Funnel Reboot

If you take the United States economy as a bellwether, you can brea businesses down into three categories. There are Start-up companies that typically have annual revenue anywhere from a million up to $40 million.

Mid-market or Scale-up organizations generally have an average annual revenue of $300-400 million.

Large enterprises, like those in the Fortune 500, had an average revenue in 2022 of $36 Billion. They represent the vast majority of all business revenues.

The point is, these companies are such different sizes from each other, that you must tailor the marketing you do according to where they are on this continuum. Ideally, you'll take on the difficult task of reinventing the marketing function at each stage of their Start-up to Scale-up to enterprise journey.

Our guest draws on 20 + years of experience in creating digital marketing and product development strategies that have resulted in highly converting online assets and campaigns. As a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer & owner of an Agency called Engagement Marketing, she has supported organizations and businesses in the growth stage looking for positioning help & support gaining further market traction. She also serves as a marketing consultant to Start-up Founders through various Accelerator and Incubator programs.

Let's talk with Shannon Clement.

For all on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 164's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Today we're talking about what analytics has to do with music (check out this music about analytics by songwriter Kai Feng). We're looking at a musician's work style and seeing what analysts can adopt from it. According to today's guest, these two disciplines have much in common.

Fred Pike is a father, a grandfather and a string musician who both plays in and is president of the Milwaukee Mandolin orchestra.

He is also a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager expert, having been a founding member of the web development agency Northwoods which just celebrated twenty five years in business. He has also shared his knowledge through various courses and at CXL which is better known as Conversion XL and sessions he has presented at Superweek.

He approaches marketing analytics in much the same way as he approaches a musical performance. So let's listen to how he does that, in my chat with Fred Pike.

For links to all things mentioned, go to episode 163's show notes page at www.funnelreboot.com.

This is the second episode in a series on having a thriving career. There is one specific subfield where this challenge is harder than usual - it's marketing within paid and organic search. There are always new tools and techniques coming along, and In our guest's opinion, to be a search marketing professional means upgrading yourself, to master them while the iron is still hot.

I'll be talking with someone who has dealt with more than her fair share of change - but who feels she is better as a result. Originally from Peru, Giannina Fumigalli has lived in Montreal Canada for the last 18 years and who has been working in digital marketing that whole time, including both agency and client-side roles. She is currently the Growth Marketer at Vircom, a pioneer in B2B Email Security.

All people and things mentioned can be found via episode 162's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

There's a lot you need to deal with in a marketing career, such as:

• What skills you should chase after when in an entry-level vs what's needed at higher levels

• How to manage both above and below your level

• What continuous learning actually looks like

• Knowing when a job isn't panning out and you need to cut your losses

• Balancing whether to join a company based on the brand's cachet, the title, the salary and what you will get out of the experience

• Advice when interviewing for marketing roles - what she looks food when hiring

• How to cultivate your profile within your organization

• When to stay a generalist, or when to gain a specific skill by joining a special project

This episode's guest is eminently qualified to cover these topics. Marissa Homere is the VP of Marketing at Irwin, an investor relations and capital markets software company. She is a demand generation leader and for the last decade, she has built and scaled marketing teams in a wide range of industries. She also teaches in an online marketing program.

In this episode, Marissa shares her thoughts on the marketing industry as a whole, how young professionals can be best prepared for today's rapidly changing environment, and what it takes to succeed in a fast-paced marketing role. Most importantly, she talks about how, as a wife and mother, how societal issues have muscled in on her life as a marketer. Like being a working parent, handling old oppressive tendencies in the workplace, struggling to balance career ladder-climbing with family responsibilities.

Links to all people and items mentioned are available on the Funnel Reboot Ep 161 shownotes page.

If you want to learn about sales and start Googling, you quickly run across self-professed gurus, who claim to know the secret to selling. If you faithfully follow this method (available today only for a low low price), you'll have sales success. Despite feeling a twinge of skepticism about their pitch, you're so deep into their slick, pressure-filled pitch at this point that you pay for their books and courses…which end up being disappointing.

Today's guest says these gurus have put you in the Vortex of crazy.

He doesn't try to apply the same advice to everyone - his response reminds me of what an ancient Buddhist guru said. Well, according to a novel written a century ago by Hermann Hesse.

There are a few men on a spiritual pilgrimage, and they reach a stage where the leader, Siddhartha, tells his followers that he must continue on alone. His right-hand man, Govinda asks him why, "Siddhartha…spoke quietly… "Always, oh Govinda, you've been my friend, you've always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won't Govinda for once also take a step by himself, without me? Behold, now…[you] are choosing your path for yourself."

Our guest says there's only one sales method that works - the one that comes naturally to you. That refreshing take ripples through his 2023 book Do It! Selling.

