Jeff Pugel

Name: Jeff Pugel 
Current Job: Founder & CEO of Ignition
Favorite restaurant in town? Current favorites that are always popular in my house are Winking Lizard, Tavern 43 in Solon, Yours Truly, and Village Diner in Orange. It’s the small neighborhood places that are non-pretentious and a place where I can go with my family for a solid meal out that everybody will enjoy.   For a more adult experience my wife and I have enjoyed Glenwillow Tavern of late. 
Favorite thing about Cleveland? On one level - it's home. It's where I grew up (South Euclid). A big memory is the food: Stadium Mustard and Slovenian Smoked Sausages from Raddell's Sausage in Collinwood are the two big ones for me. From where I live in Solon now with my family, it's really how many options we have to do things and how quickly we can get there. If we want a very rural, almost country experience we can head east into Geauga or Portage counties. If we want the downtown Cleveland experience, it's a quick 25-minute drive to downtown. If we want to go south to Akron or Blossom, it's a quick drive down Route 8. If we want the suburban experience we head up I-271 to the east side suburbs. While I've also lived in New York City and Denver and those cities definitely have lots to do, neither have it as easy to get around as Cleveland does.

Q: Jeff first off, how are you dealing with coronavirus quarantine and how is it affecting your business? The biggest change has been having my kids home from school during the day. I’ve been home-based already but having them here during the day has been a change. They’re a 2nd and 3rd grader so while some-what autonomous in doing their assignments, they still require occasional check-ins and guidance on their assignments. So work has been cut up into more micro-sized bits of time.

Business-wise it’s been a bit up and down as I expected. What’s happening now reminds me a lot of what the mood was in New York City in the weeks after 9/11 which is where I was living at the time.  

Initially, there is the shock of the events that just happened. I lost a couple of clients whose businesses were significantly affected with the COVID-19 shutdowns during this phase and nearly all new business temporarily stalled.

Then things settled into what I call the new normal where things start to happen again. I’m seeing that now with businesses starting to get their bearings once again and starting to move forward once again at differing speeds. They realize that their goals haven’t necessarily changed, although the route they need to take to get there has, and that is the impetus to start moving forward once again. 

My active clients have stayed the course to which I’m grateful and supportive as I feel they will come out ahead on the other side. While we’ve had to make adjustments in terms of messaging and expectations, we’re still moving forward which will surely pay dividends down the road. 

And then I’m in the process of onboarding a handful of new clients as we speak who have either seen this as a great time to become aggressive in the market or continue on plans that were laid before the whole pandemic happened.

The one theme I’m conveying to everyone is that now is the time when the winners and losers post-pandemic are being established. Those companies who are keeping their prospecting and sales moving will be the ones who are best positioned to thrive when the rebound does come.  

Q: You recently just started a business called Ignition, what do you all do? The shortage of leads is the biggest marketing challenge for small businesses. Ignition is centered on helping agencies and professional service B2B companies with their lead generation through our Opportunity Creation process. What I’ve found is that many agencies and smaller B2B companies find it hard to grow, or to even make it off the ground, because they're not experts in finding and thus selling to new clients. No one told them that they’d have another job title in addition to Founder, CEO, or whatever their title is. It's CSO - Chief Sales Officer. Opportunity Creation takes the time-consuming work of prospecting for new clients off of owners to-do lists so they can instead focus on running their business and closing new business. The end result is that my clients have a predictable and scalable program to not just jumpstart often stalled sales pipelines but create a predictable process and pipelines so that they can grow their business predictably, almost on-demand.

Q: Before you started your business, you spent most of your time in digital marketing. A big part of your career was in paid media. For those companies or marketers that are looking into paid acquisition channels, what are good resources that you recommend and tips that you have? I would highly recommend engaging with an agency. Just as you wouldn’t necessarily do-it-yourself with your stocks or bookkeeping, you shouldn’t do-it-yourself with paid media. Paid media, especially digital, in 2020 is incredibly complex and everchanging and there is no way a marketer or business owner can successfully manage a paid media campaign with everything else on their desk. I’ve seen many companies who have tried to do it themselves actually waste a lot of money as a result. 

One aspect many marketers also overlook is the messaging or offer which is often more critical than picking the media channels. I would make sure you have a validated message that is proven to work in non-paid channels first before taking that same message and putting it in paid channels. If it doesn’t work, it can be a very expensive mistake. 

Q: One of the things that I've been surprised by in Cleveland is how many digital agencies there are. How have you differentiated yourself in the marketplace? The biggest is that I’m not an agency in the traditional sense. I don’t sell creative, public relations, nor media buying services. 

My focus is on outbound sales tactics that require no ad spend – LinkedIn, email, and phone calls. Those are very different than the marketing and advertising strategies and tactics that most agencies are focused on. 

Q: One of the other things you focus on is helping develop qualified leads for companies with an emphasis on LinkedIn. What are some of the biggest mistakes people make when utilizing LinkedIn for BD? I actually just gave a presentation to the Sales & Marketing Executive association about this. The biggest mistake I see on LinkedIn is that a person’s profile isn’t set up for social selling in 2020. Most people have it set up in a resume style which is no longer effective….even for job seekers. Profiles need to be set up in a prospect facing manner. That way when you cross paths with an ideal customer, they can tell instantly what you do and if you might be able to help them with a problem they’re having.

Another significant mistake I see is forgetting all the rules of selling that one uses on offline channels. The key to effective social selling is to not rush things. I see too many people go directly into pitch mode once they connect with someone and that is often the fastest way to lose a potential sale on LinkedIn.