Funnel Reboot

Episode 225

At the time I'm recording this it's a new year. This is a typical time when people plan what they're going to achieve fitness-wise, financially and professionally. If you're working on that last one and wonder about what marketing reads you should try, I have some marketing books that could do just the thing. There are Five in all. - Let's dive right in.

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

Thinking up a new product and commercializing it is not easy. All products face Financial, Technological and of course Competitive market barriers. But doing this in the field of Healthcare is not like any other industry. In healthcare, there exist extra regulatory hurdles that make product innovation even more difficult.

Before every medical device is introduced, they must find academics who will research them and publish articles that are heavily scrutinized by peers. Then they have to endure clinical screening before receiving government approval, which applies tight restrictions on what you can say about the product and how it's used. After they enter most markets, the products must be coded so insurers will reimburse patients who use them. So if you have a health or medical technology product, how can you market it when you face all these limits?"

For the first time here, the mic will be in somebody else's hands. That person is Cindy Grabowski, founder of Mind Grove, a US-based training platform built specifically for MedTech professionals. Have to disclose that I have no affiliation with Mind Grove, other than giving them a no-charge review of the marketing course on their platform. Anyway, she turned the tables on me to hear me answer how you can market in the Healthcare space with so many constraints.

As I present my points on healthcare marketing, listen for tips on:

• Building your digital assets throughout your product's lifecycle

• Setting up campaigns on digital channels without breeching privacy

• Engaging your patient population to create your content for you

• Getting buy-in from decision-makers on upgrades to your marketing program.

So give this unique talk I have with Cindy a listen - I imagine even if you aren't in Healthcare Marketing, you'll come away with better ideas on how to overcome your own constraints. Let's go hear how we can navigate around constraints.

Timestamp Chapters:

00:00 Introducing Cindy Grabowsky

01:07 Glenn takes a turn as guest on the show

03:09 What we'll cover in Healthcare Marketing

04:33 The Big Question: Why is Healthcare so hard?

06:38 Leveraging Data in Healthcare Marketing

09:56 Case Study: EndoGastric Solutions

17:27 Optimizing Digital Presence and Compliance

33:57 Skills for measuring, managing Healthcare Marketing

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

The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I'm talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it every day without noticing. Taking just language, be it English, French, Spanish or Italian, they all use words with origins that tie back to ancient law, institutions, arts and sciences. The concepts they gave linguistic expression to are stitched into everything that comes out of our mouths.

You'll hear a passionate discussion today by two guys who both did an undergrad in classics. But you won't need to know anything about this to get great marketing lessons from today's talk. Believe it or not, the ancients can teach us a fair bit about marketing!

Our guest's undergraduate courses taken at the University of Oxford in Classical Greek Language and Literature inspired him to write the book we're discussing today.

He is a trainer, author, strategist, and lecturer who applies Storytelling, Behavioural Economics, and insight-driven thinking to brands and communications. Serving as a Course Director for several professional institutes, he also delivers TEDx talks and has spoken on stages around the world. His clients span organizations such as the BBC, Panasonic, Nokia, The Royal Albert Hall, and the UK National Health Service. An accomplished writer, he has published several award-winning books, including The Storytelling Book, which has sold 40,000 copies.

His seventh book, The Classical Marketing Book, is being released in North America at the start of 2026. Let's go to the UK to speak with Anthony 'Tas' Tasgal.

Chapters Timestamps

0:00:00 Introducing Tas Tasgal

0:02:48 How Ancient Cultures Inform Modern Marketing Today

0:06:29 Uncovering Marketing Power in Word Origins

0:10:26 Using Ancient Myths for Market Segmentation

0:13:33 Connecting Behavioral Economics with Storytelling Power

0:17:21 Strategies to Avoid Marketing's 'Junk Folder'

0:21:52 Crafting Persuasive Frames with Historical Stories

0:26:43 The Power and Peril of Condensed Language

0:30:53 Mastering Persuasion with Ethos, Logos, and Pathos

0:34:48 Satire and Timeless Human Patterns in Marketing

0:37:57 Tapping into Ancient Wisdom for Modern Marketing

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

We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don't hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments. That's especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It's a live feedback loop marketers can't get anywhere else. Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other's meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly. Our guest today understands that better than most. He's a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He's known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance - something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach's tone to get them back on track. And he doesn't restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let's go talk with Karl Ortmanns.

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

Is your Brand truly memorable? Would a person who bought from you a year ago be able to recall your name or say what they found compelling about you? The reality is that a lot of brands are instantly forgettable.

You don't have to wallow in a world of Meh - you can turn your brand into something memorable - we're going to hear a process that's been codified in a book that came out in 2025 called BrandJitsu. .

Listen in as we delve into the book's process, which begins not with a funnel but with a Loop we've got to Embrace. We'll hear how to plumb the depths of our brand by thinking of it as an Iceberg. Lastly, we'll drill into a brand's DNA to find out how we can spread its unique outlook.

Our guest was tired of working with brands that felt like they were screaming into the void, so he designed a process that let customers feel, remember, and advocate for a brand. He honed his methodology as a creative director, and founded the brand agency called Make More Creative to help brands that had this problem solve it outright.

He is also Host of TheRebelRebelPodcast and Speaker and mentor for the Canadian Trade Accelerator Program. Let's go to Calgary Alberta to speak with Michael Dargie.

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

Here's a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities When it's so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities?

The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful communication with buyers contains elements that just don't scale - this takes more than a trivial amount of work. But that is precisely why you need to do them.

A new book came out in 2025, called Human Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. Even though Gen AI that's all around looks set to marginalize content marketing, this book predicts that AI's knock-on effects will bring old retro practices back into vogue. If Wired Magazine were to meme it using their Wired/Tired/Expired phrasing, it might say that

Humans Interacting with no machines = Expired

Machines Monopolizing Interactions = Tired

Human-Human interaction via Machine = Wired

The book also argues that marketing & communications folks have to make different types of content for segments of the buyer journey, all held to different goals and different time horizons. Don't dump random content on social channels. Like instruments in a score, your pieces need to work together—not add noise.

It also said being Human-Centered extends to where and how we use our messages. Our leaders have to go to trade shows, make podcasts, meet people, and have real conversations. Trust grows when customers feel seen and heard.

The author of the book is by day, a speaker and is currently Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Canva. By night, she's a Singer, actor, and fitness fiend. Let's go to Northern California to talk with Ashley Faus.

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

Up to the 18th century, making and trading things was harder than it needed to be. You had to deal with a bewildering patchwork of local constants and norms. It was actually the French Revolution & administrators who came out of it that started to codify how we measure things. The standards they adopted were ultimately formalized in 1875 at a Convention whose name you may recognize, the Metre - or should I say Meter - Convention.

The Standard set at the convention spread beyond France to most of Europe, removing friction in commerce and everyday life. Engineers could spec parts to the same tolerances; pharmacists could dose reliably across borders; food producers could print consistent nutritional labels; shipbuilders and container makers could agree on common dimensions; and architects and builders could order materials that matched on site. Over decades that shared language of measurement turned local guesswork into dependable infrastructure for industry, science and trade. Today, About 95% of the world's population lives in countries that have officially adopted the metric system.

"Metric" in that sense solved disagreement about how much — it replaced local guesswork with a shared language of measurement so engineers, traders and regulators could trust one another.

Businesses face the same problem today — only the units have changed. Instead of metres and kilograms, modern organizations trade in clicks, sessions, impressions, cost, conversions and revenue. These are the metrics that power decisions, budgets and boardroom arguments. If one team's "conversion" counts form submissions, another's counts purchase intents, and a third's counts paid signups, you get the same mess Europe lived with before standardization: wasted effort, mistrust, and bad decisions.

That's why the digital-era equivalent of adopting the metric system matters: a single, governed vocabulary of business metrics (clear definitions, lineage, owners and calculational rules). Give everyone the same definition of "revenue," "LTV," or "ROAS" — and the same ability to trace where those numbers came from — and you turn noisy arguments into aligned action. In short: standardize the units, restore trust in the numbers, and your dashboards start to behave like the modern factories that metrication once enabled for Europe.

Turn to how many marketing teams are now constrained by the disparate marketing measures we have - it's the choke-point preventing us from sharing dashboards between groups, asking bigger questions, and getting full bang for money spent on our analytics infrastructures. If we're going to keep our sanity, we must get on with Metricizing our metrics. Going down a path where business metrics are treated as standardized units opens up possibilities as big as the Metric System opened up for our global economy.

Our guest is a Proud Swiss-Canadian, technologist and entrepreneur. In 2001 he co-founded analytics software company Klipfolio, one of whose products aims to address metric management. Note that I'm having him on today to give his personal perspective - there's no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. When he's not working in or talking about analytics, you'll find him cycling in the city we both call home. Let's go talk to Allan Wille.

