“This technology that's been available for big brands and large enterprises, we like to say we're democratizing that for small businesses.”

This week on Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos, we are having a wonderful conversation with  Gavin Macomber, the President, and CEO of Cloudli Communications, a leading provider of voice, messaging, and data communications solutions for businesses and consumers of the future generation. He enables numerous other businesses to welcome clients in novel and inventive ways through his company. Also, over 7,000 clients rely on Cloudli's mobile-first unified communications (UCaaS), VoIP connectivity, and digital fax solutions.

[01:47] Gavin's Journey - Gavin shares his career experience thus far, highlighting key elements that he believes have benefited him.

[12:21] Cloudli Communications – Gavin explains what his company does and the impact of their work. In addition, he describes several methods they've employed to improve their approach to enhance the customer experience.

[22:05] Research - Gavin mentions the outcomes of his research. Also, he further describes how his firm assists local businesses and how they interact with customers. 

[32:26] Business Texting – Gavin outlines the facts he has gathered regarding the influence of business texting on the SMB market. 

[34:56] Inspiration - Gavin describes whom he looks up to in the business world and where he finds inspiration.

Resources:

Connect with Gavin:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gmacomber/

Gavin Macomber on Meeting Customers Where They Are, Not Where You Are

[00:00:32] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of be customer led. I'm your host bill staikos. I have a dear friend for our guests today. Gavin Macomber is the CEO of a company called cleverly communications. Now gladly is a leading. Of next gen voice messaging and data communication solutions for businesses and consumers.

[00:01:10] I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks so much for your time today, bill. It's great

[00:01:25] So congratulations. And I'm honored to be. Oh, man.

[00:01:39] So very excited to have you going. So Gavin, we ask every guest the same question to kick off, right? So, and you've got a really interesting background marketing strategy ventures. You've been a founder. Tell our listeners a little bit about your journey. Let the rabbit out of the hat a little bit, I guess, but tell us, tell our listeners about your journey and some, what are the differentiating factors that you think.

[00:02:01] Gavin Macomber: career. Great question. And, yeah, let me, I'll give you a little, a little bit of background and then maybe try to inject some, some life learnings that not to get preachy at all. Just, cause I, I know when I, when you're not probably talked about this too, like when you start your career, you don't, you're not always confident in terms of.

[00:02:40] It was the old GT internetworking. It was, it was like a spinoff from Verizon. when Verizon was formed back in the day, I'm dating myself a little bit here, but. So

[00:02:55] Gavin Macomber: They were doing, do you know what he was doing?

[00:03:14] And I went to work for them. They had, when I left business school, I thought about going, should I go big corporate or should I do something else? And I've always had an entrepreneurial bent to me. And one of their customers was a startup that was doing international calling from cell phone. At the time, for consumers and, over voice over IP.

[00:03:54] As we know, it was like B2C versus B2B. It's always challenging. So fast forward to, we had, we had some success, enough success where we basically pivoted the company to become more of a B2B player, changed the name. From a consumer name, like cellular LD to, mobile sphere. and we, we had some, we had some, some luck.

[00:04:34] Gavin Macomber: And, while you, you, you learned from your, there's the, the challenging years. and, and, and everything, everything leads you somewhere in your life. So, for younger listeners that are, that are like, trying to figure out like what to do next, or, what if I don't.

[00:05:08] Right. or those stories, but I, but I got to know the management team and they said, Hey, we're, we're launching a new product bondage mobile. Come help us. And it was like started time for change. And my wife was from New Jersey. That's how I ended up in New Jersey though. So like, so I came down and started working for Vontage.

[00:05:39] Bill Staikos: And that was the Vonage app on your mobile phone. Right. I remember using that.

[00:05:45] Gavin Macomber: you that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So at the time it monitors very consumer focused, but that was, that was it. It was like, the Vonage, you had Vonage at home and then you had Vonage on your phone and that's, that's what we did. And, and it was, it was neat.

[00:06:20] Now, and, consulting is, you always hear this. It's like feast or famine. Right. But, and, and I did that for about five years, and, and it was, and I also did a couple of little startups in there. I was involved with a couple of startups, which was Nate ended up, with a company consulting for a company called first.

[00:06:59] This was, they, they had this solution where they could literally brand and they have it today and they're doing well with it brand the entire screen, what they like Amex logo. So, it was American express calling and trying to reach you. Right. And not only would they tell you, not only did you know it was American express color, but they would purse.

[00:07:32] Bill Staikos: days.

[00:07:49] Like even branded texts could be a thing where I'm getting random numbers. I'm like, who is this? Right? Yeah. Sometimes I'll say T and T or whoever it is there. But, I love that and absolutely would increase my propensity to pick up the phone. If I knew that. A brand versus someone own number.

