Inbound Success Podcast

How would your marketing results change if you could achieve 90% open rates and 60% reply rates to your emails?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, 7 Figure Millennials podcast host Brandon Fong talks about the email marketing strategies he used to help SuperHuman Academy hit its ambitious growth goals, and how he's built on that experience to create the "Magic Connection Method" of email outreach.

Through his podcast and consulting services, Brandon is on a mission to change what success means for an entire generation of young entrepreneurs—and he's using all the marketing lessons he learned in his own career to help others achieve their goals.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit BFo.ng/inbound to get a free copy of Brandon's training program on the Magic Connection Method
• Learn more about the Magic Connection Method (and use promo code 7FM to get $500 off the package)
• Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn
• Listen to the 7 Figure Millennials Podcast

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Brandon Fong, who is the host of the seven figure millennials podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Brandon.

Brandon (00:26): Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Kathleen (00:29): I would love it if you could tell people your story, because I think you have such an interesting journey in terms of where you've worked and what you're doing now. So maybe you could talk a little bit about your background and then explain about seven figure millennials and some of the things that you've got kind of that you're working on at the moment.

Brandon (00:46): Yeah, absolutely would love that. So I always like to start my story at Wisconsin Hills middle school. So I know it was a little earlier than most people would start, but that's where my story started. And I remember very specifically, I'd be sitting in the classroom and the lunch bell would ring. And like, if you remember from when you're in middle school, if you're listening to this right now, you know, whatever the environment of a middle school is with all the obnoxious sixth graders flooding into the hallways and stuff like that. And if you look closely, you'd see, I always carry this picture on my desk. So if you're listening as you can't hear it, but I have a picture of little nerdy Brandon.

Kathleen (01:17): As you're, as you're saying this, I'm actually going to screenshot it so that somebody is listening, then they can go to the show notes and see the picture of little Brandon. So here we go. All right, got it.

Brandon (01:29): Well, if you're listening, I had this big bugs bunny gap in my teeth. I had a, the, the, you know, these cute little glasses that I didn't really like that much, but so if you look closely at the halls of my middle school, you'd see little nerdy, Brandon hanging out behind everybody else, kind of procrastinating on his way to lunch. And you may be wondering why the heck would any sixth grader procrastinate on like the one time of freedom that they have during their day. Right. And the reason why is because when I would go through the lunch checkout line, I'd have my plastic tray with the curly fries or the chicken nuggets or whatever was on sale for the day. I put it down next to the lunch lady, I type in my student ID. And then up on the screen, it would show the words, Brandon Fong, $0 and 0 cents.

Brandon (02:05): And the reason why it showed that is because I qualified for the free lunch program. And I was just so embarrassed. Like some days I would even hide out in the bathroom and try to distract my friends, or I would try to make some jokes. So they wouldn't see the screen or something like that. And I was super frustrated back then because I wished I had more resources. I wish I had more money. Right. But what my incredible parents taught me from a very early age is that if you, if you want to be successful, it's not about the resources. It's about learning how to be resourceful. And so one of the number one things that they taught me from a very early age was the power of connection. And so they would actually let me skip school when I was 16 years old and go to local networking events.

Brandon (02:40): So I would be this 16 year old would probably be like oversized you know, dress clothes that didn't really fit me in that kind of stuff, but I'd be learning how to talk with these kinds of people. And so if you fast forward five years, I kind of kept practicing the skill of connection and learning how to connect with people. And so my senior year of college, I ended up reaching out to a really successful entrepreneur. His name was Jonathan Levy. He was the host of the superhuman Academy podcast. And I just reached out to him and that turned into an incredible, it kind of felt like David versus Goliath though, you know, it was like, who was I, some college kid reaching out to the successful entrepreneur, but that turned into an incredible relationship where I ran his marketing for over three years helped I was on the team where we added over a hundred thousand students through the online courses, a 1.5 million downloads added to his podcast or his YouTube channel.

Brandon (03:26): And on top of that, Jonathan got into this really high level group called genius network. And if you're not familiar with it, it's a high end mastermind. It cost $25,000 a year to attend. You need to make at least seven figures to be in there. And Jonathan got accepted into this group and I got to go along with Jonathan and participate and engage with those meetings with people at incredibly high levels. So it was crazy. Cause it's like here I was this little kid just wanting more money. And then I got catapulted. I was the youngest person in the room at genius network at age 22. And I had this opportunity to learn directly from some of the world's most successful people. And so all that to say, there's really two main things I'd like to share about why share that story. One. I learned the power of connection.

Brandon (04:05): I learned that you were just one connection away and it's been very true in my life that whenever I went to the next level, it's always been because of a connection with somebody. And so that's the key key lesson number one and key lesson. Number two is like, again, like I said, I had the opportunity to catapult into and see what success looked like. And if I went on the path I was on, I saw that there were incredibly successful people that seem like they approach success a little bit differently than other people. They like, they prioritize their happiness, their health and their relationships, and they're still incredibly successful. But at the same time, Kathleen, you and I have both heard stories of entrepreneurs or people that are incredibly financially successful, but they're like miserable on the inside still. And so that, that was the inspiration behind the seven figure millennials brand is to inspire millennial entrepreneurs, to prioritize their happiness, health and relationships while achieving their biggest entrepreneurial and financial goals.

Brandon (04:54): So I'm on a mission right now to change the global conversation around what success means for an entire generation of entrepreneurs. Because I don't think that we can call someone successful if if they are still working on, you know, I mean, obviously there's, there's some elements to it, but I, I think that the true definition of success should definitely include the happiness perspective of it. So that's how I got my whole start and this whole stuff I've been working on some beer millennials since the I think it was September of this year. So it's all new I've, I've, I'm on my own since leaving Jonathan's company as a may of this year. So just over six months now. So it's been an incredible journey and I'm excited for diving into any aspect of that that you want to dive into.

Kathleen (05:30): Well, I just have to say that I wish I had half of your energy and enthusiasm when I was your age. My life would probably look completely different right now, but that's awesome. I love like just your hustle and your, you know, the drive you're putting into doing what you're doing. I was really interested when you and I first connected in some of the things that you were able to accomplish at superhuman. As you said, you, during your time there, which was just a couple of years, you enrolled more than a hundred thousand students into the programs. There you increase podcast downloads by 1.5 million. You grew the YouTube channel by 15,000 subscribers through the Facebook community to more than 32,000 people, et cetera. And you were also primarily responsible for managing an email list that had more than a hundred thousand people on it.

Kathleen (06:20): And email I know was a key part of, of how you all accomplished what you did. So I wanted to just start by digging into the topic of email because we all do it. It's not going anywhere. Despite everybody always constantly, again and again, saying emails, dead emails, dead. It's not dead. I don't know that it's going to die anytime soon. And so it's definitely a skill that I think we all need to master. So let's, let's sort of break it down. Like what, talk to me a little bit about what you did at superhuman, the approach you took.

Brandon (06:50): So when it comes to email marketing, I think that it's really, I actually, with any marketing topic, it's really easy to go super complex and you want to do all this fancy pants, automations and that kind of stuff, but like sometimes automations can get in the way of you actually making money and helping people, right? If you make things too complicated. So I think at the end of the day, simplicity is really key. And so I was really focused on lots of like the, the content that was going out on a weekly basis, how to send engaging content, get people to engage with those emails, make sure our deliverability was high, that, that people were responding and, you know, increasing our engagement score on those platforms. And I think that, you know, just at a high level, some really important things to talk about here.

Brandon (07:29): And I know you have some very advanced listeners, but I think for me, it's always been crazy to think about, you know, the fundamentals, like what are the fundamentals, the things that are always true that will continue to be true. And then how can we make sure that we're not forgetting that in, in, in all this crazy stuff that we're going on? So whenever I was creating an email automation or a broadcast email, I think it's really hard. Or it's really easy to think, Oh, I'm writing to a hundred thousand people right now. Right? But like, to me, whenever I would sit down to write an email, it's always about how am I writing to one person? Cause it's like, your language is entirely different if you're trying to talk to masses and then nobody actually responds to it. So I think in our world today with marketing, with lots of rooftop marketing is what I, what I've been calling it lately where people are just kind of screaming from a rooftop, but like how can you create engaging content that get people to lean in and make them really interested in engaging with what you're doing?

Brandon (08:15): So we can, we can talk a little bit more about that. We can also talk about, I think there's another interesting topic where it's like, people think that they have to create either content or promotions and they view them as two completely separate things. But there's some other ways that you can make sure that you're doing hybrids, that you're, you're, you're engaging people and also moving them forward through your funnel and that kind of stuff. So however you want to take it or we can dive into anything else. I said that before, too.

Kathleen (08:36): I'm really happy that you talked about writing as though you're writing to one person because that's, I so strongly believe in that that's something that I do. I think in, in the email marketing world, they call that the rule of one, like you should have one person in your head and you're writing that email to that one person. So talk me through like how that plays out as you're putting your email together.

Brandon (08:56): It's funny. Cause like, you know, sometimes I'll even go into Gmail and I'll write my email on Gmail, just because it's like, when you're sitting inside of your, you know, your ESP or your, you know, active campaign, you know, whatever you're using, it's like, it's easy to like kind of lose sight of what you're doing. So sometimes if I'm stuck, if I'm like this doesn't sound right, I'll literally just pretend I'm writing an email inside of a Gmail. So I mean, I, I, I can take that in many ways. I mean, for me I'm a huge copy nerd, so I'm always studying copy. So like I'm always looking at creating what Joe Sugarman calls, the slippery slide effect where it's like, you read the first word and then you can't help or you read the first sentence, you can't help but read the next sentence.

Brandon (09:33): And then it leads to the next sentence and the, before the end, you pop out and you, you know, you're at the call to action or whatever it is. So for me, it's always about short, concise sentences. It's about very seeing, seeing, I'll usually write an email and then I'm like, what can I subtract here? How can I say this more concise? How can I cut out the fluff? And how can I really just get to the heart of the matter? Maybe there's some, you know, explanations or things that just didn't belong there. So I'm always reading my emails out loud. I'm always you know, like I said, checking to see how I can make it more concise. And I'm looking at creating that, that slippery slide so that people pop out at the end and are really interested in engaging with whatever content was being sent.

Kathleen (10:09): I would love to get your take on subject lines because obviously with email marketing, it all starts there. If you can't get somebody to open your email, you're dead in the water. I have, I have certain opinions about this. And it, and it relates to this topic of writing. Like you're writing to a singular person because marketing subject lines are really, really different than the subject lines we write when we're just writing to connections or friends. You know, oftentimes when we write to connections and friends, like we don't, we're not using title case in our subject lines, for example you know, in fact it may all be lowercase and we're not necessarily telling them like what what's in the email. It could be something simple like FYI, I thought you might be interested. I dunno, like how do you, how do you handle that? Because there's a certain school of thought that like your subject line with marketing emails should, should tell people what they're going to find in the email. And then there's another school of thought that's like, no, it should just literally be something that grabs their attention and gets them to open it.

Brandon (11:10): It's a great question. Sometimes when I'm stuck with subject lines, like I studied lots of viral headlines. Like I have a spreadsheet that like I've went and I've researched like bunch of content that has done really, really well. So I'm always modeling what's working in this space. And another thing that I'll do is like, I have an email where I'm subscribed to dozens, hundreds. I don't even know maybe at this point, thousands of different newsletters. And so sometimes I will scroll through and I can say, okay, if my email was competing with all these other emails and it was in this inbox right now, would I be compelled to click on it? And so those are some of the small tests that I do. I mean, there's, it's interesting. Cause you brought up like the difference between sending a marketing email and an email to a friend because something that I do sometimes depending on the kind of engage, the automation that I'm running right now, but sometimes I will create an email that will look like it's an outreach.

Brandon (12:04): So like some, like it just has to do with the formatting too. So it's like, I'll create an email that will look like it's actually coming from somebody that's not in the marketing world. So I'll make sure that it's not centered. I'll make sure that, that it's, it's kind of like, I test it to make sure that if I want to open in Gmail, it actually looks like it's being sent by somebody. So there's different things that you can do. There's this concept of a nine word email by Dean Jackson which I don't know if you've ever experimented with that personally, but like we found that to work really, really well when we were at superhuman and the concept of a nine word email is basically the fact that it's just, it's just, it's exactly what it is. It's a nine word email.

Brandon (12:39): So it's like you send the message and it's simply a question like, are you, are you in, are you interested in whatever the outcome that your company is working on right now? And that's it, it's just a question. And then it's kind of a strange thing to get in your email inbox because people are used to these really long emails, but then you get this nine word email, and it's just a question. It looks like it's coming directly from the person and you can get incredible responses from that and then take that opportunity of those responses to engage with them and enroll them, or, you know, figure out a resource that you can provide them. But that's another thing that I've been really obsessed with now especially in today's world where we want real connection with people is how can I get people to reply to the email? And then how can I just leverage customer service or, you know, another opportunity to just engage with them and really make them feel like they have a relationship with the brand. Because like I said, it's like, we feel like we're being yelled at all the time. At least sometimes I feel like that way. So it's just like, how can you get people to lean in and actually respond and engage and train, train that behavior of like somebody's actually interacting with you as if they would interact with somebody else.

Kathleen (13:39): So what is working for you to get people to engage?

Brandon (13:41): I think the easiest thing too, is like when, when you were sending an email that is designed to get somebody to engage, you have to make it easy for them to respond to it. So like you think about these two questions reply yes. To this email, you know, it's like easy for someone to copy it, copy and paste the word. Yes. Or tell me what the number one goal is that you're focused on right now. And there's a time and a place for both. But if you're looking at simply just getting somebody to respond and open the door to a conversation, you want to make it super easy. So sometimes I found that to work where you just give them a prompt, like just say, Hey, respond with this specific phrase and then we can go. So like, those are obviously easier to get people to respond if you have something very specific like that. But if you, if you're looking at a different kind of engagement where you're wanting people to signal and say, for example, you're validating a new product offer or something, you know, like you, you wouldn't want people as as many responses, but you'd be more interested in the quality of responses and people self segmenting based on their interest. Right. So then you could ask a more specific question that will lead to a less, a lower reply rate, but most likely higher qualified leads.

Kathleen (14:42): Yeah. That's, that's really interesting. What about, I mean, the other topic I'm always fascinated with, with email is just kind of list management, right? Like email it's so easy to abuse, email and send too much too frequently. Also keep people on your list who maybe aren't engaged. So it's kind of a big topic, but what's your approach to that?

Brandon (15:10): Huh? This is something that I was kind of learning a little bit more on the tail end of superhuman. It's like, how can you make sure that you're cleaning up your list appropriately? How can you make sure that you're unsubscribing people that aren't engaged? So I mean, I guess I can kind of distill a little bit of, of, of what I've kind of taken as my approach, but I mean, right now it's like, I want to make sure that people are engaging with me and if they're not engaging with a certain amount, I have like automations that will track. If they've engaged within a certain amount of time, lots of ESPs will have standard automations to determine with tagging how often they are engaging with your content. And then if they're, if they've been moved to the disengaged tag, which could be, you know, up to 90 days plus of disengagement, then you move them to a separate list, which you can then try to re-engage them.

Brandon (15:55): But another thing that I've been experimenting with that maybe this is kind of like a newer topic, but it's like, how can you completely move them from your ESP and move them to a different ESP because you're ruining your sender score if you're sending to unengaged people, but at the same time, they haven't told you that they didn't want to hear from you. And so there's a chance they might re-engage. So that's something that I, I I'll just be completely transparent. Like I haven't really experimented with this as much, but like something I'm really excited to do potentially is moving to a different ESP, still continuing to send the, the content. And then when they re-engage moving them back to my primary ESP so that I can keep the engagement score high. So that was kind of just a riff, but hopefully I can,

Kathleen (16:31): It's really interesting that you bring that up because I always struggle with that. Like, and maybe I'm just an internal optimist, but I don't, I don't want to ever completely write off my disengaged people, but you're right there. There's such you risk a lot by constantly emailing them. So you do have to be very selective in how you choose to send things to those people. And that's an interesting approach that you just mentioned.

Brandon (16:54): Yeah. And I, Oh, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say too, I think something that I've, I've studied from and I've seen work really well too, is like, I think I mentioned it at a high level before. It's like, people will think that you have to do content and promotions and you view them as two kind of separate things at once. But something that I've learned recently, I saw it being done in genius network. I saw it being done. I'm learning from this guy named Dan Kechele right now. And he uses this a lot right now, but there's this, there's this thing called the super PS. And so what, you may have the right offer, but it might not be the right timing, right. It may even be the right target market, but it's like, it's just not the right time for them.

Brandon (17:31): And so the number one thing you can do is make sure that you're giving more offered more frequently so that when it is the right timing, they're ready to move forward. So that's another thing that was kind of a switch for me recently. It's like, okay, I don't have to view this as, Oh, I'm only sending value based content. I'm only sending a promotion right now. How can I, my podcast content or a YouTube video or any other kind of con content I'm creating. And then in the PS say, Hey, what PS, whenever you're ready, here are three ways that I can help add value to your business or, you know, whatever the topic is. And then it's like linked to the podcast link to a front end product, you know, or whatever, based on tagging. If you want to go more dance, you could or, you know, subscribe or check out other pieces of content. So that's a, that's a way that you can easily add value to people while simultaneously providing them with next steps to move forward in the next step of the value letter and not view it as something that's completely separate from each other, but rather working together at the same time.

Kathleen (18:26): I am a huge fan of the PS. So I'm really glad that you mentioned it. I think it's, it's very underused by marketers and I've actually seen really good results. So that's interesting that you brought that up. Another question. So before you mentioned setting, sending emails that look as though they came from somebody's personal Gmail, another thing that I love that when do you use that approach versus when do you use like a more formatted email stuff?

Brandon (18:54): Good question. So I, I am taking the approach right now with my email list is I'm kind of starting fresh and have the opportunity to relearn from, from what I experienced with managing the email list with a hundred thousand people. So it's like when I'm starting a relationship with someone, I want to set the tone right away that I am just a human that they can respond to and interact with. And so in those initial automations, I try to make it look more like it's coming from me. And, and so it'll be formatted more like a Gmail and asking them to reply to things frequently I'll even like follow up on an email that I sent. That's something that people don't do that much when it comes to sending, setting an email automation, but it's like, I'll send the first, you know, whatever they subscribed with and then I'll wait a day and then if they didn't open or apply to that, then I'll, I'll follow up and say, Hey, I'm just bumping this to the top of your email inbox.

Brandon (19:41): Like I copied and paste the message. Sometimes things get lost in cyberspace because especially when you're sending the first email you're dealing with, you know, the spam, spam, spam filters, and if you're getting lost in the, the promotions tab and that kind of stuff. So that's, I mean, that's a really high level response to that is that in the initial automations, I'll be sending stuff that, that makes more look like I'm sending from them. If I'm sending out a podcast, maybe I make it, I make it more centered and it's kind of more of a broadcast email, but I kind of switch it up. You know, I, I just, I don't want people to get used to one particular thing. So I'm always looking at like making it interesting and engaging. And depending on the context, if I want them to reply more, or if I want them to simply just click on something, then it might depend I'll switch the format. I think.

Kathleen (22:10): I'm glad you brought up that you resend things to people who haven't opened your emails, because I've always thought that that was a big missed opportunity also for marketers where, you know, you pour all this energy into creating a, what you think is a great email. You could send it out to potentially a very large list and then some percentage, usually a fairly large percentage, because let's be honest, open rates, generally average somewhere between let's call it 12 and 25%. So 75% plus of your recipients don't even open it. A lot of marketers just sort of like say, Oh, well, right. But I like that approach. Or do you change your subject line when you do that? Like, how do you, what do you do to see if you can get somebody to open it when they didn't do it the first time?

Brandon (22:58): Yeah, you can switch the subject line around. That's like a really simple way of doing it, but I guess this doesn't directly answer your question, but another thing I'm really excited about right now that I've been experimenting with is this concept of trigger emails. And basically what that is. It's like when somebody clicks or replies to an email, you can set up an automation that sends an email, the second that they opened or clicked. Cause you know, that they're in their email inbox already. And so say for example, you were sending out a piece of content that was related to a product that you have out, and it's just a piece of content. So you could send that out and then they, if they clicked on it, obviously they're interested on that topic. And then that can trigger an automation to go out, to send another email. That would be like, Hey, I saw you're interested in this topic. Here's, you know, maybe a front end value ladder thing that you could add a that's more like a cheaper product, or maybe it's a book to a phone call. If you're, if you're doing that, that kind of another interesting thing that I'm like, how can you create an automation where they're, you know, they're already engaged because they just clicked on it or they just replied to it. And then you toss in the automation to follow up on the back.

Kathleen (24:08): Yeah. I love, I love that triggered sequence. That's really cool. I guess you have to have like a decent email platform or marketing automation platform in order to trigger it though. Right?

Brandon (24:17): I actually, you know what, I haven't experimented with different ESP. I'm an active campaign fan. So I know you can do an active campaign, but I know it's fairly common that inside of an ESP, you can click it and tag someone based on a click or tag someone based on a reply. And then typically on other ESPs, you can send another automation based on a tag being added or based on a click in an email. So those are some standard ways, but yeah, I wouldn't be able to comment on how to do that within different ESPs, outside of active campaign. Yeah.

Kathleen (24:47): So shifting gears for a second, you, you spent a lot of time at superhuman, really, you know, sharpening your email skills and now you've left and you're out on your own and you're refining kind of some new approaches to emailing. And I know you have one, you call the magic connection method and right now it's your number one marketing strategy. So I would love it if you could break down what that is and explain kind of how it works and how it's getting you such great results.

Brandon (25:15): Yeah. And I know we're talking about inbound here, so I want to make sure that this has relevance to the conversation here. So it's like, you know, if you're in SEO, you're getting back links. If you want to create YouTube, grow your YouTube channel for more inbound leads like you want to have partnerships, same with a podcast, you need to get gasser. If you want to get featured on podcasts, you need to outreach. So like that's where or strategic partnerships for that, for that matter for any kind of content creation, that's where the magic connection method really comes into play because it is, it is a cold email process that I'm using right now. That's getting about 90% open rates, about 50% reply rates and, and, and opening the doors to incredible conversations that lead to relationships that can help, you know, any in any marketing activity for that matter.

Brandon (25:56): So I'd love to walk through the three steps, the three steps that people can use. Okay. So it's pretty simple. I'll give a high level overview. So there's three steps. The first part is the hook. The second part is the irresistible offer. And the third part is the no oriented question. And I will say before I dive into those three things, the whole goal of this magic connection method process is simply to get them to respond to the email. That's it. And I see this like being an issue a lot in the marketing space, it's like, you'll send an email to develop a partnership relationship. And it's like, people will ask for a call right away, or they'll try to send to, you know, a website and say, get back to me or something like that. I just want to make it as simple as possible for someone to respond to my email so that then I can engage in the relationship and, and figure out if it's even a right fit.

Brandon (26:41): If there's a way that we can go else elsewhere. So that's the whole goal is to get them to respond. So the first part is this part that I call the hook and the biggest mistake that people make with the opening lines of an email. And you've seen this Kathleen and they make it all about them, right? Like, hi, my name is Brandon Fong, and I've done blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've worked at this company and I own this cool thing. And you're kind of just like, Whoa, like, I don't like, I'm sorry, but I don't really care at this point, you know, or, or your email inbox, your LinkedIn inbox is a perfect example.

Kathleen (27:08): Oh God, don't get me started

Brandon (27:11): Like, Hey, you're a human. And we're both wearing a blue colored shirt. Like let's connect them

Kathleen (27:15): Or even worse. It's Hey, you're a human. I would like to sell you my SEO services proposal. How come you haven't called me back yet.

Brandon (27:24): Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, so how can we stand out from the noise? It's very simple. It's just that we just have to show that we care about the person that we're reaching out to. Right? So the very first part, it's not something that you can copy and paste because you have to actually do the research on somebody to reach out to them. So some of the most powerful things that you can use in this first part is if you have a mutual connection, that's like the strongest one. Otherwise if you've consumed their content and enjoy their content or got results from their content, you can share a compliment on that if you like their experience on a company. So this, it depends on your ability to do research on the person that you're reaching out to. And I, somebody asked me the day when you use a magic connection method, email versus a non other kind of email, and I'm like, I'm sorry, it's black or white for me.

Brandon (28:06): It's either, I'm going to take the time to research somebody and like, actually make sure I'm developing a relationship or I'm not going to send the message at all. So, so that's kind of the first part. It's one to three sentences show that you are actually took the research time and time to research them. The other comments I'll make here. And I don't think this is, as you know, maybe this isn't something that as irrelevant to your audience, but it's like, it's, it's one to three sentences. Sometimes I see people like they go from one to three sentences to like creeper and stalker status where it's like the way a book on you. And it's like, no, that's, that's getting weird. Let's just keep it to like one to three sentences show that you, you, you know, short, concise sentences that we cared about them.

Brandon (28:41): So that's, that's the hook. The next part is the irresistible offer. So I'll usually transition by saying something along the lines of like, besides wanting to share that with you. I do have a quick question for you and the irresistible offer. There's a big difference between a normal offer and an irresistible offer. And so the example that I actually heard, somebody brought it up the other day and I've been using this as an example, Kathleen, have you seen those companies that are doing mattress sales online, they're selling mattresses online. So I love this as an example for an irresistible offer, because it's like, think about the traditional way that you would buy a mattress before these online retailers is that you would have to go into a store. You would kind of awkwardly lay on this mattress in the middle of a department store with like your jacket on.

Brandon (29:24): And it's just like, you don't know if that's actually would be comfortable at night and then you have to make this decision, this purchase decision for something that you're gonna sleep on for however many years, are you gonna own that mattress? Right? So that's kind of a terrible, terrible user experience, I guess. So these online retailers, what they've done is they've created an irresistible offer and they say, Hey, Kathleen, what we'll do is you take our quiz and we will ship you the mattress. You can try it for 100 nights, sleep it in your own home, your comfy, PJ's tested out drool on the pillow, what I say, you know, whatever you do at night, make sure it's a good fit for you. And then if you don't like it, you can send it back for a hundred percent money back guarantee. So that's an example of an irresistible offer. You make it very easy for, for that person to say yes to it. You made it very they had a lot to gain from it and you minimize the risk right? The time and money risk is like you showed. So those are some of the keys of creating an irresistible offer.

Kathleen (30:13): I have to interrupt you for one second, because when you were describing the mattress buying experience, all I can think of in my head was what if we like put on our pajamas and went to the mattress store in our PJ's with blankets and pillows to try to mostly as possible experience.

Brandon (30:33): Yeah. Can I take a nap here?

Kathleen (30:36): No, I, that, that picture just came into my head really, really clearly. So I definitely think that the irresistible offer is much better.

Brandon (30:42): Yeah, yeah. I would say so. Yeah. And there's a, there's a quote by Dean Jackson and he was the guy that I mentioned earlier with a nine word email, incredible marketer. But he has this quote where it's like a compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. So how can we create more compelling offers that get people to lean in instead of trying to argue with them, you know? And so like, that's, that's the point of this irresistible offer? And I will say like the very first irresistible offer I ever created was the email that I sent to Jonathan that opened the door to that relationship with working with superhuman is because I had been listening to his podcast. I had been subscribed to his email newsletter. I had been following his content and I've been taking meticulous notes for months. And so I sent him a message and I was like, Hey, I've been following all this stuff.

Brandon (31:22): And I identified all these areas that I think could be improved. I have some suggestions for you. Here you go. Here they are. And if you want help implementing them, I'd be happy to do that a hundred percent for free. I don't want to be paid for it. And if you don't like my work, you can just, you know, no harm, no foul. We can just part our own ways. And like, we can go off. So like that was my first year resistible offer that I ever made that opened the door to that relationship. There was no money risk. There was no, I mean, maybe some supervision, risks, I guess that's the risk you take when you bring on somebody like that position it. So he had a lot to gain and I made it easy for him to say yes, and that opened the door to that incredible relationship.

Brandon (31:54): So how can you create, what is the irresistible offer if you're listening right now in your, you know, whatever, whoever you're trying to outreach and I'll, I'll go, I want to share two specific things that I I've, I've said a lot that I found to work really, really well for that irresistible offer is if there's some kind of a component that you show that you did the work ahead of time for them, that's really important that, that you can show them that like, Oh, they've already invested in this that made it really easy. And so I like to also do it with something very tangible, like a Google doc or a video, like, Hey, I put together a video for you that has this. Or I put together a Google doc that explains this irresistible offer that I've created. And so like, I like to reference that in the irresistible offer. So it shows that I've invested time and energy into it. So I've been going for a while. Is there any, anything you wanted? Yeah, I know. It's just,

Kathleen (32:40): I think it makes complete sense because like, if you are a student of some of the more like classical marketing texts, there's like CLD news persuasion where he talks about the concept of reciprocity. And I think that that has a lot to do with what you're talking about, where if you've done that work ahead of time and you've invested in getting to know the person and done your research on them, there's, there's a there what you're doing is you're showing that you've already put the time in. So I think it does make someone feel so they need to at least give you a little of their time. And then it also reminds me of I don't know if you've ever read the book. I think it's called give and take by Adam Grant grant. Yeah. Oh, it's such a great book. And I mean, it's just like, everybody should read it regardless, like just for life, but it's an awesome book for marketers to read about, you know, you really need to give first. And so I think your examples are really fantastic illustrations of,

Brandon (33:32): Thank you. Yeah. I, you know, I've studied Joe Polish a lot from genius network and he has this quote life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. So, you know, how can you show up as somebody that's constantly looking at adding value and supporting somebody and again, even if they replied and if it didn't make sense for my irresistible offer, like I'd be looking for ways that I could connect them with resources or people that I could help them. So it's like, I just, I love to just open doors to, to relationships and keep them in my lexicon of database of people that I can connect them to. So if you just take that approach and it's just like, Hey, even if it doesn't work out, like I have some connections potentially that could work out for you. Like, you know, somebody's going to respond just because they see that you're, you're genuinely invested and you want to care about the relationship that you're reaching out for.

Brandon (34:09): So, so anyways, so, so now we've, we've covered two of the three steps. So we've, we've got the hook, we've showed them, he cared about them. We showed that we have something incredibly valuable for them that that shows that they have a lot to gain. They, we did a work ahead of time for them, and it's very simple, tangible, tangible, like a Google doc or a video is what I've tested to work. The last part is now we just got to get them to respond to say, okay, let's let me tell, tell me more about this. So in the past I tested yes questions. Like I would say, are you interested or something along those lines and those work, that's fine. But then I read this book, one of my favorite books of all time never split the difference by Chris Voss. And for those of you listening that I've never heard of it.

Brandon (34:49): Chris is an ex FBI hostage negotiator. So this is the guy that's on the phone when there's some lunatic in a basement of a bank with millions of dollars and 10 hostages. And he's about to blow up the place. Like, what do you say on the phone to make that the, you know, the, the, an unsub or I've been watching lots of criminal minds, like the unsung, what do you make him not, you know, not blow up the place. And so one of the things that he teaches is this concept of a no oriented question. And the way I like to explain it is that every single day we have a finite amount of yeses that we can give, right? Because whenever you say yes, what does that mean? It means you're giving what your time. It means you're giving away your money. It means you're giving away your energy.

Brandon (35:29): You're giving away something, whenever you say yes to something. And so if you compare that to the exact opposite, it's a lot easier and a safer if we say no to something, right? Cause whenever you say, no, you feel like you're not being pressured. You feel like you're in control. And so the no oriented question is simply taking what would be a yes oriented question and just making it so that their response to do it is no. So that means starting your question with, would it be a bad idea if dot.dot, or would it be ridiculous if dot.dot? So like, if we're going back to our example, show that we cared about them, we created this Google doc, would it be a bad idea if I sent this over for you to check out? So like that, that would be an example where now the person's got reaction is not you know, no, I'm not interested in it.

Brandon (36:15): Don't tell me more about it. It's more of like, no, it's not a bad idea. Let me know. I'd be curious to find out more information about it. So there's no worries. The questions are very, very powerful. You can use this. Not only here. I mean, Chris boss teaches it. I use it the other day. I was at actually I won't even go there, but like Chris boss's book is really, really good if you want to, if you want to go there. But so, so that's important. And I would experiment with no oriented questions in other areas as well. Because as an example, if somebody is not responding to your email after they've replied to you and you're supposed to work on a project together, the question that Chris teaches in the book, that's so good is like, have you given up on this?

Brandon (36:51): Like, and so now that person is like, Oh no, I haven't given up on this. Or another way that you could reach out to is like, are you not the right person to talk to about this? Because if they're not responding, they get that email. They read it and they're like, Oh, I am the right person. No, I am the right person. I will, I will respond to this. I'll tell you. Or if they actually weren't the right person, they'll say, no, here's my colleague that is responsible for this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's plenty of ways that you can toss in no oriented questions. I would, I would just encourage people listening though. It's like I had, I gave this presentation once and somebody responded with a magic connection method, email. Cause you know, it's always cool that when people take, take what I teach and they apply it, but somebody respondents, would it be inappropriate for me to blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I don't like the word inappropriate. Cause it's like, it's just like not I'm a copywriter. So it's like, it just didn't, it didn't land. Right. It's like inappropriate.

Kathleen (37:38): It has such a negative connotation.