For links to people, products or concepts mentioned, visit the Funnel Reboot site's page for show #219.

In 1985, Robert Fulgham published a book that has gone on to sell 7 million copies. That puts it in league with nonfiction books like the biographies of Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela & the Diary of Anne Frank. In "All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten," Fulgham lays out a handful of rules we all internalized on our way to adulthood. They include…

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don't take things that aren't yours.
• When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

You've probably noticed the problem with Fulgham's syrupy homespun advice. It's not the world we live in. kindergarten class bear no resemblance to Capitalism— which is more like what you see in recess on the playground. From a marketing perspective, there are critical qualifiers we must add to Fulgham's rules to make the applicable to the Big bad world out there:

Share everything? Sharing sounds noble… but capitalism says if you come up with an idea and patent it, those whom it's shared with have to pay you for its use. Sharing doesn't automatically mean you lose your competitive edge

Play Fair? Sure, play by the rules. But know that the biggest rewards go to whoever understands the rules best. If your competitors are using a playbook, you should change how the game's played, and beat everyone else in the process.

Don't take things that aren't yours? You shouldn't steal, of course… but marketing is literally the legal appropriation of someone else's audience. History's full of greenfields where pioneering R&D created a category…only to see it harvested by a fast moving disrupter.

To sum up, being a producer in this system is trying to outdo your fellow producers to win a consumers's business, you should use every exploit capitalism allows to win.

Our guest has been in and worked with many startups, showing them how to bend the rules in their favour. He has run conferences that have brought thousands of companies together to share these unfair advantages. He's also co-authored a book showing how to identify growth hacks using analytics. And in 2025 he and his co-author released the book "Just Evil Enough"

Let's go to Montreal to talk with Alistair Croll.

For full notes on concepts mentioned, go to the Funnel Reboot site and check episode 218.

For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we'll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey,

For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey's, surgery isn't an if, it's not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations.

But throughout all that, he's displayed unwavering courage. His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him insights that he shares in his book, "Scar Tissue." And whether your difficult situations have come on the operating table or in the workplace, you'll appreciate the unique perspective Danny brings.

Let's get ready to reevaluate our perception of weaknesses and why they might be strengths…with Danny Covey.

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

One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn't win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of.

That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn't find anything notable looking back at his track career. Back in high school he'd struggled to master all the motions used in the high jump; and coaches noted how little he practiced; when time came for track meet qualifiers, his jumps came up short.

But when he got to University for civil engineering, he began to experiment with other ways of jumping. In his studies he learned that our ability to jump is limited by our centre of gravity. Lifting our whole body over a bar at the same time demands that we raise our centre of gravity to that same height. So Fosbury analyzed to see if there was a way to get a human over the bar one part at a time, which temporarily moves our whole centre of gravity to somewhere below us, even below the bar. That means that without jumping any higher, we can clear a higher bar - it's playing a trick on physics.

Fosbury used the technique selectively for 2 seasons because his coach still went by the tried-and-true technique, and the heights he cleared got higher & higher. It wasn't until a month before Mexico City that he secured him a spot on Team USA.

The Olympics was the first moment where everyone saw Fosbury's new backflip maneuver - the press coined it the Fosbury Flop. Everyone also noticed his performance - he didn't miss a jump right up to the metal round. I bet as international competitors watched him advance while they hit the bar must have felt pretty disarmed by that flop. The bar was raised in the finals to 2.24M or 7 ft 4¼ in, higher than at any games before. Fosbury missed on his first two attempts, but cleared on his third, winning the Olympic gold medal and broke the Olympic record

Ever since, this back-first technique has been the obvious way every jumper has used. Fosbury's style so clearly solved the high jump problem, we don't even question it.

Lots of problems seem unsolvable until an obvious solution is posed. It's a phenomena today's guest commonly sees on websites. Her recently-launched book puts it this way: "The solutions we implemented may seem obvious in hindsight, but the problems and opportunities remained hidden until we analyzed their data in depth-and that's the point!"

Our guest has spent 25 years teaching digital marketing strategy and analytics at business schools and consulting to companies whose websites generate hundreds of millions of dollars. She is the author of "42 Rules for a Website That Wins" and came out in 2025 with "Website Wealth: A Business Leader's Guide to Driving Real Value from your Analytics". Let's go to Northern California to speak with Philippa Gamse.

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 216.