[00:08:09] I think, it's a technology that's going to get rolled out by the carriers Verizon T-Mobile at and T it's it's common. And there are a couple of players in the space first, Ryan certainly wasn't the only one, but, but that was, I did that for a couple of years. It was a fun. Stan ended up running marketing for them left in 2020 and got started looking at the unified communications market.

[00:08:55] unified communications and IP facts company in Canada. And they said, Hey, we're looking for somebody to come in and do some due diligence and help us think about strategy. And should we go into the U S and all this? I said, no, I'll put my hand up. And, so, so I did, I consulted for them and then, W we, and we came up with a strategy and everything, and we got along pretty well.

[00:09:36] Could be, could work really well in a distributed manner, distributed fashion, et cetera. So, and we're going to go in and we're going to expand in the us so fast forward, I, I, for the first year I ran the company like on zoom like this, right. And you've probably heard those

[00:09:52] That's tough. As a new CEO as well, like that had to be a challenge in the house. It

[00:10:12] And so we're, we're providing companies and people with mobile communications technology that allows them to work from anywhere. So, you, you have to, you have to sort of foster that, right? absolutely.

[00:10:33] I mean, we've got listeners gratefully around the globe, like tell us a little bit about cloud layer and some of the products that some of the things that you guys have even, somewhat recently have come out with a pretty cool, I mean, just really interesting, awesome technology that you guys are putting out there.

[00:11:13] We also have, the company, also has, a, IP facts business. And that's a whole, whole nother story because people hear the word facts and they're like, the people are still faxing

[00:11:26] Gavin Macomber: IP faxes is actually huge. It's I mean, the entire, like the, just a quick example of the entire medical community, hospitals, insurance companies.

[00:11:54] And particularly in north America, the, during COVID unified EUCAST as they call it, Became rapidly adopted. Right. As you can imagine, I mean, March, 2000, March 20, 20, everybody went home. Right. All at once. And that's why Microsoft teams took off. Right. Because everybody companies figured out they had teams on there, office 365 package.

[00:12:38] What we realized though at cloudy was when we started thinking about our north American strategy, we realized that. SMB market, particularly the, the micro SMB market. And when I say micro SMBs, I'm talking about businesses with like two to 10 employees. Right. And there, there are, there, there are 10 million of those in the U S just to give you perspective.

[00:13:08] Bill Staikos: financial services, even that right. You've got a small RIA team that's managing money somewhere and

[00:13:19] Right. Which so that's, which is exciting to see. I love, love to see that. So we, so we came up with a product called talking taxed and, we launched it just a couple months ago. it's really targeted for micro SMBs it. And what it does is, as you might imagine, based on the name it's it's it's we basically took texting.

[00:13:53] So it's, so it's it. And there are companies who've been doing this for a long time, right? This is not new. Look at, I know you had,the CMO from live person on last month. Great, great, great podcast. By the way, hit a live person. Been doing this for big companies for a long, long time, big brands like airlines and being able to text a big business like an airline.

[00:14:35] And I got a flight. Like it was wild. this is a great example of like big brands and large enterprise have access to that kind of technology from companies like live person, mom and pop retailers, not so much. Right.

[00:14:53] I mean, we've just because we've been able to support a lot of different small businesses in our area because of it. And they've taken advantage of yeah, they've got stuff, certainly on the web and you can do your ordering, but I have texted a couple of. That's more personal though, but like, think about sort of like being able to text my order or saying, Hey, could you add this to this order?

[00:15:21] Gavin Macomber: absolutely. And we, as consumers of have lived through this, like, think about your kids are hungry for dinner, you didn't make it to the grocery store.

[00:15:46] Gavin Macomber: You've probably been there that, that we, like, my kids always ask for it, but they, the only way to order a pizza from them is on the phone. Right. So you gotta like, and you know how it is, everybody's busy, like, how am I going to call them? And I, and I got to, do I want. Cheese and half pepperoni.

[00:16:12] So we're talking to X does for these types of businesses, we have an app that's that you can put on your smartphone. Right. So, obviously like, your iPhone you're in. Yep. But even cooler, we have an iPad app and a lot of businesses use iPads now. And then of course we have a, like a Mac Mac app on Mac iOS and we have a, a PC app if I'm in the pizza shop and I've got an iPad there, I can see those.

[00:16:57] But it gets super challenging when you have. Multiple employees. Right? Think about, I'll give you an example, like a real estate firm who has a team, and that's pretty popular today. Like, you got a team of real estate agents, two, three people and comp customer texts, realtor, a right, and says, Hey, I'm interested in this.