Brandon (37:41): Exactly. So, so let's just put like some, some, some like bumpers up, like, you know, start with, would it be a bad idea? If, would it be ridiculous? If, and it's funny because my wife and I, even when we're grocery shopping, like Leah will be like, well, would it be a bad idea if? Because I use them all the time.

Kathleen (37:56): Would it be a bad idea if I bought this really great bottle of wine right now?

Brandon (38:01): So that's it, that's it, it's, it's very simple. The hook, the irresistible offer, and the no oriented question, opens the doors to these incredible relationships. And and then you can leverage that to form incredible friendships, strategic partnerships, collaborations for content, you know, whatever it is that you're looking at accomplishing it's, it's kind of a copy and pasting that you can use.

Kathleen (38:21): And tell me more about the results you've been getting from this. You mentioned it earlier, but I just wanted to like, come back to that for a second.

Brandon (38:27): Yeah, of course. So like, I mean, I'm seeing 90% open rates and I will say as an asterisk to that, the first email that when I ever send it usually gets about a 30 to 40% open rate, but I follow up like two to three times afterwards. So like that initial email that gets sent over time, it will get about a 90% open rate if you're doing things the right way. And then I'm typically getting about 50% of people to reply to these emails. And then, you know, you can engage, engage the relationship even more you know, you can send them, I'm, I'm talking with somebody right now. Who's, who's interested in, in leveraging this model to create individual workshops for companies to do sales and marketing training. And so, like, that's, that's something that we were using this kind of process where it's like getting them to respond, to attend this, this you know, education-based event. And so that's another context of that it's being used.

Kathleen (39:14): So you're getting 90% open rates. Do you have a particular subject line you use?

Brandon (39:19): Ah, great question. So so this is, again, it's actually funny, cause you mentioned Cialdini before he has another book called Pre-Suasion and it just, I'll be completely honest. I actually haven't read the book, but it's just like, I understand the topic, cause it's really important to understand what people are experiencing before they experience your content or your email or whatever it is. And so some people will use a subject line, like quick question or something like that, but it's not a good pre-frame because it's like it could be click baity, you know, people are using that kind of thing all the time, you know? So in the subject line, I'm usually what I do is I take a condensed version of the irresistible offer so I can show them that they have something that they can expect to gain as, as a result of opening this email. So that's usually how I suggest people to do it. It's nothing that you can, you can't steal the ones that I've been using. Cause it's like, it's, it's an irresistible offer that I'm creating for someone. So whenever you're

Kathleen (40:06): On the spot, but like what would be an example of that?

Brandon (40:09): Well, would it be okay if I, I mean, I'll be completely honest. Like I got on this podcast cause every time.

Kathleen (40:13): No, I was going to say, even if you didn't, you totally use this on me and it worked, so yeah, let's do it.

Brandon (40:18): Yes. So I think, I think the subject line for when I reach out to you is like the inbound success podcast, number one episode or something like that. And I referred to an episode that I listened to and then I also re referred to, you know, a bunch of topics that I think would be valuable to your audience. And I told you, I put together the document that, that showed all the different things that I could add to the audience. So that's an example of, of the subject line I was working for me.

Kathleen (40:40): Yeah, no, I mean, and I will give you kudos because you did very few people take the time to send me pitches and I get a lot of pitches. I probably get five a week. Very few people take the time to like say, Oh, I listened to this episode or that episode. And here's what I liked. In fact, very few people take the time to actually figure out what the podcast is about, which is my first filter. Like if they pitched me on some topic having to do with sales or, you know, like starting your own business, I'm like, this is not what my podcast is about. So those are the obvious ones, but like people who've actually listened and can, can speak to what the podcast is about. That gets my attention. And then you did you put together, it was like a three page Google doc with long descriptions of like, here are some different things I could talk about. And I was like, wow, he really did his homework. Thank you. So it, it for sure worked. Yeah.

Brandon (41:30): Well thank you so much. And I think it's important to think too, like the person that you're reaching to, there's a concept in copywriting. It's like enter the conversation that's already happening in your prospect's mind. And so it's like when you're reaching out to them, that's another kind of filter. I always put it through. It's like before I send an email, how would I feel if I was receiving this thing? Like, if I'm a podcaster, what are the things that I'm looking for? I like, like me as a podcast or now it's like, I want good guests that can provide valuable content to my audience. And so like thinking about from the perspective of the person you're reaching out to like, what is valuable to them and how can you help assist and provide them with resources or connections or anything that can help support what they're looking for inherently. And if you, if you hit that correctly, then that's when you're really going to develop these relationships.

Kathleen (42:11): Yeah, for sure. Well, I could probably talk to you all day about email. We're coming up on the end of our time. So I want to change shift gears for a minute and ask you the two questions. I always ask all my guests. The first one is we obviously talk a lot about inbound marketing on the podcast. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound these days?

Brandon (42:32): You know so I was thinking about this and I feel like there's like, there's probably people that you come up to that are being referenced all the time. But for me, one of my favorite inbound marketers, or just marketers in general is Russell Brunson and ClickFunnels. Like the content that they create is so phenomenal, the ecosystem that they have developed. I mean, like it's, I'm a perfect example of me finally converting on Russell Brunson stuff after years, like I had been consuming as podcast. I wasn't a user until like four years after I'd been already getting value from the stuff that he was sharing. And so, but he just kept showing up, kept adding value. And so I love the content that he creates in the ecosystem he's built on, on just getting people results. And then he's just the natural by-product of wanting to work with him because he's done such a good job.

Kathleen (43:15): It's a great one. So how do you stay up to date? Like how do you keep yourself educated and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to like all the things that are changing so quickly with digital marketing?

Brandon (43:26): No, I think I'm going to give kind of a non-traditional answer here and then I'll give more of a traditional answer. Cause it's like somebody asked me the day, it's like, how did you learn about marketing? How'd you learn about entrepreneurship? And I think that the best lessons come from simply observation of day to day experiences, because it's like, when you can understand the first principles of human behavior, what makes people do what they do? What makes, you know, it could be even a conversation where like I was having, what was the, I'm just a copy nerd. So I was talking to somebody of the day and they're like I have this goal and it's interesting to me, but it's just like, I wants to make sure that my family is proud of what I do. And like when he said that I'm like, Oh, that's good copy.

Brandon (44:00): Because it's like that, that, that tied into what he was doing. Like what motivated him fundamentally. So it's like, I'm always observing conversations. It could be a billboard, it could be, you know, a sign in the grocery store. I think that's really where my best marketing knowledge comes from is just like observing and understanding what's working. But for a more, you know like applicable thing that for a source of information, my best information always comes from conversations with people like high, high level people that are in, that are doing stuff in the marketing world, because like they have their fingers on the pulse. So, you know, anytime you can connect with like a high level mastermind or a strategic partnership group, I'm an incredible group right now called tribe for leaders. And they do these, these pod, they put you in a pod with three to four other marketers and entrepreneurs and they just facilitate conversations. And there's this, there's this quote by Joe Polish. Again, it's like, you can't read the label from inside the jar, but everybody's sitting inside of a jar. Right? And so it's like you have this incredible opportunity to learn from other people and what's working in their industries. And so that's super valuable for me. And how I kind of stay up to date is just like learning. What's working from other people that are doing stuff on a day-to-day basis in their particular industry.

Kathleen (45:05): That's such a great quote about the jar and the label because we are, we all are in our little bubbles and getting out of your bubble is like the best thing you could possibly do. So it's funny. My podcast is my mastermind. Yeah, that's how I get to talk to so many interesting people like yourself. So if somebody is listening to this episode and they want to learn more about the magic connection method, or they want to listen to your podcast or connect with you and ask a question, what is the best way for them to get in touch with you online?

Brandon (45:33): Yeah, thanks so much. So I actually put together a special link for you guys if that's, if that's okay. I can share that. So I always like to explain beforehand, cause it's a short link that people aren't kind of like, they're like, I've never heard of this short and like it's cause I created it. I bought a Nigerian domain to make it happen and I'll explain. So my name is Brandon Fong. So I wanted the short link B F O dot N G. So that's what I, it's the.ng is Nigeria. So that's the short link B F O dot N G slash inbound. And that will take you guys to some more goodies that you can get. If you want a training on how to leverage the magic connection method, more specifically, a hundred percent free. And I thought also what's the most valuable thing I could give to you guys.

Brandon (46:09): And I figured, well, what if I just gave you messages that have worked for me that you could just copy and paste? So, so that, so that's something that you guys can grab on there if you go to BFO dot N G slash inbound. And I give some of my automatic emails that I call. So you can just kind of model off of what's worked on there. And then on there as well, also share my podcast, but, but you can check that out right now. It's at the seven figure millennials podcast. And like I said, that's all about entrepreneurs who are prioritizing their happiness, health and relationships well pursuing their biggest entrepreneurial and financial goals. But also just as a, as a final thing, if you want to get the magic connection method, you can just go to magic connection, method.com.

Brandon (46:44): And then the coupon code I give to my podcast listeners is seven FM. So I'll just give that here as well. You can use that coupon code and I'll unlock an extra $500 with the bonuses. So I do an interview with Joe Polish. I do an interview with Wayne Breitbart, who is one of the foremost experts on LinkedIn. He shows how to get a connection and then leverage that connection to connect with other people. So there's a whole bunch of other goodies that I added in there. So that's the coupon code seven FM. If you use that now unlock those extra bonuses.

Kathleen (47:11): All right, well there you have it. I will put all those links as always in the show notes. So head there, if you want to check out any of those resources or connect with Brandon and if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, I would love it. If you would head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast or review that's how other folks find out about us. And if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, Brandon.

Brandon (47:40): Thanks so much. I had a blast.

How do the podcasting pros get the most mileage out of their podcast guest appearances?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Command Your Brand CEO Jeremy Slate shares his strategies for podcast public relations.

Jeremy is a podcasting pro who hosts the Create Your Own Life podcast and is an active podcast guest. 

In this episode, he talks about the specific tactics he uses to market his own podcast guest appearances and help his clients get the most mileage out of theirs.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the CommandYourBrand website
• Visit commandyourbrand.com/7reasons to get Jeremy's white paper on how to get booked on more podcasts

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Jeremy Slate. Jeremy is the founder of Create Your Own Life podcast and the co-founder of Command Your Brand Media. Welcome Jeremy.

Jeremy (00:26): Hey, thank you so much for having me, Kathleen. And I'm stoked to get a chance to hang out with you today.

Kathleen (00:30): You know, I always love talking about podcasting. It's very meta because of course we're on a podcast about a podcast.

Jeremy (00:38): Exactly.

Kathleen (00:39): And I've had a lot of guests who've talked about podcasts, but you're, I think you and I settled on a really interesting sort of spin on that topic, which we haven't talked about yet on the inbound success podcast, which is podcast PR. So I'm really excited to chat with you about that. But before we get into that, you have a very interesting background with podcasting specifically, and I think that's, that's a big part of your journey. So for those who are listening and may not be familiar with your story, could you talk a little bit about your background and how you came to be doing what you're doing now?

Jeremy (01:15): It's like kind of like a Beatles song. It's like a long and winding road because like, it's weird. Like I went to school to be a college professor. That's like what I wanted to do. So I have a undergrad degree in world religion and Torah. And then I studied literature at New College Oxford and then got my masters in early Roman empire propaganda, not a very applicable skill and like the world of like getting a job other than like working at a library.

Kathleen (01:35): I want to go back to school and study what you studied though. It all sounds so interesting.

Jeremy (01:40): I was, I'm like the world's biggest nerd too. And I'm like, I'm a former competitive powerlifter too. So I was always the guy in the front of class, like sitting there, like answering all the questions, you know, like sitting there big and muscly, but answering all the questions. So you know, that's kinda like where life started out for me. And then when I was 24 I was two years into teaching high school and my mom ended up having a really bad stroke and it made me look at a lot of things in my life really, really differently. So I was like, okay, well, I'm going to try and do something differently. And my wife was presented a network marketing opportunity. I didn't know what that was. So I thought I was gonna be like a millionaire in like three days. It didn't work like that.

Kathleen (02:13): Don't, we all, like we hear about those.

Jeremy (02:16): It didn't work. I did spend two years of my life, like full-time, you know, trying to make it go right. And then from there I went to selling life insurance. I was really good at it. I hated telling people they were going to die. So I just kinda couldn't do that every day and went from there to private labeling and selling products on Amazon. And I left the, get my product for $1 promo code in my listing. And I lost all 200 of my products and made no money. So I very quickly put myself in a very rough situation. I'm like, Oh man, I can't do this anymore. So I actually ended up working for a friend's web design firm. I had taught myself how to, how to code reading blogs and watching YouTube videos. So I was writing HTML and CSS and all that kind of stuff. And I've been a podcast listener since 2006 when they were still like a lot of audio books and then one podcast I listen to this, to this day called the no agenda show. They like make fun of the news for three hours twice a week. It's great.

Kathleen (03:04): It's so easy to do now.

Jeremy (03:06): It's especially easy now. So like that was kind of where I was at and I was like, all right, well, what am I going to do for myself? So I started creating your own life in 2015 and we had 10,000 listens in our first 30 days. Which is, you know, not normal. It took off very quickly. I got to talk to lots and lots of amazing people that I admired and very quickly people started saying like, Hey, can you do this for me? I'm like, okay. So we started a company called Slate Media Productions, where we did like a done for you podcast model. And I found it a lot more, went into it than I expected, and a lot more work was involved in it. And I'd never hired anybody, anybody before or anything like that. So my wife was my co-founder in that company.

Jeremy (03:43): And part of what we did is we got clients on podcasts before they launched their own. And our clients were like, Hey, I love having my own podcast. But to me it makes a lot more sense to, to go on shows. So we dropped everything else we were doing. And we just really focused on, you know, being the PR firm for the podcast space. And we've grown substantially since 2016, we were started to now we're up to 14 people on our team. And you know, we've booked thousands of podcasts for lots of incredible clients.

Kathleen (04:09): So side note, before we keep going for those listening, if there's a dull roar in the background, it's because there's a crazy storm going. So if you're wondering what that sound is now you know.

Jeremy (04:20): I thought maybe we were filming for a Carpenters song.

Kathleen (04:22): Yeah.

Jeremy (04:23): Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.

Kathleen (04:25): It is definitely a rainy day on a Monday. So I think it's really, it's really fascinating to hear your story because it kind of parallels the crazy trajectory that podcasts in general have had, you know, they've been around for a very, very long time. Like I want to say since the nineties, technically I think at one point, but they've really, really taken off in the last five years or so. And hearing you tell your story about, you know, people wanting to create their own, but then realizing that guesting on podcasts is a huge opportunity and the whole PR opportunity around that tracks very much with what I've seen as a marketer, who I am a marketer who both hosts my own podcast. And for during, in my day job, I actually have as part of my budget guesting for my CEO. So he goes on podcasts all the time.

Kathleen (05:21): I'm going to start doing it soon. So I'm totally 100% bought in, but I want to, you know, it's one thing to, to be a guest or to host a podcast is entirely another. Then what you do with that media asset, because it's a little bit of that whole tree fell in the forest scenario where I think there's a lot of people who spend money on podcasting hosting or guesting, and then it doesn't produce results for them because they don't then know what to do with it. So that's what I want to talk to you about today. Okay.

Jeremy (05:51): Just add to that too, because I think like not, not knowing what to do with is one thing, but I think also they go into it with, I guess not the right expectations, not the right understanding as well. So I think that's also really, really important going into it is having the right expectations and understanding too

Kathleen (06:04): Well. Let's actually talk about that for a second because I've had this debate on this podcast before, and I'm really curious about your take on it. I've had people say podcasting is not something you should do for lead generation. And then I've had people say, absolutely podcasting is something you should do for lead generation. So like when you talk with people about podcasting hosting or guesting, what is your advice in that regard? Like what is a good use of podcasting as part of the marketing mix?

Jeremy (06:34): I want to say that part of that too, like part of the, the expectations as well as also knowing like what audience you're helping and how you're helping them, because every person out there wants to go on Tim Ferris and Lewis Howes and Joe Rogan. And the thing you have to look at, like, is that going to help my brand and help what I'm doing or is that a vanity thing? And a lot of people want these vanity metrics and they want stuff like that. So I just wanted to kind of like add that because it's really important too. But in terms of like expectations, like I primarily called appearing on podcasts, a PR action or a public relations action. Now, the thing that's beautiful about it is you've married PR and direct response marketing because there is a lot you can do with that.

Jeremy (07:08): So in the way of, you know, you're getting seen, you're getting known, you're creating trust, which is really important, but whereas on a traditional radio show or TV or something like that, you can't really retarget listeners. You can do that with a podcast. And that's, what's really interesting because you can actually, you know, set up the right Facebook ads to retarget people. You can set up the right landing pages to go back and retarget people, there's email capture software that you can use. So there's a lot you can do with it. But I don't want to say it's primary, primarily a lead gen action. It's a creating trust, creating a piece you can use, but then also making sure that you're retargeting, continuing the relationship with the people you're speaking to. So that's, that's really the thing I always tell people.

Kathleen (07:46): Yeah. And I think there's, I mean, there's a huge brand awareness play in general. That's that's, to me, one of the greatest values of it, like one of the reasons we're using it at my company that I work at now is we have a new product we're introducing and it's, it's targeted at an audience we've never sold to before. Right. And so, you know, we're using it to kind of warm the audience up and make them just even aware of our brand name. You know, we're still in private beta, but I think the more they hear our name, the more there's like, Oh yeah, yeah. I heard about that. Then when we're ready to start selling, it's going to be a much easier. So I think there's that aspect of it as well. So, so let's talk about this, I guess, guesting in particular you go on a podcast, you you're a guest, you get interviewed, the interview gets published. Then what, like talk me through how you talk with your clients about

Jeremy (08:39): Yes. Well, I'll tell them first and foremost, before they go on an interview, like the thing you have to have down is your differentiator, like what makes you different and interesting and special and unique because a lot of people will and like we've had clients go on the same podcast. One client has an incredible experience, gets lots of leads and exposure from it. We've had another one and say, you know, that wasn't a great show for me. So I will say first and foremost, how you show up is super vital to how the experience is going to be in the results you actually create from that. So you need to be different and you need to also show up to serve. So that's vital as well. I find so many times like I've had guests on where I haven't published the show because they'll direct me to a YouTube video or a page or a course or a product rather than actually like being the expert and explaining for that period of time.

Jeremy (09:19): So it's really, really, really important to do that. And then also like in terms of that also how you talk on that, it's really important to we, we look at every interview is having essentially three parts to it. That being story, message, and call to action into your personal story creates trust. It shows people, you can actually make the transformation, whether it's for yourself or a client you've worked with, or you know, the, the, then the message is what you're actually going to teach people to do, you know, how you're going to actually teach them step-by-step to do something. So that's really, really important as well. And then the call to action, which kind of brings us back to kind of where you'd started. The question is, what do you want people to do at the end? And we find that usually it's going to be something that helps people apply what you just taught, because there's two parts of the learning, right?

Jeremy (09:59): There's the actual theory of it. And the actual application of it. When you have those two, somebody can learn something. And that doesn't mean they're going to go out and they're going to like, you know, start a marketing firm, or they're going to like, you know, start this crazy program, but it creates this idea in their mind that they won with you. So, like for example, one of the things that we give away is we give away a white paper that teaches people, the things they need to know about basic PR actions. So they can actually get results in their business from that. So it needs to be something that aligns with what you taught and aligned to their mission, aligns your company. Now, once you give that away the landing page, you're going to send people to I, we recommend really do it this specific way.

Jeremy (10:32): So, you know, like for us, it's like commandyourbrand.com/. I find it to be pretty easy. And the one thing I've heard from somebody else that we've had book launch clients do because it gets good results is to buy like a like a URL that you can swap things in and out of. You know what I mean? Like a www go to meet.com or something like that. Like you buy like a, a vanity URL, and then when you're releasing new products, you can actually swap it out. So that's a really good thought process too. I like having it on your own site and in that way, just because I find that it's easier. So then when you have that landing page, you want to have a Facebook pixel on that landing page. And then what you're actually going to do is set up 30, 60, and 90 day audiences.

Jeremy (11:10): And then you can retarget those audiences at a dollar a day budget, because then if you're going on lots and lots and lots of podcasts, you know, you're spending 30 bucks a month for one podcast, and then you're spending 30 on another, another, another. So you actually have these podcasts working for you and retargeting a lot of the people that you've been on, a lot of shows that you've been on. And then in terms of what happens once somebody gets that opt in, we actually have somebody to go through a seven day email sequence, you know, the first day being like, Hey, here's the freebie. I promised you, thank you so much for grabbing that. Then you want to go to your hero's journey. Like, you know, why is this important then the the third day email, what we actually tell people to do is tell stories around what your biggest objections are.

Jeremy (11:49): You know, like, Oh, this doesn't work or, you know, marketing is hard or whatever it is. And in that seven days, you're actually educating somebody that if they weren't ready to buy, when they heard you on the show, cause your freebie, they're going to come back around and want to have a conversation with you. And then after day seven, we said, okay, it's fine. And now have this person in like a broadcast sequence. Follow-Up. So that's kind of what you're going to do from there. The other thing we do on that landing page, which is something we've been doing since January of this year, and it's been really, really good it's called get emails.com and get emails.com has a massive database of like, people have already opted in for stuff. So this is totally like, you know, white hat, like not a problem.

Jeremy (12:25): And it's because we all know people sell our information online. So when you go, when, when somebody that is in that email system goes to your landing page, they recognize it and they then opt the person into your email list. So then we actually have a seven day sequence set up for that too, because if somebody opts in, they want to know how they got there. Cause how many things do you opt in for? And you forget that you did it at a site. So it really brings somebody through that journey as well. So that's kind of like what we're doing when somebody goes to a landing page because I call it the leaky bucket. Right. you want to keep looking at where are the holes in this bucket and where else can I patch them? So I'm not missing anybody that does go there and maybe didn't jump in right away or may want to work with me in the future or may need an area to continue this relationship.

Kathleen (13:09): All right. I have a lot of questions.

Jeremy (13:13): I tend to talk a lot. I'm from Jersey guy.

Kathleen (13:15): I love it. You're out. You're here to talk. That's why I invited you in. First question. I want to go back to, you said there's three parts to going on a podcast. It's your story. What you're going to teach and then your offer. Yeah. So the, the teach part is the one that I'm interested in talking about for a minute, because I totally agree with you. And when I look for guests for my podcast, it's all about like, what can they teach my audience? And, and I talk specifically in, you know, in, in all of the information about the podcast, about how this is not a podcast, necessarily focused on getting you in and inspiring you. I love for you to be inspired. It's more about making things actionable.

Kathleen (13:59): Like I want people to leave and feel like, okay, I have things I can immediately do to make my marketing better. So it is all about teaching at least this podcast. And there are other podcasts that are different. Like maybe Tim Ferriss is a good one. You talked about. So when it comes to teaching, though, what I've found is that there are definitely some people who are very good subject matter experts who want to go on podcasts, but then they feel like, well, I can't give up the secret sauce because it's the secret sauce, right? Like, so I can't, I can't teach them my proprietary method. That gets great results because that's how I'm going to get them to convert, like so that they fill out the form to get that. But then, and so I've definitely found myself with some guests where I'm like, all right, we're not getting there's no, there, there, like you're doing the inspiration, but you're not doing the actionable. And so how do you counsel your clients about like, what's the balance to, on that?

Jeremy (14:52): I call those barrier people. They're just the same people that want to know. Like, so how many dollars do you have in your bank account before you fill out this application? Cause I want to see if we're a fit. No, my job is to convince you, you need what I have, whether you have the money or not. So I think you, you don't want to be the barrier guy. Right? And, and we had a client who's actually our very first client back in 2016. And he literally would get on, he was in the real estate space and he would tell people everything they needed to know and they got on and like, Oh my God, this guy's brilliant. And I can't do all that. I need to work with him. He made half a million dollars off podcasts off the 16 shows we put them on.

Jeremy (15:25): As I said, he's brilliant. He did a lot of remarketing too. We can't take credit for all of that. But when you show up to really, really teach people and really show them that you can help them, they just need to know you're the expert, like 99% of people like aren't going to do it are going to try it themselves and be like, dang, this is too hard. I need to come back to you. Like we had somebody that had heard me on a podcast, had a conversation with my sales team about a month ago, said, okay, we're going to have my team try and do this. They came back two weeks ago and said, it's hard. We need to work with you. And, and that's what you really need to look at is if you're the expert in, you're confident in what you're doing.

Jeremy (15:59): Like, you know what I mean? Like you don't have people sign an NDA before you a sales call. It's the same type of thing. People want to know that, you know what you're talking about and that you can get them results. But if you don't show up to teach everything, why are they going to listen to you? Right? Like there needs to be a reason why they're going to listen to that podcast. Like some of my favorite podcasts that I've listened to on the business side are like things where people get really granular with stuff. Because then I'm like, okay, well I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I can't do this part. That's why I need this person. And I think that's where, where you really create trust. And you really create this ability for somebody to want to work with you.

Kathleen (16:31): Amen. And, and I think the thing that I've noticed is that the DIYers are going to be DIYers. They don't have money. Anyway, the secrets are not like, they are just, they are DIYers by nature. And they're, you know, if, if you don't tell them how to do it, they're going to find somebody else who will and do it themselves. Like it's not taking business away from you.

Jeremy (16:54): Like we've had people buy like one of our courses teach somebody how to do what we do for yourself. We've had people buy those courses with larger companies just to see how it works when they hire us to know what they're getting. Like, you know what I mean? Like if you're really willing to show up and educate, then people are gonna wanna work with you.

Kathleen (17:07): Yeah, absolutely. So, so assuming somebody has something worthwhile that they can teach about the offer and what is a good offer for podcasts?

Jeremy (17:19): I find that eBooks just kind of stink because everybody and their brother has an ebook and somebody doesn't want it.

Kathleen (17:24): Everybody thinks that eBooks are going to suck whether they do or not.

Jeremy (17:29): They just, I'm just not excited. Oh my gosh, another ebook. I find that really good and to the point white papers are good. Like if you let somebody know like, Hey, this is one or two pages is everything you need to know. And it's really good. Like our white paper the seven reasons you're not getting books in your favorite podcast does really well. Because the name is also important too. Like that's also good. I find worksheets are good. I find quizzes are good. Like things that somebody can use as a tool and get some sort of an instant win. You know what I mean? Like I just find eBooks, just take too much concentration. You know what I mean? Everybody's got one and they're 50 to a hundred pages and people don't want another thing to read. You know what I mean?

Kathleen (18:02): And it's amazing how 99% of the time, it's 50 to 100 pages of really general, non-actionable stuff, which is why people think that your ebooks are going to suck.

Jeremy (18:15): I'm going to give you twenty-Five pages of fluff. And at the end, this is how you buy something. Right.

Kathleen (18:18): TLDR, I could have told you the whole story in a paragraph. So the, okay, so, so assuming you have a good offer, then the other thing I want to ask you, and this is also back to like when you're on the podcast, what's the natural way to make that offer, because I think you don't want to come across as being spammy or too salesy.

Jeremy (18:39): It's story selling. You know what I mean? Like it's like, Hey, you know, this took me two years to figure out and I don't want anybody to have to go through what I had to figure out in order to do it and make the same mistakes I made because I made some really bad ones. So I actually want to cut that learning curve for you. So if you want to grab that totally free, no obligation. You can go to xyz dot com. Like you want to tie it back to a story, even if it's a quick one. Because you know, once again, stories create human connection and that's what really connect people to what you're talking about. So stories are really important. Like I I'm sure you've had guests before they give you like 27 different places. They can find you online. And like, that's really hard because a lot of times people, you have to think of their modality, right? They're in a car they're at the gym. They're hopefully listening to you at their desk, but still working. So you want to think they're always doing something else. You want to make it easy, send them one place and tie it to story. Don't send them 50 places.

Kathleen (19:27): Yeah. And I like the idea of having kind of a call it like a single offer that can be reused for many things. And I've noticed that with some of my better guests that are really well organized, they have a landing page, as you said, it's either on their site at a simple, like my url.com/you know, offer or whatever

Jeremy (19:49): We use ClickFunnels, but we just set up sub-domain, which is really nice, because then it's still your URL, it's training dot command your brand.

Kathleen (19:56): But I also love like getting a vanity URL. And it's funny when you were talking about doing that, the first person that came to mind was somebody I've interviewed before on the podcast. Christopher Penn. He has the best vanity URL ever when he speaks at conferences and I'm probably going to get it wrong, but you'll get the gist of it. When he speaks at conferences, he has the URL, where can I get the slides dot com. Isn't that genius? I was like, man, I can't believe you have that. And so like, that's his landing for every talk, it's just go to where can I get the slides dot com and you'll find the slides.

Jeremy (20:30): I can't take credit for that idea either. I got that from George Bryant, who has mindofgeorge.com which is smart because then every time he has a new offer, they just change the vanity URL that, you know, where it directs. And it's just because you're basically changing your offer on every podcast you've ever been on. Like how great of an idea is that.

Kathleen (20:45): Yeah. It's so smart. So you direct people to these URLs. Now talk me through, I want to get a little bit more granular on the re-targeting because are you suggesting that you have like one URL and you're going on, let's call it a podcast a week. And then every one of those podcasts, you're sending people to the same URL and then you're, and they're enrolling in the same retargeting campaign or are these separate URLs with separate retargeting campaigns?

Jeremy (21:09): So it depends cause most podcasts I'm going to go on are going to be about the guesting side and about like the marketing and PR side of things. So like typically I'm going to have the same offer for that. If I'm going on like more like stuff geared to my podcasts, I'm going to direct people to another landing page that I have built towards podcast content. So it's, we really have two offers pretty much for that. You know, the other, one's like a quick course in like starting a podcast, cause it's like a little bit more aligned with that other audience. So I just really have to two offers and then on that we're we're running retargeting campaigns.

Kathleen (21:42): Okay. And then go, let's go back to what you were saying about having different audiences. That's important. So break that down a little bit more for me.

Jeremy (21:50): So if people want to hear more about this, the person I got it from is Dennis Yu from Blitzmetrics. So Dennis is brilliant. He has a lot more training on that, but the basics of it is in your Facebook ads manager, you can set up audiences, right? So you set up the pixel first and I'm sure your audience is aware of like what a Facebook pixel is, right? The piece of code you place on a site and it captures identities. So what you can actually do then is when you go into the pixel settings in Facebook ads, you can actually create audiences, meaning like audience one is everybody that has seen your website in the last 30 days. Audience two is everybody that has seen your website in the last 60 days. And audience three is everybody has seen your website in the last 90 days.

Kathleen (22:31): Is it everybody who's seen your website in the last 60 days minus the ones on list one?

Jeremy (22:35): No, it's usually just, it just spreads them out. It adds them all together. So 90 days would be all would be the other two. I tend to use the 90 day one more because it's got a larger audience size because it's got the other two combined. But that's what you're going to want to do. And then you set up like ads at a dollar a day to retarget those people because it's not gonna be a huge audience. So a dollar is going to get you a ton of reach and you're doing it for every podcast you've been on. So that's a lot of ads running every single month, but it's not a huge like out-of-pocket thing. And then what you're going to actually learn based on podcasts you've been on is actually which ones are more of your audience because you're going to see who's taking action. You're going to see what really happens with that podcast. So you're gonna get to know your audience even better too. So you can create a lot of ton of insights on the backend of Facebook ads.

Kathleen (23:17): So this may be a dumb question. But, okay. So let's just take your example. So sort of half the podcasts you're going on, it's about guesting, which is what we're talking about.

Jeremy (23:26): I'd say 70%.

Kathleen (23:28): So look, I mean, my listeners are smart. They know that you're going to have an offer for them. They're going to go to your site. Correct. We're going to get re-targeted. So, but the way it sounds from what you're describing is let's say you do another podcast next week on guesting as well. Those same people are going to that same site getting put into that same campaign. So you don't have, you don't have like different ads per podcast ads per campaign.

Jeremy (23:54): Yeah. Per campaign. So it's not crazy. So like, but I do have two different types of retargeting. We run at them one being like, Hey, you missed the offer. Here it is. You forgot to download it. You forgot to read it, whatever it is or another one being here's our webinar. And I have a really good webinar that like, cause I hate webinars that you get on and be like, Oh my God, I just wasted an hour of my life. I, Oh my gosh. Like I feel like I've created processes because of things I hate. So like we actually have a training that walks people through a lot of the basics of getting us off on podcasts. So then that retargeting webinars actually been really good for us. And at the end of that, we sell a call. But then they also go into another email sequence on that. So like we're really making sure we can find every single hole in the bucket. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Kathleen (24:37): So what, what types of, so you have the two, you have the, you got the offer or you didn't get the offer, correct?Like, what are those next step campaigns look like? What are you trying to encourage them to do?

Jeremy (24:48): So if they miss the offer we just have a short one, which is like more education based on like things they may have missed in the first one. Cause remember we have that original seven day sequence they get when they opt in, I find that if they didn't grab the offer, they didn't read the six emails after that. So we tend to reuse the emails that we see have the highest open rate by a lot of our other readers in that sequence. So we know that at least they're good enough. Like one of my favorite is radio versus podcasting. Because people, until they actually understood how radio stats work, they try to hold podcasting to that same thing. And they're like, Oh my God, that's what I find radio stats. So like we use our most successful ones from that campaign and this like smaller mini campaign.

