Episode 6 | Kindsey Haynes: Recent College Grad Skyrockets Sales Growth

Kay interviews Kindsey Haynes, Chief Marketing Officer of Kirkham Irontech, a cybersecurity company. Kindsey is responsible for both marketing and the sales team, emphasizing the importance of strategy, personalization, and human interaction. Kindsey shares the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the company pivoted their strategy,  which skyrocketed their results.  She also outlines the power of AI and online tools in marketing and sales, including her own favorites. 

--------------------


Kindsey Haynes is the chief marketing officer of Kirkham Irontech, and has extensive experience in the information technology world as well as sales and management. Kindsey oversees the marketing and sales department, developing marketing and sales strategies that have led the company to phenomenal growth.  Kindsey graduated from the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith Arkansas and now calls Honolulu, Hawaii her home. 

Contact: linkedin.com/kindseyhaynes
Linktr.ee/kirhamirontech

Kay Miller interviews women in sales with proven track records, as they share their experiences, success strategies and tools you can use to crush your sales goals. Kay has a history of sales success, earning the nickname “Muffler Mama” when she sold more automotive mufflers than anyone in the world. Kay and her guests deliver actionable insights and real-world tools that will help you overcome obstacles, adopt a winning mindset, and maximize your sales results.

Kay is the author of the book, Uncopyable Sales Secrets – How to Create an Unfair Advantage and Outsell the Competition. Go to Amazon.com and search “Uncopyable Sales Secrets” to order the book, or click the link below.

Contact:
kay@uncopyablesales.com
linkedin.com/in/millerkay
Order Uncopyable Sales Secrets: amzn.to/35dGlYZ

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Welcome to Uncoyable Women in sales. If you're looking for actionable insights in real world tools to turbocharge your sales starting tomorrow, well, you're in the right place. Your host, Kay Miller, earned the affectionate nickname Muffler Mama when she sold more automotive mufflers than anyone else in the world. In this podcast, Kay will talk to another superstar women in Sales as they reveal UN copyable strategies you can use to rack up more leads, snag dream clients and take your sales numbers through the roof. Stay tuned and get ready to make more sales. And how about this? More money?

Speaker 2 (00:00:44) - I'm very excited about today's guest, Kinsey Haynes. Kinsey is the chief marketing officer of Kirkham Iron Tech and has extensive experience in the information technology world, as well as sales and management. She's passionate about educating the world on cybersecurity and the risks organizations face. Kinsey graduated with a degree in business administration from the University of Arkansas. She now lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, which I happen to know She takes full advantage of. Kinsey Haynes.

Speaker 2 (00:01:19) - I love this girl we met not that long ago. 2020 is when you started with Kirkham, right? And yeah. Tell us how that all started.

Speaker 3 (00:01:32) - Yeah. So I it was my last semester of college, which was I guess that was a winter of 2020 right before Covid hit that January. Well, I'd been looking for an internship my whole senior year and just hadn't found anything I was doing like administrative accounting work at a local and gas company. I was not loving it. It was nothing to do. Yeah, I honestly was not a fan, but I was constantly checking the university website for openings and I found an internship for a company called Kirkham. It based out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, which is where I'm originally from. And it was just, you know, this technology company, simple Plane marketing internship. And I'm like, okay, you know, this would be a good starting point, kind of get my foot in the door, learn some real world marketing. And so I went ahead and applied, got the interview, and I remember walking into the Kirkham Met Office and of course, like a couple people walked up to me and I'm like, Yeah, I'm here for an interview.

Speaker 3 (00:02:38) - And they put me in the conference room and sat down. Was Tom Kirkham, our CEO and founder. And of course I didn't know who he was at the moment and he introduced himself. We sat down, got to chatting and he's like, You know, you seem perfect for the job. Like he hired me right there on the spot. And yeah, I was, you know, I was in my last semester of college, you know, for marketing. I was getting my bachelor's in marketing. And I at that point when I took that job, I had no idea what I was getting into. Um, right then Tom handed me over a couple books and one was Steve's book on Copyable, and I don't know what year that came out. I'm not really sure you'll have to.

Speaker 2 (00:03:21) - Oh, that's been a while. I don't know, like 2017 maybe.