[00:17:36] Anybody on the team receives it and can respond to it. And w if I respond to it, and we all time, you can actually see me typing, right. So you're not going to respond to the customer while I'm responding. Right. And then we have all kinds of cool things. Like, we can add auto replies, right.

[00:18:09] Bill Staikos: I love that. And you you've actually done some re your company's done some research on this, which I thought was fascinating.

[00:18:36] Tell us a little bit about that research, because I think like some of those results were really interesting to me, like, those numbers or like some of the numbers in terms of people are interested in texting their small business or mom and pop down the road or a really fascinating, totally.

[00:18:51] But last year sometime, and it was, a couple thousand us mobile users and the results were really that they are really interesting. We, first of all, the big stat that jumps out of it is, 93% of consumers want to talk and text with a small business. So this is like the pizza shop, right. I want to call them to order the pizza, but I also, I would love to text them if was, and, and then the other one that we did, we asked consumers about.

[00:19:31] Bill Staikos: if there's not a sign of privilege, it's Amazon showing up at your house every single day with like multiple boxes.

[00:19:38] Gavin Macomber: So the, but the, but the child, like a lot of, we all want. Local business, small business. And like, so, in a lot of these small businesses, they they've, they they've got the stuff. And so it's really about just making that purchase experience for small businesses. Convenient for consumers.

[00:20:15] You can order a case of wine. It'll show up at your doorstep. But what about the local, your local wine shop downtown, who you want to support their independent? maybe they've got one or two locations. And so again, if I can text them and say, Hey, did that, one that, that, Italian Chianti that I like come in, right.

[00:20:50] Bill Staikos: And I think that's what the important thing around text is.

[00:21:15] You can just fire off that text and say, Hey, I'd like a case of this wine as an example that is meeting your customer where they are, right. And th and it fits, and now you fit into their. Which is so meaningful in not only today. I think that the pandemic has certainly accelerated that, but, I mean, that was a trend that's been building, but absolutely critical for any business and love that.

[00:21:59] Right. But when they're like looking at your product, how do you think that makes them change their view or their perception of this is really important? Like we've got to really think about. How this fits into how we're engaging our customers. Like, is it like a light bulb moment or is it like a problem they thought they'd never had?

[00:22:17] Gavin Macomber: Yeah, that's a, that's, that's a great question, bill. And, I love to ask you the same question cause you probably, you could probably help us there. It's, it's the, the, the challenge with micro SMBs and like, we all know, we've either been small business owners and we know small business owners and people, especially during COVID.

[00:22:57] So how can I help you help grow your business and make it easier for your team and make it more convenient for you? Less of a stressor. It's like, we, we, we, we wrote this blog post about. Couple,maybe maybe six months ago, vacation proofing your SMB, right? Like small business. People want to go on vacation, but what if the phone keeps ringing.

[00:23:38] Right. And that doesn't really sound like a vacation to me, not at all. So what we, what we with our service. So we do texting and voice it's all together. And so what you can do is you could have, you can really control, not only like you can control the customer experience and you can provide a really, I think even, even better customer experience, because think about when you, as a customer, when you call in and you don't get the business or they don't answer the phone, We have we have, if you text in, we can send an auto reply.

[00:24:27] And we'll, we'll, we'll text you. And then you send it up and then they press two and our platform will send an automatic text to them saying, and then we now we've converted the conversation into a texting thread. And w and somebody on the team can jump in and say, oh, Hey bill,

[00:24:44] Right. Yeah. Yeah. Kevin's on vacation. I'm going to take this one.

[00:25:08] And, that's, again, if you can have that, that number comes into a shared app and three or four people can respond to it makes it easier.

[00:25:26] Increased revenue, reduce your costs, improve the culture at your company. Right? So for me, when I think about meeting your customers where they are, you've got to do it in a customer friendly way, of course deliver the types of, or, or open up sort of a way to engage your business that your customers are looking for.

[00:26:03] So for me, it is, it is very much about increase, opening the door to the front or the top of the funnel, and then being able to keep them in, because now you're keeping them engaged in a very personalized way.

[00:26:17] Circle back to it. When you talk to small businesses, right? What do they, how does the light bulb go off? So one of the things that we can do, is we can text enable your existing landline phone number, right? So this is your, your voice number. Pretty cool. It's cool. And, and look, we're not the first to do it.

[00:26:53] So that's super powerful stuff. And when you tell a business that the business owner that usually they're like, you kind of, they're like, you can do that.

[00:27:03] Gavin Macomber: This is another crazy statistic. And we tell them, your customer, you've got customers out there that are probably trying to text that night.

