Funnel Reboot

I can't prove it, but I think many marketers wish they could improve how they're perceived by corporate leadership.

I have felt this way in more than one role, and racked my brain on how to fix it. I've entertained everything including coming to board meetings with a dozen custom-branded donuts.

Thankfully, the a solution I have come up with isn't extreme and it doesn't require donuts.

I was recently given the chance by a local association - the OPMMA - to give a talk and I picked this problem.

I hope as you listen to how I think it's solved and the three moments where this method demands doing the opposite of what our gut says to do.

So give a listen to 'From Adversaries to Advocates'

All references in this show are linked in the Shownotes for this episode on the Funnel Reboot site.

We humans like conversations that keep moving forward. Every time we share some detail about ourselves, we expect the other person to remember it.

If they bring that detail back up in our next interaction, we feel pleased and want to keep that relationship going. Conversely, we get annoyed when they blast us with messages we had already said didn't interest us.

This is severely problematic for us sales and marketing professionals. The sheer volume of people and details we all encounter is too much to keep straight in our outbound emails, let alone in our heads, and that's why we use CRMs.

But there are many CRMs out there and to fit a business, they all need to be customized. That's where our guest comes in.

A graduate of CalState in information systems, he worked in data analyst roles for several tech companies, including a Customer Relationship Management company that sold to enterprises. Wanting to work more with solopreneurs and SMBs, he decided to go out on his own as a CRM consultant to show them sustainable relationship-building techniques. Suffice to say, he is able to deliver immediate benefits to his clients under this business model. He also has a passion for coaching people on their nutrition, which explains why both components are blended in the name of his business - the health data guy.

Let's go to Laguna Beach to speak with Brandon Drake.

Chapters/Timestamps:

00:00 Why Memory Matters 00:34 Meet Brandon Drake 02:19 From Burnout to Health 03:44 Back to CRM Consulting 07:00 Relationship First CRM 09:14 Automated Nurture Emails 11:20 Crowdsourced Content Engine 12:11 Bio Form Data Hack 16:11 Progressive Profiling Scores 19.45 PSA: Funnel Reboot Reading Room 20:29 Segmentation Beats Spray 26:46 Protect Email Reputation 28:16 AI Needs Process First 32:28 Where to Find Brandon

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 233

In the 2009 movie "Up" there's a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel.

We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let's be honest and admit that we get caught on a treadmill of activity without stopping to ask ourselves if it's having an impact.

How do we break this habit? This month's book says it's by creating a Go-To-Market plan with detailed tactics. A plan reminds us why we're sticking with those tactics, so we don't get distracted by any tactic that comes along.

Our guest has an MBA and 25+ years of marketing leadership experience in the US and Europe. Her consultancy, Transformation Insights, offers Fractional CMO services that help companies grow by building go-to-market strategies that are consistent and effective. She is also a speaker and the author of The Marketing Growth Formula which came out in late 2025.

Let's go to Miami Florida to talk with Heidi Hattendorf

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 232

There is a quiet, enduring power in wisdom that resists the urge to conform. Wise people refuse to abandon their convictions. It's not obvious who will be the Wise character in These Stories, the role often casts them as having lowly beginnings or in the shadow of others who are more powerful. But they speak out anyway, even if they are mocked or sidelined. Take:

Don Quixote's sidekick Sancho Panza, whom Quixote usually makes fun of, becomes so well known for his practical wisdom that he becomes a Governor. In the story of Sidharrtha, when the prince leaves his palace, he is called a fool and so-called teachers treat him as an outcast. They never reach enlightenment but he ultimately does.To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch, the lawyer in the deep South who was shunned by his community for taking on an unwinnable case. Though he lost, townspeople credited him as "the only man in these parts who can keep a jury out so long in a case like that." Sheherazade, the woman in One Thousand and One Nights who was facing execution at dawn, but who told cliffhanger tales that stalled the king's command, saving her life. Lastly, the Young boy In The Emperor's New Clothes, where everyone believed the lie that only smart people could see the emperor's clothes, so no one said anything as he walked by. The boy's exclamation brought what everyone knew to be true into the open.

