what I call the barbershop model. So you come into a barbershop and Tony is better cutting hair than Ryan is, and they all do things a little bit differently. And that’s okay from that scale of business, but the larger you build, you can’t necessarily have.

 

different product or different service across the board. Because if there’s a lack of consistency and cohesion, that’s where things break.

 

Jeff Walter (29:42)

So, so in engaging an agency, you’re like, okay, I want to, I want to start doing, you know, upping my marketing game. want to start getting, you know, creating my lead gen, know, lead gen awareness building and lead gen within my target market. I want to do something that whether we’re doing traditional digital, whatever I want it to be consistent. I want to create a process that’s repeatable, scalable, and consistent across my markets. Is that a.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (29:55)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (30:11)

And then if you kind of lead with that idea.

 

you’re off to, you we’re not doing a master class on that right now, but if we leave with that idea, it’s a good start and then a good agency should be able to take that and shape a plan to meet those criteria. that a good way of thinking of it?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (30:31)

Yeah. So you’re effectively building your foundation for consistency. And one of the kind of cornerstones of inbound marketing or marketing in general is the idea of a persona, which is effectively what is my lookalike customer? Who do I sell to the most? What’s unique about them? What makes them interested in what it is that I’m selling? And so, especially when you engage a marketing agency or anybody else for that matter, the things that you’ll want to start off with is understanding who you’re selling to, your persona.

 

having a tone and style guide for things like your brand, your imagery. And really, again, it’s just building out this package of how do I stay consistent? So you can give that to a new franchisee and effectively tell them, here’s how we speak to clients, who’s our primary client, here’s who you should pull in. And instead of them starting from zero without an expectation of what to do, you’re starting from 20%, 40%. And so it makes the process faster for them and again, contains consistency for you.

 

Jeff Walter (31:26)

Cool. the revenue and shifting gears again on the revenue operations side, what’s your favorite part of your job on revenue operations?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (31:30)

Mm.

 

has to be creative problem solving. I can give you a couple of examples. Love to use tools, love to use AI and love to improve process. So back to understanding who our ideal customer is. You have the world’s most powerful intern. You could have one individual sift through everybody who submits a form or comes to your business and tell you, is somebody who’s healthcare.

 

and have that done for you on an individual basis. But when it comes back to scaling and automation, we built out a process that will basically tell us from your fundraising information, information about your company, information on your tech stack, who are you to us? Who is our best customer? Are you in there or are you somebody completely new? And so to me, it’s that creative problem solving of how do we build things at scale and just really interesting automations.

 

Jeff Walter (32:21)

And what are some of the most interesting problems you’ve faced in trying to bring that to reality?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (32:27)

A lot of the problems come back to building an idea of your brand or your business. So back to the world’s smartest intern, they just join your company. They don’t know what your business is unless you tell them information. They don’t know how they should be doing things or who you are. And so, especially when it comes to AI, a lot of the challenges, how do you personalize this to your business? So there’s tools that can do this. One example is clay. Clay is a

 

kind of enrichment and data platform, highly recommended for many purposes. But one of their nice features with their AI is the ability to attach documents for context. So per any AI that I’m using, we have our brand and tone guide, we have our overall sales deck, we have our marketing messaging, and feeding that into whatever I’m talking to will always come back with a more personalized answer for us.

 

Jeff Walter (33:14)

So I’m familiar on the content generation side using AI and even on some of the image generation and stuff like that. And I’m not familiar with clay. So let’s say I’ve got my CRM, it’s capturing a bunch of leads. These leads turn into clients. So I’ve got that raw data, let’s say.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (33:27)

Sure.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (33:39)

So I hear what you’re saying and I want you to be able to take that data and say, well, here’s all these leads, you know, name, name, email, phone number, company, blah, blah, blah, whatever I captured on the form. Here’s the ones that converted and are now clients. And yeah, and here’s the ones that when I, you know, I was able to pit, was able to submit a proposal on and we lost and you know, all that, all that data, right. If I.

 

hear what you’re saying. If I understand what you’re saying correctly, I can use a tool like clay to take that data and say, based on this, who, who’s my, who, who is my product really appealing to? And then they would go out and, and basically say, well, is that right? I’m like, yeah.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (34:19)

Exactly.

 

Yes, you can definitely use it that way. So clay, can imagine as kind of an Excel sheet or a Google sheet. it’s interfaces kind of spreadsheet based. So what you can do is there’s a lot of integrations to different CRMs or different databases. You would upload the list of people that you’re talking about. And not only can it pull from anything that’s when you’re in your CRM. So if you have unstructured data points that you want to pull from, can do it there. You can also enrich data. So you can basically add an additional column of.

 

Jeff Walter (34:33)

Okay.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (34:53)

Zoom info enrichment or different data provider enrichment and view things like industry, or if you’re talking person, it could be age, demographic location. And at the very end of that process, have an AI tell you based on all of these data points, please sort this into categories you have, or it can provide suggestions to you. So a lot of cool use cases of that can be things like, tell me who my primary customer is. It can be things such as.

 

Jeff Walter (34:54)

Mm-hmm.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (35:20)

why we are losing deals. If you’re capturing that data near CRM, that’s one way to do it. If you’re capturing or recording transcripts, you can pull it from there. Similarly, you can say, why am I losing deals? So something that may have taken one person 40-hour project to look at all that information and input it into a spreadsheet, you can now have answers to that within 30 minutes to an hour if you’re doing things quickly.

 

Jeff Walter (35:44)

Interesting. Interesting. so, so then you’re getting a better sense of these are the types of prospects that lead to clients. These are the type that just dead end. And these are the type that I’m able to pitch, but I lose. Like I can get, I can almost get a persona of each.

 

Right. If I, you know, all depending on the data and the data sources and how you, how much you can aggregate and how much you collect. But that’s interesting to be able to sit there and go, well, I’ve got these thousand leads over the last year, let’s say. And, know, I closed 10 % of them. And so here’s the a hundred I closed. Here’s the 300 I lost. Here’s the 600 I never got to bid on because it died. Right. And then you’re.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (36:07)

Yep.

 

Exactly. And so I can

 

tell you from the information that we have, who shows up to our meetings, who turns into a deal, who wins a deal. And so as soon as you come in through the door, we do this entire process where we can identify, it’s a really good fit. Here’s why they may want us. Here’s a way that may use us. And so that just helps us in the process in general. And from a data perspective, it gives us really good forecasting and an idea of what we’re going to sell.

 

Jeff Walter (36:58)

And then if you’ve got those kinds of personas, right? Like the winner persona, the loser persona and the opted out persona, let’s say, you, then, then, it comes to my mind is you then flip that and go back to the top of the funnel and go, well, I want to broadcast more for the winner persona. I want to, you know, I want to filter. mean, you know, it’s all.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (37:02)

Hmm?

 

Jeff Walter (37:23)

You know, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not scalpels, right? You’re not, you’re not doing fine, but you I want a megaphone on my winter persona and I want to, I want to turn down the volume on my, my loser persona and my, my never get that bad persona. Right. That. And so.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (37:41)

Yes, and so

 

I won’t call it a loser persona. I’ll say negative persona. ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (37:45)

Yeah, that’s the wrong thing. But it’s like, you know,

 

I don’t like that term, even though I just came up with it. But it’s, let’s call it near miss. I’ve got my hits, my near misses, and I never got at bat. Right. And

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (37:58)

Exactly. And so

 

back to the feedback systems, you can take that information, pass it back to your conversion events and the audiences that you’re looking for and create what’s called look-alike audiences, which are effectively people that are identical or alike to who you just sold to for a higher chance to win.

 

Jeff Walter (38:14)

Very cool. And then I would imagine, and getting back to something we talked about at the beginning of all this, that the bot, it doesn’t necessarily address the bot problem on paid advertising per se, but if I got more of a megaphone towards the people that are turning to clients and I do the lookalike personas and I, or, know,

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (38:19)

Hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (38:34)

It would seem to me that like, can at least mitigate that challenge a little bit because you’re not spraying across the whole field. You’re focusing on these guys and you still got the problem, but I think maybe you mitigate it a little.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (38:39)

Mm-hmm. There’s the…

 

You definitely

 

mitigate it. There’s things that you can do to, again, optimize and like you said, focus in on a specific area. And then you can also potentially suppress submissions or suppress follow-up because if we have an idea of who’s going to close and who isn’t, maybe the people who are more likely to close get immediate contacts versus people who are less likely to close get an automated sequence or follow-up to them. So handling your time.

 

differently is also a value add there.

 

Jeff Walter (39:15)

Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. Thank you. mean, I, I, as we were preparing for this, I was thinking on the design side, but as we, as we’re talking, your, experience on the, on the revenue operations, I, like, I appreciate you just sharing all that because I think that’s one of those things that a lot of folks in this space struggle with, because like I said, they tend to be the, the, the master doers. And then

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (39:32)

Absolutely.

 

Jeff Walter (39:43)

And then tying it back into the design, I think a lot of what we’re going see on the AI side is like we’ve seen the laundry side. We’re going to swap out for higher quality, right? We’re not going to necessarily pocket, especially when it comes to like design, I think. Everybody can tell the difference between a really high quality, you

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (39:52)

you

 

Agreed.

 

Jeff Walter (40:05)

design that just it’s beautiful. It, it, it, whether it’s whether it’s a house, a building, a meme, um, there’s just something that hits your soul. Right. Um, it’s like, you’re almost at peace. It’s almost like, um, you know, um, very metaphysical experience. It’s like, oh, awe inspiring. And then there’s the stuff that, you know, hacks like me have done.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (40:18)

Hmm

 

Jeff Walter (40:32)

Or, know, it’s like, okay, you know, let me try and do this and you get something. Yeah. It checks the box. Let’s just say, but, but it doesn’t move anybody’s soul. ⁓

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (40:39)

us.

 

In the

 

space of AI, you often hear the term work slop, which is effectively something that looks productive or looks like it checks the boxes, but the quality isn’t there or something isn’t great. so, especially with AI and scaling, you’ll get those things that are just not of quality. And then you have the things that you elevate, which really stand out.

 

Jeff Walter (41:05)

Yeah, I think it does. And so that, you know, coming back into the whole circle, if, as a franchisor, I’m building this, you know, customer acquisition engine, this revenue operations, this start at the top of funnel, bring them all the way through. And, and I’m, and I’m taking advantage of all this identifying my, I mean, this is the value. This is the tremendous value added for the franchisees, right? Cause you’re, you’re, you can scale that, right? And.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (41:16)

Mm.

 

Jeff Walter (41:30)

And I’m doing that in a certain way. And then at the same time, whatever is going out to attract folks, it’s like, you got to up your quality of the content that you’re generating. And, and that’s, and that’s where, you know, people that do that for a living, they do it really well, because that’s what they do for a living. And they have these great tools that they can take it to the next level. So that’s kind of what I’m.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (41:44)

Thanks.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (41:57)

Is that a good kind of synopsis or to kind of understand what it seems like that would be a good quick start guide, not quick start guide, but guiding star or is that, you think that works?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (42:11)

Yes, it’s definitely

 

a good North Star. think you can make it a physical comparison or a internet comparison, but let’s imagine you have 10 people walking past a store, only 10 % of them become a paying customer. Cool. You’ll be one out of 10 people. The two things you can do is either increase the amount of people walking by your store. So in 20 visit, you get two customers.

 

Jeff Walter (42:15)

North.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (42:36)

Or you can increase the likelihood that they will close with you to 20 % and then 10 people will still turn into two customers. So really when you combine those two of improving quality and scale and the conversion rates, that’s how you make things exponentially better. But especially when it comes to marketing, a lot of it is creating the voice in the audience. So being able to build marketing campaigns and audiences allows more people to see you. So you combine the two and that’s how you build a larger funnel or a larger customer base.

 

Jeff Walter (43:04)

Very, very cool. Well, why is, I feel like I got a lot out of this. I know that my listeners have got a lot of this. Are there any pearls of wisdom that you haven’t shared with us that you’d like to share with us?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (43:21)

there are really none. the only, the only very shameless plug that I will add is as a part of revenue operations. I am also, often the one who supplies demos to the sales team. If you have any interest in design pickle, feel free to let me know or fill out our form. as you can guess, there’s a lot of ways for us to see whether he would make a great fit. but I would love to continue the conversation.

 

Jeff Walter (43:22)

Okay.

 

Yeah. And so just it’s okay. Shameless plugs are good. You gave us tremendous value. The least we can do is give some value back to you. So if somebody wanted to get a hold of you or design Pickle, how would they get a hold of you and design?

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (43:56)

Yep. Best way to get ahold of me. If you think you would be a good fit, feel free to reach out to me directly if you want to speak to myself on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is Wyatt BP. And if you want to talk to the business, if you search design pickle, I will tell you that our branding and who we are is fairly identifiable. You will be able to tell that it’s us by the pickle and submit a contact us request. We will usually get back to you within the day or within 24 hours.

 

Jeff Walter (44:24)

Wyatt, thank you so much for sharing your time with us and sharing your wisdom. And I think it’s written in really good direction focusing on that acquisition side and the design element that ties into that. I really appreciate your time and that wisdom. So thank you so much.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (44:39)

Absolutely. It’s been a blast.

 

Jeff Walter (44:41)

Yeah. And everybody out there, you know, thank you for listening and watching. We greatly appreciate it. And my guest today is Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle and he is with Design Pickle. And so go check them out. Thank you everybody.

 

Wyatt Borchetta-Platt of Design Pickle (44:54)

Thanks all.