[00:27:13] Bill Staikos: That's pretty cool. That is really cool stuff. Yeah. Let me ask you a question. What do you, when you think about business texting, I mean, you guys are probably measuring this, but like, what are you hearing in terms of the impact of that on the SMB space? You guys considering

[00:27:35] Small business owners who, have, have, we've got a free trial, so you can sign up and you can use the service for a month on us. which is pretty cool. So we get a lot of feedback, which is great. Cause you, you want customer feedback and that's how you improve. But, it's, it's great to hear, stories from business owners who.

[00:28:13] Gavin Macomber: I think we we've made their lives easier. We made their lives more efficient. It's go back to the vacation proofing business. and then from the, from a consumer standpoint, I think we're, we're giving consumers that option to text a local business. Right. And, and so that's for them, it's, pulling it back to like ordering pizza for your kids.

[00:28:39] Bill Staikos: I just went through the order pizza for your kids last night. I would've loved to be able to text cause I wa we were running around the house trying to take care of three and get, get them.

[00:29:00] This is really cool tech. I've got two more questions for you, Gavin. and I've recently started asking, the first one, but I really do love the response to that again. And I've actually gotten feedback that, that folks love this question because it's opening people's perspective into different, leaders out there.

[00:29:20] Gavin Macomber: That's a great question, bill. And you, you said you sent that to me a couple of weeks ago and I'm still thinking about it. And, I respect people that, are visionaries. people who can see markets. Shaping three, five years in the future.

[00:29:54] but even a year ago, like the market was. And it's very immature. Right? Very, still very emerging on, on trial and it, and another year goes by another two years, everybody's going to be driving you bitch. So yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:12] Gavin Macomber: Yeah. Yeah. The F-150 is going electric, right?

[00:30:19] Gavin Macomber: one of those things. Totally. in our industry, there, there are a couple people. So one Rob LoCascio, he's the founder of, of LivePerson. I don't know Rob, but, I've watched him over the last 10 years. I've watched that company grow, again, classic example of like knowing that this was the world we were going to live in, was going to be messaging and texting.

[00:30:57] This is in your, in your sweet spot and, and love to hear more about where you think that the whole conversational AI space is going because of. That's for people who haven't heard that term. So I think it's still sort of a niche term. w what are your thoughts on that?

[00:31:17] It's certainly in the higher end for sure. But what I see more and more, and we, we talked a little bit about this when we have the COO on is, and they're doing some really cool stuff, and there are other platforms out there that are doing this, but it's much more interactive and more engaging, video.

[00:31:52] And in live live persons have massive organization, right? Like they're sort of at the forefront, a lot of the stuff, but the, the interactiveness is going to get much more sophisticated and the personalization as well. And company's ability to deliver personalized messages at the right moment in context is really going to start to get much, much bigger, which so I'm really excited for that.

[00:32:42] So when you, you hire somebody in the onboard them, what do they need at their home, in their home office? Right. How do these guys have figured out how to make this experience? Incredible right. Beyond more experience. So when you, when you started a new company and you're working remote, and this, this platform allows that company to basically make sure you have everything you need, right.

[00:33:22] he's, also look working remote is not easy. I think he's also doing a lot of good injecting, a lot of good for people out there that are especially like, if you're younger and your career, I mean, imagine your first job out of college and you've got to work remote, right. That's gotta be super challenging.

[00:33:56] Other younger employees. Right. And, old guys like me, I'm like, I'm never going to the office. Like, I don't want to do that. Right. So, but like, but it was really fascinating in the importance of creating that human connection early on. Not just getting it right from like an onboarding perspective, but even, being able to think about.

[00:34:29] when you, when you think about where you go for inspiration, where do you go to fill your tires?

[00:34:45] And that's all well, and, and, obviously like just, being aware of like trends and what's happening around the other one, but I'll give you another one that I'm a huge fan of morning brew. Not, not to plug them too much, but I love what those guys have done. Alex Lieberman. Brilliant guy.

[00:35:11] Bill Staikos: Yeah. Super engaging podcasts. I mean, and what they're doing, I mean, what they've accomplished and what they continue to do is just, it's awesome.

[00:35:20] Gavin Macomber: to see. They've got a new podcast called imposters. I haven't listened to it yet, but I just. I just

[00:35:30] Gavin Macomber: sounds pretty cool. It's like, how do people, how do people get to where they are in their careers? It's like what we're talking about right now, it's going to be fascinating.

[00:35:45] Bill Staikos: Well, you've got to run a business. I know that's not easy. That takes up a lot, plus a plus a family and everything else. Gavin, it's so good to see you, man. So happy to have you on the show. I really appreciate you coming on and talking to, talking to listeners about a little bit, what you're doing, what you're hearing out there in the market.

[00:36:14] Gavin Macomber: Thanks bill. Well, a pleasure. A pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me having us and, really enjoyed the conversation. So let's, let's do it again soon, in, in

[00:36:30] Thanks. Absolutely. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening