LOMA: From Zero to T-Mobile and Panera as Customers

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Alex Nocifera, co-founder and CEO of Field Day and Loma, martech and franchise tech companies serving multi-location and franchise brands, explains how he took Field Day from its inception to signing the likes of Panera and T-Mobile as clients. In short:

1. Effective marketing doesn’t begin with tactics such as trying out a channel. It starts with a deep understanding of your customer’s problems.

2. B2B marketing is like entrepreneurship in that there are no shortcuts. For the most part, you make contact with your customers dozens of times, and eventually, you earn a meeting.

3. Big deals come from the learnings of smaller deals. Just as you secure placements in trade press before getting covered by the WSJ, honing your product and building credibility through success stories with smaller brands is what enables you to go after bigger brands.

Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:

JZ: Your company Field Day has worked with name brands like T-Mobile and Panera, amongst hundreds of other large multi-unit brands. How do you get from starting an ad/martech company to working with brands that big — which is a dream for many founders when they start out?

AN: I subscribe to an inside-out philosophy. Research the problem deep inside the industry before constructing any products or solutions. I've been in the multi-unit and franchising industry for two solid decades. And really, the theme that has driven multiple of my companies is that from a multi-location perspective, every location has a mandated budget to spend in their local market. There’s a reason it’s in every single franchise agreement in the US — it assures the franchisor’s brand stays top-of-mind in the area where they want to acquire and retain customers. It also helps hedge success for franchisees by keeping a pulse on the local markets. That's the general thesis.

With Field Day, what I really tapped into was a gap in resources — brands have been trying forever to get the people who work inside multi-location stores to go do some community marketing. I kept coming across brands that would say, “Yeah, we ask our franchise operators to do this. We know this is a big opportunity due to the power of local connections. But it’s hard to coordinate across hundreds of locations.” Field Day was the answer.

My point is, though, that I had to develop a lot of deep insider knowledge — I had to hear that problem from dozens of people — before I could develop a solution and take it to a big brand. I did my time with lots of smaller brands. And by the time we got to household names, we had had some decent credibility and some PR, which helped.

JZ: Two lessons for me here. First, you did not start with a marketing tactic. You started with a deep understanding of the customer — in this case, multi-location brands whose locations had contractual agreements to spend marketing money but did not know how to do that. Second, you don’t start with the big brands. You start with smaller brands, turn them into advocates, and build up. It’s similar to how, in marketing, you don’t start with the Wall Street Journal. You go to tier-two trade press, then tier-one trade press, and then national business press.

AN: Yeah. It’s the old Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. The more reps you get, you're going to develop a deeper, broader, more empathetic understanding of the problem and how to solve it. So, number-one is the inside-out philosophy. Number two is fail-fast testing. For example, at Field Day, we started with local outreach - truly old school guerilla marketing and canvassing. That turned out to be really inefficient. Then we bought a database, which evolved into us writing a routing algorithm and started figuring out time efficiencies. And then we baked that in our service, too. We kept getting better because we were getting those reps.

The hardest part is getting in front of brands. They are just getting pummeled with people selling them products and services. So, that’s why you have to create content — to build equity, trust, and empathy with this constituent. To get in the room with the brand you’re dreaming about, you have to develop an authentic runway of understanding.

It’s going to take 100 reps before you get the first brand. And then, when you get a logo, that runway might shorten from 100 to 95 reps. You're going to get two logos, and it goes to 90. I guess the biggest point I would tell a young entrepreneur is there are no shortcuts.

JZ: It takes a lot of touchpoints and a lot of reps. And you take a variety of approaches to getting those touchpoints. You have to see what's feasible within your budget at the time.

AN: Your best route is a referral. If Joe is a trusted entity to a person who leads marketing for a brand, that trust is going to get you a meeting. But if I have someone making calls and sending emails and engaging with them on LinkedIn, it's probably going to take three, six, nine, 12 months to get a meeting. And you hope they're still there by that time so that the meeting actually happens.

I truly empathize with multi-unit marketers today: the in-house marketers who are fielding offers from technology providers. They're getting inundated with messages. Plus, 90% of these marketing teams are under-resourced. So, they can’t devote someone on their team to filtering through vendors. The upshot is you have to play the long game and reach them from every direction. I think authenticity is also really important.

JZ: I would say the same thing to agency entrepreneurs that you said to me about martech entrepreneurs. There are no shortcuts. You build relationships, you impress people one time, you stay in their orbit, and one day they're going to need something, and they come back to you. But we're not in the business of selling $10 items. You can’t just cold call or hit people with a performance ad and succeed on pure hustle or volume. It really is about multiple touch points and staying top of mind. And over time, people do come back if you have something of value.

AN: Exactly. And that's the inside-out logic, right? When you do that dance over your first one, two, three years, you get some logos that make you look credible. But then, by the time the product needs to be measured and really held to the truth, if you didn't really research and build with a real discipline and rigor around the details needed to succeed, that will get exposed.

So, you build the core first, iterate on it, and eventually the product is good enough — and your awareness is good enough — to work with the Paneras and T-Mobiles of the world.

JZ: This philosophy of building gradually is not just about entrepreneurship. It’s also B2B marketing and GTM. It's not a linear path. You try something, you mess up, learn, and earn a bunch of touchpoints with your target audience. Over time, you hone the channel allocation as well as the messaging, and marketing gets both more effective and efficient. Of course, there are shorter-term goals that everyone needs to hit. But that long-term view is important.