Jeremy (25:25): It's like three days after that for the webinar, that's more really about like, why haven't they booked a call yet? So like, Hey, you know, we would love to spend some time with you. Like, Hey, this is a client success story. This is one of our clients and, you know, the actual income they created from it and it's towards booking a call. Or since they're now in that retargeting, if they didn't even watch the webinar, they get sent the webinar again. So it's, we have a lot of email sequences as you can see.

Kathleen (25:50): So, and, and they get an email every day for seven days

Jeremy (25:54): For seven days for the, for the opt-in one and for the webinar one, but we only do three days for if they've already opted in for, for the for the, like the freebie, because they've already gotten seven days. I don't want to hammer them a full seven days again.

Kathleen (26:08): Okay. And I'm assuming you have rules set up in the background around taking people out of all these sequences and campaigns, if they finally convert.

Jeremy (26:15): Yeah. We use Active Campaign for that. Because I found that's really, really, really good in terms of like like the different tags. You can add the different actions you can add. It's like, at least from all the ones I've used as the one that seems to give me like the most things I can change.

Kathleen (26:28): Got it. And what kinds of conversion rates do you see and do both with your own marketing and with your clients' marketing?

Jeremy (26:36): With clients it's hard because not every person at the same, like I said, we had one client that had like huge numbers. We've had other ones that had those. So it's just really hard to give a, it's not something we're usually watching for clients. So I can say on our, on our side you know, we're having a really good rate of people coming and hearing us on a podcast and coming to work with us. Now those numbers, aren't huge in comparison. Like I'd say it's probably like 10%. So in the grand scheme of things, it's not huge, but if you're on a lot of podcasts, you're continually growing that number, growing that number, growing that number. And we had a lot of people that have said, Hey, I've heard you on a podcast. I learned a lot about it. And I was like, Hey, I need you guys to help me with this.

Kathleen (27:13): No, I think that's actually really good because in my experience, you know, even if you hire a podcast booking agent, it's not that expensive. Correct. So if you're, you know, if you're getting that number of clients, the ROI is pretty huge. I mean, it takes like one client. I don't know. It depends on what your average order value is, but yeah, I would say for us, it, it, one client every few months would pay for the podcast guesting service.

Jeremy (27:36): And that's the thing I have to think about too, is like, what's the value of a client for you versus what you're doing there as well. I think that's really important. That's why we've really, for, for us, like I said, we've really focused on just teaching our clients how to do the backend stuff, not really doing that for them, because that just became a huddle, a whole nother rigmarole. And we're not, we're not a marketing agency, we're a PR agency, but we do take responsibility to make sure they know what they're doing, you know, after the fact.

Kathleen (27:57): So beyond retargeting the listeners of the podcast and, you know, enrolling them in follow up email sequences. Is there any other podcast promotion or outreach that you're doing once the episode airs?

Jeremy (28:13): So we're creating snippets and stuff too. So we use Headliner. Its a really good one. The thing that we've been doing a lot more now is actually, since I'm doing a lot of my podcasts on zoom and on video, we're actually using those to make like viral style videos. So those have been doing pretty well. And LinkedIn's kind of been our big place to do that. So we do a lot of long form content on LinkedIn, meaning that you get like 1300 characters. So your first line has to be something that's like decently shocking or attention grabbing, because if you've seen a LinkedIn post, it's like, you got three lines and this is see more. Yeah. So you want to grab somebody's attention in that first one to two lines, and then you're actually telling a narrative story about the podcast or about what you taught on that to kind of bring them back in.

Jeremy (28:53): And then we always have people with the link in the first comment, because any posts, whether it's on Facebook or whether it's on LinkedIn. Twitter, not so much because there's not really another place you can put a link. But on Facebook and LinkedIn, they actually down rank a post. So if you put a link in the actual post, so you put in the comments, you need to know it's in the comments. So we're doing a lot of like content marketing around that stuff too. Video is not doing as well as it was on LinkedIn. So we're actually focusing mainly on long-form posts right now, but we're doing a lot of viral style videos as well. And we're keeping them under 60 seconds too, which is really important.

Kathleen (29:24): Yeah, it's interesting because I've really seen that evolve with LinkedIn about a year and a half ago, video was doing extremely

Jeremy (29:32): Well. It's crazy. The view numbers were nuts. I could like reshare a goal cast video and get a hundred thousand views on it.

Kathleen (29:37): Yeah. I was, I was doing like three videos a week for myself on LinkedIn back that point. And I've completely stopped now. That's a long form content. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So are you posting that content as yourself individually? Or are you doing any of it out of a company account?

Jeremy (29:55): So I'm usually doing it on my own account. I find, you know, company accounts just don't do as well on any platform. I know LinkedIn, they're doing a little bit better because you'll just, you just get followers. So we do have somebody on our team that'll post some of that content to the, to that page because it just kind of grows on its own Facebook, unless you're giving them money. Like I just had an, I find Facebook unless you're running an ad to just be kind of worthless anymore. Linkedin for us is where we spent most of our time and it's not personal accounts.

Kathleen (30:19): Yeah. I found the same thing with Facebook. Like as far as organic posts, like I just post there to keep the lights on so that if anybody happens to look, they're like, Oh, they're still there.

Jeremy (30:30): The reach is pathetic because even like paid reach, if you like, re-targeted the fans of your own page, you're only gonna get one to 3% anyway. So what does it matter?

Kathleen (30:36): Yeah, it's terrible. Interesting. And, and, you know, in terms of visits from the types of podcasts that you're going on, like, what numbers do you see of people coming back to your site and converting?

Jeremy (30:51): So we do run some Google ads, but our biggest traffic source is really podcasts. So like in terms of that, we're seeing, you know, anywhere from 250 to 500 people hitting our site a day. Now as I say, we're running Google ads too. We don't run a huge budget. I spend like maybe 500 to a thousand dollars a month in Google ads. So you can kind of figure there that the, the other percentage of it are coming from podcasts, but I've been going on three to five podcasts a week for, Oh gosh, how many years now? Like five years. So like, wow, that's a, that's a, a lot of people that continue to come back to evergreen content. You know what I mean? Like,

Kathleen (31:27): Can you, like, at some point you run out of podcasts to do.

Jeremy (31:30): So there's 1.7 million podcasts out there right now. And you know, kind of new ones are starting all the time and, you know, some fade away as well. So it's like, yeah, there's always kind of new places to talk as long as you're kind of willing to show up and help, you know?

Kathleen (31:44): Yeah, that's great. I love that strategy. And if, if somebody is listening and they're like, okay, you got me, I'm interested in doing podcasting. Like what's the best way for them to get started with podcast guesting?

Jeremy (31:57): So I would honestly, I always recommend this recommendation people, I would say, start with going on shows before you start your own, because you at least learn both sides of the mic and you get a little more comfortable with it. But in terms of like starting guesting, start with smaller shows, that's meaning less than 20 episodes, you know, less than 20 reviews because they are a lot newer. You're kind of both getting your feet wet at the same time and it's going to be a more attainable show to get on, you know what I mean? And, and so that's kind of the, it's the same strategy I talk about with getting PR, like start local and then kind of move up bigger as you get up there. So like, I would start with smaller shows and then as you're going up, you can start looking at shows that have over 50 reviews, over a hundred reviews, over 200 reviews, but you really want to build a portfolio of stuff first.

Jeremy (32:37): And at the same time, like, feel like you're really getting good with telling your story and teaching as well. Because if you get on a big show, but you blow it, like, it doesn't really matter. Like I went on EO fire four years ago now at this point, I honestly think like had I went on that and we had some good results. Like we had a couple of hundred people opt into our list from that. But like had I went on that podcast now I would have gotten better results than I didn't, you know, the end of 2016, because I'm a lot more versed and a lot more, you know, able to converse on that. So the thing I always tell people as well, like, even if it's somebody on your staff having practice interviewing you, like, even if it's just on zoom or whatever it is, because you want to get comfortable with that too way back and forth, and that's going to really help you be able to show up and be able to really help.

Kathleen (33:19): Yeah. And you can get to the point where you can do it in your sleep. And that's how it feels to me. I'm like episode 171 and somebody the other day asked me what I do to prep. And I was like, maybe this is terrible, but I do nothing. Like I just make sure I know. I make sure I know what we're talking about and I know your name and I know your title, and then I have pronounced your name. And then beyond that, it's like, all right, let's go and see where the conversation takes us.

Jeremy (33:40): The type of show you run. That really makes sense because it's very much geared around teaching. Cause like then when I do like with my own show, like I do have to prep a lot for that. Cause I'm talking about life stories. So like if I don't know stuff, it's kind of weird, but like when you're in a teaching show, like you are that you can totally do that. It's amazing. Yeah.

Kathleen (33:55): Yeah. And it's subject matter I know pretty well because I used to host another podcast for a company I worked for that was in cybersecurity, which is a topic I don't know as well as marketing. And that, that one I had to do a little bit more homework, not to sound like an idiot. Well this has been so fun. And before we wrap up, I want to ask you the two questions I always ask all of my guests. The first one is, this podcast of course is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really kind of setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?

Jeremy (34:26): Ooh, well I mentioned him earlier, so I would say George Bryant he's helped to create several unicorn businesses. So he's, he's a big fish when it comes to that. And he's actually doing a lot of stuff around email marketing now. So I would check out George Bryant.

Kathleen (34:39): And second question. All the marketers I talk to say that one of their biggest pain points is keeping up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing. They, you know, I often hear it described as drinking from a fire hose. So how do you drink a drink from the fire hose? How do you keep yourself educated and up-to-date.

Jeremy (34:58): There's an old, weird album movie from the early nineties called UHF where he starts an underground TV station. And one of the things they do they do in every show is drink from the fire hose. Every time somebody says that I think of you get to drink from the fire hose. But one of the things that I do, there's a few people I'm reading. One is Neil Patel because everything he puts out is just great. Which is pretty awesome. Copyblogger's another one I'm looking at as well, because this is when, whenever you can learn to write while it's good. And I'd say those are the two biggest ones I'm looking at. Like other stuff, it just kind of I'll pick and choose like I'm on Twitter a lot. So like I tend to see things that catch my eye. I'll go that way. But you know, it's either Neil Patel or Copyblogger.

Kathleen (35:34): Awesome. Well, those are two good ones for, to check out. Last question for you is if somebody is listening and they're interested in learning more about you or about your podcast or your business, what's the best way for them to connect with you online?

Jeremy (35:48): Absolutely. I feel lame doing this now, since we already talked about it, but like, people don't want to make this thing. If people don't want to make the same mistakes I had because you know what, let me tell you, like I was on a bunch of podcasts. In the beginning I'm like, why is nothing happening? We talked about EO fire before. Like I didn't, I got some action, but I didn't get up to the type of business I want to get up because I wasn't ready. So people don't want to make those same mistakes. I put put together an awesome white paper. It's two pages long. It's called the seven reasons. You're not getting booked on your favorite podcast. And it's going to teach you everything, you know, about the real basics of PR and how that marries with direct response marketing. So you can get that over at command, your brand.com/seven reasons and the word seven or the number seven work for that.

Kathleen (36:22): Nice. All right, there you go. He's drinking his own champagne. I don't like the phrase eating your own dog food.

Jeremy (36:30): So a dog would be jealous anyway. Yeah. You got to walk the walk.

Kathleen (36:32): I love it. So for the white paper, I will also put that link in the show notes. So if you're listening and you are in your car and you forget that link, just head to the show notes for this episode and that will be there and you can connect with Jeremy. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode or you liked what you heard, please consider taking a minute and heading to Apple podcasts and leaving the podcast a review. That is how we get found by other listeners. And if you know someone else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Jeremy. This was a lot of fun.

Jeremy (37:10): Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Accurately reporting on marketing attribution has historically been one of the biggest challenges facing marketers. Here's how one expert solved it.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Dreamdata founder Steffen Hedebrandt spent years working as a marketer trying to accurately measure the ROI of his marketing campaigns and investments. After struggling to find a software tool that could do it for him, he finally built one for himself. 

Today, Dreamdata helps marketers process data from multiple platforms to make sense of what's working, and which marketing efforts are driving results for the business. 

In this episode, he shares some of the key lessons he's learned, and what marketers need to know about marketing attribution reporting.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Dreamdata website
• Read the Dreamdata blog
• Connect with Steffen on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Steffen Hedebrant who is the co-founder of Dreamdata. Welcome Steffen.

Steffen (00:22): Thank you so much, Kathleen. I'm happy to be on a show that is about my, one of my very favorite topics as a marketer.

Kathleen (00:31): I am excited to talk with you because we're going to talk all things, data, and my listeners know that I am a huge marketing nerd and I love to nerd out on really specific marketing topics like this and data is, is one of my favorites. So before we get into it, I would love it. If you would tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, your story how you came to be a co-founder of Dreamdata and what Dreamdata itself does.

Steffen (01:01): Thank you very much, Kathleen. So ever since I left university I've been working with all things growth. You can see where it kind of, basically I started out doing doing a lot of SEO, then moved into more like regular business development that then like then I became a marketing leader and now I'm a co-founder of a company. So I've been doing a lot of different stuff that needed to grow. All of it has been B2B though. So when I'm, when I'm talking here today all of my experiences based out of a B2B world and not at the B2C world. So I think that's always important to, to know today. I'm a, I'm a, co-founder at at Dreamdata and we make a, a B2B revenue attribution platform. And we so this is kind of a big thing for us.

Steffen (02:01): We first of all, we do B2B attribution. You can say, and, you know, B2B is quite a lot more complex to track than, than the B2C scenario. You have multiple stakeholders and a deal. The deal takes three, six, 12 months. The deal is closed by a team effort from marketing to sales, to maybe customer success as well. So there's a ton of touches involved in this, and that's why we call ourselves a revenue attribution platform, because we heavily believe that all touches matter and not just the marketing touches here, like doing only marketing attribution would be seeing that the effort of the sales people was not important in the B2B deal. And we want to give the holistic picture, not just the contribution of marketing to it. So if I take a step back and why I find this really interesting, I was a marketing leader at a company called Airteam, which does school screen-sharing devices for schools and businesses.

Steffen (03:11): And I joined when there was like 15 people and left around a hundred and from zero ad spend to $150,000 a month. Initially I knew every time I pushed a button, I knew the effect on the other side, but as you go and you've picked all the low hanging fruits and that you're running on all channels, it gets pretty muddy, whether it makes sense to add in another 10,000 euros or 20,000 euros to the monthly ad spend. And that's because of this problem that does maybe three or four people involved in making a decision. So you might make your marketing investment on getting one person to your website. And then another person comes to validate the product. And then a third person comes to pay for the product. Then you can only see that you spent your money on like getting the new step to sign up or the demo call where in fact, all three people were actually part of the same journey. And that's why you want to kind of, you want to be able to actually match the spend you had on the first person with the revenue you make with the, on the last person who comes with the credit card.

Kathleen (04:20): This is so interesting. And, and the timing of this conversation is perfect because I was just having a debate with somebody on LinkedIn about marketing attribution. And he was rightfully saying that, you know, while everybody loves when marketing can report on like marketing sourced leads, like, Oh, we brought this person in, you know, there's also marketing influenced leads and, and, and marketing influence pipeline. And we were talking about how, at least in my experience, most C-suite people don't really care about marketing influenced pipeline because it seems like a vanity metric to them. Like, and I think it's because of a lack of really good data. I think they just think it's like a made up thing. Like, what do you mean you've influenced this pipeline? And there's also this natural tension between sales and marketing of like, who gets credit. And I feel like, I feel like so much of that almost like toxic attitude is, is, comes because we don't have really clear visibility into what's really happening.

Kathleen (05:36): It's like, you know, it's like marketing saying, okay, this lead, I get a hundred percent credit for, because I sourced it and sales saying, well, I get a hundred percent credit for this one because I sourced it. And there's like, it's very binary. There's no in-between. And, and that's precisely because of what, like you're describing, we don't have that crystal ball into like, what are all the touches, the journey with all the different people in the mix. And so I'm so interested in, in what you do, because it seems to me that that having that kind of data would open the door to maybe changing the conversation that happens around attribution within companies.

Steffen (06:15): Yeah. I have so many comments but you can say, so how I fundamental approach to attribution is let's get all the touches there before we talk about anything else, which means if you have this sales and marketing alignment conversation, then the first thing you can see is, look, this is all the touches that we have on this account. Then after that, you can then discuss, you can have an opinion about what was the important part that magazine actually started the journey or that sales finished the journey, but you got to have all the touches there. And I think what, what most B2B companies are struggling with is that they are the CRM system is dictating dictating what's going on or what, what, what is perceived as the true, if you can say. And the problem about that is that I think a lot of them have this original source field and that original source field can be modified constantly by whoever wants to know, move us this webinar.

Steffen (07:24): Or I met him at this event and kind of then like just the fact that you can constantly change it, according to your opinion is a big problem, but it's also a very narrow field into a, kind of a less, it's kind of a less touch before you converted the the person. But what goes ahead is all the kind of anonymous behavior until that you actually convert them into the first time, you know, what person. So that's kind of also what we, the way we approached this, this, that we, we give our clients, the, each we put on the website and that script starts to assign everybody who comes to the website with an anonymous ID. And then we record everything that the anonymous ID is doing. And then at the point of time where they identified himself, we get the consent to go back and look at the anonymous ID. So it's not just the last touch. He came from this retargeting thing. Then the first time we heard about him was this original source in the CRM.

Kathleen (08:22): And you're pulling data in from a lot of different platforms, correct? I mean, you're sitting outside of kind of the rest of the tech stack and, and aggregating all of that.

Steffen (08:34): Yeah. And this is where I probably couldn't, we, we could need your advice as well because we, we feel like it's kind of, we're kind of trying to make a new category where we kind of want to be the center to check in the middle. So we basically built data pipes to every tool that you would use. So sales would have their CRM marketing, some automation, customer success, a tool, maybe just a BDR tool that's as well. So you basically, we integrate all the data over to us. And then instead of Kathleen being five Kathleen's in each system, we would organize you to be one person that are present and have touched us in all the tools. And then we map you to the account. So every person, or we basically build a timeline. So if there's Kathleen and then Steffen from the same account, we'll just put every time there's a touch, we'll put it into the timeline.

Kathleen (09:24): So how are you, I mean, in principle, that sounds great, but I imagine that the potential for like duplication at the, at the individual contact level is there, I imagine trying to somehow, like the biggest nightmare I have in my many systems is trying to associate all the various contacts with the parent account and like capturing all of that. So how, how do you handle that across so many different systems?

Steffen (09:55): Yes. That's some of what you you pay us to run our algorithms to fix, we can fix it inside of whatever tool, but we will fix it on our end. So like, we will identify duplicates on persons, on accounts, et cetera. And then we have like a hierarchy of like rules that kind of run through and then fix this, these things done in this way.

Kathleen (10:24): And how does that work? Is it bi-directional so like when you clean it up I, you know, I assume like, let's say I have HubSpot and Salesforce and outreach and all these different tools then desk. And I have like my messes in each of those platforms. And then it goes into your platform, you clean it up, is there, do you then have a function where you can sort of like push it back out and correct.

Steffen (10:52): Right now we don't push it back out, but we, like, we fix the we, we fixed it within our, you can say data model and we also expose the data model to the client. So if they want to like use it to, to push back, then they can they can do that.

Kathleen (11:08): So what would be, obviously people are using your system for attribution, but I imagine they're also using it for other things, because it sounds like if you had insight into what's happening at an account level with all of your contacts in my head immediately goes to, this is so great for account based marketing. I could, I could do account level scoring. I could use it to run ad campaigns. What are all the different ways that people are using this?

Steffen (11:40): Yeah, so I can think are like main main users right now are the marketing, the attribution, and it's also the customer journey to get an insight of all the touches, but I use it myself when I do business development to sort of see, okay, now that account that I had been targeting, he actually came back to our website. Now it's a good time to reach out. And what I mean by that is that it's a great way to, for your reps to know who to work with and what to do, because you can see now that account is active in some sort of system, would you, and you can see what they've done. So you can kind of also figure out what you want to do next.

Steffen (12:27): Does that make sense? It can also be kind of figuring out your, your channel mix more like on a, like a leadership level because we, and if we do attribution all the way down to a specific campaign, but we also aggregate it up per channel and some channels play very, very, very different yeah. Roles. And if you look inside of Google analytics, you would only see kind of less touches, but there's actually a lot of channels that work well, if you're able to track from, like, where did they start campaigns that don't start campaigns? What would be some examples of that? Oh, that's a lot. But like, for like, let's say digital businesses, it's very typically a Google ads, for example, a search ads. I've never, I have to confess, I've never been able to make Google ads, looks profit, look profitable inside of Google ads.

Steffen (13:24): And the problem is that if, when we go back to the example that I gave you before, is that you do your investment on some sort of persona that has some sort of intent, but then some person comes with a credit card afterwards, which is to touch. You would see in the Google analytics and those sorts, but the spend was made at another place. So the spend actually starts a ton of journeys, but it's the first touch. It's not the last touch. That's so incredibly important to understand, because if there's a 10 X difference in revenue from first to last touch, then Europe probably heavily investing in a source. I'll give you another example. In my old company I, I had the beginning of 2018 or so I went to the CEO and said like, now we need to really heavily bet on content.

Steffen (14:17): And we went out and hired two writers, a designer, eh, a videographer, and then a manager for the team and for the first nine months or so, the only thing we had to show was, Hey, look, organic traffic is going off in Google analytics. And it's like, yeah, but you can't really pay salary with organic traffic increasing in in Google analytics. And that was actually the point of time when at the end of 2018 met my two co-founders who had just left their old jobs to, to build this company. And basically because we'd been using Segment, I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Kathleen (15:04): I haven't used it. I've heard of it, but I have not used it.

Steffen (15:09): It's a customer data platform. And because we had been using that, we were able to replay our data from like all the visitors from the website and what they've done, and whether they, they ended up becoming deals. And so, and what I could suddenly see is that basically with that technology that now co-founder of it, we were able to prove that the content actually started a ton of journeys, but it was not the last touch on those journeys to become a revenue. And then we started seeing specific clusters of content that were super valuable, but completely impossible to see inside of Google analytics.

Kathleen (15:54): And why is it so hard to see that in Google analytics?

Steffen (15:58): It's because this thing, as the example I gave before, like it's very, it's very rarely at the person with the credit card that does the research and what Google analytics shows you is like they came in from this source or this source, and they did this and this, and then, then your direct channel will be the channel with all the money. And that's a, you can't really scale that somebody comes directly to your website, they give, give you money. You need to kind of understand that full journey in order to sort of do more of what works and do less of what not doesn't work. And let's see if I can let's let's go on to just talk a little bit about concept then, because I think what I've, what I've seen is really that it's so important that you look at what you do, content that has a strong intent versus a big volume.

Steffen (16:54): When I look across all our B2B customers here at Dreamdata, all those articles that they've done, where they've done keyword research, and they have a lot of traffic on the keywords. So rarely that there's any revenue on those those articles, but very narrow articles with a lot of intent, like searching for an alternative to a competing product or that those sorts, they drive so much revenue out of very small chunks of traffic. And I think that's a mistake I've made so many times because you get so fascinated by this large amount of searches, but when did it arrive on your website? There's several intent behind it.

Kathleen (17:38): I'm so glad you said that because this is something that I have been preaching for a while. You know, and it was funny at the last company, I was, we made a very niche product and we, there was like almost no search traffic for it. It's a tiny, tiny amount of search traffic. And I think most people, had they done keyword research would have been like, it's totally not worth creating any content around this. But, you know, my thing is the 20 to 30 people who searched this every month are like the 20 to 30 people who will buy from us. And, Oh, by the way, at that company, we were selling to government. And so one sale could be like millions of dollars. So we did this whole content strategy, like a whole pillar content and topic, cluster strategy around this like extremely tiny, tiny niche topic.

Kathleen (18:35): And we, the great thing is we were very quickly able to own it. And Google, like we had all the top search results. In fact, we'd beat the national security agency and we beat Wikipedia for one of the topics and it worked. So I totally agree with you. Like, it's just funny to me that people do, they, they, they try to, like, as somebody once said, like eat the elephant in one bite, when, you know, there's just an easier way to do things. And it's to go after those tiny, tiny topics, when, you know, the intent is so good. So I love that you have data to back that up.

Steffen (19:09): That means also kind of, when you then pull them to your website, you don't pull a big audience that you have to pay a ton of money to retarget, but you know that the people who then come you'll want to pay a lot of money to, to get in front of it.

Kathleen (19:22): Yeah. It's worth it to spend a lot more, you know, per impression or per click, if you know that that's the right person. And it's funny because I had the same conversation. This is like making me think of a bunch of things. I had the same conversation recently. I was doing some training for my team on how to use LinkedIn really well. And we were talking about hashtags on LinkedIn and people, a lot of people don't even realize like how useful they can be. And one of the questions I got was yeah, but how much search volume do those hashtags have? And I was like, I don't even care if they're super relevant to us, even if there's like a tiny number of people searching, like those are the people that we want to see. So it's just, I I'm so on the same page with you about this,

Steffen (20:08): But it is kind of also when you compete for the big things, like you also most likely competing with some extremely powerful players that you can kind of, you can forget about outspending them because they have a ton more money than you have. So you want to go around those big guys in there and find the topics where, where they're weak.

Kathleen (20:27): That's exactly right. So now I want to know all the other cool things that you've discovered looking across your customer's data, because that's really interesting that you're able to surface those insights.

Steffen (20:39): I think yeah, it's also, you know, I'm a marketing leader by background myself. So being able to peek into these different kinds of machines, it's it's very interesting. One component that I would like to stress as well is it's a metric. We call it time to revenue, which means from the first person from an account who was anonymously on your website until the account is close to one, how long does that take? And it's significantly longer than most of our customers expect. So, so what companies don't do really, really well is that from the point of time where an account hands over an email, then the typical CRM sales machine, they know exactly how each stage, how long that takes. But they forget to actually add all the research time where customers are anonymous and actually like still trying to understand what you do. And it's part of the same journey. I think that's my point,

Kathleen (21:39): Right? That famous statistic, everybody cites that people get 75% of the way through their buying journey before they want to speak to a sales person or whatever that number is.

Steffen (21:48): Yeah. And so like the reason why this is so important is that a mistake I made a ton of times in my, in my old job was I was trying to judge my ad spend in the same month that I made the investment. Even though I know that the average journey is maybe six months or so, but it was all I had kind of say, okay, I spent this money and we made this money this month, but it's, it's a ridiculous thing to do because the number you pull up is vanity. So what were you able to prove with this is that we can help people actually understand when they can judge an experiment. If the average journey is like, let's say 160 days, you cannot do the confusion after 60 days or, or, or the sorts of that. And also kind of for us, marketing people the CEO cannot come in November and say, Hey, you need to impact the budget this year, because I actually know my time to revenue is 160 days or so. So if you want me to impact this year, we need to start that investment a lot earlier.

Kathleen (22:53): Oh, that's so interesting because that is a mistake I see people making a lot is trying pay-per-click ads and deciding within 30 days that they're not working. I can't tell you how many times. I used to own an agency. So I I've seen a lot of different companies, I've been, you know, in a lot of companies Google analytics. I'm now in house myself. But so often I see people try it for just a short amount of time, 30, 60 days. And then they conclude pay-per-click advertising doesn't work for me, you know?

Steffen (23:27): The problem as well to that is that it's not going to hurt the first month because you've sort of stuffed the funnel then like three months go by and you realize, Hey, we're not getting any SQLs now because it takes 90 days to become an SQL. For example.

Kathleen (23:46): You've got to know that it is so important to know what your leading indicators are for pipeline. And I mean, I feel like in sales that's a little bit easier cause I used to be in sales also. And, and I knew, for example, when I was in sales, that if I didn't do a certain number of like initial, we call them exploratory calls. If I didn't have enough exploratory calls in a given week two to three months later, I wasn't going to hit my target for closed one deals in marketing. We do a much poorer job of that. And I think because it's less straightforward and you know, harder to measure. So I think it's really interesting that you you're able to pinpoint that time to revenue and give marketers a better sense of like what they need to do now. And if they're not doing it, what the effect is going to be in that future timeframe.

Steffen (24:35): And if there's another thing to preach around, this is also that the granularity matters when you're looking at your pipeline, meaning that it's kind of vanity. Let's say you're judged on delivering a hundred MQLs per month. Then you don't just want to increase that a hundred MQLs to 150 MQLs. You want to look at who actually moved on and become, became a sales qualified lead. And then you want to granularly understand each of those, let's say 25 journeys. Where did they come from? Was it specific ads, specific content or something else? And then you want to focus on increasing the amount of SQLs or basically the accounts that kind of go all the way through your pipeline. You want to repeat the success of those campaigns and the new one is stop everything else almost because that's wasting your own money. And it's wasting also the salespeople's time,

Kathleen (25:37): For sure, like knowing which types of leads are the best and then turning up the dial on those.

Steffen (25:43): It's kind of, I think most sales people like say sales leaders and CEOs are saying, they look at the spreadsheet and say we had 50 SQLs. Give me 50 more. And then, then you just scale your whole spend to try to hit that overall number, but you just waste so much money if you have no, if you don't understand the kind of granularity that is driving the specific SQLs.

Kathleen (26:09): Well, and I think part of the problem, I was just talking about this with somebody. Part of the problem is that so many marketers are judged by the number of MQLs they're able to deliver. When in reality they should be judged on the same thing sales is, which is revenue at the end of the day. Revenue growth. Because the incentive, if you're judging marketing on MQLs, is for marketing to send over everything. And half of it could be garbage. I was having this conversation and we were talking about like, sometimes you, you know, marketing will send over a lead that's like, Oh, this person downloaded an ebook. Well, that is not a person who's ready to be called by sales. Like not at all. If you're being judged on revenue, you're more likely as a marketer to say, okay, this person only downloaded an ebook. Let's hold off. Let's make sure we're nurturing them really well and push them to become a hand raiser. And then once they've raised their hand, let's send them over. But absolutely reverse incentive in place the way I think a lot of companies incent marketers.

Steffen (27:15): Very much agree. I'd like to see, I think we will see, I would rephrase it. The thing I think we should see marketing wanting to go to SQL focus or like later stage pipeline focus. Of course there are some parts of the deals that they are not in control of, but you want to be tracking them onwards from MQL to like, are they actually really quality leads? The ones you sent through?

Kathleen (27:42): Yeah, for sure. And it's funny because we started this conversation talking about like sales and marketing, kind of sometimes being adversarial and wanting to take credit for things. And I think this, this almost comes full circle and brings us back to that because sales and marketing are both being judged based on revenue, as opposed to MQLs, SQLs, all of that. And if I also sort of believe that like compensation for both should be tied to revenue, if everybody's being judged on the same metric, then all of a sudden there's no need for anybody to claim credit. Everybody's getting credit based on the same number. So you, you row together as a team, right?

Steffen (28:24): Actually I have a few customers who trust our data so much that they're starting to assign compensation to the marketers based on the attribution models, like are marketing actually starting journeys that ended up converting like three months later. So that's radical, but they are judged on whether they actually just have these first touches on the deals that actually end up becoming like actual signed deals.

Kathleen (28:50): That's interesting. What about influence? Are they compensated on their influenced revenue too?

Steffen (28:56): Not that I think, but they're also pretty radical in the thinking, but I like that it's kind of the they're so data-driven that they want to reward the market system that sense.

Kathleen (29:06): See, it goes back to what I said in the beginning, which is that nobody in the C-suite cares about marketing influenced revenue. I just haven't found anybody yet. Marketers love it, but leaders don't.

Steffen (29:18): And I think this is also kind of, if you want to be taken seriously as a marketer, as a marketer, you want to, you need to have the narrative, you need to be able to explain why, what you do becomes revenue, because then it's, it's a lot harder to let you go during a pandemic. If you're actually delivering, like, let's say 70% of all deals marketing touched or something like that.

Kathleen (29:45): Well, I love that point that because heads of marketing, CMOs, VPs of marketing, have the shortest tenure of any position in the C-suite. And so anything that can help us justify our existence and keep us around longer is a good thing.

Steffen (30:03): So incredibly complex to be a marketing leader, because one day they're shouting leads and then your day it's like, we need to new have a new branding, a new position or something like that.

Kathleen (30:15): Everybody thinks they're a marketer, right?

Steffen (30:20): So also super different kind of, I think my strong side. So the more like numbers serving my marketing, which makes me struggle sometimes when it's about like communication and positioning and those sorts of things. So I guess did the challenges too. I can now I'm the, I'm the founder, but for markets this out that they really need to be explicit about what they're good at and what the CEOs can expect when they hire you as a marketing leader. Like I'm not going to do the perfect branding campaign. I'm looking to do stuff that drives revenue or, or the opposite,

Kathleen (30:56): Right. Or, or if I'm weak in this area, we're going to have to be ready to hire somebody. Good to support me. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're going to switch gears for a minute here cause we're coming up on our time and I want to make sure I have a chance to ask you a couple of questions that I always ask all of my guests. So the first one is, you know, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the gold standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days?