Speaker 3 (00:03:25) - Okay. So it was a couple years old when Tom had me read it and he handed me that book. He handed me, I think it's called Marketing by Dan Kennedy.

Speaker 3 (00:03:36) - And then he handed me over an old book on advertising, and I took all three home. I think I had like a week before I started. And he was like, great. Him And I sat down, I read them, I took notes. I had my little notebook and I was just writing down as much as I could because I hadn't read the marketing or cells book before at that point, you know? Yeah, I had my my textbooks for school and I sat in these, these college classes and all that. But it like these books, it kind of put everything into perspective for me and it made everything click. And I started like the next couple of weeks and of course was right before Covid hit. So I was in office and I worked one on one with our CEO and founder Tom, who is amazing as a marketing guru himself, you could say he's really done his best to immerse his knowledge in marketing and learn as much as he can and sales and all that. And so he just kind of threw all of that onto me.

Speaker 3 (00:04:41) - And fast forward to March of 20, 23 months down the road, as three months into my internship and Covid hits college classes, they're done. You know, we don't know what's happening. They're like, Oh, we'll just be out for two weeks, you know, go home. You know, you'll do your school work from home. The professors didn't know what was happening. They didn't know how. I ran online classes. It was kind of a mess. And Tom was like, We just want to go ahead and go full time. I'm like, okay, why not? You know, I I'm working from home. You know, I don't have class anymore, so I go ahead and go full time right? Then in March and that's when you started the coffee with K, I think it was that March, if not right, Right.

Speaker 2 (00:05:21) - That's our mastermind that you were a part of for three years. And yeah, that was.

Speaker 3 (00:05:26) - That was great. Yeah. Um, and just it's been, I guess it's 20, 23 now, July of 2023, which is crazy.

Speaker 3 (00:05:35) - So I've been working for the company for three years now. Now we're Kirkham Ion Tech. We had two divisions Kirk Hammett, Iron Tech Security, Now we have Kirkham Iron Tech and we do cyber security for businesses of all sizes and outsourced. I.t. So if you need, you know, anything it wise for your company, that's something that we can take care of. So and.

Speaker 2 (00:05:56) - I'm, I'll have those links with this interview so anybody can can find you and I have to throw in a couple editorial comments. One is that you're right Tom is very impressive, very smart dude, really has immersed himself in marketing. Now, I know you are now in charge of marketing and sales. Um, but Tom considers you such a find. He tells me all the time. I am so lucky that I found Kinsey and you have really taken this company and and really grown it. And and so, you know, I do want to talk a little bit about, you know, some of the things that you've done to grow this company.

Speaker 3 (00:06:49) - Yeah. So when Covid hit, there wasn't really anyone doing marketing except for Tom when I first started. So it was there doing direct mail pieces here and there. That was some of the first things he had me do is we print letters and send them out to our list. And Tom was also doing in-person speaking events. And with Covid, everything went online. And so I remember us doing our first webinar, I think it was for like the Arkansas Rural Water Association or someone like that, a local association where we could present to their members and we immediately kind of realized we're going to have to switch how we're doing things just because of Covid. I mean, it changed a lot for everyone. And so we immediately started just doing webinars, webinars, webinars, webinars all the time, and we got in a good little flow of things doing that. And of course I was doing other things to other than webinars like Direct mail and the email marketing, social media. But webinars have kind of been our main thing.

Speaker 2 (00:07:55) - Last mainstay. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:07:57) - Oh yeah. And so not only are we doing these in-house, you know, where we host it, we promote it, we do all the work for it. We're also doing these webinars for, like I mentioned earlier, associations. Um, I, you could also say we're, it's more of like a networking networking thing. We are, you know, working with people that work with our ideal client, our moose that you and we.

Speaker 2 (00:08:25) - Better stop for a second and just explain.

Speaker 3 (00:08:28) - Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:08:29) - The word moose and in in our mastermind I just got such a kick out of it because whenever someone would talk about something that they wanted to try or, you know, what they wanted to say in their messaging, it would always come up Who? Who's your moose? Who's your moose? That is your ideal target. And you actually had one particular moose in the beginning. And I'd love to hear how you validated the fact that that really wasn't the best.

Speaker 3 (00:08:59) - Moose Yeah. So when I first started, our moose was real water utilities.

Speaker 3 (00:09:05) - And so that was who we were focusing all of our marketing on. That was we're focusing our website content on that, all of our blog post, email marketing, the webinars you're doing. We're working with the World Water Associations, doing whatever we could to get in front of these real water utility guys. And Tom had chose this target audience before I'd even started, and I think he chose them more so because they have the need. You know, it's all marketing is all about and sales is all about finding what's their pain point, How can you fix it? You know, what problem can you solve for these guys? And these real water utilities have a very big problem that we can solve. We, I want to say for a whole year from when I started, all we did was focus on these guys. And I mean, there are moose. So everything we did was revolved around these guys. But. No one was buying and we couldn't really. It took us a second to figure out why, like, we're doing all this, ah, our education.

Speaker 3 (00:10:09) - It's not even salesy. It's it's good information that they need to know to make that informed decision. And we were kind of that thought leader in the industry, too. Everyone knew who we were, but no one was buying. They schedule a meeting with my sales guy but then not move forward with it. And so we were kind of starting to see, okay, this is an issue. We can't keep moving like this or we're not going to grow as a business, that's for sure, because we just weren't seeing any results. And we realized that the the moose, the market, the rule, water, utilities, it's an older generation, I think. I can't remember the statistic. It was so long ago when I looked at it, but it was like three fourths or something of people working in the rural water. Utilities, utility industry are about to retire. So it is in you know, they're an older generation of people that have a harder time accepting technology and accepting change, especially with technology.

Speaker 3 (00:11:06) - It's scary to them. I mean, I'm sure their first iPhone or whatever, they had to have help, you know, how to learn how to use it. And a lot of people, too, struggle. So we were like, okay, let's let's switch this up. We looked at our list of clients. We have some really good law law firm clients that we've had for a really long time. You know, we're like, Let's just dip our toes into the water, kind of doing the same thing we're doing for water. But with the the law associations and the legal industry, how can we get our foot in the door with them? And we did the exact same thing and then started seeing results. We were doing the webinars, but for the law associations, the bar associations, we started doing a podcast, our CEO and founder would we would like I'd pick a list, kind of a hit list, I'd call it, of these legal podcasts that we had lawyers listening to. And Tom got on a couple of them.

Speaker 3 (00:11:58) - I'd reach out and just say, Hey, you know, we're an expert in the industry for lawyers. You know, let's partner up and and see how we can help your listeners. And so we started doing different things like that, and it worked. So we've done the exact same thing for other industries.

Speaker 2 (00:12:15) - So you're defining your Mooaw as an industry and you can have more than one, but each of those is a particular moose. Like you said, you have your messaging for that moose. And so I just want to clarify, when you do the webinars, I know you you make an offer. Yeah. And that's what you know. Why don't you explain that? Because that's what drives people to your sales guy and he closes the deal.

Speaker 3 (00:12:42) - So we've spent a lot of time in crafting the message of the webinar itself because we want usually it's an hour long, we want the member, the participant of the webinar, our moose, to be ready to set a meeting with ourselves Guy after the end of that hour long webinar.

Speaker 3 (00:13:04) - So we want them to be sure enough about us in our company. Trust us enough, build enough rapport throughout that webinar for them just to go ahead and go to that calendar and book some time. And so the whole thing's educational and at the very end what we have is our contact information there for a bit. We were putting the direct calendar link, but we realized with some of these guys, we don't even really need a meeting. It can be a simple phone call, kind of like take an order kind of thing and there's really no need for a very big assessment. It all depends on the size of the business, of course, and we do state that.

Speaker 1 (00:13:43) - Today's podcast is sponsored by the acclaimed book on Copyable Sales Secrets How to Create an Unfair Advantage and Outsell Your Competition by Kay Miller. Put the secrets in this book to work and you'll make more sales, grow your network and become a top earner. See the show notes or go to Amazon.com and search for Copyable sales secrets to order the book right now.

Speaker 2 (00:14:08) - Yeah, I think. Now. I just lost my train of thought. I was going to try to interject something, but now I can't remember. But. But. Oh, I was going to say that you really that is content marketing what you're doing. You're giving value up front, which is definitely what I recommend. And then the, the moose that see the need and that, that want to contact you raise their hand. We talk about the moose that raises their hand and then you've got really a qualified prospect. And so it really simplifies the process for your salesperson so that upfront work really pays off. And those webinars, those are great. And I know Tom speaks. I didn't realize that he was, you know, that you're finding podcasts for him to be on, but that's a great idea. Yeah. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about where you find leads and maybe you want to talk about LinkedIn and something else that you use that I learned from you.

Speaker 3 (00:15:13) - Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:15:15) - So LinkedIn, something that we've kind of just been we've been using it for a while, the way we've been doing a couple different things to get leads through LinkedIn lately. So when we do our webinars, we also put it as an event on LinkedIn and we don't do LinkedIn lives, but we put it as an event on there. So you can invite all of your connections that you have on LinkedIn and they can accept that they're going to attend or they can decline it. And what we do is if we see that they've accepted but not actually signed up for it, we will send them a message on LinkedIn and just say, Hey, we saw you registered or we saw you said you were going to attend to our webinar, but we didn't see that you registered. Can we grab your phone number and your email and we'll register get you registered so they don't even have to register themselves. We'll do it for them. And so I have my intern go through and just message the people that have marked that they're going to attend.

Speaker 3 (00:16:09) - And a lot of like we have a very good conversion rate on the people that do give us their contact info. The majority of them do show up to the webinar and then we have had quite a few of those guys actually turn into clients. And of course if I'm connecting with them on LinkedIn or their LinkedIn connection, for the most part they're going to be a prospect. Not all are, but when I am adding people on LinkedIn, you know, I want them to be a good prospect. Something else really cool with the whole webinar thing is you can repurpose that content. So if you go to our YouTube page, we have so much stuff on there and there's a new little feature that I'm not sure if you know about it. Okay, You can actually YouTube will turn your videos into podcast now for you and you don't even.

Speaker 2 (00:16:55) - I didn't even I didn't know that I.

Speaker 3 (00:16:57) - Didn't either until like two weeks ago. And so we did a little deeper dive series and I just went and it was a simple click and now they're a little podcast on our YouTube page.

Speaker 3 (00:17:07) - You can make clips out of your webinars just a two, three minute little clip out of your webinar that you can do different things with. So it's it's a great form of, of lead generation. And sometimes if we're working with association, you know, they'll give us a list and we can reach out or they'll send out emails for us on our behalf saying, Hey, you know, here's an e-book from Kirkham Iron Tech that did this presentation. Here's the contact info. Yeah, we've kind of got to figure it out.

Speaker 2 (00:17:37) - I know. And it's, you know, your business has just exploded since since 2020, coincidentally, when you came from the University of Arkansas. And you also have a very sophisticated follow up, automated follow up email system, don't you?

Speaker 3 (00:17:56) - Yeah, we recently switched CRMs, so if stuff has changed a little bit, but we do. They were called automations in my last email platform and now they're called Journeys and I don't have as much like freedom with the CRM sucks, but I do follow up always and I have it set to where, for example, if someone does attend one of our in-house webinars, I'll make it to where they're added to the list and then it automatically sets a task for my sales guy.

Speaker 3 (00:18:28) - I give them a call and say, Hey, I saw you just came to our webinar yesterday. What do you think? Do you have any questions? How is your current IT right now? Do you need any help? Stuff like that. And it's just we we have that follow up in place and it doesn't take much work to set up that automatic part of it. But it also kind of just depends on the platform you're using.

Speaker 2 (00:18:52) - And again, you talk about an e-book, so you're providing value up front. And you know, my book that you've now you've read my sales book too, but sales and marketing are so related. You know, marketing is getting your message out, providing content that will resonate with your moose, getting them to raise your hand. And then. Then you know it. Then that makes the sale that much easier. So so this is really integrated in what you do and it's a great example of that. You might want some resource where you could actually get people's phone numbers.

Speaker 2 (00:19:27) - Oh yeah, what is that seamless?

Speaker 3 (00:19:30) - Seamless.AI.

Speaker 3 (00:19:36) - Uh huh. And then there's another one that's similar that we've actually been evaluating. It's called up Lead UpLead, and it's a similar platform. And we're just we're trying to kind of figure out we're evaluating right now, we're switching up vendors and stuff, but seamless and applied. If you ever have like one single contact that you cannot find their phone number anywhere, you can go into Seamless and search their first and last name or their company or however like there's lots of different options you can put into the search fields, but it'll give you their email addresses, their personal email address, their work email address, their phone number, their cell phone number, their physical address. If you want to send them a postcard or anything like that. And then you can do a mass search. So for example, like my mouse, let's do like law firms, more than ten employees bringing in more than $1 million in revenue a year.

Speaker 3 (00:20:38) - And I only want managing partner CEOs, owners, CTOs, CIOs. I want people in the C-suite. And then I oh, I want them in the US, only United States. And then I'm trying to think what else, what other filters I usually do, I think.

Speaker 2 (00:20:53) - But you've really drilled down that Yes, yes. You to really drive.

Speaker 3 (00:20:57) - Defining your Moose has to be you have to get it as close as you can. Like we know that if we bring in a company with less than ten employees, you know, we may not get the kind of revenue that we want and it's not going to be worth our time closing that deal. That's something that we have switched in the past years. We used to bring on these smaller, you know, smaller guys and we just we we can't keep doing that because it's it's taking up too much time or the support. It's just not worth our time of having them a client at that point. And so we just we've made this new role where it's like we've got ten endpoints or higher and we know that we have more opportunity even in the future.

Speaker 2 (00:21:38) - Right? And you know, going back to the moose and when I was in sales and, you know, I won the number one sales award for muffler selling mufflers. Right. Um, but strategy was such a part of that because when you want more numbers, whether you're working on commission or you're a business owner or, you know, any kind of sales, you want more sales. And a lot of it is strategy. So we always say, start with your moose. Yeah. And the better that you know them, the more resources you can spend on tracking them down and converting them to a sale. So you've been very smart about really drilling down on your moose and and offering some great content. So, you know, in the early on I said that Tom feels very lucky to have found you and he is very lucky. You are so sharp in this. In our Coffee Mastermind, you shared so much powerful information with the group. But Kinsey, you are also a little bit lucky to work for Tom.

Speaker 2 (00:22:46) - Yes. And why would I say that?

Speaker 3 (00:22:49) - Um, working from home has been quite nice. I was able to leave Arkansas, so it was June of 2021. So over two years ago now, I moved out to Honolulu, Hawaii, and I'm still here, haven't left.

Speaker 2 (00:23:10) - And it's really and enjoying the heck out of life. Yeah, I mean, I'm so jealous, you know, I can see you're having so much fun, but you work really hard. I know. Especially because of the time zone. You work early and then. But the good news is you get off early and you go to the beach.

Speaker 3 (00:23:30) - I do. Yep. Start about 5 a.m. my time, which is 10 a.m. Arkansas time. Still a little bit late, but then I worked ten hour days, so I'm off at 3:00 my time and yeah, it's a it's a pretty good gig.

Speaker 2 (00:23:46) - It is and it's it's work hard and play hard. But again, your results speak for themselves. You know, if you were not creating those results, you wouldn't be able to do it.

Speaker 2 (00:23:56) - But you're also disciplined, you know, to to get up and work starting at five take some discipline and, you know, success in sales or anything else. It does take take discipline. I will ask you what one couple last things. Uh, we talked a little bit about I and then if you have something, some piece of advice for other women that are in, you know, either sales or marketing, what it would be. So, so I is just, oh, my gosh, the huge, huge buzz term. And we're hearing it everywhere. And cybersecurity is kind of a scary part of that. But until it destroys the world, you can use it, right?

Speaker 3 (00:24:46) - Yes, And you should. And you should. I mean, it's one of those things if you're not using it, you're going to you're going to fall behind the times. You got to keep up.

Speaker 2 (00:24:54) - So how do you what are some of the ways that you use it?

Speaker 3 (00:24:57) - Yeah. So recently we've been using it to help us create direct mail, like our sales letters.

Speaker 3 (00:25:04) - It's super neat because you can type into the AI or ChatGPT or Jasper or whatever you're using. You can type in, write a sales letter on cybersecurity to business owners using the writing style of Ogilvy, and it's able to do that. You know, we've got one of the best writers out here and you're able to write in that stuff and it does it.

Speaker 2 (00:25:32) - And it's amazing. It's scary. Amazing, right? Yeah. And I'm sure that you do some tweaking to that, right?

Speaker 3 (00:25:41) - You got to personalize it. And at the end of the day, I was having this conversation actually yesterday with someone and she asked, you know, are you scared that AI is going to take over your job? And as a marketer, and I'm like, no, because the AI doesn't know who my moose is and who has to. There has to be a person behind the AI to let them know like who the moose is, you know, doesn't want to target law firms. And, you know, I have to tell it.

Speaker 3 (00:26:11) - So, no, I'm not like, worried about, you know, job lose my job. I don't think marketers should be worried because it's still you still have to have that human interaction behind it.

Speaker 2 (00:26:21) - It just it frees up time. And, you know, as a writer, we both know that staring at a blank page, it makes it so hard to write. And and for sales people even, you know, to write an email and if they're not very good with grammar or writing, you can start with AI and then, you know, just edit it, which is a million times easier.

Speaker 3 (00:26:44) - So I've been very impressed with it. It's been a game changer. Absolute game changer.

Speaker 2 (00:26:51) - Yes. Yeah. And and like you said, businesses who are not using AI or marketers, salespeople, you know, you're falling behind your competition, who is using it. So, you know, I think some of us want to keep our heads in the sand, bury our heads in the sand. But this is a huge opportunity.

Speaker 2 (00:27:10) - So no surprise that you're using it.

Speaker 3 (00:27:13) - So.

Speaker 2 (00:27:15) - Uh, so I wanted to close with a question about what advice, if any, would you give to someone in your position. And I have one piece of advice I think you're going to give, and that is to keep learning. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:27:31) - Read books. Yeah, Keep learning is that's a big thing. One thing I've learned from Tom, one of the first things I learned from him that will probably stick with me the rest of my life is that only you can really educate yourself at the end of the day, especially once you're out of school. No one's forcing you to learn anything and you have to be the one to read those articles or watch those videos or listen to those podcasts to constantly build your tools and your toolbox because you have we have all these great experts in this world that we can learn from. You know, it's there's so many amazing smart people out there and you just have to push yourself to actually go out and learn it, you know, it's hard sometimes when you are working and doing this and this and this, and the world is crazy.

Speaker 3 (00:28:18) - Life is crazy. But yeah, you can't constantly got to educate yourself. But if I had to give one piece of advice, I would just say, get out of your comfort zone. I know when I first started, that was one thing. I was like scared to send emails to my list and I was like scared to post on social media too much. And I was scared to use like, emojis in an email or anything like that. And now it's like, No, I'm sending out stuff all the time and I you have to get out of your comfort zone. You have to.

Speaker 2 (00:28:45) - That is great advice. Really good advice. And like you said, once you do it, it gets easier. So it's it's hard in the beginning. And of course, you know, whenever you're afraid to do something, you can you can build momentum. And the only way to do that is by doing so. It's, you know, it's sometimes a little painful, but the reward is a huge and and you're a great example of that.

Speaker 2 (00:29:10) - Kinsey, thank you so much for being on my podcast and enlightening not only the listeners, but me too. I always learn something from you. And even though I in a way see myself as a mentor to you, I see you as a mentor to me. So I really appreciate our relationship and it's grown into a friendship, so I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. And I'll have fun at the beach.

Speaker 3 (00:29:40) - Thank you. Kay. It was so great speaking with you.

Speaker 1 (00:29:44) - Thanks for listening to this episode of Uncpyable Women in Sales, Your source for Secrets you can use to make more sales. Check the show notes for links and contact information and if you enjoyed the podcast, please spread the word by subscribing, sharing and leaving a five star review. You can always learn more by going to Uncopyable sales.com/podcast. Until next time, go out and supercharge your sales like a true Uncopyable rock star.