These fictional characters remind us that while the truth may be unpopular at first, people eventually realize they should listen to, and follow the person who said it. They remind us that when leaders step up, share their convictions, act as the voice of reason, they will ultimately triumph.

Our guest's new book says that any company wanting to lead their category.must fearlessly shout out what they know to be true. The title "Market Eminence," refers to the position of category authority that leaders who do this can reach. Its tone is as bold as his previous books Do It! Selling, Do It! Speaking and Do It! Marketing. He is also an advisor who works with marketers, salespeople and executives, host of a 500+ episode, top-ranked podcast called The Selling Show.

Let's welcome back this previous show guest from Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, David Newman.

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks.

When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don't have to raise N very much to see it balloon in size. Each increment it jumps by represents its value going up by a factor of ten.

The question of how we reach scale then isn't how to change financial numbers by a basic percentage; it's how do we grow them by a factor of N?

Our guest knows how sales and marketing can scale their organization without snapping them. *come with their own jargon like batch mode, local vs global maximums, and WIP bottlenecks.

He graduated from the University of New Brunswick with an engineering degree and then went into technically heavy roles, working in IBM's semiconductor division. He pivoted into leading sales and marketing teams for tech organizations until the late 2000s, when he founded a product startup with an app that helped salespeople gain visibility into their funnel activity. He also teaches sales practices and scaling up in the engineering faculty at the University of Ottawa.

Join me now as I sit down in person with the head of Ottawa's Scaling Up initiative, Peter Fillmore.

Chapters/Timestamps

00:00 Intro 02:10 My guest Peter Fillmore 03:27 What Changes When You Scale 05:37 Making the Funnel Visible 08:58 Sales Fundamentals and Urgency 09:55 PSA 12:03 Saying No and Off Ramps 13:26 Marketing Segments and Messaging 15:31 Discipline Metrics and Cadence 22:53 Connect with Peter & Ottawa Scaling Up Initiative

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales.

This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven't always been this way.

A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet's governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would be able to vote on changes to the internet - and at their peak 158,000 people were on the voting rolls. This was a radical global experiment in direct democracy.

That model didn't take off, partly because to be a voting member, Internet users everywhere would have to (at least temporarily) upload some Identification - and most weren't willing to share that kind of data.

What happened instead was the rise of social networks owned by a handful of companies, who conditioned us sellers to post promoted content with attention-grabbing messages because that could be used by the algorithms to keep buyers on the platforms. And I've got to call out how , as buyers, we're also complicit because we now give those platforms way more data than the Internet governing body ever asked for. How ironic.

But our guest maintains that it's in our ability to regain our equilibrium. While we're all collectively responsible for how we communicate, marketers can be an ideal catalyst of change. We can make content that prioritizes authentic interaction over consumerism, be it on the current platforms or ones yet to exist. We should remember the saying of the American philosopher Thomas Paine: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

My guest has been leveraging social media to grow audiences and income since MySpace was around. In that 20 year timespan, she has leveraged her social media knowledge both by working for sports organizations and corporations like AT&T, iHeart Radio and DirecTV to running the agency Next Step Social that does this for health and wellness brands. She's also a speaker and a podcaster.

She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughters. Let's go now to speak with Katie Brinkley

Chapters/Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 03:01 Meet Katie Brinkley 04:01 What Community Means 06:03 Attention Economy Shift 08:58 Audio Beats AI 10:40 Discovery On Rented Land 11:48 Four Post Strategy 16:10 Platform Culture Matters 17:35 Metrics True Fans 19:47 Beyond Consumption Mindset 23:35 Katie Origin Story 28:03 Burnout And Conversation 32:16 Audit Your Feed 33:29 Where To Find Katie 34:00 Closing Thoughts

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 229

We need to talk about what's been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta's ad platforms.

A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy images, and a vague 'goal,' and we'll take it from here."

Performance Max (PMax) and Advantage+ are the ultimate "Trust Me, Bro" of the marketing world. They've turned "manual control" into a dirty word. They want us to believe that the algorithm knows our customer better than we do—even though that same algorithm once tried to sell me a pair of shoes I bought three weeks ago.

The platforms are no longer just tools; they're aggressive backseat drivers.

• Google is constantly "recommending" that you switch to Broad Match (conveniently spending your budget faster).

• Meta is hiding the "Manual" button behind three layers of "Are you sure? This is less efficient!" warnings.

• The "Auto-apply" Trap: If you don't uncheck a box buried in a sub-menu, the platform will literally change your strategy while you're sleeping.

They aren't optimizing for our ROI; they're optimizing for their inventory. It's getting a little ridiculous. It feels like we're being slowly evicted from our own accounts.

AI is a great engine, but it's a terrible pilot. It has no "common sense." Media buyers aren't here to fight the machine; but they are there to keep the machine from driving a brand off a cliff.

After gaining her B.A. from Butler University and working in B2B, she had her first brush with digital channels like SEO and paid search and saw how they could drive business better than traditional methods. That came as a pleasant surprise, given how her sales role relied totally on making cold calls. Bringing that sales-focused grit to DTC, and honing her digital expertise over the last 14 years, she now serves as its CEO. When she's away from agency business, she is likely to be spending time with her husband & two sons, often at Wrigley Field catching a ball game.

Let's go to Chicago, to meet Lyndsey Maddox

Timestamp Chapters

00:00 Intro

02:05 Lyndsey on whether experts still matter

04:51 PMax Leads and Nuance

09:55 Honest Forecasting with Clients

15:41 Humans in the Loop

24:22 Agency Size and Fit

30:00 Connecting with Lyndsey

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 228

To enjoy the wondrous technologies we have today, we first had to grasp the science behind them. Science is built on good data—but did you know that bad data delayed one of the most significant inventions of the last 150 years? The engine at the heart of every plane, train, and automobile was held up for decades simply because of how records were kept.

For millennia, we've known that combusting fossil fuels releases immense power. By the 1700s, scholars realized that if the gases trapped within those fuels could be ignited predictably in a chamber, they could create an internal combustion engine. To do that, however, you'd need to know the exact nature of every gas—the fuel composition, the air-to-fuel ratio, and the necessary heat resistance. Without those specifics, an engine stays on the drawing board.

That didn't stop scholars from trying. They studied gases under various pressures and charted their results in massive tables. Robert Boyle recorded values when temperature was constant; Jacques Charles did the same for volume. But despite all this data, we weren't getting closer to a functional engine. Using tables to capture every possible variable was inefficient—we needed a universal rule.

In the early 1800s, physicist Émile Clapeyron compiled these century-old tables with recent findings from Amedeo Avogadro. By consolidating these scattered sources, he realized they all pointed to a single law governing gas behavior that had been buried in the noise. This was the Ideal Gas Law. With it, engineers could finally calculate exactly what an engine needed, moving from theory to the rapid production of the vehicles we use today.

Your marketing and sales data is likely in the same shape as those old tables. It may contain breakthrough ideas for growth, but they will remain hidden as long as your data is disorganized. Just as it worked for the scientists of the industrial revolution, once your data is in order, the insights will follow.

Today's guest will convince you that your data must be in a scientific state. She is a recognized expert in data classification, cleaning, and transformation. Known as the Classification Guru, her blogs, books, and talks have earned her over 43,000 followers on LinkedIn. We're discussing her 2026 book, Optimizing Sales and Marketing Data.

Let's go to Guildford, England, to talk with Susan Walsh.

Chapter Timestamps

00:00 Intro

02:34 Meet Susan Walsh

03:31 Why Clean Data

04:27 Blunders And Backlash

06:32 Ethics And Accountability

09:30 Hidden Costs ROI

12:49 Duplicates Fraud Waste

14:29 Segmentation People Problems

18:21 Taxonomy And Standards

21:25 Master Lists Automation

23:23 Data Code Framework

25:56 Spot Checks Pivot Tables

27:17 Excel Cleanup Toolkit

30:20 Revenue Advantage AI

33:12 Where to get a hold of Susan/her book

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

How do you amplify a message when you can't lean on traditional justifications like "because we'll make a profit out of this"?