David Newman has been working since 1992 to help customers land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. From Fortune 500 corporations to sole-practitioners, his firm has helped over 1,800 clients with their marketing, sales, and professional services. David is also the host of the highly rated podcast, The Selling Show.

David is married to the #1 most amazing woman on the planet (his words, not mine), launched two great kids into the world disguised as small adults, and has enjoyed raising some of the world's sweetest retrievers.

Links to every item mentioned appears in show 160's page at https://funnelreboot.com

How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable.

In the 27 years since he graduated with his MBA, Darrell Amy has worked heavily in the tech sector, mainly in sales and marketing. Wanting to help a larger number of companies, in 2004 he started his own business, speaking and acting as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer. In 2020, Darrell authored Revenue Growth Engine book How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth.

He is a member of the Forbes Business Council and co-chair of the Kingdom Missions Fund. Based in Arkansas, with a family that now includes a couple of grand-children, let's go talk to Darrell Amy.

Links to everythings mentioned in episode 159 can be found at the https://funnelreboot.com shownotes page.

The relationship between those who generate creative work and the rest of us in revenue-related roles can be …strained.

From those I've talked to in graphics or visual arts, being left to their lonesome makes it hard producing creative that's exactly what the marketers and other stakeholders wanted.

That's one reason why I hope you listen to today's talk with a graphic designer who wrote a guide for other graphic designers. To help your interactions with your creative counterparts.

The other reason is this author's healthy outlook…on everything. I was first exposed to how zen-like he was when I met him at an event in 2017. Reading LinkedIn updates over the next few years I marveled how he did everything at his design agency, his training business and his college lecturing. When we met again (virtually) in 2020 , he talked about everything he had going on, but in that same calm tone.

So by the time he came out with his second book this last year - "Stop Looking for Zebras", I seized the chance to let you hear his unique viewpoint for yourself.

Let's go hear from our guest Robert Smith who will explain the book's title, and much much more.

All people and items mentioned are linked in episode 158's show page on our site.

"So, what does your company do?"

This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I'm asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps.

This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing's hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and intent-based campaigns aimed at key Accounts can all be for naught if sales doesn't have a game-plan for their conversation with the prospect.

It is at this point that companies seek the help of our guest

After getting his Ph.D. at Stanford Brent Keltner spent ten years as a social scientist at the RAND Corporation.

While he liked using his academic training, he looked for places his knowledge could be more practically applied. Jumping to enterprise and early stage companies, he found gaps in their revenue function. But also found he could get sales teams unstuck from specific challenges with a bit of theoretical modeling.

After more than a decade of experience as a revenue leader, he founded Winalytics LLC, a go-to-market and revenue consultancy whose clients include DealerRater, Lexmark, and Ascend Learning. He continued developing his list of situations and corresponding plays, which led to the publishing of his collection of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook which Brent came out with in 2022.

Links to everything mentioned in the show is on the Funnel Reboot site's episode 157 page.

In this episode, I spoke with Danny Decker about the book he co-wrote with RJon Robins, "The Automatic Marketing Machine" which came out in 2022. The book combines direct marketing, nurturing emails and retention tactics to form a sustainable supply of ready-to-buy leads.

Danny Decker spent most of his childhood in West Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he was young, he saw people spending a large portion of their day getting water. In a similar way, businesses struggle to get a steady supply of prospects, even though leads are as important to business owners as water. In their frantic bid to fill their funnel, they commit random acts of marketing, looking to Danny just like the villagers that he once watched use up precious energy, spending much of their time on just subsisting.

He is based in Huntersville, NC with his wife, two kids, and a hyperactive German shepherd. Through the Automatic Marketing Agency, Danny now shows businesses how to secure their prospect-supply by building marketing systems that work to help businesses reach their full potential.

Links to everything mentioned appear in the Ep 156 shownotes at https://funnelreboot.com

My guest believes that online advertising gave birth to one of history's greatest frauds, and has become a threat to democracy. That's right. It's actually the subtitle of a 2022 book he wrote called AdScam.

It is the basis for our talk, which looks critically and conscientiously at the unsavory side of digital marketing.

He's not some advertising outsider wagging his finger at the industry. Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and led a major international agency's US operations. He has written numerous books, including "Bad Men" and "Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey."

Nicknamed the "Ad Contrarian," his writings under that name caused Business Insider to recognize it as one of the world's leading blogs about marketing. He has been honored as the Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club and served as part of the Advertising and Marketing International Network and the California Academy of Sciences. In short, he knows what he's talking about when he says there is something wrong with advertising.

He and I both agree that there is a war between the privacy-side and the surveillance-side proponents here. And it's unclear how this dichotomy we're in is going to be resolved. I will say that his solution for how to fix this - to eliminate all tracking - is harsher than mine. I'd like to end up with some arrangement where buyers receive advertising that gets close to feeling personalized, but that doesn't track them without their consent.

All the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 155's page on the Funnel Reboot site.