Steffen (31:29): So now by me being Danish I think I can throw a company out there that you haven't heard of before. Normally I would say like Intercom or Segment or something like that who do superior content, but there's a Danish company called Sleeknote where I'm a huge fan of their continent, their CMO is called Emil. And they've produced kind of the thorough content that like makes you feel bad about to continue to do it yourself. So precise and so like dense and rich and yeah. Check out their blog. I think that's fantastic.

Kathleen (32:09): I'll definitely check that out. And I always love when I get answers to that question and it's a company I haven't heard of before. So thank you for bringing Sleeknote to my attention. Second question is, digital marketing changes so quickly and I always hear marketers saying that one of their biggest challenges, it's so hard to keep up with everything. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and, and stay on the cutting edge of everything with digital marketing?

Steffen (32:37): I think for me, it's the, the newsletter from growthhackers.com, which is kind of a weekly digest of the top posts in there. I think nowadays, it's the five best posts that they share. It's Monday evening when it comes out. And I think that's the most kind of cutting edge stuff that I see. And I think I've reached, I don't read many blog posts anymore because I've reached the kind of an experience level where I know that the basic tactics of most of the stuff, but in there I still like get "Oh, that I haven't seen before. And I want to implement that ASAP."

Kathleen (33:18): Yeah. I'm going to have to take a look at that. I have, I switched roles recently. And so my email changed and I haven't been getting the growth hackers emails, but it is good stuff. And you're right. Like when you reach a certain point in your career, it becomes harder to find content that makes you go like, wow, that's really cool. I didn't know that.

Steffen (33:37): So I've also like recently switched from like being a marketing leader to like marketing and sales leader. So like now I'm back to reading books, like High Quality Prospecting, Predictable Revenue and all that kind of stuff. So within sales, I feel I still have a lot, a lot of stuff to catch on. So there I'm actually willing to, to open the books again, but within marketing, I feel pretty comfortable about a bunch of stuff.

Kathleen (34:04): That's great. Well, growth hackers is a good one. All right. If somebody is listening and they want to learn more about Dreamdata or they want to connect with you online, they might have a question, what's the best way for them to do that?

Steffen (34:16): I think LinkedIn is where I'm the most active. I read everything on Twitter, but just reach out on LinkedIn. That's, that's a good spot. And the marketing innovation that we do, you can read on the Dreamdata.io blog to follow that I put out pieces there once in a while as well.

Kathleen (34:35): Fantastic. And I'll put links to all of that in the show notes. So head there if you want to check out the Dreamdata website and blog, or if you want to connect with Steffen on LinkedIn. And if you're listening and you learned something new or you enjoyed this episode, consider heading to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review, that's how other people hear about us. And if you know somebody who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much Steffen. This was a lot of fun.

Steffen (35:11): It was a big pleasure to be here. Thank you, Kathleen.

How is ABM software provider Demandbase beating its own growth projections despite uncertainty relating to COVID?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Demandbase CMO Peter Isaacson shares the story of the company's growth, from the creation of the account-based marketing category, to how they're pivoting during COVID. He explains how his team shifted gears when the COVID pandemic hit and why the changes they've made have them beating their own growth projections.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Demandbase website
• Connect with Peter on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Peter Isaacson, who is the CMO at Demandbase. Welcome to the podcast, Peter.

Peter (00:25): Thanks, Kathleen. Thrilled to be here.

Kathleen (00:27): Yeah. I'm excited to talk with you. You guys have had a phenomenal year and Demandbase has had a pretty impressive growth trajectory in general. So I'm, I'm looking forward to digging into what the the secret sauce is behind your success there. But before we do that maybe you could take a minute and for my guests who might not be very familiar with other you or Demandbase, just talk, talk a little bit about your story, who you are, how you got to where you are today and what the company does.

Peter (00:55): Sounds good. So buckle in, I'm assuming I've got 40, 45 minutes to tell this story that a long career now I've, so I got my start in advertising, did that for several years in New York, moved out number of years at Adobe put together enough kind of areas of responsibility there that it gave me the ability to step up and become a head of marketing. And I've held a few different CMO positions. Most recently I was COO at a dot com healthcare IT company called Castlight Health. We were actually customers of Demandbase about seven years ago. That got me introduced to Chris Gola, who was the founder and at the time CEO of Demandbase. Got to talking to Chris, just love the space that they were in love, the market opportunity and, and, you know, as important as anything else, maybe more important, like got along famously with Chris and decided to make the move over to become CMO with Demandbase. That was a little over six and a half years ago. Been a phenomenal ride. We're the leaders in account-based marketing. Probably one of the high points in my career was helping identify ABM as a category that we wanted to fully develop and, and getting that off the ground. And now Demandbase really offers a comprehensive platform for all aspects of account based marketing from identifying the right accounts to go after, to engaging with them and measuring the results all the way through your programs.

Kathleen (02:37): I love your story. And I, because I always love hearing when somebody has been a customer of a SaaS product, and then, and then they go on to be, you know, the head of marketing. I've had one or two other guests that have come into their roles that way. And I always just think that's such a great testament to, you know, the actual quality of the product itself, because it really does take a lot as a customer to say, I want to go work for that company and help them grow. So that's,

Peter (03:03): Yeah, it was, it was a great, it was a great transition. And as you said, it was part of my go-to narrative during the first couple of years of you know, meeting customers and prospects and stuff, just talking to them about the fact that I was a customer to one.

Kathleen (03:17): Yeah. There's no better testament to the quality of it than, than that really. So you said something that also really struck me and that was one of the highlights of your career was really getting to create the category of account-based marketing. And while this whole interview is not going to surround category creation, it certainly could. But I did want to just say that I that's so, so interesting to me and that that's how you and I originally connected cause I was picking your brain on category creation because so many marketers talk about doing it. And so few have actually done it. And, and I do want to ask you a few things about that. Cause I think I would be remiss if we didn't, if we didn't touch on that as part of this interview when did that process start? When did you realize you thought you had a new category?

Peter (04:06): Well, it wasn't so much. We thought we had a new category. The process started when we decided that we needed a new category. And really the basis for it was when I, when I joined Demandbase and talked to Chris and it wasn't some, you know, individual epiphany that Peter Isaacson alone had. Chris was, you know, thinking about this before I joined. But I think the recognition was that we had a really interesting you know, technology offering that took about three or four minutes to explain. And the reason it took three or four minutes to explain was there was no context for it. It was kind of a it's demand gen, but it, you know, focuses on the byte accounts. And we were able to identify the accounts and debit and you know, for the early adopters, that was great.

Peter (04:57): Like they were on the edge of their seats and wow, I can't do this any place else. And they were excited about it, but we knew absolutely that a three or four minute pitch was about three and a half minutes too long. And we needed to give context and categories, give companies and marketers individual's context that helps them frame what your offering is. And that's what led us to understand that we really needed, there was no category we could attach ourselves to necessarily that would be appropriate. So we needed to create our own. Once we decided that we started looking around at, you know, do we invent some, you know, new name, you know that no one's ever heard of. And we decided, you know, there was you know, ITSMA gets credit for this, but there was this term account-based marketing that had been developed really back in 2003 or so. But it was, it was pretty narrowly focused. Not many people used it, not many people talk about it, but we latched onto that and really attach meaning to it, defined it in the way that made sense for us. And, you know, then it just completely took off. And in ways that I'm happy to talk about that. I'll leave that to you on, on where you want the conversation to go.

Kathleen (06:20): When did, when did you first have that aha moment about the category?

Peter (06:24): You know, it's interesting. I I went and presented at a conference called Predict, which I think was in the late summer of 2014 and Doug Campbell John who was the CEO of a predictive company. And I'm drawing a blank on it right now, but he was his company. It was probably 60 or 70 people, a hundred people. And they put on a conference called Predict. I went and did a presentation that was focused on account-based marketing. And the, the reaction from the hundred people that were in the audience was so immediate and overwhelming. I literally went back into the office and ABM was kind of a pillar that we were talking about. I was like, look no further. We have our category and we are going to double, triple and quadruple down on this. And that was really what got it going kind of this recognition that there was a spark there that as long as we fan the flames was going to develop into something. Now you also, you got to convince analysts that it's important. You got to convince the press that, you know, they should write about it. And you got to get a little lucky and have competitors come in and, and fight over it. And all of those things.

Kathleen (07:43): That's amazing. So when you got home, you said we've got to double, triple down on it. What did that look like? I mean, is that you guys just creating a lot of content around what ABM is using the terminology consistently? Were there events, how did you, how did you move forward from there?

Peter (08:00): Yeah, I mean, I, you know, when I say that, you know, you need analysts to cover it, journalists, to write about it customers to want it competitors to compete over it. Those are kind of the four legs of category creation. As I look at it, you really need to figure out how you generate all four of those. Right? So we specifically built out our content, which included pitch decks and other things, and started going out to analysts and selling them on the idea of an account-based approach. And account-based marketing as the category that was going to transform kind of old-school demand gen that had existed for the last 10 or 15 years. They knew that, you know, demand gen had, as it was executed, had some fundamental flaws, which were starting to show over time. So they were buying into it. We went out and pitched the story to press, they started taking it in. And then as you said, thought leadership kind of, we started actually creating kind of, this is how you ABM content. I, and really kind of getting out there and saying, this is what ABM is. Here's how you define it. Here's why it's important. And here's how you execute it.

Kathleen (09:14): Great. And, and so fast forward that started in 2014. And I think, you know, it's interesting because I owned a marketing agency around that time. And I remember the first time I heard somebody use the term account based marketing and it was, it was on a sales call. I was talking to a prospect who was from a B2B technology company and they were looking at hiring us to help them with, it was an inbound marketing agency. And so you know, we were talking about demand gen just as you might think. And, and the question was, well, how does this fit in with an account-based marketing approach? And I'm literally on the call going, Oh, I've got to Google that right now to that question. And then it was just funny. Cause it was like, as soon as I heard that term for the very first time, then I just started hearing it all the time everywhere. It was weird. It was like, it came out of nowhere. And I think that was around 2015, 2016. If I recall, so it's just, it's funny from, from my perspective, I guess, being in the, in the audience for it, how it, like, it seemed to be something you never heard of it. And then it was like all over the place over there.

Peter (10:22): Yeah. Once the bottle came on with the, you know, the top came off the bottle, it, it just exploded. It really was amazing how quickly it caught fire. And again, it takes a certain amount of luck and timing for category creation. Don't let anyone, don't let someone's outside ego tell you that, you know, it was all just, you know, hard work and, you know anything else that like anything, it takes a little bit of luck and our timing was perfect. We preceded by about a year or so Terminus coming into the market and starting to talk about themselves as an account-based platform. Engagio came in at around the same time. Eventually a couple of other players and suddenly everything like we, at one point were tracking 60 companies that were using ABM as the way they were positioning their company, whether they had actual ABM technology or not 60 companies at one time were positioning themselves as ABM providers. It was just incredible how quickly it came.

Kathleen (11:22): I mean, and, and side note, that's so crazy that those companies weren't all around like five, six years ago, it doesn't seem like that long ago. And so much has changed in the market. That's wild. As soon as you said the year, I was like, wait, that all wasn't that wasn't a thing back then, but it wasn't, that's nuts. Well, what I really want to talk to you about is the last year or two at Demandbase, because you obviously, it's been, it's been an interesting kind of past five or six years since you've arrived. You had the category, it really took off. But then, you know, as a marketer, I always think like this when the sexy stuff is, is sort of the boxes checked on that there's the real meat and potatoes of the marketing work and you still have to achieve really strong growth for a company, especially if you're a venture backed. If you, you know, if you're in the kind of space you're in. So talk to me a little bit about what you've been doing at demand-based in the last year, year and a half to really continue to fuel your growth.

Peter (12:26): Yeah, so I mean like any company as you're growing, you hit different stages of growth. And you know, we hit 2021 was set up to be a very difficult stage for everyone, including us you know, once the pandemic hit and like for a lot of reasons which I can go into I just 20, 21 has turned out to be a phenomenal year for Demandbase, I think culturally we've kind of pivoted a bit and become kind of far more aggressive you know, put, you know holding each other a little bit more accountable than than we had in the past. And, and, and some things like that, but also pivoting pretty quickly to kind of address the new reality that existed within the macro economy and the micro economy as it related to, to Demandbase in our business.

Kathleen (13:31): And, and how big is your marketing team now?

Peter (13:35): We've got about 23 folks on it, 23, 24.

Kathleen (13:39): Okay. And what does that, how does that break out in terms of areas of focus?

Peter (13:44): So we've got, you know, it's pretty traditional, it goes across it goes across corporate communications digital marketing demand, gen customer marketing into marketing ops and product marketing now actually with the Engagio acquisition product marketing now technically reports into through John Miller and the product team. But they've always been aligned with marketing and, and still kind of share a, kind of a close relationship with us on that.

Kathleen (14:24): So, and you mentioned that the pandemic, you know, none of us could have foreseen that that was coming. And I, I don't know if you're anything like me. I had funny enough just joined a new company last January, and I think it was like, I joined January 13th and by January, by February 10th, I had come up with like my 30, 60, 90 day marketing plan. And then I remember within like three weeks of that, I had to just toss it all out the window because I, it was a very small startup, it's a different company and and all of their leads were coming in through events. And so until we could get a real good inbound engine going, we had a lot of events we were focused on and then it was like, okay, we're not doing that anymore. So I'm, I'm, I'd love to hear from you. What were you all planning prior to the pandemic? And then how did you make that shift? Because it's obviously, you've obviously managed to make lemonade out of lemons.

Peter (15:18): Yeah. So, I mean, we had gone through our planning process. We were kind of executing the plan and you know, going along happily hearing about this thing called COVID-19, but you know, it wasn't it wasn't a big issue. And certainly in late January, early February our big event each year is the ABM innovation summit which was really the, the only big ABM focused event that was out on the market. And we typically had, you know, over a thousand marketers and sales folks attending. And it was for this year for 2020 was scheduled for, I think March 13th, March 13th and 14th, or March 12th and 13th. We were a week and a half away from it. Which means that, you know, 90%, 95% of the work had already been done everything, you know, we were doing the final kind of prep for it and, you know, slides and stuff like that.

Peter (16:17): And we made the gut wrenching decision that we were going to have to cancel it. I'll never forget it. We made the decision, I think, on a Friday and it was a serious toss up. We weren't sure we were doing the right thing, but we decided to go ahead and cancel it. And I'm thinking kind of, you know, questioning ourselves for the next 24 hours within 48 or 72 hours. It was so clear that there was no way we were going to hold a conference and events that just kind of unfolded that quickly. As you probably remember, it was just went from like a, Hey, I think we could still do an event and pull this off to, Oh my God, there's no way, we're no way we're doing this. And it w it was, it was, you know, a gut punch to the, to the marketing team.

Peter (17:10): And I, you know, I don't think I've ever been prouder of the marketing team when kind of collectively everyone did this disappointed, exhale, like, ah, we're not going to be able to put on our event that we've been working so hard on for the last four or five months to okay, what's next. And the pivot that I think Demandbase made, but also a lot of other companies was just extraordinary kind of identifying like, okay, we're, you know, it's going to be a hundred percent digital are, may, you know, some of our main tactics like events are off the table, our field events, our activities, our dinners, things like are gone. What's going to make up the, you know, fill the gaps. So we started doing everything from you know, doubling down on our own advertising investment which we were already investing heavily in, but put more money into, and then you know, webinars, true virtual events converted the ABM innovation summit to to a virtual road show. And then started doing things like you know, converting our direct mail and things that we had done like virtual or excuse me field events into virtual wine tastings, right? Sending out a bottle of wine to 50 prospects and customers and doing virtual tasting. So things just happened so quickly that it was extraordinary and the results were fabulous. I mean, we really especially during those early days, we just didn't skip a beat.

Kathleen (18:45): Wow. I mean, kudos to your marketing team because a little over a year ago I was working at another company where we put on an annual conference. And so I've definitely I experienced firsthand how grueling it is to, to do that. And the work that goes in and just the, especially in the last few months leading up to it and to have to make that decision so close to the date of it. I, I can't even imagine. But it absolutely sounds like it was the right decision to make.

Peter (19:19): It was the right decision to make, but as, as you know putting these on Kathleen, like about a week and a half before, you're at that point where you're wondering yourself, is this all worth it? And it's the payoff of the event itself where you're totally energized and it's a company event at, at your process. Everyone loves it. And so, you know, inevitably it's like the highlight of the year and, and you know, that that's coming, like, that's what gets you through. And the fact that like you stopped just before and you don't get the pay off is what's really kind of just general.

Kathleen (19:54): Yeah. I've always felt like events were a little bit like that time period. You described as a little bit like the last few weeks of being pregnant when you're like any day now, any day, now it could be over and then you have your baby and you're thrilled and happy, and it's wonderful. And you forget that the last few weeks of being pregnant are not any fun at all. So

Peter (20:17): Literally my so sorry, we don't go. I have to go down to too far down the pregnancy path. I've never been pregnant myself obviously, but I did quote something that my wife said after her as she was heading in with her second our second kid was the, you have to be so uncomfortable by eight and a half months pregnant to want to go knowing what you're going to go through to want to go through that just for it to end. So it's kind of like I, yeah. Okay. Yep.

Kathleen (20:49): Yep. And then much like pregnancy events is the same way you say, Oh, I never want to do that again. That was so much work. And then your brain has a magical way of wiping all the hard parts away and making you think, do it again next year or whatever.

Peter (21:02): So, so true. But

Kathleen (21:03): As you say, like, I won't, I won't belabor ha no pun intended the pregnancy analogy, but yeah, that's amazing. One of the things I'm dying to ask you is have you continue doing those sorts of virtual events and virtual, what would have been field events and have you seen any change in in participation in the results you're getting? Because I hear so many marketing leaders talk about the fatigue that's kind of started to set in with virtual events.

Peter (21:34): Yeah. it absolutely has without a doubt. So it's just, it's funny how just digressing for a moment, like how many things have changed so quickly during this COVID period. It just seems like everything has been compressed and trends that usually, you know, evolve over a couple of years have happened like in, in seemingly a couple of weeks. Right. And, and just as a digression, I think, think back to the, during the very first days of the pandemic, every, you know, every marketer was telling the rest of the HR team and sales team, like you've got to show empathy, like don't just jump into a sales kind of thing. And, you know, boom, I want to sell you this. Every marketer, you know, was saying like, you've got to show empathy, you've got to address the situation like in these unprecedented times that, that, that, that, that we're all like, yeah, well, you know, Hey, I understand that the times are tough. And there was like two sentences of like empathy. And after about two and a half weeks, people were thinking like, if someone begins an email with these are unprecedented times, I'm going to scream. And like, we immediately pivoted as like, stop trying to show fake empathy. Like those things

Kathleen (22:54): That became the punchline.

Peter (22:56): It became the punchline, but it happened in like a matter of a couple of weeks. It seemed, it was just, it was just amazing. So anyway, getting back to your question. Yeah, there absolutely was fatigue in a way that, you know, usually develops over a couple of years, happened in a couple of months, like suddenly at first and during the pandemic, we were blowing away all numbers for webinars and virtual events and things like that. Just like, I think a lot of companies were, as people suddenly found themselves with a little bit of extra free time, they were looking for opportunities for professional development. They were looking for opportunities to replay some of the events and conferences that they had been to that provided them an outlet for professional development and things like, and, you know, the numbers were just extraordinary. And then, you know, by August it was kind of like, wow, the numbers just started falling off a cliff.

Peter (23:55): And so we've definitely seen it. What's, you know, what's now required is you've just got to get much better about what your, the content that you're providing, the length of time you're providing it, the, you know, the combination of, you know, tape versus live, things like that. You've just got to get much more creative in terms of what you're doing and how you're doing it. So what are you finding is working right now? So we've, we've gone to fewer webinars, right? We were kind of loading up on them at the beginning and now we're kind of really dialing back on what we're, what we're looking at is really doing kind of more tent pole events that have high value, great content outside speakers with some things that, you know, folks want to hear and trying to mix it up live and and recorded so that it feels a little bit more spontaneous and aligning our message around that rather than a lot of little things or, and making sure that the big things aren't like full day sieges where, you know you're, you're hoping that people will spend eight hours looking at a zoom and, you know, that's not happening anymore.

Kathleen (25:16): No way. I mean, I can only speak from my personal experience that I, I sign up for lots of those things, but if you ask me how many I actually go to it's the zero I, I look at the wall of, of you know, things on my calendar, like of virtual sessions. I just think who has time to say, I mean, the only reason it works in person is because you're literally physically removed from your office. And even then I think people sit in conference halls and they're checking their work email, and they're on their laptops and they're multitasking anyway. But, but the difference is there's an expectation that changes when you're physically gone that isn't present, I think when you're attending something virtually. So,

Peter (25:59): Yeah, I agree. I think I totally agree. And that's, that's just made it more and more challenging. I think. So what we saw were quite honestly, this is, it worked at the beginning, but it's working probably even better now is high value kind of curated smaller opportunities. And I mentioned virtual wine tasting that has, that's been a home run for us just because it's something special. It's something at the end of the day, it involves alcohol in any way. Everyone's using that more and more as a crush these days, that through challenging times but it also provides kind of some fun networking opportunities. And, you know, it's not something that works with a crowd of 200 or 300, but it works super well with a crowd of 50 when you can, you know, do some breakouts, meet some new people, kind of over a glass of wine, talk about, and then come back together, share your experiences and do stuff like that. Those types of more curated high value experiences have proven to have some staying power and are the things that folks are still willing to invest time in.

Kathleen (27:15): And of course the question I always hear from marketers, when we talk about things like that is, you know, how are you handling the fact that when you send, for example, that wine to your participant, that you're sending it to their home address in many cases like that's one of the interesting things that I've seen really change about ABM in the last year was it used to be, you know, great, we'll do like a dimensional mailing with something really cool to invite somebody to the event or what have you. And we can always send it to their office. And and you know, it's, it's just not the case anymore. So how is your team handling that?

Peter (27:49): Yeah, I mean, again, for high value you know opportunities folks are, you know, more than willing to give their their home address, kind of understanding that if you send something to my office, I'm probably not going to get it until next March. There are also you know, Sendoso, PFL, those guys have, you know, they recognize that the stuff that the office is just not working, so they've been building their database and providing kind of opportunities to kind of get the home addresses and provide that. So we've relied partly on our own outreach and partly you know, on vendors that are that have platforms.

Kathleen (28:32): Nice. And then as you think about your, your 2021 planning, I mean, obviously none of us has a crystal ball. We have no idea when, you know, when, or if the world will ever return to what we used to think of as normal. But how are you applying kind of the experience you've had this year and the lessons learned to what's in your 2021 plan?

Peter (28:54): Yeah, I mean, our one, our going in assumption is that that we're not going back to where it was anytime soon. I mean, even with the vaccine coming in, you know, Q1 midway through, you know, and getting through the population mid Q2 I'm not sure the CDC thinks in quarters like we do, but that's how I'm thinking about it. But we just don't think any of that's going to return for, you know, not in 2021, maybe not in 2022. So everything that we're doing is, is virtual. I think what's benefited Demandbase quite frankly is, is two things really the reason that we've done quite well this year one account-based marketing just makes intuitive intellectual sense when you're dealing with scarce resources, because it's all about focusing your dollars on the stuff that's really going to move the needle and, and drive your business forward.

Peter (29:54): So there's been a lot of like, yes, I need to focus and account-based marketing as a way to focus. The other thing that's happened is the CEO of of Microsoft kind of now famously earlier in the summer said two years of digital transformation have now taken place in the, in the last two months. And all these companies that we're talking about, digital transformation have accelerated it. And at the beginning, I had all kinds of conversations about what Demandbase offered, but also just about digital transformation, writ large with with customers. So, you know, some, some, especially some very large companies that were really focused on, on digital transformation have made that switch. So right now our 21, 2021 planning is all about taking advantage of that digital transformation about like having, you know, companies and engaging with them on now that your digital first enterprise or mid-market company, how you actually, you know, execute that in a way that's going to be very focused around your account. So you know, our, our account-based advertising plays a huge role in that the ability to personalize your website plays a huge role in that, and then how you align your sales and marketing teams around kind of data and insights that they can both act on is the other part of that. And that's what we're really focused on promoting

Kathleen (31:25): And that approach to kind of that go to market approach. What is that something that's really only accessible for larger companies, or can any company take that approach and maybe do it in a more scrappy way? Like, where's that where's that cutoff line?

Peter (31:41): Well, I see account based marketing as a, as a strategy is accessible to every company, right? No matter how small you are even if you're 10 folks, like it's probably even more important to actually focus on the accounts that are really going to start establishing the beachhead in your business. That doesn't mean that you need a platform like Demandbase, you don't, and we wouldn't sell it to a company that had 10 people because you just wouldn't take advantage of all there was to offer. But account-based marketing as a strategy is accessible to all it's the companies that, you know, start reaching a hundred employees and, you know, maybe 25, 30 million and in revenue where kind of really developing or investing in an account-based platform starts to really make sense for them. And they can start really getting kind of full value from it.

Kathleen (32:38): Great. Well, it'll, it, it will be interesting next year to see what happens with events. I mean, I've heard a lot of back and forth from some people saying in person events are coming back and my my personal take on it is even if they do, I think a lot of people are going to have PTSD honestly, and, and be too afraid to, you know, I think even when some people are vaccinated, it's going to be, it's going to be a muscle. We haven't flexed in a long time. And so I certainly don't see virtual events going anywhere. I think the challenge is going to be, how do we keep it engaging? How do we you know, continue to innovate in a way that people show up and participate. And it sounds like those smaller format events are, are definitely the way to go. I was interested that you said that your wine tasting is that you have like 50 people there, because that even almost seemed large to me. So how do you, how do you make an event, a virtual event with 50 people still seem intimate?

Peter (33:33): You so you do breakouts. You basically come together. So we've kind of got the formula down now where we've we come together, there's a host, right? So sometimes it's me, sometimes it's someone on my team. Sometimes it's a a sales leader, but there's a host that welcomes everyone kind of gets the ball rolling. Usually tees up a topic or two that we'd like to kind of cover. And we also mix it in with kind of a couple of, you know, icebreaker types of things like, you know you know, what are you binge watching now? And some things like that, but we usually do kind of three breakouts where we get into breakout rooms of five people, or so four people, we do that for like seven minutes and we come back as a group and then we just invite, you know, Hey, what do people say about binge-watching? What did what's, you know, the best superpower that you heard, things like that. And some people are on chat. Some people are, you know, very vocal and, you know, expressing, and it becomes a bit of a free for all, but a fun free for all,

Kathleen (34:39): For a few drinks,

Peter (34:40): A couple of glasses of wine, everyone's feeling pretty good and everything. So the key is kind of breaking it out, just like, you know, if you've done, you know, bigger planning meetings, things like that, you've got to break out, come back together, break out, come back together. That format has worked super well.

Kathleen (34:58): And do you generally find, I mean, let me rephrase that in my experience, when I've gone to those kinds of events, the ones that I've enjoyed the most have had very small amounts of like presenting slash selling and very large amounts of more just social time. How do you generally kind of land on that balance?

Peter (35:17): So it's a slide free environment, 100%. So we, don't kind of, Hey, now that you've got your wine, settle back in and now, you know, let me drone on about like seven pitch deck slides that I want to take you through. So we never do that. It's usually just, you know, an, a two sentence opening, like, you know, we got a lot of customers got a lot of prospects that anyway, just a level set, like Demandbase, here's what we do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then usually it's teeing up kind of one, or maybe two areas to discuss around account based marketing. And it's, you know, let's talk about the biggest challenges you have with sales and marketing alignment, right? So it's not about Demandbase. It's more about your challenges as marketer that you're facing and let's have a conversation about that. And, you know, if Demandbase comes up in that fine, if it doesn't, that's fine too. We were really just kind of teeing up challenges that that sales and marketing folks have.

Kathleen (36:16): I love that then all these questions are totally selfish because I'm going to be doing some events like that next year or so I may or may not be taking a lot of notes as you talk. No, that's great. Thank you for sharing all that detail. I mean, I could ask you questions about this all day, but we don't have all day. So I want to shift gears for a minute and there's two questions I always ask my guests. And I'm very curious to hear what you have to say. The first one is, you know, the podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really kind of setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?

Peter (36:53): Yeah, I mean, I, so when I think of inbound, I'm going to transition it to demand gen, which transitions to ABM. So I think about it as like an account-based marker. So I'm going to, I'm going to change the frame of reference if you, if you're okay with that. You know what, I've I've been blessed to work with three outstanding heads of what we call demand gen or growth marketing, but they're really kind of focused on ABM. And the first one that I worked with at Demandbase, Sherry Johnson, she's gone on and and is now a consultant doing great work. Second was Lisa Ames. She's gone on and is doing unbelievable things. And Brian Finnerty is our current who has been phenomenal in his role. All three of those are absolute pros and, and know so much about about account-based marketing. Probably the person that knows most about it was actually co-authored the book that I wrote and did a lot of the heavy lifting. And that's Jessica Fewless who is now working at Inverta partners as a consultant. So these folks have gone on and are now kind of teaching other people how to, how to do ABM.

Kathleen (38:05): Those are all new names for me. So I'm definitely looking forward to checking them out. And, and for anyone listening, I'll make sure to put links to their LinkedIn profiles in the show notes. Second question. A lot of the marketers I talk to say that their biggest challenge is just keeping pace with how quickly the world of digital marketing changes and staying on top of all of that. How do you personally stay educated?

Peter (38:28): But it's a great question because, you know, going to conferences, you kind of, you know, absorbed through your you know, what was going on and, and things like that. And you were always able to pop into different things. Right now, what has been most helpful to me have been the CMO kind of zoom networking things that I'm able to engage in. You know, you and I are part of Revenue Collective you know, but other other folks through nicer has put on some CMO networking things. And there have been others that I've participated in across this past year in particular. Those have been the most useful for me. I mean, I'm, I'm paying attention to tech crunch and Diginomica and, you know, things like that. And they're always useful for kind of what's going on with product launches and M&A, and things like that, but what marketers are doing, I get the most out of my CMO networks.

Kathleen (39:29): It's interesting. I feel the same way. I used to listen to a lot of podcasts and now that I'm not commuting anymore, I've, I've really reduced that dramatically. And, and similarly, my kind of networks of other marketing leaders have replaced that. So that is, I wonder if there's like a more macro trend going on with the emergence of, of closed groups. I mean, there always have been close groups, but I wonder if it's really kind of like you described earlier, how trends have accelerated dramatically this year. I wonder if that's one of them.

Peter (39:58): Yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. I, yeah, I used to be much more in tune with podcasts now and that I'm not commuting. It's just, I don't have any time during the day, and it's very difficult for me to, you know, go through 10 hours or 11 hours and then say, I want to hop on a, you know, B2B podcasts.

Kathleen (40:17): That does not sound like my idea of weekend fun.

Kathleen (40:22): Well, great. So if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about Demandbase, or they have a question for you, what is the best way for them to connect with you online?

Peter (40:32): Sure. So you know certainly our website is great. But if you want to connect with me personally find me on LinkedIn. Love to chat with you that way.

Kathleen (40:45): And again, I'll put those links in the show notes. So if you want to learn more about Peter or about Demandbase, head to the show notes, and you can hit those links. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new head over to Apple podcasts, or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. That's how other folks find out about us. And of course, if you know somebody else doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Peter.

Peter (41:18): Thank you, Kathleen. This was fun.

CMOs have the shortest tenure of any C-suite leadership role. Christina Del Villar says that's because they don't take the time to build a marketing map of influence.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Christina Del Villar talks about why it's so important for marketing leaders to be effective internal communicators within their own companies and how building a 'marketing map of influence' can be a game changer when it comes to getting things done and increasing tenure.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And my guest today is Christina Del Villar, who is a Silicon Valley marketing expert with 25 years of experience. She's an author, she's a board advisor, she teaches. I'm sure she does 20 other things, but we're going to have her tell us in her own words. Welcome Christina.

Christina (00:50): Thank you. Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So I have been a marketing executive in Silicon Valley for the past 25 years, mostly focused on go to market strategy and overall marketing strategy. And in my past, my career has mostly been focused on B2B organizations in that space. And I've worked with about 30 startups over the years, including Bill.com, which went public last year just about this time, as well as some really established companies like Oracle and Autodesk and Wells Fargo. And basically, you know, I was lucky enough to be in Silicon Valley, but one of the things that, that I learned right away was that I'm not that big idea person. I'm not the person that's going to come up with the next big thing or this huge paradigm shifting type product, but where my strengths were.

Christina (01:38): And this is what I realized was in developing that strategy, the processes, the programs, the teams, everything that's needed to execute and implement their go-to-market strategy. So that was kind of a learning lesson for me, really understanding where I fit in. And I've really embraced that over the years and really like it. The other thing that came to that I came to understand really quickly was that marketing in general is just, it's a very misunderstood I'm sure you've experienced this many times where people really don't know what it is that we do, what we bring to the table. A lot of people just think we, you know, make t-shirts and touch keys and tweet and have fun all day long and they don't really get the concept of, of the marketing strategy, both inbound and outbound. And, and so it was this really hard as a marketer and working on strategy to help people understand both externally my executives leaders outside boards that we discuss things with and internally to my own teams.

Christina (02:35): And, and what I found was that we're just, we're kind of, kind of bad at marketing ourselves, right? And we're supposed to market the marketer and we're just not, not very good at that. So over the years, what I did was basically created a framework and a methodology that would help marketing professionals work smarter and more efficiently all while having greater impact, but taking that a step further, I really wanted them to be able to articulate the value, add that they have not just in a marketing organization or their team, but to the overall corporate strategy as well. And so that was really key to what I'm, what I basically spent the last six months doing is developing writing the book that talks about this and developing some courses that will help people do that. And then over my career, I've just sort of been doing it ad hoc, not really recognizing it as a framework or putting it in, in that kind of a framework that's easy to understand and implement.

Christina (03:22): And so that's basically what, what I've been doing. And I think it's really important for people to understand that you, you can, you can build a great strategy. You can have a great plan, you can execute seamlessly, but if you then don't take those results and share them in such a way that are meaningful to your audience. And that kind of gets back to the market, the market, the marketing person then it's just kind of, it's meaningless, right? Like a CEO really doesn't care. How many MQLs do you bring in, but they want to know is how much revenue you brought in. So it's really just a matter of taking all that information and figuring out what those results look like, and then sharing those results again, in such a way that are meaningful for your board or the CEO, or even your manager or even like the sales team or product teams, because they're thinking about things differently, they have different goals. So again, that's why I wrote the book. And hopefully my goal is to help others avoid some of the pitfalls that I've experienced, or I've seen a lot of my colleagues and my teams go through over the years.

Kathleen (04:25): I love this topic. I need to, I have been accused over the years of picking my podcast guests for selfish reasons. And I admit it, I do, I, I pick topics based on what I want to learn more about. And this one is such a good one, in my opinion, for a couple of reasons, one, there's a ton of data that the average tenure of like a CMO it's under two years or something crazy like that. The shortest of the C-suite, it's the shortest tenure of any C suite position. And what you said about marketers being terrible at marketing themselves is so spot on. So just to share a little personal anecdote, I just, this past week published my personal website, which I have been working on for two years. And it wasn't like it was hard to build the site.

Kathleen (05:22): I just, like, the thought of writing copy about myself and like finding video and pictures of myself, it was just, it was not fun at all, but whatever I did it, it finally happened, but it was painful. And, you know, I definitely realized through that process, like marketers are horrible at marketing themselves and I'm, I'm, you know, example number one of that. But what you really said that I think struck home to me was about marketers, not communicating well internally in the organization, what they do and the results they're getting. And I will fully admit that I'm guilty of that. You know, I'm a serial startup marketer. And I don't know that this is unique to us, but I can certainly speak to it. Like we're doing 50 things at once at all times. And, you know, you're when you're the head of marketing at a startup, you're strategizing, you're reporting and you're executing. And sometimes it's very easy to fall into the trap of spending a lot of your time executing and some strategizing and not a whole lot reporting on what you're doing and write about it. So I am, so that is all very long way of saying I'm excited to talk about this topic.

Christina (06:30): I love talking about it. I love writing about it. So I'm excited that other people, and again, I think it really does. It hits home for a lot of people and there's often been times, and I'm sure you've experienced this in some of your listeners where they're like, look, I know I have to share my results, but I just need to get it done right now. It's only my focus on is just getting it done. And by doing that, it's great because you're getting it done. But then at the end of the day, nobody knows what you did.

Kathleen (06:55): Right. And like, so what I think that sometimes people think marketing is a whole lot of like, woo. Nice pictures, and...

Christina (07:10): We do, we make really nice graphics .But it was interesting. I was in a board meeting one time. And one, one when the sales person got up, he was talking about this amazing deal that had just closed. And it was one of the deals. It was a huge, one of our biggest deals ever. And it closed in under a month and everybody's like, yay. Sales is amazing. And I was like, Oh, you know, actually, let me tell you a little bit about that sale. We just made in a month that actually took eight months to get to where it was so that we could actually sell it. It was like some, you know, a junior person in the organization that saw this at a trade show, they signed up for the trial and then it kind of, they started, you know, internally you know, championing this product of ours and then somebody else got wind of it. And then they started getting more information. They came to webinars, they did all this, that was an eight month process. But what happened was the person who actually purchased it a month earlier, went and finally saw a webinar sign up for a trial and then told his team to buy it. And so I was like, you know, this, it wasn't a month. It was eight months. And it was eight months of marketing's really hard work and nurturing that got us here. And, and everybody looked at me like I was crazy.

Christina (08:18): They're like, no, sales made that. And I'm like, no, no, no. So again, we just really have to learn how to show all of that. Then again, what you were getting into a little bit about these touch points that I talk about, but help people understand how to identify these touch points. And then again, explain to everyone all throughout the organization, along that customer journey, all the different areas that marketing impacts.

Kathleen (08:41): So let's start out by kind of laying a foundation here of, of shared understanding in terms of like terminology, because you talked about a marketing map of influence. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Christina (08:56): So that was my own terminology. And basically what I did was I wanted to personally understand how I could have more influence and build more trust within an organization and then help my team understand how they could do that both internally with our marketing organization and then externally to the rest of the company. And then even beyond that becoming thought leaders in the industry. And so what I did was I literally, and I have a picture of my map of influence and basically what it is is it's looking at what, again, I'll call touch points and I'll define those in a second, but all the different touch points that marketing has and how we can either get better at identifying which ones we can have more influence over. And then how do you share those results with the rest of the organization? Because again, that's, what's missing, it's not just the executives that don't understand what we do.

Christina (09:47): And a lot of people within an organization don't don't understand what it is that we do. So the map of influence that I build out basically goes along the entire customer journey. So starting with product development, going through the area that marketing definitely owns lead, you know, the lead life cycle and then looking at it from the buyer perspective and the component that sales is working through all the way through to customer engagement and how people are onboarding and adopting. And I mean, it was their turn, that sort of thing. There's all of these tiny little areas that marketing touches every single day. And we might not recognize it as, you know, something marketing does or not necessarily you know, part of our, our daily responsibilities, but, but it's in there. So for example, if you're thinking about, you know, the product team, the product team is developing products that marketing can influence what is being developed.

Christina (10:40): They, because we understand you know, what features or functionalities we might be able to actually, you know, sell, sell for sale separately and have a different pricing structure around it, that sort of thing. We might be able to help product keep on, on brand with whatever it is that they're developing. Sometimes they come up with these, you know, features and it's totally different color and the logos are wrong or it's not there at all. And so really these are areas that we can influence. So the product is just doing a better job, but the marketing is definitely involved in that, that piece of it the life cycle, that's all of our programs and the webinars, all the different inbound and outbound programs we already have. But even within that, are there ways that we can think about them differently and have more influence over what we're doing, looking at it from the standpoint of the go-to market strategy, right?

Christina (11:27): So we can definitely, we can do a ton of events, but if events aren't bringing in the right kinds of leads that we're looking for over the next 12 months then, is that something we should be focusing on or should we be focusing on something that's going to bring in less leads, but more quality leads and qualified leads. And so there's just some things that we could be thinking about a little smarter. And again, there's plenty of things we can, we can help with sales, we can help them write scripts. We can basically help them identify which you know, prioritization of leads that they follow up on. So, and we do this stuff every single day. We just don't think about it as part of our marketing job or part of how we're influencing again, the overall success of the company.

Christina (12:07): And then from a customer engagement standpoint, there's a lot of things we can do. We can help with, you know, how to videos to get. We just wanna make sure that they're being that the customers are being onboarded and adopting properly. So, you know, can we produce a best practices webinar, or, you know, can we somehow build out some reports that would be useful for customers? And again, we, we do these things already. We just don't think about them. Again, as ways that in ways that we can use them and leverage them to have more influence. So those are, again, those are kind of some of the touch points and that's kind of how I build my map with influence. It really does go along the entire customer journey in the lines of the go to market strategy and the overall company performance that we're looking for and ultimately helps guide me in terms of which things I want to prioritize. Cause I know, you know, everyone in marketing meet me, get interrupted every day with all these tiny little things, right? Like, Hey, I'm going into a meeting. Can you pull a report for me? Or I've got a presentation tomorrow. Can you build a graphic for me? Or, you know, I have some customers coming in. Can I get some t-shirts all of these things that we do on a daily basis are part of our jobs and it's, but we just need to think about them a little smarter and, and actually prioritize those.

Kathleen (13:20): So you talked about how kind of step one is identifying all the areas that marketing might touch or have influence on. And you just kind of, I feel like you gave a really nice overview of that. And as I was listening to you talk, what was going through my head is, is, you know, that's, that's a lot, and I know this from my experience, like that's what I experienced now. I mean, I'm not even in that big of a company, but really it's almost like every piece of the company, there's something that marketing can touch, whether that's the employee, the employer brand customer marketing, lead gen you know, product development, there's truly, you could have your hands in everything. And so I guess this is a two-part question, really, which part one is what is the best way to have a voice in those things for two is what is the best way to do that in a way that like doesn't become completely overwhelmed and eliminate your ability to focus on, you know, the things that are going to move the needle from a revenue standpoint.

Christina (14:23): Oh, right, right. No, and that's a, that's a great question. And in my mind, and this is a little bit controversial, but I really feel like marketing should own the go-to market strategy because we literally do. We are the foundation of everything that's happening. Again, along that customer journey, what kinds of products are being built and developed and how they're getting sold and how much they're being sold for them, what they look like, all of that, you know, are things that we, we do have a hand in. But, but to your point, we can't do everything. You know, I'd like to think that I could, but I can't. And, and we have limited resources and limited personnel. So what I generally do is when I, when I build my map of influence, I look at all of the touch points and, and again, there's, you know what I mean?

Christina (15:04): There's probably like a thousand. I might be exaggerating, but probably pretty close to that. And then what I want to do is I want to prioritize those and I always want to prioritize those based on a couple of things. One thing is our overall corporate goals. Like what, what is our overall objective? What is the revenue objective that even beyond the revenue objective is the objective to get more logos or more recognizable logos. Like you really need to kind of understand what this go to market strategy looks like. And so I want to map it to those and anything that's going to help me with that or things that I want to focus on. The other areas are looking at things that are important to the customer, right. Because, you know, while it's great that, you know, we have a plan is this going to align with what the customer is looking for and what the customer's needs are?

Christina (15:48): I've been in many, many product meeting where, you know, they're discussing what features and functionalities to develop. And some of them are just amazing, right. But is this what the customer needs, or even, you know, wants or anything like, are they willing to pay for it? Because if not, then we need to think about, you know, should we be developing this, if it's something that they don't even want, then, then, you know, we just need to kind of consider that. The other area that I want to look at is the expertise of my team. Like what who's on my team and what works, what skills do they have? What skills gaps do we have and what can we can we easily do? Like, what are some of the low hanging fruit things that we can, we can do easily? So I want to look at that and if, if I'm missing some skills on the team, is there a way to either train them?

Christina (16:31): If it's, you know, if this is a really critical thing that I want to focus on or do we need to potentially hire in or bring in some contractors. And then the final thing really is, you know, sort of what are the levers that I can easily pull, or my team can easily cool, right? Because again, we don't want them doing everything and we, we do want them to be laser focused, but we want them to just sort of think about things a little differently, right? So you know, again, this has been aligned with what our corporate goals are and what the customer's needs are, and it's something that we can do easily. And we have we have the means the technology tools, resources to, to put in place. Then those are the types of things that, that's how I would basically prioritize those.

Kathleen (17:08): So there's a couple of things you just said that, that stuck with me. One was when you talked about it being sometimes controversial, that marketing owns the go to market strategy, and then you also talked about like, we're, we have all these potential features for our product. And do we know if people will really pay for it? That one struck me because we literally had this conversation last week at my company. And I am in the middle of doing pricing interviews with customers and I'm having them force rank features, which is a fascinating exercise to go through. But again, those, both of those kinds of comments allude to the fact that we're talking about collaboration across departments, about who should own the go to market strategy. Is it marketing, sales? The question of what features should we build in our product? Is it, is it your engineering slash product team or is it marketing or sales, right? A little bit about just internal communication and how you handle that. Because I do think that very often when we go into these conversations, at least because of historic perceptions about marketing, we don't necessarily, we're not necessarily thought of as having the same kind of not, I don't want to say power, but, but influence in those conversations perhaps.

Christina (18:29): Right. So.

Kathleen (18:31): I don't know. I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

Christina (18:33): Great question. And that really is what the map of influence is supposed to help you do. Right? So for example, if you are if you're a little more focused on, on the product side of things, or you have the you know, you have a really good understanding of what customers are looking for and you want to have influence on what features and functionalities are being built out then looking at all of those touch points that we talked about earlier that you have you basically, you know, you take a couple of those and you kind of test the water with it, right? So for example, if you, if they're coming up with this amazing feature, but it's not within it, you know, sort of the brand or, or what your core mission for your company is, then it's really easy to go and talk to somebody and say, Hey, you know what?

Christina (19:21): I know you guys were looking at this feature. You know, here's some, here's some data and here's some interesting anecdotal information that I have about that kind of a feature and why it might not be the best feature for us to, to focus on right now. So you're, you know, you're not saying this is what we need to do and, you know, don't, don't do that feature or that feature you're, you're going in. And you're saying, you know, I I've done some background. I recognize what our customers are looking for. And it just at least opens up the door to start having, having some conversations. I'll give you an example. When I when I was working at, at Autodesk, there was a, there was a feature that I needed to be built out and have it ready within a year.

Christina (20:02): And what it was going to do is going to exponentially increase our revenue. But you know, a year later, if I'm going to a, you know, an engineering team or product team and saying, I need this feature developed now, so that it's ready in a year, it's really hard for them to say, Oh, sure, let's just reprioritize our entire roadmap for you. Right. So, so basically what I did was I had it mapped out to say, if we do this feature, you know, by the time that it's ready, and this is a year, these are the programs are going to do, and the campaigns are going to have to promote it. And this is actually going, it was really going to exponentially increase our revenue. It's going to increase our revenue by like 25%, which would net out. Let's just say I'm making up numbers, but like $30 million.

Christina (20:41): Right. And so I was talking to the head of engineering about it and he was like, wait, are you telling me that, that my team, by doing this feature for you could help our company bring in $30 million? And I'm like, yes, exactly athlete. So it really is. So he was like, Oh my God. And he like, starts telling his team's like, Oh my God, we, you know, we can bring in revenue if we do. So it was this really helping them understand. So, you know, not only that I needed this and then I had a plan to execute it and that it was going to be successful. And if it's successful, this is what it was going to bring in. It really helped. It gave them context for why they should want to reprioritize. And I think that again, context is missing from a lot of our conversations. You know, you can collaborate, but if you're not helping people understand why it's significant then, then that's a problem. And you really do need to have, sorry, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead. No, no. I was just going to say, you really do need to have a clear understanding of what you think the results will be for some of these things so that you can articulate that to, to folks so that they buy into what it is that you're doing.

Kathleen (21:47): So that's actually the perfect segue. You mentioned that you went to the head of engineering with kind of a map. You had things mapped out. You had a plan. What if somebody is listening and they're thinking, in principle, this sounds great. Like, how do I actually do this? Like, what are the components of, of this type of map or plan?

Christina (22:10): So the, at the end of the day, and again, it kind of goes back to marketing owning the go to market strategy and really beyond that, truly owning revenue. I mean, oftentimes sometimes, sometimes I've given a revenue target and sometimes I'm not. But at the end of the day marketing again, especially if it's sort of a foundation across the entire customer journey ultimately has whether they're responsible for it or not. They should have a huge revenue target that they're trying to, they're trying to reach. And, and some of the programs that you're focused on are going to work backwards from that revenue and, and, you know, how are you going to get to this revenue? So, and in some cases you don't know, you don't know how much truly, I don't know that it was going to bring in 30 million or whatever number I had there.

Christina (22:58): But at least I have a starting point in a, any point of conversation. And, and I think that that's, you know, really key. It's just helping, you need to understand why you're doing this program, how it aligns with the strategy and what you think the outcome will be before you kind of go into some of these other, other conversations. And in some cases, it's, it can be hard, some cases you don't. I mean, there've been times when I have zero data, so I'm just like going on my gut or past experience. In some cases you have the data, you know, how much you know, a similar feature functionality might bring in, for example, from a revenue standpoint. So you might have some, you know, some data, and this is, again, this is a, it's a process. You, you, you know, you haven't mapped with influence, but you're not going to implement it all at once.

Christina (23:43): And it's going to take, you know, months or years to actually get to the point where you're kind of have full coverage of that map. But again, it's really important to understand those end goals and kind of work backwards from back. And again, I think the context is, is, is important for people to understand. I think this happens with events. A lot of people are like, why do you, why are you even doing an event? Because, you know, we get bad leads and they go nowhere. And, and so you have to help them understand that, that it's it's a longer sales cycle, you know, you're trying to weed out the quality leads, but there's also a component of, you know, branding and messaging and some other things that you're trying to, to you know, get across, you have other objective objectives for that. And just helping people understand what those objectives are sort of helps them again, align with you, or at least again, open up the conversation so that you can figure out how you can collaborate or, or make some compromises as well.

Kathleen (24:38): So what does this mean for you? Especially somebody who's coming in. A lot of my listeners are either the senior, most marketer in their company, or darn close to it, or they own a certain component of marketing. What does this mean for how that person should approach a relationship building with the leaders of the other parts of the organization?

Christina (25:00): Yes. I think that there's a couple of things for those, for those folks. And I've, I've done this with my teams as well for those folks, their peers are the ones that they need to influence and collaborate with. Right. But I think it's also really important for the folks underneath them to start building those relationships. So generally what I'll do with my team is I literally assign you know, somebody, you know, you, you need to build a relationship with somebody in sales and product and you know, customer success and I'll even, I will even assign these people. And sometimes it's a known relationship like, Hey, you know, product, you know, head of product, I'd love for my team to be more engaged with yours. So I'd like to pair up some of our folks together so that they can collaborate and, you know, they can just start going out and having some coffee and that kind of thing.

Christina (25:45): And just, again, just, it builds the relationship, but it also builds empathy as well. And I think that that's really critical. So I do that with with all levels of my organization, with all the other organizations. And then again, I think that the, it goes back to the results as well, because the results aren't just there, they're not just marketing, they're not just sales results. People need to understand that they also were involved in that, in having that impact on the company and the company performance as well. And so, and again, there's, there's a difference between like giving credit to somebody like, Hey, you know, sales made that great sale, right? That's, that's nice, but it's not getting to the point where, you know, the, this, this revenue came in because, you know, product builds the product or feature that we needed. Marketing did an amazing job of building campaigns to bring in qualified leads. And sales did an awesome job of shortening the sales cycle by nurturing their leads a little bit better. And then the onboarding was executed seamlessly by customer success. And that's why we have the successful revenue that we, that we reached. And so it really is just a matter of helping people understand the impact that they're having along that customer journey that you're building out and the go to market strategy as well.

Kathleen (26:58): So let's break down that topic of, of communicating and reporting. I'm, I'm, I'd love to know, just sort of from all different angles, like how often are you reporting? What are you reporting on? Who's it going to, what format does it take?

Christina (27:13): That is a great question .So in terms of that, the sort of peer to peer relationship building that I have my team do basically I want to make sure that at least once a month, they're getting together, not on a work-related project and just like, you know, building, building that relationship and friendship. And again, it could just be like half hour coffee or zoom call or whatever, whatever it is that we're doing in this day and age. So sort of, sort of starts with that in terms of then engaging I often will, it's hard to integrate or sort of embed yourself in some of these other organizations. Right. but I like to get to a point where we're invited to their meetings, but I initially do that by having my own meetings, my own Brown bags.

Christina (28:07): So let me think about it, you know, there's four weeks in a month. Each week, I'll do a Brown bag with one of those different organizations and just kind of get them engaged and understanding what it is we're doing in terms of the programs we have. And again, helping them understand context for them. At one point I used to have these big open Brown bag meetings, and then, you know, engineers would be falling asleep cause I'm talking about programs. And so I'm like, ah, that's not going to work. So now I do that individually.

Kathleen (28:35): Yes, a full belly and a brown bag talk is not a good combination.

Christina (28:38): It's amazing. But, so I started doing them with the individual organizations and they did one with an engineering team once. And it was interesting because, you know, they were actually, they were told to go to the Brown bag, which is fine. So so they were at the Brown bag and they, they were kind of, you know, they were just, aren't sure why they were there or, you know, what this meant. And they were a little bit disengaged. But at one point I started talking about like how important it was to truly understand the data behind, you know, the customers on the back end of things. What were our customers experiencing? You know, when did, was there like a peak, like we knew that like Fridays were, you know, the biggest day for customers to sign in or whatever, whatever it was.

Christina (29:22): I was looking for information so that I could you know, go back and get writes the best practices or, you know, understand like what a good case study might look like. And an ROI might look like, and this guy who I literally felt was checked out, he looks at me and he goes, he goes, wow. You know, we have industry data for the last 10 years on all of our and it shows their usage numbers. And and a bunch of other things it's like, would that be helpful for you? I was like, Oh my God, that would be amazing. And then everybody else started getting engaged at like, Oh we can totally pull that and we can do this. And, and so I started to tell him like, this is why we do case studies, and this is why we do these best practices.

Christina (30:03): And this is what an ROI means to our customers. And so they took all of those definitions and sort of some of the content programs that we're developing. And they're like, you know, this is great. We're going to go back and discuss this because we think we have a lot of data that we can interject into your reports and your case studies. And so we're gonna, we're going to go think about it and then we'll get back to you on how we can help. And so just like that engineering has completely engaged. They, they have a much better understanding of what it is that we do. They feel like they're part of this entire program of marketing and selling and really making the company successful. And so that the, those monthly, or however, however, it works for you, Brown bags make sense, but I would recommend you do them by the individual department or organization you're looking at because they're, they're looking for, for different things.

Christina (30:51): And then in terms of the reporting, the results I usually do a monthly report out in terms of, again, what it is that we've done and why we did it. And I try to keep them, you know, I don't want to write 15 different reports to make everybody happy and make everybody in their own sort of you know, mindset, understand what it is that we're doing. So about 80% of it is a pretty standard report. And then 20% of it is specific to whoever that organization is. So, so we do things like that. One thing that was interesting when I, when I worked at intact, we would have these monthly sales calls. And the point was to say like, this is what we did this month. And this is, these are the results we have. This is how many MQL, this is kind of going on down the funnel.

Christina (31:39): And then to set the stage for what was coming in the next month, so we could get help from them. And over time, like I was there for like a couple months when I realized that the sales team is just completely checked out. Like, again, they're told to be at this meeting, they were not enjoying it. They're not getting anything out of it. And they would rather be, you know, grocery shopping at Costco for all I know. But what I did was I recognize that they're what they were interested in most was understanding the pipeline and how much revenue. And so if you think about a funnel, that's like the very last slide we had. So what I told my team to tell him, like, I literally am like reverse the slides. I'm like, I might just change the order. I'm like, literally take the last one and put it first and just go, like, literally just flip the entire, flip your entire presentation.

Christina (32:25): So they started with like, this is how much revenue we brought in, and this is the pipeline we brought in. And that was as far as we got, we never even got to the rest of the slide. So then everybody wanted to have conversations and they had questions. They wanted to know like, this is great. Was there something we did differently? You know, can repeat this. And so just starting to have those conversations and understanding how they want to understand the data that you're bringing to them and what's meaningful to them really, really helps a lot.

Kathleen (32:51): Well, and you've said a few times I've noticed that marketers should be more focused on like revenue results than MQL calls or leads. And that I just could not agree more with because I feel like very often we're pushed to report on the lead gen. But what happens is when you, when you get stuck in that rut of being measured, having your value measured by leads, you're no longer strategic to the organization. And that is why we wind up being pushed into the back seat behind the sales team

Christina (33:25): Or whoever.

Kathleen (33:26): You know, because we're, we're commoditizing ourselves.

Christina (33:30): Absolutely. And, and that's, and it's an, it's a known, it's a known factor to them. So they get it like, okay, you brought in leads, but they still don't really even know what that means. Right. Like I, you know, I did a Salesforce Dreamforce conference and we brought in 1200 leads, but only 200 of them were qualified enough to send a sale. So this feels like, well, what happens to the other thousand leads? I'm like, Oh, why I can give them to your sales team? They're just going to hate me. So I'm not going to send those.

Kathleen (33:57): I think if we report on leads, we are kind of cheating because it is a backdoor way of absolving ourselves for any responsibility or elite quality. And honestly, for building good collaborative relationships with sales teams and supporting them in the way they need to be supported. And I could rant on this for a very long time. I've actually worked in a sales role before, which I've always say, I think every marketer should do at some point in their career. And it's, it's certainly changed, you know, my attitude and approach for how I should work with sales teams. And I just, I think there still are a lot of marketers out there who are like, well, you know, I just delivered the leads. No. What sales did with them going home for the day . And they think about like SLA plays as like, I fulfilled my part of the bargain. Now it's your turn. Just like, it really breeds this very antagonistic relationship.

Christina (34:59): Right. And I think that when you if you're just, if you're just passing them off as well, and again, I'm not saying you need to explain every single lead, if you're just passing off a bunch of leads without an explanation it doesn't help the sales. It doesn't enable them to do their job well, because you can say again, I have 200 leads, but just recognize that these are from a trade show. So they're going to take longer for both of us to nurture. And we also know that at the end of the day, they are a smaller sales. So maybe we should look at your seek list and rearrange it so that, you know, we know that these more leads that are coming from the webinars are people who are sending up for trials. You'll have an opportunity to engage with them or fully sooner rather than later, you know, because you don't want to, if you're calling like webinar leads for, you know, 500 webinar leads that that might not be the most effective use of your time.

Christina (35:53): And we have, we in marketing, we have details like that. We understand how long these leads are going to take me know what that, again, what that path looks like, how many times we have to touch them before they actually become more engaged or ready to go. Are there times and I've set this up in our sales force instances before where if somebody comes to our website and then and it could be gone for a while, or they can sort of have, you know, a little bit of interest over time. But if suddenly there's a lot more activity on the website and then multiple people from the same company have multiple, you know, more and more activity on the website. Then I know that that company is at the point where they're, they are looking at us, right. They've gathered a committee or a team together, and they're looking at it and the folks who just went to our website. So I'm going to tell my sales person again, automatically via Salesforce to go reach out to those people. Now's a great time to reach out. They just had five people on our website yesterday. Like, go, go, go get them. And those are things that are gonna help the sales person and that's our job, right? Our job is to help enable the sales team to sell better, faster, and, and with with bigger deals. And so any insight we can help them with is just gonna help them significantly.

Kathleen (37:07): Well. And I think also the corollary to that is that not caring about lead quality or, or, or allowing yourself to be measured by lead numbers can backfire on you as a marketer in the sense that I'll give you a great example. I was, I am sort of new in my role and I'm lucky that in the company I'm with now, I am very well aligned with the sales team on what does constitute a good lead in the sense that like, if somebody just downloads an ebook, the last thing I want is for myself to call that person. And I have worked in places where that is exactly what happens. Any, anybody with a pulse gets a phone call and that's terrible. There's no faster way to turn somebody off and to damage your brand. And so if you're a marketer who's being judged on lead numbers, you're incented to pass every one of those very, very top of the funnel leads on when they really shouldn't be passed to sales yet, versus you're a marketer who's judged by revenue. You're more likely to only pass on the hand raisers and to be motivated, to find more hand raisers. So, you know, and, and then that aligns you better with your sales team on the followup action.

Christina (38:19): And, and I think, you know, to take that, I totally agree. I think that just a step beyond that, it's important to educate everybody on that you're going to get fewer leads, but they're going to be higher quality leads, right? So, so it's funny. I have a chapter in my book and there's a story in there and it's called 17,000 leads please. And this is a true story. I was in a board meeting and I had this beautiful presentation. It'd be met all of our goals. It met our lead goals, our revenue goals. And I was super excited to tell the board about it. And this guy just stands up. Like I barely started talking because 17,000 leads, that's what we need. And I was like I'm, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, what? He's like 17,000 leads. You need to go get 17,000 leads.

Christina (39:05): And I was like, what is that? I'm like, did you just pull that number out of like, what is 17,000 leads? Why not a hundred thousand? And then I'm like, you know, I can, I can get you 17,000 leads in about two minutes. I can go buy them from, you know, D&B, not a problem. But the question is what, what is the objective and where do you think 17,000 leads is going to get us? Because that's what I want to understand. What are your expectations from those 17,000 leads? And then let me go figure out how to meet your expectations. And it's not going to be 17,000 random weird leads.

Kathleen (39:41): Exactly. Oh my God. I feel like there's a thousand stories that if you talk to any marketers out there but we are getting close to our time. So I want to make sure that I shift gears now, because I always ask all of my guests the same two questions, and I want to hear what you have to say about this. The first one is, you know, we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. And I feel like the conversation we just had is like, so related to that, like, it's not about spamming. It's not about calling everybody. It's about educating your audience and, and then following up with the right people. So is there a particular company or an individual that you think is really kind of exemplary for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?

Christina (40:25): That's a, that's a great question. I feel like I work a lot in the B2B space, but there's a bunch in the, in the D2C space as well. For me, HubSpot has always done an amazing job. And even when they first started off, I don't know if you remember before they had their platform and it was built out, they were just this amazing plethora of content for marketing people. And I was like, this is amazing. I love this. And I was eating it up. And like, in the back of my head, I'm like, why are we doing this exactly. And call from a sales guy? And that's exactly what happened. They came out with a platform, but by then, they'd already had like, you know, millions of marketing people you know, downloading their information. So they were familiar with you know, with your name and everything.

Christina (41:09): And they did it by educating us and giving us and helping us be better marketers. So they built up this trust over time. So I thought they did an amazing job with that. There's a company, they do video hosting called Wistia, and they're doing a great job right now. They're, you know, with, with COVID and everything and everything, just a little bit crazy. What they started doing was they they have their employees just doing random videos from their home or walking a dog or whatever, and they're posting those on Instagram. And so it's just kind of getting real and trying to get, build relationships with people and show empathy and just be like, this is, this is where we are. We're walking our dogs with masks and, you know, we're going to have Thanksgiving dinner by herself, so whatever, but, and maybe that's okay.

Christina (41:55): But you know, it's just one of those things where I think they're doing a good job of is kind of making it real if you will. And then from a, from a, you know, direct to consumer standpoint, which I don't necessarily focus on as much. I think Chobani yogurt has done an amazing job from day one. They have been thinking about, you know, even if it meant losing revenue, how they can help how they can help people who aren't, who are less fortunate during these times. You know, whether it's just, you know, throwing up a pop-up stand with yogurt or making sure that, you know, kids that were in school that were on the school meal programs are getting food. They've done a lot of things around that. And to me, that's just, it's always, really, I think, you know, it's I think often companies kind of get away from what their mission is or really understanding their customers. And, and I think that you know, in, in times of in times, like I'm in the middle pandemics it really helps people remember like why we're here and, and how, how we can be innovative and, and stretch our thinking so that we can, we can help others, but still be profitable. That's okay too.

Kathleen (43:02): I love those examples. I, and I followed Wistia for years, but I have to admit, I haven't been taking as close a look at them in the last few months. So you've given me a good reason to go back and check out their Instagram. It's pretty funny. Second question. Digital marketing changes so quickly. And I always hear marketers saying like, Oh my God, I can't keep up with it. So how do you personally stay educated and keep up with it?

Christina (43:26): Yes. And for me again, I've been doing this for 25 years, so it's changed dramatically, you know, from a spreadsheet to these amazing, you know, automated tools to AI that's out there now. But some of the things that I follow. Rand Fishkin, who I know you had on your, on your show, both you know, Moz is amazing and his new company SparkToro is pretty, pretty fascinating. So I like to see what he's coming out with. And he does a newsletter. I think it comes out weekly or every other week. And then the other folks that I really like are Neil Patel and Eric Siu's Marketing School podcast. Basically what they do is they just take a ton of questions and, and that's why it's like real it's up-to-date information because people are asking like, what is this tool and how do I do this?

Christina (44:09): And, you know, what does it mean to, you know, when your budget's completely gone? What are some options that I have? So they spend a lot of time answering you know, sort of ask me anything type style podcast where they're answering questions about strategy and tools and the technology that's out there. And it's just, it's really, it's really useful. And they're, they the tape it I think like every Friday, and then they have these little, like seven minutes, seven to 10 minute podcasts that they release every day and they're always really useful.

Kathleen (44:38): Fun fact. I've had two of the, three of those people on the podcast. Not just Rand, Eric Siu was my guest. It was my first episode, I think, of 2018.

Christina (44:49): Oh, that's awesome.

Kathleen (44:52): I haven't head Neil Patel on yet. So maybe...

Christina (44:54): You should definitely, for sure.

Kathleen (45:00): Hey Neil. Come onto the podcast.

Kathleen (45:01): Awesome. Well, this has been so much fun. If somebody wants to learn more about, you know, the stuff that you've written about and talked about today, or they want to connect with you or ask a question, what's the best way for them to, to get connected with you online?

Christina (45:16): Best way is you can find me on LinkedIn. Christina Dell Villar. And hopefully we can spell that out for you. And then also my website is Christinadellvillar.com. And then in about early 20, 21, my course will come out that will help people. It basically teaches people how to build a map of influence. And then I have a book coming out in summer of 2021 called Sway.

Kathleen (45:42): You have been busy. Congratulations on all the upcoming releases.

Kathleen (45:49): And I will put links to all of those things in the show notes so that everybody can find them really easily. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new, please consider heading to Apple podcasts and leaving the podcast a review. That's how more folks find out about us and get to hear our great guests like Christina. So thank you so much, Christina. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate you coming on.

Christina (46:12): Thank you so much.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit Christina's personal website
• Connect with Christina on LinkedIn

Do you **really** know where your ad campaigns are running, and what do your ad placements mean for your brand?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, brand safety expert Nandini Jammi talks about why it's so important for brands that are running programmatic advertising campaigns to know exactly where their ads are running. 

As the co-founder of Sleeping Giants, Nandini made national headlines for her brand safety activism. Today, she works closely with brands through her company Check My Ads to ensure their ads run only on websites that align with their mission and core values.

As Nandini explains, maintaining careful control over where your ads run isn't just important for your brand's reputation, it's good business because it will increase the ROI of your ad campaigns.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Check My Ads website
• Follow Nandini on Twitter

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Darrell Amy, who is the author of the Revenue Growth Engine. Welcome Darrell.

Darrell (00:24): Kathleen. It's great to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Kathleen (00:28): I'm excited to dig into this with you because we have a hot topic that I think marketers have have struggled with for a long, long time. But before we jump in could you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and what the Revenue Growth Engine is?

Darrell (00:47): Absolutely. So I am a sales and marketing junkie. I started as straight out of college with a marketing degree in my hip pocket, started in a sales B2B dog eat dog aggressive sales environment, was a sales rep, sales manager, worked with a Japanese company, helping them recruit and train resellers. And then I got the idea in 2004 to start my own business and my very first client, I trained his sales team. And when we got done training the sales team, he said, Darrell, everything you taught my team is fantastic, but my website doesn't say anything about it. Now, keep in mind, this was 16, 17 years ago, way back in 2004. And he said, do you build websites and being as it was my first client, Kathleen, you know what the answer was? Yes, sir. We built websites.

Darrell (01:38): I'd actually built one for a nonprofit and for my church as well, but I pulled my marketing degree out and, you know, with now close to a decade of, of sales experience and started down this journey of developing salespeople and have had the opportunity to train thousands of salespeople for companies in the fortune 500, all the way down to great, fantastic locally owned, small businesses. And the same time started on this journey in 2004 of web search, social inbound, account-based marketing.

And it's been so much fun having a foot in both the sales and the marketing world all this time, but also feeling that tension back and forth about, you know, this, this perennial topic of sales and marketing alignment and how do we work together? So that's what brought the Revenue Growth Engine together. I wanted to put together a model of best practice to be able to align marketing and sales, to drive what we're all about, whether you're in sales or marketing, which is revenue growth.

Kathleen (02:43): I love that. And it's, it's the perfect segue because as you say sales and marketing alignment has been a topic that marketers have talked about for a long time.

Certainly as long as I've been in marketing and they've even come up with names, like I think HubSpot called it smarketing. And we, one of the companies I used to work at, we joked, we didn't like the word smarketing. So we called it smalignment. But like, literally it's why is this so hard? Why?

Darrell (03:21): Well, it, it, you know, having, having a stake in both worlds here now for almost two decades I think it's hard because there's so many different reasons.

One we, we tend to get focused on, on even though we're, we're heading in the same direction, we're talking different language, you know, if, if you think about the language of marketing, which you know, is fascinating journey here, you know, as it continues to evolve and the platforms and the data and the you know, all of, all of the different words and verbiage we use in marketing and then the world of sales, which, you know, in some ways has changed in a lot of ways, hasn't changed that much.

And so I think there's, there's misalignment communication. And that's why, you know, to me, the, the, the moment the light bulb came on for me was I was getting ready to speak at a conference.

Darrell (04:16): And so it was a growth conference and all these businesses were there. They wanted to grow. There were, there were marketing people in the room and you could tell they were in the front rows, they were ready to roll. They were excited about all the new gadgets and all of the new you know, the new tools out there. And it's an incredibly exciting time for marketing right behind them.

You could see the sales managers, the sales managers are in the room, you know, if they were either, they were either on their phones trying to, you know, close a deal or get something moving forward. And, but you could kind of see the thought bubbles above the sales manager's heads, right? Like, why are we here? This is a waste of time. We could be out selling something and where, why don't I, why aren't you giving me better leads?

Darrell (05:00): And then in the back of the room where the business owners and they're back there, I can see a couple of them drinking their coffee. And they're like, you know, looking out over this, you could just see them going, why can't y'all get along and figure this out. And as I was preparing for this conference, that's when I realized that this isn't about marketing. This isn't about sales. As much as I love either both of the professions, what it's about is growing revenue.

And if you boil it all down to the most basic level, Kathleen I've determined, there's really only two ways to grow revenue. We get more net, new customers, or we sell more to our current clients. Those are the two ways to grow revenue. And so rather than talk about sales and marketing, I say, we shift the conversation to driving net new business and cross selling more to our current clients, and then let's get together and figure out how to do that.

Kathleen (05:55): All right. So how do we do that? Because you have this, I don't know why this is so difficult to solve. Like it's, it's, I would think that this would be something that would have been fixed by now. So, so I would love to hear your take on, on what the best way is to approach it

Darrell (06:12): Well, so here's the, here's the first place to start is just to look at your business and ask the question. If there's only two ways to grow revenue, getting net new clients, or selling more to your current clients, which of those two are you good at? And which are you maybe not so good at where's your core strength?

And what I find is, Oh, I'll illustrate this with a story. We went to do a growth strategy workshop. I get involved in a lot of these, this was pre COVID. So it was on the airplane, down into West Palm beach, working with a great technology company down there.

And we've got the owner of the company in the room, say VP of sales, marketing director, a couple other folks in the room, and they're there to put together a strategic growth plan. And so we get to the beginning of the conference and you know, we're just North of Miami, we're drinking cafecitos that great.

Darrell (07:04): Oh man, it's so good Cuban coffees. We're having a great time. We get ready to start the conference. And like all, you know, all workshops. I say, you know, what are your goals? We said, going around the room and the owner of the company goes, I want more net new business. And everyone goes, , we want more net new business. So I write on the board net new. So what's your goal?

And they said, well, 10%, if we can get 10% year over year net new, you know, we'll be happy. Is that okay? That sounds modest and reasonable or write down 10%. So what did you do last year? Oh, and I'm expecting like 2%, maybe we went backwards, you know, something like that. And he goes, well, we did 9.8% net new growth last year. That's what I did. I started laughing. I was like, well, congratulations.

Darrell (07:52): You know, we should write a case study. This is great. But then I said, what about cross sell the other driver of revenue growth? And this company had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in personnel partnerships training on this new services initiative. That was a great fit for their current client base.

How's that going? And the owner's eyes roll back. Right. And he's like, Darrell, we're struggling with this. So here's, here's why I tell this story sales and marketing. You know, rather than having this battle back and forth, which we can talk about, I've got some thoughts on that as well, but rather than have the battle look at the two drivers of revenue growth, find the one you're not good at and then get together and say, how can we solve this problem?

And in the case of this company, you know, they said, how can we solve this problem of cross selling?

Darrell (08:44): Well, say, you know, the obvious answer from sales is we need to develop a regular cadence of meeting with our ideal clients to review business and keep up to date.

So they started a periodic business program and got their reps trained and managed around that to support that marketing started a consistent client communication program and backed it up in this case with a client loyalty program, which gave the reps a good excuse to go in and have their first what they ended up being quarterly business review.

And so now, you know, that it wasn't about, you know, marketing, we need more leads. These leads aren't good enough, you know, that kind of stuff, instead of was saying, okay, we've got a real business problem here.

We need more cross sell revenue. Let's get together in the same room, put our creative hats on together and figure out how to do it. And as a result, you know, now they're beginning to cross sell people into that new business area. And when you start doing that, revenue starts accelerating.

Kathleen (09:42): So you talked about getting marketing and sales together and as step number one. And I think there, there are different levels at which you can on what you can really kind of look at sales and marketing alignment. There's a very like theoretical level of, of psychological alignment and that sort of thing.

But then there's the very practical level of when do we put these people in the same room, how often, you know, and for what purposes, so maybe we could start there and can you talk me through kind of your perspective on, on, you know, these are generally two different departments within a company, and so what, is there a meeting cadence that you are a fan of for them?

Darrell (10:25): Absolutely. And, and so there's so many different ways we could talk about this. I think there should be a regular meeting cadence and whatever that cadence is, then the question goes, well, what's the topic of the meetings that we're going to have when we're working with clients to implement a revenue growth strategy, we'll have a quarterly sales and marketing strategy meeting where they'll look at core initiatives for a stage of the client experience that they want to work on together or a particular problem such as cross selling they want to solve. And then that group will set some, some goals for that business quarter.

And they'll meet together weekly in a sale, a weekly sales and marketing or marketing and sales alignment meeting. And so in that meeting now, they've got specified projects that they're working on. You know, some are more marketing focused, some are more sales focus, but they're working together and building out that infrastructure for those projects.

Darrell (11:24): And they're both giving input on them. So we get to the end of the quarter and the projects are done. It's not, you know, one of the biggest problems with sales and marketing alignment is marketing creates something, launches it. I was talking to a sales rep out in Los Angeles and a great rep works in financial services. And he's like Darrell.

I went to meet with one of my clients today and they pulled out something from our marketing department and put it in front of me and ask me a question I'd never it before in my life. So, so let's get marketing and sales together on some type of regular cadence. I think weekly to have an alignment meeting where where we're solving problems together and we're creating things together, whether it's collateral or campaigns or whatever that is so that, you know, we're cross pollinating and getting input and buy-in throughout the, throughout the process.

Darrell (12:17): The other thing that you can do there's two other things, very practically for sales and marketing alignment related to meetings. One is to set a cadence of deal analysis. And I talk about this and the Revenue Growth Engine book, where maybe once a month you say, you know what, we're going to get together for an hour, or we're going to get together for lunch, or we're going to do something once a month with some sales leaders and some marketing leaders in the room.

And we're going to take a deal. We won the deal we lost and a deal that went to no decision, and we're going to tear it apart together, and we're going to figure it out and we're going to figure out why we're winning, why we're losing and why, you know, why we're getting no decision deals. And now sales and marketing in the room together are able to process that you might invite in your sales reps from time to time.

Darrell (13:06): You might even invite in the client and go, why did we win? You know, this is this is helpful. And, and doing those, those deal analysis meetings, those usually just happen in the sales department. If you have a great sales leader, they'll already be doing deal analysis. It's kind of like Monday at LA.

You know, it's like Monday after the football game, we all watched the tape, right. Here, I think companies shouldn't do that as a sales and marketing team and maybe even operations together to figure out why are we winning? And that's going to make the marketing better. It's going to make sell sales better and it's going to help align.

Kathleen (13:43): I love that. I'm, I'm curious about one thing, cause so I've worked in sales I've I obviously work in marketing now. And I've run a lot of sales and marketing alignment meetings and, and what I found in my experience and maybe I'm running them wrong, but I found that that a lot of times they veer into becoming a time for sales to, to ask marketing for things.

And I will say at marketing's behest, like when I have these meetings, I'll be like, what can we do to help you sell better? You know, what are questions you're hearing from, from prospects? What are, what are things you need to close deals faster? And I think those are all things that need to be talked about, right?

Like, because marketing has a really important role in sales enablement, but sometimes I feel like these meetings veer into the territory of just become like adding to marketing's to do list without kind of the reverse, which is, you know, really looking closely at marketing hand sales leads, what's happening with them and what is sales doing on their side? And this is totally my biased opinion because I spend more in these meetings as a marketer than I ever did as a sales person.

But what is your experience been? Because sometimes that, that to me can get frustrating where I'm like, okay, this, this meeting should not all just be about adding to my to-do list. It needs to be a two-way street where, you know, the sales team gets held accountable for using the marketing materials and doing certain things. I dunno, I dunno. Have you seen anything work really well?

Darrell (15:16): Well, I think that when you do start creating things together, so you start with strategy, you know, and rather than start at the tactical level, which tends to happen, right? What do you guys need? Oh, I need a brochure or, you know, whatever. I, you know, if you start start a lot of times those meetings start there.

The other thing to do is I want to talk about leads for a minute. Cause this is one of the biggest places of tension between marketing and sales sales says he don't give me enough leads. And when you do get leads, sales said, these leads are garbage. And then the marketing people say never close the leads. So and I work primarily in the B2B space. So the answer I'm going to give here is in the business to business space and in the business to business space.

Darrell (16:04): Most of the companies that I work with in most companies in the business to business space have a defined target market. In fact we recommend that you dial it down even more to what we call ideal clients, which is not a new term, but the idea is who are the clients that can buy everything that you sell and are a good fit.

They align with your company values and you know, the types of clients you want to work with once you know who your ideal clients are, you've got the profile you've marked your current ideal clients because not all of your current clients are ideal by the way. And maybe it's a usually 80-20 rule then go out in the marketplace and go, okay, let's get the data on our ideal clients. Once that happens. Now, the sales and marketing lead thing is over.

Darrell (16:57): I say, if you know who your ideal clients are, you don't need leads. You already know who your leads are, what you need is engagement and intelligence. So a lot of this back and forth of, you know, Hey, you're not giving me enough leads. What we need instead is we need, we know who our ideal prospects are.

Let's now put a plan together from a sales standpoint and a marketing standpoint to make sure we have what I call a hundred percent coverage of these ideal prospects. So from a sales standpoint, you know, the sales leader goes, Hey, here's IRA. Our ideal prospects. We've agreed on a cadence to call on the three most important decision makers, influencers, or marketing speak personas in those accounts on a quarterly basis. So you can call on anyone you want to, but absolutely hundred percent. We call on these ideal prospects.

Darrell (17:52): We engage with them and if you don't want to do it totally fine, we'll give it to somebody else. So you put a target account program in place. Marketing's the same thing. Now this requires a different thought pattern in marketing.

Cause usually with marketing, we've kind of been like, we're going to throw, you want to throw the nets out, throw the lures out and hope we snag something. But with an ideal client profile in mind and it lists of ideal prospects. Now it becomes incumbent upon marketing to say, we're going to use every possible effort to get the company in front of these prospects with a value proposition.

And we're going to aim for 100% coverage, meaning that every decision maker and influencer hears from our company and engages with our company in some way on a regular basis. Now, are we ever going to get to a hundred percent?

Darrell (18:45): No, but you know, now from marketing rather than becoming tactical campaign focused, we're gonna run an email campaign and we're going to do this. Now we're getting in the room and we're going, okay, we've got these prospects. What can we do to engage with them?

And this is more of an account-based marketing mindset. You know, an account-based marketing is a fantastic model. That's been pioneered at the enterprise level in the technology world. But regardless of what you hear in the enterprise level or technology world, this mindset of saying, Hey, we know who our target, our ideal prospects are. Let's figure out how to get in front of them and let's use our best, most creative minds and all of the tools and tactics at our disposal to make sure that happens.

So now we're not talking the stuff that's going back and forth between marketing and sales now is about engagement with these ideal prospects and clients rather than, Hey, I got somebody that gave us an email address from somewhere in the world that might possibly be a human being, right? So a little bit, little bit different mindset. When we look at ideal clients, they're, I'll get off my soap box.

Kathleen (19:58): No, I love all of this. ABM is definitely can be a really powerful strategy if, if executed well. So my question, as I listened to you talking about all of this is what advice do you give to marketing and sales leaders about how they forge a relationship with each other? Because it seems to me that this would all need to start there with the head of marketing and the head of sales becoming one another's best friends.

Darrell (20:32): Yes. And you know, relationships happen with common quills, like happened with time, spent together. You know, they happen when both both parties are rewarded for success.

You there's, there's so many different dynamics there, but at a minimum, you know, I would say start spending time together a lot of time together and, you know, marketing people, one of the, one of the best things that, that I think we can do as marketing people is it used to say, get out in the field.

What that means now is get on the zoom calls, right? It'd be there. On the zoom calls set up, set a cadence where you go, you know what? I'm going to spend a certain amount of time every week with salespeople on calls with prospects and clients, because what's going to happen is in the process, you're going to forge a relationship.

Darrell (21:27): You're but you're also going to get that valuable information, which is what's important to our clients and prospects right now. And maybe even more specifically, what are the actual words that they're using? Because right now, and this may be, you know, there's so many times we've been saying recently, this is more important than ever, but here's one thing I want to say.

And I'm a firm believer that when it comes to the message, which, you know, marketing owns the message when it comes to the message, we've got to always remember that buyers don't buy products. They buy the outcomes, those products and services deliver good old Theodore Levitt walked into his Harvard business school class. And the first day of marketing class holding up the old drill bit says, you know, nobody ever buys a drill bit. They buy the whole course set, Seth Godin would say, go South.

Darrell (22:17): We'd say they didn't buy the hole. They bought the ability to hang the plaque on the wall. Right. And I always laugh because then Donald Miller stands right behind and says, well, they didn't actually buy it. The plaque, they bought the ability to look good to their friends.

So they didn't get isolated weighted and eaten by a lion, you know, whatever the motivation is, you know, buyers buy outcomes, right. And what's so critical right now. And this is why I think marketing and sales need to be working together and meeting with clients and prospects together is the outcomes shift or continuing to shift.

They shifted with COVID when the crisis happens. So I think we all know that, but I mean, if you think about know, for example, right after about six or eight weeks after the crisis started this, this year Gartner went out and did some research in the tech space and they said, what outcomes do you want?

Darrell (23:08): Well, last year it was all about scalability. And how do we, you know, accelerate growth and do all these things this year or after the crisis, the outcomes changed resiliency, redundancy, remote working, enabled that same product, same service, different outcomes, which means different message.

And I think that message is going to continue to shift as we move through the different stages of economic recovery, whatever that looks like. And so in this time, it's really critical that is marketing people. We get out there with the sales team and we know participate or lurk in video and zoom meetings and listen in really pay attention to what the specific top of mind outcomes, the problems and aspirations that our prospects and clients have.

And that is aligning that. And then after those meetings sitting down with their sales team and debriefing and going, okay, what do we hear here? So we can make sure that the message that we're delivering from a marketing perspective that also gets repeated by salespeople is laser focused on what the clients and prospects actually want right now,

Kathleen (24:20): Do you ever find that marketing gets pushed back from sales on that participation? Because it's interesting. You know, I've, I've seen various levels of receptivity to this. I worked in one company where the sales team was highly receptive to marketing, kind of being a fly on the wall.

Then I spent some time in the cybersecurity sector and nobody wants any flies on the wall, whether that's a marketing person or like now there's all this great technology like gong and chorus and you know, where you can record calls, but in B2B cyber it's, it's like next to impossible to do any of that.

And, and then I've worked in companies where, you know, they, the sales team just says, well, we don't want to bring a clown car into a meeting. Like we want to keep it small. And so I'm wondering what you've seen and what, whether you've seen that pushback and if so, how you've addressed it.

Darrell (25:17): Well, certainly I think that's a sales leadership issue and you know, and obviously not withstanding highly regulated industries and, you know, different things like that. I mean, there's, there's certainly a lot of different challenging circumstances, but the reality of all of it is marketing can't, we can't as marketers deliver a clear focused message unless we're able to be in front of buyers.

You know, there's only so much that internet research is going to do. It's actually hearing the words that they're using. Another way to go about if you can't get involved in the meetings.

One thing that I think marketers should do and should always have at the top of their priority list, it's usually at the bottom, but at the top of their priority list is case studies, success, stories, client interviews, whatever you want to call it. So and I, this was, this comes from just a, a 32 second rant from running a marketing agency now for 17 years, right?

Darrell (26:17): Hey, Darrell, we need you know, to redo our marketing. Great. Okay. So we come back with, you know, website and all the different things. And then underneath all on that red list of recommendations is to put together a set of case studies because we always ask, do you have any case studies?

Well, no, we hadn't ever gotten around to it. Okay. So now, you know, now it's like, Hey, we need a new website. We need corporate brochure, some videos, all this. And then we say, well, what about case studies? Well, we'll get around to that when we're done with that. So I got to the point where, and you know, now the answer is, look, we're not going to build a website for you.

We're not going to build a corporate brochure. We're not going to do anything for you until we write three case studies for your current clients, because then you'll see, we'll see together what the actual outcomes those people want and what they value from your company.

Darrell (27:12): And I've just always makes me laugh. Kathleen, I get asked I've had the opportunity over the years to write many, many case studies. And when I do, I'll always interview the sales rep first, and this is such a great point of marketing and sales alignment.

So I'll interview the sales rep and say, Hey, tell me about this client that give me the backstory. Why did they buy Oh, well it's because we saved them money. Or we gave them a positive ROI, which is sales speak for save the money. Okay. Great. Any other reason? No, no. It was mainly because of my good looks and we saved them money.

Okay. So then we'll interview the client and you know, we'll get down to the benefits section. What were the challenges, what did this company do for you or how have you benefited? And the client will start rattling things off.

Darrell (27:58): We like this, we love this. This is really helped our organization. It solved this problem. And in most of those conversations, I ended up having to say, Oh, by the way, are you tracking the ROI, trying to bring the money thing into it somehow. And most of the time the clients go, well, not really, but we like this, this, this, and this.

So then I go back to the sales rep and go, Hey, do you want to know why your client actually is buying from you? And do you want to know how much money you left on the table by discounting this instead of charging a little bit more than what they were currently spending to get all these additional benefits.

And so case study conversations, you know, I would say as, as marketing, you know, I would challenge you to set a cadence to say, I'm going to do one of these a month, or if you don't have a library of them one a week and really get that that going, it's going to help fuel your message.

So you're able to create better content, but we'll also give you tons of stuff to go back to the sales team and begin to add value and forge those relationships.

Kathleen (29:00): That's a really good point. And I don't know how many marketers really do that, but I love that notion of, you know, so often as marketers, we're going to sales and asking them to tell us things, but if we can interview customers and, and bring intelligence back to sales, that's really powerful.

Darrell (29:22): It is, and you know, the market research is good and we should be doing that. And we should be, you know, doing industry trends and seeing what's going on, but none of that can replace the actual conversations and words with our ideal clients. And that's where, you know, it gets down I'm Canadian. So I like maple syrup. I write about maple syrup a lot in Revenue Growth Engine. Just because

Kathleen (29:49): You would get along with my husband really well because he not kidding says all the time that maple syrup is the, the universe's most perfect food. He puts it in his coffee.

Darrell (30:01): Does he drink it straight?

Kathleen (30:03): I don't know if he would admit he did.

Darrell (30:07): And I don't know if I would admit on live radio, I drink it straight up that may or may not happen, but what's great about maple syrup is we take a substance that, you know, is sweet. It's okay. You know, SAP comes out of a tree, but then it gets distilled down. It takes 40 gallons of SAP to make a gallon of maple syrup. And that's where having these conversations with clients.

And then also if possible participating in sales meetings, that's where you get it boiled down to the really good stuff. And that's where we create messaging that is really effective. And that can't happen until we get in front of clients as marketers and cooperating with sales. And that is one good way to start to build those relationships.

Kathleen (30:49): So I'm curious about one thing, which is, do you think that the way marketing and sales leaders are compensated feeds into this divide between marketing and sales, like is there, is the incentive structure part of the problem or the, I shouldn't say the incentive structure itself, but it's the fact that they very often have two different incentive structures or in some cases marketers have no incentive structure, right. You pay, like, I wonder if that, if that lends itself to deepening the divide between marketing and sales.

Darrell (31:27): Maybe I think so. And I'm thinking from two different angles, one is just in terms of overall results. You know, when, when the team wins, everybody should win and you know, I'm not a compensation expert by any stretch, but just that principle of saying when the team wins, everybody should win. And we all know in today's buying environment that there is no buyer that doesn't touch the company's marketing at some point before, during and after the sales process.

Right. I mean, it's just, it's the reality of today's world. So I think there should be an incentive there, especially, and I would, I would say, especially around landing ideal clients, like that's where you should really have the high fives, but the other place that I think a lot of companies miss it, even if they've got a structure that does align marketing compensation with results is usually sales compensation is aligned to net new business and not cross selling more to current clients.

Darrell (32:33): And you know, this, this is when we look at companies, if you grow net new business by 10% great, you know, it's going to take you, the investment analysts have a rule of 72. You take the number 72, you divide it by the return on investment. It tells you how long it takes to double your investment. We can use that in the sales and marketing world. If we growing 10% year over year 72 divided by 10%, it's going to take you 7.2 years to double the revenue of that business.

Now, if I can cross sell, do net new and cross sell at the same time, I can cut the time to double the business in less by 50% and some even more cause the exponential nature of it. So now instead of seven years, I can double the business and say three. So I think companies would be smart to compensate marketing and sales, not just on net new, but also on cross sell revenue to current clients.

And to really focus on that. And most companies we go in overall, it's not a, it's probably a general rule that that's just not happening and there's a great opportunity to align marketing and sales by getting the comp right around cross selling.

Kathleen (33:47): I would agree with you. And I just, the whole thing really does make me wonder if marketers were given the exact same incentive structure as the sales teams with whom they work, how would that change things? And I was thinking, as you were talking, I was actually thinking through it, if it were true for me, which it's not right now.

And if, if I was being comped exactly as my sales counterpart was, I suspect and shame on me for not doing this already, that I would probably more frequently be saying to him, Hey, like we got to sit down today and look at what it's going to take for us to hit the number, you know, this month or this quarter, like I would be doing that more often.

And so I don't know. It's just, it's interesting. I hadn't really thought about it before, but you, you got me, you got my wheels turning on that during this conversation.

Darrell (34:34): Mine as well. And, and I think you know, the general principle here is, is if the sale, if you want sales and marketing aligned, when the company wins sales and marketing should both win. And you know, there's, there's there's no disputing that, that it takes a team effort from the buyer's perspective, right?

We all know the data. We all know that that, you know, the buyers are way through the buying journey. I'm laughing Kathleen. Cause I was on a live cast the other day and I was quoting the challenger customer data on there's an average of 6.8 decision-makers in the average B2B transaction. And I said, that was 10 data, 10 years ago.

I know it's higher now. And I was live on the podcast and Brent Adamson chimed in, in the comments and said, it's now 12. So that made me laugh. But I was the reality is today, especially in the B2B buying space, you know, these decisions are complex. There's a lot of different people involved.

It takes a team effort from sales and marketing to make sure that all the decision makers and influencers are properly informed and, and, you know, properly engaged throughout the buying cycle. And there's no way that sales can do that all by themselves. So , let's look at compensation. Great. Okay.

Kathleen (35:58): If, if nothing else I'm, I think I'm going to for the next week, do a test and pretend as though that's how I was being comped and see what it gets me to do differently. Interesting. And what happens as a result of that? So I'll make myself the Guinea pig. Well, we can talk about this all day, but we're running out of time.

So I want to shift gears for a second. I always ask all my guests the same two questions at the end. I'm curious what you have to say. The first one is that, of course we are the inbound success podcast. So when it comes to inbound marketing, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park these days?

Darrell (36:35): Well, I am a huge HubSpot fan. We, we have been a HubSpot partner for a long time now and I, what I really like is I do like the innovation that's happening there. We've talked today about some account-based marketing strategies. I call it account-based marketing light, kind of, you know, for the, the mid sized companies.

And HubSpot's bringing more and more tools to the table in that space. And also just the beautiful way they've aligned sales and marketing with sales tools, CRM in the middle marketing and even operations. Now I say huge shout out for the work that's going on at HubSpot big fan.

Kathleen (37:14): I mean, they are absolutely the gold standard. Second question. One of the biggest pain points I hear marketers express to me is that digital marketing is changing incredibly quickly and it's very hard to keep up with everything. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and up-to-date?

Darrell (37:32): That's a great question. There's no, there's no stopping with education. I, I think the reality is you've got to be a voracious reader right now. So if you look behind me, I've got a lineup. This is my lineup of books to read right now. You know, and so I, I try to read a book every week and in the process as well, just you know, I've got my Feedly stacked with with as many informative blogs as possible.

There's no way getting around doing the hard work of educating yourself. And I think it's, especially for marketers, it's gotta be something where you say, Hey, I'm going to dedicate 10% of my week to educating myself. Otherwise you're going to fall behind really quickly.

Kathleen (38:20): It's very easy to do. It's very easy to do. All right. Well, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about the Revenue Growth Engine, or want to connect with you online and ask a question, what is the best way for them to do that?

Darrell (38:36): Well, you text the word revenue to 21000 that's revenue to 21000. That'll take you through to our website, you'll get access to our growing toolkit, which actually contains some tools that will be helpful for sales and marketing, maybe to work on together and to set some goals.

And of course, my name is Darrell Amy, and Kathleen. There's just not that many people out there with the last name, Amy and the first name Darrell. So I bet if you look for me on LinkedIn, you'll probably find me. I'd love to connect with you.

Kathleen (39:04): Well, I will make it even easier and I will put the link to your LinkedIn and your website in the show notes.

So make sure to head over to the show notes if you're listening and you want to connect with Darrell or learn more about revenue, growth engine, or gain access to his toolkit in the meantime, if you were listening today and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, please consider heading to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast or review, I would really appreciate it.

And if you're listening and you know, somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because you never know, they could be my next guest. Thank you so much for joining me this week, Darrell.

Darrell (39:48): I had a great time. Thank you, Kathleen, for all you're doing here on the podcast. It's fantastic.

Kathleen (39:52): Oh, thank you. All right. Until next week.

Sales and marketing alignment is a concept that companies have talked about for years and somehow still haven't managed to solve.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, growth strategist and author Darrell Amy what companies can do to finally achieve marketing and sales alignment. 

Darrell knows how to help businesses grow. Rolling up his sleeves, he works behind the scenes with executives, sales leaders, and marketing professionals to develop and execute revenue growth strategies. He knows what works and what doesn’t, and he is shares this information in his new best-selling book Revenue Growth Engine: How To Align Marketing and Sales to Accelerate Growth.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Text the word "revenue" to 21000 to go to Darrell's website and gain access to his Toolkit
• Connect with Darrell on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Darrell Amy, who is the author of the Revenue Growth Engine. Welcome Darrell.

Darrell (00:24): Kathleen. It's great to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Kathleen (00:28): I'm excited to dig into this with you because we have a hot topic that I think marketers have have struggled with for a long, long time. But before we jump in could you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and what the Revenue Growth Engine is?

Darrell (00:47): Absolutely. So I am a sales and marketing junkie. I started as straight out of college with a marketing degree in my hip pocket, started in a sales B2B dog eat dog aggressive sales environment, was a sales rep, sales manager, worked with a Japanese company, helping them recruit and train resellers. And then I got the idea in 2004 to start my own business and my very first client, I trained his sales team. And when we got done training the sales team, he said, Darrell, everything you taught my team is fantastic, but my website doesn't say anything about it. Now, keep in mind, this was 16, 17 years ago, way back in 2004. And he said, do you build websites and being as it was my first client, Kathleen, you know what the answer was? Yes, sir. We built websites.

Darrell (01:38): I'd actually built one for a nonprofit and for my church as well, but I pulled my marketing degree out and, you know, with now close to a decade of, of sales experience and started down this journey of developing salespeople and have had the opportunity to train thousands of salespeople for companies in the fortune 500, all the way down to great, fantastic locally owned, small businesses. And the same time started on this journey in 2004 of web search, social inbound, account-based marketing. And it's been so much fun having a foot in both the sales and the marketing world all this time, but also feeling that tension back and forth about, you know, this, this perennial topic of sales and marketing alignment and how do we work together? So that's what brought the Revenue Growth Engine together. I wanted to put together a model of best practice to be able to align marketing and sales, to drive what we're all about, whether you're in sales or marketing, which is revenue growth.

Kathleen (02:43): I love that. And it's, it's the perfect segue because as you say sales and marketing alignment has been a topic that marketers have talked about for a long time. Certainly as long as I've been in marketing and they've even come up with names, like I think HubSpot called it smarketing. And we, one of the companies I used to work at, we joked, we didn't like the word smarketing. So we called it smalignment. But like, literally it's why is this so hard? Why?

Darrell (03:21): Well, it, it, you know, having, having a stake in both worlds here now for almost two decades I think it's hard because there's so many different reasons. One we, we tend to get focused on, on even though we're, we're heading in the same direction, we're talking different language, you know, if, if you think about the language of marketing, which you know, is fascinating journey here, you know, as it continues to evolve and the platforms and the data and the you know, all of, all of the different words and verbiage we use in marketing and then the world of sales, which, you know, in some ways has changed in a lot of ways, hasn't changed that much. And so I think there's, there's misalignment communication. And that's why, you know, to me, the, the, the moment the light bulb came on for me was I was getting ready to speak at a conference.

Darrell (04:16): And so it was a growth conference and all these businesses were there. They wanted to grow. There were, there were marketing people in the room and you could tell they were in the front rows, they were ready to roll. They were excited about all the new gadgets and all of the new you know, the new tools out there. And it's an incredibly exciting time for marketing right behind them. You could see the sales managers, the sales managers are in the room, you know, if they were either, they were either on their phones trying to, you know, close a deal or get something moving forward. And, but you could kind of see the thought bubbles above the sales manager's heads, right? Like, why are we here? This is a waste of time. We could be out selling something and where, why don't I, why aren't you giving me better leads?

Darrell (05:00): And then in the back of the room where the business owners and they're back there, I can see a couple of them drinking their coffee. And they're like, you know, looking out over this, you could just see them going, why can't y'all get along and figure this out. And as I was preparing for this conference, that's when I realized that this isn't about marketing. This isn't about sales. As much as I love either both of the professions, what it's about is growing revenue. And if you boil it all down to the most basic level, Kathleen I've determined, there's really only two ways to grow revenue. We get more net, new customers, or we sell more to our current clients. Those are the two ways to grow revenue. And so rather than talk about sales and marketing, I say, we shift the conversation to driving net new business and cross selling more to our current clients, and then let's get together and figure out how to do that.

Kathleen (05:55): All right. So how do we do that? Because you have this, I don't know why this is so difficult to solve. Like it's, it's, I would think that this would be something that would have been fixed by now. So, so I would love to hear your take on, on what the best way is to approach it

Darrell (06:12): Well, so here's the, here's the first place to start is just to look at your business and ask the question. If there's only two ways to grow revenue, getting net new clients, or selling more to your current clients, which of those two are you good at? And which are you maybe not so good at where's your core strength? And what I find is, Oh, I'll illustrate this with a story. We went to do a growth strategy workshop. I get involved in a lot of these, this was pre COVID. So it was on the airplane, down into West Palm beach, working with a great technology company down there. And we've got the owner of the company in the room, say VP of sales, marketing director, a couple other folks in the room, and they're there to put together a strategic growth plan. And so we get to the beginning of the conference and you know, we're just North of Miami, we're drinking cafecitos that great.

Darrell (07:04): Oh man, it's so good Cuban coffees. We're having a great time. We get ready to start the conference. And like all, you know, all workshops. I say, you know, what are your goals? We said, going around the room and the owner of the company goes, I want more net new business. And everyone goes, , we want more net new business. So I write on the board net new. So what's your goal? And they said, well, 10%, if we can get 10% year over year net new, you know, we'll be happy. Is that okay? That sounds modest and reasonable or write down 10%. So what did you do last year? Oh, and I'm expecting like 2%, maybe we went backwards, you know, something like that. And he goes, well, we did 9.8% net new growth last year. That's what I did. I started laughing. I was like, well, congratulations.

Darrell (07:52): You know, we should write a case study. This is great. But then I said, what about cross sell the other driver of revenue growth? And this company had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in personnel partnerships training on this new services initiative. That was a great fit for their current client base. How's that going? And the owner's eyes roll back. Right. And he's like, Darrell, we're struggling with this. So here's, here's why I tell this story sales and marketing. You know, rather than having this battle back and forth, which we can talk about, I've got some thoughts on that as well, but rather than have the battle look at the two drivers of revenue growth, find the one you're not good at and then get together and say, how can we solve this problem? And in the case of this company, you know, they said, how can we solve this problem of cross selling?

Darrell (08:44): Well, say, you know, the obvious answer from sales is we need to develop a regular cadence of meeting with our ideal clients to review business and keep up to date. So they started a periodic business program and got their reps trained and managed around that to support that marketing started a consistent client communication program and backed it up in this case with a client loyalty program, which gave the reps a good excuse to go in and have their first what they ended up being quarterly business review. And so now, you know, that it wasn't about, you know, marketing, we need more leads. These leads aren't good enough, you know, that kind of stuff, instead of was saying, okay, we've got a real business problem here. We need more cross sell revenue. Let's get together in the same room, put our creative hats on together and figure out how to do it. And as a result, you know, now they're beginning to cross sell people into that new business area. And when you start doing that, revenue starts accelerating.

Kathleen (09:42): So you talked about getting marketing and sales together and as step number one. And I think there, there are different levels at which you can on what you can really kind of look at sales and marketing alignment. There's a very like theoretical level of, of psychological alignment and that sort of thing. But then there's the very practical level of when do we put these people in the same room, how often, you know, and for what purposes, so maybe we could start there and can you talk me through kind of your perspective on, on, you know, these are generally two different departments within a company, and so what, is there a meeting cadence that you are a fan of for them?

Darrell (10:25): Absolutely. And, and so there's so many different ways we could talk about this. I think there should be a regular meeting cadence and whatever that cadence is, then the question goes, well, what's the topic of the meetings that we're going to have when we're working with clients to implement a revenue growth strategy, we'll have a quarterly sales and marketing strategy meeting where they'll look at core initiatives for a stage of the client experience that they want to work on together or a particular problem such as cross selling they want to solve. And then that group will set some, some goals for that business quarter. And they'll meet together weekly in a sale, a weekly sales and marketing or marketing and sales alignment meeting. And so in that meeting now, they've got specified projects that they're working on. You know, some are more marketing focused, some are more sales focus, but they're working together and building out that infrastructure for those projects.

Darrell (11:24): And they're both giving input on them. So we get to the end of the quarter and the projects are done. It's not, you know, one of the biggest problems with sales and marketing alignment is marketing creates something, launches it. I was talking to a sales rep out in Los Angeles and a great rep works in financial services. And he's like Darrell. I went to meet with one of my clients today and they pulled out something from our marketing department and put it in front of me and ask me a question I'd never it before in my life. So, so let's get marketing and sales together on some type of regular cadence. I think weekly to have an alignment meeting where where we're solving problems together and we're creating things together, whether it's collateral or campaigns or whatever that is so that, you know, we're cross pollinating and getting input and buy-in throughout the, throughout the process.

Darrell (12:17): The other thing that you can do there's two other things, very practically for sales and marketing alignment related to meetings. One is to set a cadence of deal analysis. And I talk about this and the Revenue Growth Engine book, where maybe once a month you say, you know what, we're going to get together for an hour, or we're going to get together for lunch, or we're going to do something once a month with some sales leaders and some marketing leaders in the room. And we're going to take a deal. We won the deal we lost and a deal that went to no decision, and we're going to tear it apart together, and we're going to figure it out and we're going to figure out why we're winning, why we're losing and why, you know, why we're getting no decision deals. And now sales and marketing in the room together are able to process that you might invite in your sales reps from time to time.

Darrell (13:06): You might even invite in the client and go, why did we win? You know, this is this is helpful. And, and doing those, those deal analysis meetings, those usually just happen in the sales department. If you have a great sales leader, they'll already be doing deal analysis. It's kind of like Monday at LA. You know, it's like Monday after the football game, we all watched the tape, right. Here, I think companies shouldn't do that as a sales and marketing team and maybe even operations together to figure out why are we winning? And that's going to make the marketing better. It's going to make sell sales better and it's going to help align.

Kathleen (13:43): I love that. I'm, I'm curious about one thing, cause so I've worked in sales I've I obviously work in marketing now. And I've run a lot of sales and marketing alignment meetings and, and what I found in my experience and maybe I'm running them wrong, but I found that that a lot of times they veer into becoming a time for sales to, to ask marketing for things. And I will say at marketing's behest, like when I have these meetings, I'll be like, what can we do to help you sell better? You know, what are questions you're hearing from, from prospects? What are, what are things you need to close deals faster? And I think those are all things that need to be talked about, right? Like, because marketing has a really important role in sales enablement, but sometimes I feel like these meetings veer into the territory of just become like adding to marketing's to do list without kind of the reverse, which is, you know, really looking closely at marketing hand sales leads, what's happening with them and what is sales doing on their side? And this is totally my biased opinion because I spend more in these meetings as a marketer than I ever did as a sales person. But what is your experience been? Because sometimes that, that to me can get frustrating where I'm like, okay, this, this meeting should not all just be about adding to my to-do list. It needs to be a two-way street where, you know, the sales team gets held accountable for using the marketing materials and doing certain things. I dunno, I dunno. Have you seen anything work really well?

Darrell (15:16): Well, I think that when you do start creating things together, so you start with strategy, you know, and rather than start at the tactical level, which tends to happen, right? What do you guys need? Oh, I need a brochure or, you know, whatever. I, you know, if you start start a lot of times those meetings start there. The other thing to do is I want to talk about leads for a minute. Cause this is one of the biggest places of tension between marketing and sales sales says he don't give me enough leads. And when you do get leads, sales said, these leads are garbage. And then the marketing people say never close the leads. So and I work primarily in the B2B space. So the answer I'm going to give here is in the business to business space and in the business to business space.

Darrell (16:04): Most of the companies that I work with in most companies in the business to business space have a defined target market. In fact we recommend that you dial it down even more to what we call ideal clients, which is not a new term, but the idea is who are the clients that can buy everything that you sell and are a good fit. They align with your company values and you know, the types of clients you want to work with once you know who your ideal clients are, you've got the profile you've marked your current ideal clients because not all of your current clients are ideal by the way. And maybe it's a usually 80 20 rule then go out in the marketplace and go, okay, let's get the data on our ideal clients. Once that happens. Now, the sales and marketing lead thing is over.

Darrell (16:57): I say, if you know who your ideal clients are, you don't need leads. You already know who your leads are, what you need is engagement and intelligence. So a lot of this back and forth of, you know, Hey, you're not giving me enough leads. What we need instead is we need, we know who our ideal prospects are. Let's now put a plan together from a sales standpoint and a marketing standpoint to make sure we have what I call a hundred percent coverage of these ideal prospects. So from a sales standpoint, you know, the sales leader goes, Hey, here's IRA. Our ideal prospects. We've agreed on a cadence to call on the three most important decision makers, influencers, or marketing speak personas in those accounts on a quarterly basis. So you can call on anyone you want to, but absolutely hundred percent. We call on these ideal prospects.

Darrell (17:52): We engage with them and if you don't want to do it totally fine, we'll give it to somebody else. So you put a target account program in place. Marketing's the same thing. Now this requires a different thought pattern in marketing. Cause usually with marketing, we've kind of been like, we're going to throw, you want to throw the nets out, throw the lures out and hope we snag something. But with an ideal client profile in mind and it lists of ideal prospects. Now it becomes incumbent upon marketing to say, we're going to use every possible effort to get the company in front of these prospects with a value proposition. And we're going to aim for 100% coverage, meaning that every decision maker and influencer hears from our company and engages with our company in some way on a regular basis. Now, are we ever going to get to a hundred percent?

Darrell (18:45): No, but you know, now from marketing rather than becoming tactical campaign focused, we're gonna run an email campaign and we're going to do this. Now we're getting in the room and we're going, okay, we've got these prospects. What can we do to engage with them? And this is more of an account-based marketing mindset. You know, an account-based marketing is a fantastic model. That's been pioneered at the enterprise level in the technology world. But regardless of what you hear in the enterprise level or technology world, this mindset of saying, Hey, we know who our target, our ideal prospects are. Let's figure out how to get in front of them and let's use our best, most creative minds and all of the tools and tactics at our disposal to make sure that happens. So now we're not talking the stuff that's going back and forth between marketing and sales now is about engagement with these ideal prospects and clients rather than, Hey, I got somebody that gave us an email address from somewhere in the world that might possibly be a human being, right? So a little bit, little bit different mindset. When we look at ideal clients, they're, I'll get off my soap box.

Kathleen (19:58): No, I love all of this. ABM is definitely can be a really powerful strategy if, if executed well. So my question, as I listened to you talking about all of this is what advice do you give to marketing and sales leaders about how they forge a relationship with each other? Because it seems to me that this would all need to start there with the head of marketing and the head of sales becoming one another's best friends.

Darrell (20:32): Yes. And you know, relationships happen with common quills, like happened with time, spent together. You know, they happen when both both parties are rewarded for success. You there's, there's so many different dynamics there, but at a minimum, you know, I would say start spending time together a lot of time together and, you know, marketing people, one of the, one of the best things that, that I think we can do as marketing people is it used to say, get out in the field. What that means now is get on the zoom calls, right? It'd be there. On the zoom calls set up, set a cadence where you go, you know what? I'm going to spend a certain amount of time every week with salespeople on calls with prospects and clients, because what's going to happen is in the process, you're going to forge a relationship.

Darrell (21:27): You're but you're also going to get that valuable information, which is what's important to our clients and prospects right now. And maybe even more specifically, what are the actual words that they're using? Because right now, and this may be, you know, there's so many times we've been saying recently, this is more important than ever, but here's one thing I want to say. And I'm a firm believer that when it comes to the message, which, you know, marketing owns the message when it comes to the message, we've got to always remember that buyers don't buy products. They buy the outcomes, those products and services deliver good old Theodore Levitt walked into his Harvard business school class. And the first day of marketing class holding up the old drill bit says, you know, nobody ever buys a drill bit. They buy the whole course set, Seth Godin would say, go South.

Darrell (22:17): We'd say they didn't buy the hole. They bought the ability to hang the plaque on the wall. Right. And I always laugh because then Donald Miller stands right behind and says, well, they didn't actually buy it. The plaque, they bought the ability to look good to their friends. So they didn't get isolated weighted and eaten by a lion, you know, whatever the motivation is, you know, buyers buy outcomes, right. And what's so critical right now. And this is why I think marketing and sales need to be working together and meeting with clients and prospects together is the outcomes shift or continuing to shift. They shifted with COVID when the crisis happens. So I think we all know that, but I mean, if you think about know, for example, right after about six or eight weeks after the crisis started this, this year Gartner went out and did some research in the tech space and they said, what outcomes do you want?

Darrell (23:08): Well, last year it was all about scalability. And how do we, you know, accelerate growth and do all these things this year or after the crisis, the outcomes changed resiliency, redundancy, remote working, enabled that same product, same service, different outcomes, which means different message. And I think that message is going to continue to shift as we move through the different stages of economic recovery, whatever that looks like. And so in this time, it's really critical that is marketing people. We get out there with the sales team and we know participate or lurk in video and zoom meetings and listen in really pay attention to what the specific top of mind outcomes, the problems and aspirations that our prospects and clients have. And that is aligning that. And then after those meetings sitting down with their sales team and debriefing and going, okay, what do we hear here? So we can make sure that the message that we're delivering from a marketing perspective that also gets repeated by salespeople is laser focused on what the clients and prospects actually want right now,

Kathleen (24:20): Do you ever find that marketing gets pushed back from sales on that participation? Because it's interesting. You know, I've, I've seen various levels of receptivity to this. I worked in one company where the sales team was highly receptive to marketing, kind of being a fly on the wall. Then I spent some time in the cybersecurity sector and nobody wants any flies on the wall, whether that's a marketing person or like now there's all this great technology like gong and chorus and you know, where you can record calls, but in B2B cyber it's, it's like next to impossible to do any of that. And, and then I've worked in companies where, you know, they, the sales team just says, well, we don't want to bring a clown car into a meeting. Like we want to keep it small. And so I'm wondering what you've seen and what, whether you've seen that pushback and if so, how you've addressed it.

Darrell (25:17): Well, certainly I think that's a sales leadership issue and you know, and obviously not withstanding highly regulated industries and, you know, different things like that. I mean, there's, there's certainly a lot of different challenging circumstances, but the reality of all of it is marketing can't, we can't as marketers deliver a clear focused message unless we're able to be in front of buyers. You know, there's only so much that internet research is going to do. It's actually hearing the words that they're using. Another way to go about if you can't get involved in the meetings. One thing that I think marketers should do and should always have at the top of their priority list, it's usually at the bottom, but at the top of their priority list is case studies, success, stories, client interviews, whatever you want to call it. So and I, this was, this comes from just a, a 32 second rant from running a marketing agency now for 17 years, right?

Darrell (26:17): Hey, Darrell, we need you know, to redo our marketing. Great. Okay. So we come back with, you know, website and all the different things. And then underneath all on that red list of recommendations is to put together a set of case studies because we always ask, do you have any case studies? Well, no, we hadn't ever gotten around to it. Okay. So now, you know, now it's like, Hey, we need a new website. We need corporate brochure, some videos, all this. And then we say, well, what about case studies? Well, we'll get around to that when we're done with that. So I got to the point where, and you know, now the answer is, look, we're not going to build a website for you. We're not going to build a corporate brochure. We're not going to do anything for you until we write three case studies for your current clients, because then you'll see, we'll see together what the actual outcomes those people want and what they value from your company.

Darrell (27:12): And I've just always makes me laugh. Kathleen, I get asked I've had the opportunity over the years to write many, many case studies. And when I do, I'll always interview the sales rep first, and this is such a great point of marketing and sales alignment. So I'll interview the sales rep and say, Hey, tell me about this client that give me the backstory. Why did they buy Oh, well it's because we saved them money. Or we gave them a positive ROI, which is sales speak for save the money. Okay. Great. Any other reason? No, no. It was mainly because of my good looks and we saved them money. Okay. So then we'll interview the client and you know, we'll get down to the benefits section. What were the challenges, what did this company do for you or how have you benefited? And the client will start rattling things off.

Darrell (27:58): We like this, we love this. This is really helped our organization. It solved this problem. And in most of those conversations, I ended up having to say, Oh, by the way, are you tracking the ROI, trying to bring the money thing into it somehow. And most of the time the clients go, well, not really, but we like this, this, this, and this. So then I go back to the sales rep and go, Hey, do you want to know why your client actually is buying from you? And do you want to know how much money you left on the table by discounting this instead of charging a little bit more than what they were currently spending to get all these additional benefits. And so case study conversations, you know, I would say as, as marketing, you know, I would challenge you to set a cadence to say, I'm going to do one of these a month, or if you don't have a library of them one a week and really get that that going, it's going to help fuel your message. So you're able to create better content, but we'll also give you tons of stuff to go back to the sales team and begin to add value and forge those relationships.

Kathleen (29:00): That's a really good point. And I don't know how many marketers really do that, but I love that notion of, you know, so often as marketers, we're going to sales and asking them to tell us things, but if we can interview customers and, and bring intelligence back to sales, that's really powerful.

Darrell (29:22): It is, and you know, the market research is good and we should be doing that. And we should be, you know, doing industry trends and seeing what's going on, but none of that can replace the actual conversations and words with our ideal clients. And that's where, you know, it gets down I'm Canadian. So I like maple syrup. I write about maple syrup a lot in Revenue Growth Engine. Just because

Kathleen (29:49): You would get along with my husband really well because he not kidding says all the time that maple syrup is the, the universe's most perfect food. He puts it in his coffee.

Darrell (30:01): Does he drink it straight?

Kathleen (30:03): I don't know if he would admit he did.

Darrell (30:07): And I don't know if I would admit on live radio, I drink it straight up that may or may not happen, but what's great about maple syrup is we take a substance that, you know, is sweet. It's okay. You know, SAP comes out of a tree, but then it gets distilled down. It takes 40 gallons of SAP to make a gallon of maple syrup. And that's where having these conversations with clients. And then also if possible participating in sales meetings, that's where you get it boiled down to the really good stuff. And that's where we create messaging that is really effective. And that can't happen until we get in front of clients as marketers and cooperating with sales. And that is one good way to start to build those relationships.

Kathleen (30:49): So I'm curious about one thing, which is, do you think that the way marketing and sales leaders are compensated feeds into this divide between marketing and sales, like is there, is the incentive structure part of the problem or the, I shouldn't say the incentive structure itself, but it's the fact that they very often have two different incentive structures or in some cases marketers have no incentive structure, right. You pay, like, I wonder if that, if that lends itself to deepening the divide between marketing and sales.

Darrell (31:27): Maybe I think so. And I'm thinking from two different angles, one is just in terms of overall results. You know, when, when the team wins, everybody should win and you know, I'm not a compensation expert by any stretch, but just that principle of saying when the team wins, everybody should win. And we all know in today's buying environment that there is no buyer that doesn't touch the company's marketing at some point before, during and after the sales process. Right. I mean, it's just, it's the reality of today's world. So I think there should be an incentive there, especially, and I would, I would say, especially around landing ideal clients, like that's where you should really have the high fives, but the other place that I think a lot of companies miss it, even if they've got a structure that does align marketing compensation with results is usually sales compensation is aligned to net new business and not cross selling more to current clients.

Darrell (32:33): And you know, this, this is when we look at companies, if you grow net new business by 10% great, you know, it's going to take you, the investment analysts have a rule of 72. You take the number 72, you divide it by the return on investment. It tells you how long it takes to double your investment. We can use that in the sales and marketing world. If we growing 10% year over year 72 divided by 10%, it's going to take you 7.2 years to double the revenue of that business. Now, if I can cross sell, do net new and cross sell at the same time, I can cut the time to double the business in less by 50% and some even more cause the exponential nature of it. So now instead of seven years, I can double the business and say three. So I think companies would be smart to compensate marketing and sales, not just on net new, but also on cross sell revenue to current clients. And to really focus on that. And most companies we go in overall, it's not a, it's probably a general rule that that's just not happening and there's a great opportunity to align marketing and sales by getting the comp right around cross selling.

Kathleen (33:47): I would agree with you. And I just, the whole thing really does make me wonder if marketers were given the exact same incentive structure as the sales teams with whom they work, how would that change things? And I was thinking, as you were talking, I was actually thinking through it, if it were true for me, which it's not right now. And if, if I was being comped exactly as my sales counterpart was, I suspect and shame on me for not doing this already, that I would probably more frequently be saying to him, Hey, like we got to sit down today and look at what it's going to take for us to hit the number, you know, this month or this quarter, like I would be doing that more often. And so I don't know. It's just, it's interesting. I hadn't really thought about it before, but you, you got me, you got my wheels turning on that during this conversation.

Darrell (34:34): Mine as well. And, and I think you know, the general principle here is, is if the sale, if you want sales and marketing aligned, when the company wins sales and marketing should both win. And you know, there's, there's there's no disputing that, that it takes a team effort from the buyer's perspective, right? We all know the data. We all know that that, you know, the buyers are way through the buying journey. I'm laughing Kathleen. Cause I was on a live cast the other day and I was quoting the challenger customer data on there's an average of 6.8 decision-makers in the average B2B transaction. And I said, that was 10 data, 10 years ago. I know it's higher now. And I was live on the podcast and Brent Adamson chimed in, in the comments and said, it's now 12. So that made me laugh. But I was the reality is today, especially in the B2B buying space, you know, these decisions are complex. There's a lot of different people involved. It takes a team effort from sales and marketing to make sure that all the decision makers and influencers are properly informed and, and, you know, properly engaged throughout the buying cycle. And there's no way that sales can do that all by themselves. So , let's look at compensation. Great. Okay.

Kathleen (35:58): If, if nothing else I'm, I think I'm going to for the next week, do a test and pretend as though that's how I was being comped and see what it gets me to do differently. Interesting. And what happens as a result of that? So I'll make myself the Guinea pig. Well, we can talk about this all day, but we're running out of time. So I want to shift gears for a second. I always ask all my guests the same two questions at the end. I'm curious what you have to say. The first one is that, of course we are the inbound success podcast. So when it comes to inbound marketing, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park these days?

Darrell (36:35): Well, I am a huge HubSpot fan. We, we have been a HubSpot partner for a long time now and I, what I really like is I do like the innovation that's happening there. We've talked today about some account-based marketing strategies. I call it account-based marketing light, kind of, you know, for the, the mid sized companies. And HubSpot's bringing more and more tools to the table in that space. And also just the beautiful way they've aligned sales and marketing with sales tools, CRM in the middle marketing and even operations. Now I say huge shout out for the work that's going on at HubSpot big fan.

Kathleen (37:14): I mean, they are absolutely the gold standard. Second question. One of the biggest pain points I hear marketers express to me is that digital marketing is changing incredibly quickly and it's very hard to keep up with everything. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and up-to-date?

Darrell (37:32): Tthat's a great question. There's no, there's no stopping with education. I, I think the reality is you've got to be a voracious reader right now. So if you look behind me, I've got a lineup. This is my lineup of books to read right now. You know, and so I, I try to read a book every week and in the process as well, just you know, I've got my Feedly stacked with with as many informative blogs as possible. There's, there's no way getting around doing the hard work of educating yourself. And I think it's, especially for marketers, it's gotta be something where you say, Hey, I'm going to dedicate 10% of my week to educating myself. Otherwise you're going to fall behind really quickly.

Kathleen (38:20): It's very easy to do. It's very easy to do. All right. Well, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about the Revenue Growth Engine, or want to connect with you online and ask a question, what is the best way for them to do that?

Darrell (38:36): Well, you text the word revenue to 21000 that's revenue to 21000. That'll take you through to our website, you'll get access to our growing toolkit, which actually contains some tools that will be helpful for sales and marketing, maybe to work on together and to set some goals. And of course, my name is Darrell Amy, and Kathleen. There's just not that many people out there with the last name, Amy and the first name Darrell. So I bet if you look for me on LinkedIn, you'll probably find me. I'd love to connect with you.

Kathleen (39:04): Well, I will make it even easier and I will put the link to your LinkedIn and your website in the show notes. So make sure to head over to the show notes if you're listening and you want to connect with Darrell or learn more about revenue, growth engine, or gain access to his toolkit in the meantime, if you were listening today and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, please consider heading to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast or review, I would really appreciate it. And if you're listening and you know, somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because you never know, they could be my next guest. Thank you so much for joining me this week, Darrell.

Darrell (39:48): I had a great time. Thank you, Kathleen, for all you're doing here on the podcast. It's fantastic.

Kathleen (39:52): Oh, thank you. All right. Until next week.

Facebook's ad platform is constantly evolving. What strategies are the experts using to get amazing results today?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Feedstories cofounder, author, and Facebook advertising expert Bob Regnerus breaks down the specific strategies he uses to help clients get incredible results with Facebook ads. 

From using look alike audiences for targeting, to using retargeting to reach warm traffic, to why you should use deep funnel marketing strategies, Bob covers a lot of ground and shares actionable takeaways that anyone can use to improve their Facebook ads results, today.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit ultimatefb.com to check out Bob's interviews with folks like Ryan Deiss, Brian Kurtz and Perry Marshall, and to get his book

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And my guest today is Bob Regnerus, who's the co-founder of Feedstories, a digital marketing coach and author of five books, including the fourth edition of the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. Welcome Bob.

Bob (00:32): So good to be here, Kathleen. How are you doing today?

Kathleen (00:34): I'm great. Before we start nerding out on all things marketing, can you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself? What it is that you do and how you came to be a Facebook advertising expert?

Bob (00:50): Yeah, I'm think probably very similar to a lot of the people that are listening. I am a serial entrepreneur and I'm the type of entrepreneur who kind of found his way in through corporate channels. So I have a programming background. I, I studied that in college and my first couple of gigs out of college were at big corporations in programming. And this was kind of around 1997, 98. The internet was starting to be something rather significant. So I started getting into developing websites for clients. So I developed my first website in 1998. The first website I built that I got paid for, which was really cool. And I, it was funny, I guess I got my start into internet marketing this way that the client had built the website for actually said to me, Hey, this is great.

Bob (01:47): I love it. We're making sales, you know, this is amazing. Can you help me get traffic to my site? I said, yeah, absolutely. I know exactly how to do that. And of course I had no idea. Right. so I had to go and figure out how to do it, and that was my start in internet marketing. So I'm going on 22 years plus here of internet and direct marketing like many I've studied you know, the masters. Worked with Dan Kennedy book, Perry Marshall, and Frank Kern, Ryan Deiss. These are all people that I got to know over the years. So it's, it's, it's, it's a constant journey. So I happen to really navigate towards paid advertising. I know a lot of people are really good at SEO and organic and I'm really happy for them, but I find it too much of, I don't want to say this, but I'll say it it's kind of like voodoo.

Bob (02:39): I don't know, Kathleen. One thing works today and then tomorrow it doesn't work. I just kind of gravitated more towards paid because it was, it's a little predictable put in a dollar, make $2, you know, that's kind of our goal here. I have worked on all the platforms GoTo, Overture Yahoo, Google Adwords, but then 2013 came around actually late 2012 and 2013. I'm like Facebook is becoming a serious player. It wasn't mainstream yet, by any sense of the imagination in terms of advertising, they had a very basic garbage had product, which was right-hand side ads that you would see on a desktop, very low click through rates, very low conversions, but they started doing what are called sponsored stories. And that is the first evolution of what we see in our newsfeed today, which is ads that look like content along with all your other personal stuff. To me, that was a big, big deal. So, I dove in head first really, really got into that and it really resonated with me cause I'm a big story guy. I really enjoy connecting with people through story and its just a really good media for that. So I, I I've really been in it for seven plus years and I don't think Facebook's going away anytime soon. So I think I have some job security. Yeah.

Kathleen (04:03): Yeah, definitely. And today, are you really only focusing on Facebook ads? Are you working with clients on full funnel ad strategies across the multiple platforms?

Bob (04:14): It's a really good question. I have found. Just, just for me that I, I have focused mostly on two things. I am kind of the Facebook guy in our company and then my business partner, Brandon, focuses on video and video marketing. So, we, we make, made a conscious decision not to do full funnel stuff because, we have found being specialists is a little bit more, it works better for the way we are wired than to be generalists. And so I'm not disparaging of the agencies or things like that. Just for us, it, it feels like we can, you know, separate ourselves from the competition more, but being really good at a couple of things versus trying to be good in a bunch of things.

Kathleen (04:59): It's interesting because I feel like I could do a whole podcast episode and invite on a couple of paid ads, people and just stage a debate between like, should you do it all? Or should you specialize? And I've probably interviewed an equal number of people on either side. And, and one of the arguments I've always heard for specializing is that, you know, as you've kind of mentioned, these platforms are getting incredibly sophisticated in terms of their capabilities and that really to truly master them, it almost as a full-time job, you know, just staying on top of everything.

Bob (05:36): Well, I, I, you know, I maybe, you know, I kind of glossed over a number of years, but I think like other entrepreneurs, Kathleen, I had my up and down cycles. I, I barely survived the crash in 2008. I actually had an agency that was well-staffed. We had about 15 people working for us and we were banking on continued growth. And a lot of our clients are information marketers, especially in the real estate niche. And of course, 2008 was the great crash. Many of our clients quickly ran out of money and when they ran out of money, they could stop, you know, they stopped paying me and formed a whole cycle. So I had the pleasure number of years ago, laying off a bunch of people that I call friends. And so I didn't want to live through that again.

Bob (06:25): And so just part of the way I'm wired, I, I enjoy having a smaller company now. That's more specialized and doesn't have so many moving parts purely, purely a personal choice. I have friends that are running agencies that are six figures, seven figures, and even eight figures. And they're doing amazing. I think it's just kind of, I think you really have to pick the way you're wired and what, what, you know, I tried to develop my business now more towards the lifestyle I want. I'm, you know, I'm in my early fifties, I coach high school basketball. Like my kids who are both in college, so I'm just making different choices. And again, I think everyone's got to make their own choices as to what makes the most sense for them. And for me right now in my career, those things make the most sense to me.

Kathleen (07:15): I can totally relate as somebody who owned her own digital marketing agency in the same timeframe, 2008, 2009 that was some angst ridden years. So let's, let's talk about Facebook and you know, you and I chatted a little bit before we did the podcast about how I feel like my audience is pretty experienced. And they tend to know, you know, they, they tend to know the basics. And so I would, I would be willing to bet if I were a betting woman, that the majority of them have done some Facebook advertising, you know, they, they know the one Oh one level stuff, but, and I'll speak for myself here. That's, that's me too. I've managed teams that have done Facebook ads. I could run Facebook ads on my own, but I'm not a Facebook advertising expert. And so I selfishly want to dig into is for somebody like me, who understands basically how it works, what are the things that I need to know to really take it to the next level, especially like Facebook today and how it's functioning now and the ad types that work the way you rotate in creative and just all the, you know, I guess call it two to three Oh one level.

Kathleen (08:31): Things that, that really result in great performance on Facebook. I know that's a broad question. So I'm going to allow you to kind of take that where you want to take it. Yeah.

Bob (08:41): Well, it's really interesting. Facebook now is very much a mature media. You know, think of where Google was about 10 years ago, where it's, it's, it's a wide swath of beginning advertisers, middle tier advertisers and high end advertisers. You know, we're talking big brand companies with big budgets and things like that. So one of the things that is different now and is difficult for a lot of advertisers, just the fact that there's just a lot of money flowing into Facebook and you and I happen to be recording this on an amazing day here in the U S it's election day. We have no idea what's going to happen by the time this airs, you know, who knows what's going to be going on.

Kathleen (09:22): Right. Probably best for all of us that we're in this room. And we can't be watching the news

Bob (09:27): Safe in our bunkers, listen to podcasts, not the news, but one of the big, you know, what I'm talking about here is the environment. So for about 30 days, give or take a couple of weeks, we have seen just record high CPMs. The cost of advertising has been just massive.

Kathleen (09:48): Well, and we're coming into black Friday, cyber Monday.

Bob (09:51): Yeah. that's coming up, but I have noticed more spending this cycle than I did in 2016. And then certainly during the midterms of 2018 just the highest CPMs we've ever seen. But yeah, so this other thing that we have going on called COVID has shifted a lot of money into the e-commerce space. So a lot of your traditional big box retailers who kind of always rely on foot traffic into their stores are now heavily investing in their e-commerce sales, because they know people are not going to go to the stores in droves. So I have seen really since, you know, kind of August here political spending, and now here we are, the elections will be over. The politicians will leave, but you're right. There's going to be a huge influx of cash into the ad auction specifically for e-commerce. And I saw a commercial, I think it was two weeks ago. Target said black Friday is now right.

Kathleen (10:53): Well, prime day has already happened. I mean, I feel like it's sort of like how stores put Christmas decorations now out in August, I feel like the same thing is happening with holiday deals and sales. Yeah.