In the for-profit world, the justification for marketing spend is straightforward: you put money in to get more money out. But how do you amplify a message when you can't lean on traditional bottom-line justifications? For non-profits, associations, and social enterprises, the "profit motive" is replaced by a mission, yet the fundamental challenge remains identical—you must find and keep your "customers," whether they are donors, members, or beneficiaries.

Marketing in the non-profit sector isn't just about "pulling heartstrings"; it is about solving a business problem using the same tools as the private sector. Whether you are a plumber looking for a lead or a foundation looking for a donor, revenue is the common denominator that keeps the lights on.

In this episode, we explore how organizations can move beyond "waiting to be found" by using paid traffic as an accelerant. We will dive into why Mission-Based organizations should look at paid Traffic. Specifically The Google Ad Grant program.

Whether you are a for-profit marketer looking to apply your skills to a "3-dimensional" cause or a non-profit leader ready to fill your funnel, it's time to stop treating marketing as an afterthought and start treating it as a vital utility.

Our guest is a marketing consultant who supports both for-profit and non-profit local service organizations. Through his agency, Harvest Demand, he blends smart digital strategies with practical storytelling to help these organizations grow. He also brings experience in search and AI optimization, as well as leveraging digital advertising, including managing ad grants for non-profits. In other words, Sean's all about making a real impact for a variety of organizations.

Let's talk with Sean Moher.

Timestamps/chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:41 Sean defines the Nonprofit Landscape

02:24 What Is Marketing Without Profit? "Finding and Keeping Customers"

03:13 The 3-Party Value Exchange: Mission-Based Value Beyond Transactions

07:06 Emotion vs. Action: Telling Stories That Still Drive Donations

08:02 Measurement Reality Check: Analytics, Funnels & the Awareness Gap

10:39 Why Paid Traffic Matters: Stop Waiting to Be Found

11:34 Google Ad Grant 101: $10K/Month in Search Ads (and Why It's Not Magic)

14:01 Rules, "Loopholes" & Eligibility: What You Can (and Can't) Advertise

15:54 Grant Limitations & Strategy: CPC Caps, Leftover Inventory & Testing in Parallel

18:20 AI as a Utility: Faster Research, Better Campaigns & Knowing Your Donor Avatar

23:34 Doing Pro Bono the Smart Way: Aligning with Interests, Boards & Real Impact

26:28 Where to Find Sean + Final Takeaways

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 226

Positioning is an element that's so foundational to Marketing, it's taught in every introductory class alongside the "Four Ps" of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price.

But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail?

Take Microsoft Zune: Because how people thought of MP3 players had already been set by Apple

Colgate Frozen Entrees: Sure, both food and toothpaste enter our mouths, but other TV dinner brands don't plant the taste of toothpaste in your head.

Harley-Davidson's "Legendary" Cologne: People buy a fragrance for the impression they want to leave, not one whose name evokes burned rubber and gasoline.

Cosmopolitan Yogurt: There are plenty of brands in the dairy aisle. People didn't think a fashion brand belonged there

Frito-Lay Lemonade: Marketing a salty snack and chasing it with a "Thirst-quenching drink" strikes people as a cynical cash grab

The reason these brands flopped is they tried positioning themselves on a competitor's turf. The correct way to position yourself is to start with customer needs and work outward from there. To do this right, we've got to flip the traditional concept on its head. Instead of positioning, the author we're talking with today says we must deposition our brands.

He is the founder and chief strategy officer of brand strategy firm Fazer. Over three decades, he has led strategy for Fortune 500 companies as well as venture-backed disruptors. His work has been featured in the New York times Forbes and MIT technology review.

Let's go now to New York City to speak with Todd Irwin.

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.