Bob (11:04): It definitely is. And stores have lost a lot of money and they are going to try to make it up. So they are pumping money into advertising and trying to make that happen. So the biggest thing that people are probably facing and, you know, the clients that come to me for coaching are like, Hey, my costs are through the roof. You know, how do we get, how do we get a stance here? How, how do we like quell the rising cost of advertising? I'm pretty sure that's what most people are fighting right now. The, the answer to that is, is, is it's multifaceted. Number one is, one of the things that we have found that is working quite well is, is really giving Facebook is much ... How do I want to say this? We want to give them as much, ability to target as we possibly can.

Bob (11:55): So really creating really good high value look alike audiences. It's probably a basic strategy at this point, but I've seen this mistake so many times is that people aren't modeling their best audience. Facebook's look alike audience is just that. It is a model of people that are just like a particular audience. And I find too many people still relying on interest based targeting versus look alikes. I was at a meeting at Facebook headquarters a number of years ago. And even then this was true. They said, you know, we know we know your customers better than you do.

Kathleen (12:37): They probably know the customers better than the customer knows themselves.

Bob (12:41): That's scary. And you, you really know that by looking at your own newsfeed, but the moral behind that story is we used to think our edge is that we would be able to dial in the targeting much better by knowing their interest and the, these pages they like and things like that. I have just found over and over that it's much better to spend time on creating a better model. So, you know, in the book we talk about this ancient concept it's called RFM recency frequency money. And the idea here is, is that we should be creating sub list of our customers. The people who've bought most recently from us, the people who buy frequently from us and the people who spend the most money and making a smaller subset of our customers and using that as a lookalike audience. And we find over and over that model beats like modeling your entire customer base and it, by far beats you know, just trying to do interest based targeting the more dialed in and the more you let the optimizer or Facebook's AI do targeting for you the better off, I think you're going to be from that standpoint. I don't know if you've experienced the same thing working with your team.

Kathleen (13:54): Yeah. I mean, I'm in a new role, so we're just getting started with Facebook advertising here, but I think it's certainly in previous situations, I've I found that to be true. Yeah.

Bob (14:05): And, you know, so kind of building on that that that's, that's really kind of a cold strategy is, is it, you know, if you, if you can't model your customers, the next best thing to customers is, is modeling an email list. You know, most of us are collecting email addresses and at least have kind of a non-buyer list. That's another good strategy is to do that. I'll get back to what to do if you don't have either of those, but I, I, I want to shift towards the idea of you know, what do we do kind of first, I think, and I see this mistake over and over, and this is why I'm bringing it up. People placed too little emphasis on retargeting. I think everybody's concept is, Oh, I'm going to go to Facebook and I'm going to go find a bunch of new customers.

Bob (14:53): And I think that's just flat out wrong. The idea of going after cold traffic is, is great, but you, and I know this and probably people listening is that cold traffic is the hardest to convert and it's the most expensive to convert. And, and quite frankly, if you don't have things dialed in right away, you lose a lot of money and you lose a lot of confidence. So one of the big mistakes I see people making is they, they they're putting too little effort into their retargeting. Retargeting of course, is the technology powered by the Facebook pixel. It's simply the ability to reconnect with visitors to your website or people who engage with your app or your content on the Facebook platform. And again, it's, I, I see it too often to not talk about it, but the idea is people who are already somewhat familiar with us are much likely to do business with us and somebody who doesn't know us at all.

Bob (15:48): I know it's elementary, but why do so many people make the mistake while they think because their product is better than all the other products? They think everyone is their customer. They simply go out to the cold, unwashed masses, and believe that their offers will convert. I really prefer to leverage warm traffic first. I like to hone my offers there and get that to convert to my warm traffic. And then if I can prove it at that level on you know, spending much less money and getting it optimized there, then I feel more comfortable going to the masses and try my offer there. I, I just think it's an elementary mistake that too many people gloss over

Kathleen (16:32): Now let's talk offers for a second because having spoken with lots of different ads experts, I've heard, you know, varying opinions on the best way to structure a Facebook ads funnel. I've heard several people, just absolutely passionately evangelize that you, you can't have just bottom of the funnel ads that you need to have your top of the funnel awareness level content to kind of draw people in. And then you, you know, you go from there. Then I've also had like, you know, at least one guest who's talked about like the progression of how you update your messaging. This was one of my earliest interviews. He talked about how if people see the same ad messaging too often, it stops working. And so he had a fairly elaborate, but I thought very wise and effective process for making sure that after a certain number of touches, he like rotated in new creative. So I'd love to just get your perspective on that kind of broad topic.

Bob (17:33): Well, here's where you can nerd out a little bit. So I, I have developed over time and this is, this is not top secret, but this is just something that I've developed and other marketers do this now. I call it deep funnel, marketing, others have different names, names for it. I really adhere to a principle that Eugene Schwartz talked about in 1966 and his book Breakthrough Advertising. It's, it's basically the customer awareness timeline. And I, and I detail this in the book. Anytime you're going out to the market, people are at various levels of awareness. Most of the market is unaware of who you are and what you offer. That's, that's just a fact. So as you, as you think about that, and as you move to the right of the timeline, the next stage is problem aware. This is really where a lot of Google advertisers really live and it's, it's actually a difficult adjustment for somebody who's good at Google to shift to Facebook.

Bob (18:32): It's because people who advertise on Google are instinctively aware about people's problems. Google is a problem solving mechanism. So when you go advertise on Google, there are people that are actively looking for solutions solution, where it happens to be the next stage of the awareness journey. And the idea is, Hey, I know you have this problem and I do a better job of detailing that problem, agitating that problem, and offering you a solution to that problem. That's, that's where a lot of advertisers are living, unfortunately, who advertise on Facebook. I see too many people running problem aware and solution aware ads to cold traffic. And that's a huge, huge mistake because only, Hey, here's what I'd like to say. Facebook is an interruption mechanism. Facebook is like a, it's like a anniversary party. You have a bunch of people over and today would be outside.

Bob (19:29): We wouldn't be indoors. We'd be outside in the backyard. There'd be family and friends there. We're celebrating the day. You know, we're laughing with, with our friends and family, and here comes a vacuum cleaner sales button, and they're screaming from the, you know, they're walking to the park. They're like, Hey, buy my vacuum cleaner. Well, you are a unwelcome guest. You're a pest at that party. Too many Facebook advertisers act like that. I know it's a funny example, but the idea is we're interrupting people who are looking at pictures of family and friends. I mean, that's essentially what Facebook is. We are interrupting them. And when somebody is at the unaware stage and you are interrupting them with problem aware solution, where ads, you are going to waste a lot of money and you're going to have really low quality scores and in turn and have really, really expensive ads that don't convert.

Bob (20:19): I think too few advertisers don't think about how to time their content. So, okay. If I'm going to interrupt somebody in the Facebook timeline, or what do I need to say to demonstrate my ability or to agitate a particular problem they have, or offer up a particular service or anything like that, you have to have different top of funnel content when you're interrupting them the first time, then once they've signaled to you that they're interested. And this is really key that the pixel really powers this. You know, I look for signals like this, they visited my landing page and they fill out a form or they watch a one-minute video. They put in their Facebook newsfeed and they watched 100% of it, meaning, Hey, they were engaged for a full 60 seconds. To me, that's a signal that, okay, they've moved beyond the unaware stage.

Bob (21:14): They're now either problem aware solution aware, and they're on their way to our solution aware or your solution aware. That's when you can start to offer them more. What I would call middle of funnel, nurturing type content, credibility, boosters, like testimonials, demonstrations you know, FAQ's those types of things. And then when they move down the funnel further, like they view an order form they watch a webinar or they've been on a call with you or something further down, well, now we're their bottom of funnel and they're very much aware of your solution and they're really narrowing it down to you or somebody else or worth you or nothing. Then you really want to target your ads towards that mindset. And I think too many people try to shortcut it and they're really misfiring on where their customer's awareness level is that, and that's where there there's big pockets of waste in their ad account because they're not adhering to where the customer is in terms of their customer awareness journey.

Kathleen (22:14): Yeah, it's interesting. I think that makes so much sense. And I think I know that I know that in the past I've made that mistake of sort of having the set it and forget it mentality with my ads and not recognizing that the customer is on a journey and the ad needs to go on that journey. The ad set needs to go on that journey with them.

Bob (22:34): And I don't know, Kathleen, the type of clients that you work with. I tend to work with clients that have much more complex or higher price products and services. Okay.

Kathleen (22:41): I don't work with clients anymore. I'm in house now. I've been out of the agency game for awhile.

Bob (22:48): I think this is another thing too, is the level of complexity in your product and the length of the buying decision makes a big difference too. You know, we mentioned e-commerce and I, and I have a lot of clients over the years who do e-commerce and it's really, it's kind of like the product that sits at the checkout counter before you go out where you don't have to do a lot of thinking. These are the types of products that the Harmon brothers, right? They work with Dollar Shave Club. And some of those like, Hey, I just saw a video. It entertained me. It's a product that I think is cool. I'm going to buy it. There's, I mean, there's obviously retargeting things involved, but it's really just like, Hey, the product is cheap enough or it's simple enough that I don't need to think about it.

Bob (23:33): I tend to attract those that are in the more complex markets. So we have more complex problems itself. It usually involves higher prices or a lot more thinking involved. So you have a lot more nurturing time in between, and it really takes a little bit more money and a little bit more patience to be able to work in that situation. Those that have that type of staying power do find success though because they're willing to go to those lengths to move and be with the customer as they shift from being unaware of me, to being aware of me and making a decision to buy.

Kathleen (24:10): What about ad formats? So specifically, you know, there are so many different ad formats now from, you know, sponsored content to stories, to videos, to you name it. You know, and that's, that's just on Facebook and I'm sure I've missed, oh carousels. I'm sure I've missed so many, but what have you seen in terms of effectiveness?

Bob (24:33): Well, it's interesting. I wish I was more creative. A lot of these new formats involve a high level creativity, and there's some cases where those big agencies just have an edge over me. I am really a proponent 80% of the time when you're starting out, you really need to focus in on the mobile newsfeed and two secondary to the desktop newsfeed. I, I prefer going into a market and make things much more simple. There are so many placements and there's so many types of ads and designs that you could do that we, we get. I think we get stuck quite honestly, I think becomes overwhelming. So what I prefer to do is, is, is simplify things for people and say, Hey, let, let's do something simple. Let's, let's try image ads and video ads in the mobile newsfeed. And I do know about mobile newsfeed, because 90% of our traffic to most businesses is going to be on the mobile side.

Bob (25:36): Okay. So I like to start there. In fact, you could live there for a very long time before you need to start branching out to other forms. Now, again, it's probably a function of the type of coaching clients that I have and the type of clients that come to us where, where some of those newer formats and more exciting formats are probably more appropriate. But you know, just realize that you really want to mix those placements and those types of designs to the type of environment and market that you're going after. I think certainly if you're in a market that skews a bit younger you probably need to have a lot more attention to types of like stories and things like that. One of the fortunate things is that we can hit both Instagram and Facebook through the same ad interface.

Bob (26:25): And you, you need to have some differences between those, you know. Instagram prefers, you know, shorter videos, square videos. Facebook tends to like, you know, profile videos like four by five, seven by 16 format works well, or the landscape 16 by nine works well. So I think part of it, Kathleen is really just I don't like people to get confused or overwhelmed by the number of choices they have. A lot of what Facebook puts into their system is, is what big advertisers are demanding. And I think part of what they do is as they deliver new products, new placements, new formats, they're, they're trying to create extra space to show ads, but the, the stalwart, the the steamship, whatever that drives Facebook's ad engine and drives most of the response still, in my opinion, is the newsfeed type ads.

Kathleen (27:21): And when you start a new campaign how many different variations on the creative do you start out with? Cause I'm a big believer in, you know, like testing and you can learn a lot, but I feel like, I feel like you could spend, you know, all your time just coming up with a million variations. So what's your personal approach to that?

Bob (27:42): It's a really good question. I think it's actually become simpler. If we are going after cold traffic, let's say we've, we've kind of here's what I, here's what I'd like to have and be armed with. Okay. as I mentioned before, I like to start with warm traffic. So what we do is we usually go and testing kind of three variations of an ad. I do not like to mix like images and videos in the same ad. So what I prefer to do is we'll, we'll develop three different videos with kind of three different messages first. So we'll, we'll kind of test those. And then what we do is we keep the same primary texts. So I'm assuming a lot about what people know about Facebook ads, but essentially there is a primary text that you see below your page name, there's the media, and then there's a headline and there's a call to action button.

Bob (28:35): So to keep things simple in our minds is we will test images first and we'll really evaluate click-through rates and just kind of see you know, how are people clicking through? And then we'll also on a video. See, like how many of the videos are, you know, getting engagement all the way through Facebook gives you, you know, how many watched it for 15, or I'm sorry, 25%, 50, 75, a hundred percent. So we'll evaluate videos that way, but I don't like evaluating images versus videos. So we'll do a video test and then we'll also do image test. You know, I like to do three. I think when you get past three, I see, I see too many inconsistent results. So you could run an image test on one day and, you, you, you think you have a definitive result and the very next day Facebook will decide to put its impressions on another image and it's really arbitrary.

Bob (29:33): So I find that three doesn't confuse the optimizer too much. And if when, once you run it for several days, you start to see some consistency. There's usually going to be a clear winner. There's going to be somewhere in second, and then there's going to be a laggard. Usually what you're going to find is that one is one is a clear winner and one is a real laggard. Um, I, I, I like to test that first and then we rotate in. So every time we have a loser, we'll throw a new one in and we'll try to beat, you know, and just see if we can move that up the totem pole. I like to kind of find three different pieces of media that work well. And then we start to test the primary text. Um, other thing that people really, really need to test is your primary texts.

Bob (30:18): Maybe you don't realize, but you only see three lines. Okay. So we used to think direct marketing. We need to test headlines well in Facebook, we need to taste, test the media first, and then we need to just test the first three lines of our text. So I spend most of my time really working on the first three lines of my opening primary text paragraph. Now, the other copy is definitely critical that we found the most impact is from, from trying variations of the first three lines. And here's, here's something just that I have found. And, and I pass this along. Everybody is you're when your three lines really engage the person in kind of a story format. If you are able to tell a story or, or engage kind of, and create an open loop in somebody's mind, then you get them to engage with the rest of the text involved in the ad. So I start with images. I'm sorry. I start with videos. Then I test images. Then I test primary text.

Kathleen (31:20): That's super helpful. And that makes me kind of think of another question, which is how long do you let a test run? Because I do feel like I hear frequently from marketers, like, Oh, I tried Facebook advertising and it didn't work. Or I tried LinkedIn advertising, you know, like I hear this about all the platforms and I'm always interested in like, is it that they didn't try long enough? Is it that when they thought it wasn't working, they should have just started new creative? Like how long do you go before you come to the conclusion? Like this channel just isn't working for me.

Bob (31:54): Yeah. There's two things that are always constantly battling for me. Number one is I have this statement and it's, it pretty much always rings true. The way something starts is the way it ends. And this is really true on Facebook for me is that if, if, if one particular piece of creative runs out in front, it's generally not going to get beat by something else. Facebook is, I mean, it's weird, but you know, Facebook is really smart. You know, the, the, the people that are creating the ad algorithm are really, really smart. The machine, the algorithms are really, really smart. So it's very rare that we will see a test run out to a lead and then retreat back later. We're always to let that run long enough so that it has some, statistical relevance. In general, there's always this rule of like 200, like you need 200 actions or 200 of anything to really make, make sure.

Bob (32:54): I tend to break that more often than not just, just going by the first, first observation. I, I have found that if you let something run a couple of days and it's just way ahead it's never going to get caught by the other two iterations. So what I like to do in that instance is declare that winner. And again, I'm not just spending $5 a day. I think, you know, you, you need to spend a couple hundred dollars on an ad before you can really make a call. It's not a hard and fast rule Kathleen, but I, I prefer, I feel much more comfortable calling a winner when I spend at least a couple of hundred dollars. So I'll follow the rule of 200 in terms of the monetary side of things. And I feel really comfortable kind of declaring a winner after Facebook's had at least a couple hundred dollars to spend.

Kathleen (33:40): All right, this is the perfect segue. Let's talk budgets. Oh yeah. Everybody, I'm sure you get this question with every single new customer that you sign. I remember I got it when I had an agency. How much should I be prepared to spend with Facebook advertising?

Bob (33:57): So there's, there's always a two part answer. The first answer is retargeting can be very, very inexpensive. I have some clients that are running very simple. What I call nurturing campaigns for $5 a day. Okay. They're coaching clients. They have a simple funnel. They don't spend a lot of money. They don't get a lot of traffic. They can put their retargeting out and nurture clients or nurture their prospects for $5 a day. However, if you are going to go and scale and go cold traffic, you need, you need to be prepared to start spending $5,000 a day. Like I said, the cost of traffic is going up, and it's going up for everybody. And of course, you know, we're, we're, we're giving you tips and tricks and we're trying to teach you how to be most effective to reduce, you know, reduce your cost, increase your response and things like that.

Bob (34:48): But it really comes down to a couple of things. Number one is, what's the conversion rate, you know, what's the normal conversion rate of your site. You know, how many people do you need to drive to that site in order for them to generate revenue for you? And, the second factor then is how much can you afford to spend to convert a customer? So the question, is a great question. We always get it. And we, we always have to kind of analyze each business individually, but it really comes down to conversion rates and, and margins. The more margin you have, the easier it is to be an advertiser. If you, if you have really tight margins and really tight windows to convert people, unfortunately it's going to be really difficult for you to make Facebook work. Because again, there, there was an expense.

Bob (35:39): You know, Facebook is not just going to give you customers, you really gotta work at it. So I, I would encourage those that have small budgets to really focus most of their time and money on retargeting. It's going to be really effective. It has the greatest return on ad spend. I have, I have an e-commerce client where we started, we only ran retargeting for three months, but that client was getting 15 to one, 25 to one, 40 to one return on ad spend during that time. And so we, we lived there for several months, kind of build up their cash stores and to give them confidence before we went out to cold traffic. Um, just know that if you've limited focus on retargeting, once you're at a cashflow or revenue space where you can afford to invest in cold advertising, then you go ahead and scale outward to that.

Kathleen (36:32): Great. Well, I feel like I could keep asking you questions about Facebook all day long, because this is such a big topic. But we are running out of time. So I want to switch gears and ask you the two questions I always like to ask all of my guests, the first of which is we always talk about inbound marketing on the podcast because we're the inbound success podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the gold standard for what it means to be an inbound marketer today?

Bob (37:00): Yeah. I mean, I, I want to mention a couple people. I'm really fortunate to be friends with Ryan Deiss. Ryan and I were in the same mastermind group before he was Ryan Deiss. What I really appreciate, and I did an interview actually for this book. Ryan's one of the co-authors in the book. He contributed a chapter. I was really proud to have him in the book. But what he's done with Digital Marketer, he talks about in an interview I did. He kind of this promoter, but he's really a humble guy. And what I really like is they, they really lead with content. They, they understand kind of the needs of marketers and they've done a really good job of niching their content and offering things to people that make it really easy to engage. They lead with education and they have really good people that are kind of working to educate the marketing community. So, you know, no matter where you go on their site, there's, there's ways to engage with them. There's there's tools. There's just all kinds of goodies that you can get from them. I think they over-deliver on their content and that's really, what's made Digital Marketer such a huge company. And then of course, the Traffic and Conversion Summit, probably the biggest marketing conference in the world at this point.

Kathleen (38:19): I just had to laugh when you said you knew Ryan Deiss before he was Ryan Deiss because I know Ryan Deiss. You know, he's not my best friend or anything. I don't know him that well, but I know him and I find it hard to believe in my head that he didn't just exit the womb as the Ryan Deiss that he is today, because like, he just seems so fully baked.

Bob (38:36): So I just had to chuckle when you said that he's, he's a good guy and a great family guy. Yeah. I also, I do want to talk about, obviously I wrote this book with Perry Marshall. Perry of course, he's been around forever. He's kind of the first person that introduced Google Adwords to the marketing community. But even Perry kind of for a while, kind of went through a wall with his lead generation. And just recently we worked on a project where he did a, a five day challenge. So challenge funnels of course are kind of all the rage and we kind of think, well, those don't work anymore. But Perry just recently did a five day challenge. He, he did it of course, to re-engage some unengaged people on this list.

Bob (39:26): We, we got about 500 people re-engage and the cost of that was about $3 50 cents to kind of get somebody enrolled, but we rolled that out. Perry's team rolled that out. I should say rolled that out to cold traffic generated 2,500 new leads into the company for the same amount of money. So about $3 and 50 cents a lead. Now the normal lead, like people are happy around nine or $10 a lead in, in this space. And so that absolutely broke kind of this paradigm where we thought we knew all the tricks really, really took was somebody who really knew how to execute that idea. David Nadler, who's also in the book with me, brought the idea of the challenge funnel to Perry and, you know, together, they put that out there. So those types of things to work, and they're not just tips and tricks, like when you really have value behind something those structures really work.

Bob (40:28): So a challenge funnel is really good. And I'll just mention one more. I, I have a particular client that I'm, that I'm helping, who is just doing quiz funnels to the Nth degree. You know, these are not just like buzzwords and hacks. They really, really work. He's got a quiz funnel in the lead generation space, and it's just, it's just converting better than anything he's ever tried. So, you know, I think all of us, you know, listening to this podcast cast and following some of these people, these ideas that are out there, they're not just like, they just don't work for a little while. They can continue to work for years and years. We maybe lose favor with it because we're always looking for the next thing, but I I'm afraid that we let ideas kind of pass too quickly. And we forget about some of the things that really really work, especially in non marketing spaces, but, I'm just really proud of Perry to kind of go, Hey, you know, I don't know everything, sought out somebody to try something different and absolutely smashed for him. So I'm really proud of him.

Kathleen (41:35): That's a great story. And I think those are three really fantastic people to check out. So thank you for that. Second question. And I think this definitely applies in the field that you're in. I always hear marketers saying, gosh, you know, how to, how can I keep up with all the changes that are happening in the world of digital marketing? It changes so quickly. You know, I feel like I'm overwhelmed. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?

Bob (41:59): Yeah, I'm real careful too. I mean, obviously putting a book out and coaching clients and things like that, I don't have the same type of space and time anymore to be educated. So you know, I, I'm a friend and business partner, Perry Marshall, but I still read his email. So Perry is the person I follow. The second person I follow is Ryan Deiss. I think Digital Marketer distills a lot of the good ideas that are all around kind of our, our world. So I do follow Digital Marketer. And then I also follow Brian Kurtz. Brian Kurtz is founder of Boardroom. He retired from that. Brian, I follow Brian because he, he talks at a kind of a a really fundamental level. And so what I, what I get from Brian, he sends out an email once or twice a week, and it's really about principles type stuff.

Bob (42:52): I, I didn't say it or maybe I did say it I'm a high school basketball coach, so I really value fundamentals. I really love to be successful that you have to master the simple things. And so at this point in my career, I just really value people that, that teach fundamentals versus tactics and hacks. You know, those things, like I said, hacks only lasts for a little while with fundamentals last for a long, long time. And I was really careful by the way in my book too, to make it a lot of fundamentals versus tactics, because a book about Facebook is going to go, it's going to go irrelevant real quickly. Right. You know, that screenshots are going to be out of date and things like that. So I was really careful to put a lot of fundamentals. They know it. So that's the type of people I like to follow these,

Kathleen (43:38): You know, that story really resonates with me. And as you were telling it, it, it reminded me of something that I had almost forgotten about, which is, I almost never talk about my kids on the podcast, but my stepson, many years ago, we were going on a like a skiing, snowboarding vacation. And he broke his arm right before we left. And he was basically told like, look, you really can't go and do all that. But he was so heartbroken. And what we figured out was, we were like, well, you, maybe you can't go on like those black diamond slopes that you're used to going on. He was a snowboarder. But what if we enroll you in like private snowboarding lessons and the person, and they focus on the fundamentals with you, like you really nail how to carve a turn. And he was so mad at us.

Kathleen (44:27): He was like, lessons, I'm too old for that. Like, this is waste of time, but we were like, we're not going to let you just go down the mountain with this broken, like he had a cast on and everything, but, and it was funny. He went kind of kicking and screaming and he, it helped that he had a really cute girl who was his teacher, but I will say, like, he really did learn the fundamentals. He really nailed like the turning and this and that. And I remember it was like in the year after that, that he became a really phenomenal snowboarder and he actually went on to teach snowboarding. So I just, like that came back full force when you told that story. And I had, I had forgotten about it.

Bob (45:05): Fundementals are boring. Like I coach 16, 17 year old boys. Like they all think they're going to go to the NBA and, you know, they're, they're not they would much rather scrimmage and do all the fun stuff in practice. They don't want to do the things that really make them better. But those, those that really master that and do that end up being our best players and they have really rewarding high school careers, and some are lucky enough to go play in college. Fundamentals are boring. I, I get it. Nobody wants to dribble a basketball or, or practice passing because we all think we're past it. We were like that as marketers. We think we all heard the terms and we've all done it. But I I've seen enough. I've gone inside enough Facebook ad accounts of supposedly really expert people. We all have blind spots. I guarantee, you know, I, I have people come in and help me out and we just all have blind spots. I think, I think we're all to kind of pushing our, our, our, our fame too far or our egos too far. I think we all have blank spots. We have spaces that we can improve on. So I value fundamentals and I, and I love when people call me out on, on really simple things. Cause I, I just think we all have blind spot.

Kathleen (46:20): Well, I think that's the perfect note to end on. I totally agree. So Bob, if somebody has been listening to this episode and they want to learn more about you or what you do or connect and ask a question, what is the best way for them to do that?

Bob (46:36): Thank you very much. I would love for them to visit ultimatefb.com. That's ultimatefb.com. It's it gives you a link to go get the book. But I have I have 10 interviews on there. So I do have interviews with Ryan Deiss and Brian Kurtz and Perry Marshall and others. All people who helped me kind of put the book together. And so I was really proud to get them on camera, just like you and I are talking, and get them to tell some stories that maybe few people have heard before. So ultimatefb.com is a great connection to me and to all that I have to offer.

Kathleen (47:14): Fantastic. I will put that link in the show notes, and that brings us to the end. So if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. That would be incredible. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, as always, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much for joining me, Bob. This was great.

Bob (47:39): Fantastic discussion. Thank you for having me.

How does a massive company like Dun & Bradstreet navigate a major change to its marketing strategy and, in doing so, increase audience engagement by 45%?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Dun & Bradstreet Vice President of Marketing Nipul Chokshi explains the mechanics behind a major overhaul in D&B's marketing strategy, from a product-centric approach, to a customer-centric approach. 

From how the company got buy-in across multiple marketing and sales teams, to what was involved in making the shift and the how it resulted in a 45% increase in audience engagement, Nipul dives into the details of exactly how D&B did it, and how any business - large or small - can apply the lessons learned to its own marketing.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Dun & Bradstreet website
• Follow Nipul on Twitter

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Nipul Chokshi, who is the VP of marketing at Dun and Bradstreet. Welcome to the podcast Nipul.

Nipul (00:22): Oh, great. Thanks. thanks for having me, Kathleen. Hello to everyone and really excited to be here.

Kathleen (00:29): Yeah. I was excited to chat with you because you know, Dun and Bradstreet is, is such a, it's such a behemoth, really. It's a large company and you know, it's interesting. I think a lot of times people can, can be lulled into thinking that being head of marketing for large companies can be easier because in theory, your budget's bigger and you have a lot of staff, but I think, you know, trying to turn the ship while it's moving is can often be difficult at a large company. And you had an interesting story that really appealed to me about turning the ship and what you all have done there and the results you've gotten from it. So I'm really excited to dig into that, but before we do that, can you just take a minute and for those who are listening and maybe don't know who you are, or, you know, have heard of D&B, but maybe aren't as familiar with what the company is today, take a minute and explain you and your role and perhaps your journey of how you got to where you are and then also what Dun and Bradstreet is today.

Nipul (01:27): Absolutely. So I'll start with myself. So I run what we call so I'm a VP of marketing at Dun and Bradstreet. And obviously as you mentioned, we have a pretty big marketing team. My specific focus area is in what we call portfolio marketing specifically for our sales and marketing solutions business unit. As you can imagine, Dun and Bradstreet is a huge company. We sell to you know, all sorts of different stakeholders within our B2B customer base, ranging from finance professionals to risk management professionals, to sales and marketing professionals. And my business unit is focused specifically on solutions that are targeted towards B2B sales and marketing folks. And so I've been at D&B for a little bit over a year now. I came in through an acquisition of a company called Lattice Engines where I was their CMO for the past five years.

Nipul (02:33): Lattice Engines. We developed AI software for B2B sales and marketing. So if you're a marketer looking to do account-based marketing and want to understand who your target accounts, where you would leverage our software, if you want it to be able to understand what the best way is to what are the key messages that would resonate with your target audience, you would leverage our software to do that and so on and so forth. And so we were acquired into D&B. We're part of, kind of this bigger business unit called sales and marketing solutions which specifically sells as you can imagine to B2B sales and marketers to help them do their jobs back there. From the marketing side, leveraging the data and insights that we provide to help marketers do a better job of targeting and engaging audiences via more personalized campaigns.

Nipul (03:29): And then on the sales side, enables sales to be smarter in terms of where they focus their time and effort as well as helps them to kind of get better context around each and every prospect that they're calling into so that they have better conversations. Prior to Lattice I was at a variety of different places. And most recently before Lattice, I was at a company called Yammer which had been acquired by Microsoft. I ran kind of our solutions marketing at, first at Yammer, and then Microsoft. Prior to that, I was at a company called Marketo. And then before that I did product management at a bunch of companies, including Siebel, Oracle, so on and so forth. So a pretty long windy road, if you will setting with product management to marketing, ultimately here.

Kathleen (04:21): But lots of brands that I think my listeners would be familiar with, including Marketo and Yammer. But what I think is so interesting is what you're doing at, at D&B, because honestly, and I'll admit, I, I don't think I was very familiar with all of the things that the company does today and, and wasn't aware of the extent of the solutions that it has for sales and marketers. So it makes this conversation even that much more interesting because we have so many marketers who are listening. So you came to Dun and Bradstreet through an acquisition. And one of the things that you've worked on and it's been, how long since you've been there.

Nipul (05:01): I've been at D&B since July of last year.

Kathleen (05:04): Okay. So since you've joined, which is not a very long time you've worked on quite a large undertaking of revamping how the company approaches its marketing. So maybe you could give a little background on that and what led to it.

Nipul (05:19): Yeah, sure, absolutely. Right. So look, ultimately you know, while D&B was acquiring Lattice, it was undergoing a lot of transformation and change internally itself. You know, the company D&B has been around since like the 18 hundreds, like 1876. Interesting fact that I learned the other day is we actually have two ex presidents who've worked for D&B in the past. So Abe Lincoln used to work for D&B yeah, as well as Taft, I believe was another person who worked for D&B. And so the company has been around very story company and everybody knows D&B most likely the this thing called the DUNS number which is effectively a social security number for businesses. Think of it as a social security number for businesses. And it's an identifier that you need, if you're a business and you're looking to get a loan or you're looking to get government support or whatnot, whatever, right.

Nipul (06:21): If you're looking to do commerce. And so there's a whole big kind of data business there that the companies traditionally thrived in. And over time, it's built up a portfolio of capabilities and value propositions, not just for the folks on the finance side and the risk management side, which leverage that DUNS number, but also on the sales and marketing side where you can use the DUNS number as an identifier for that you can do better targeting for, for your you know, sales and marketing campaigns. You know, on top of that, there's obviously a whole bunch of other data assets that the company provides as well. Firmographics, data, intent data, and so on and so forth. So that, again, from a sales and marketing standpoint, you can be a lot more diligent in terms of your targeting and your campaigns. And so the company's been around for awhile. The company had been public, like it went private in 2019. Just this part of an internal kind of transformational effort. The company was looking to really kind of revamp.

Nipul (07:44): The company went private in 2019, undertook a variety of different transformational initiatives one of which was really transforming its go to market fit. You know, traditionally from a go-to-market standpoint, the company took very much a inside out approach where it's like all the value props and all the campaigns were all about promoting individual products. And at this point we have hundreds of products that we sell just to sales and marketing folks and B2B companies. And so you know, that as you can imagine, that not a very effective way of doing things. So the things that we undertook, our transformation effort was to really reorient our, go to market and make it a lot more customer centric. So that you know, rather than selling individual products you know, our key tenant is take more of an outside in approach to understand who are the buyers, what are the problems that they need solved and what the solutions, right?

Nipul (08:56): Not even individual products, but the solutions that we can deliver to help them achieve those and kind of solve those problems. And so that was kind of the crux of, of the effort. And so there's a whole bunch of things that we can talk about just in terms of, from a marketing and sales standpoint that we've done to kind of support that. So at a, at a high level, that's kind of the gist, hopefully that gave a little bit of an orientation around and context saying the problem we're looking to solve.

Kathleen (09:29): Yeah. I love hearing that story because I think that it touches on a problem that a lot of companies have, and you don't need to be as big as, as Dun and Bradstreet to experience that where, you know, if you're a company that has multiple products or solutions that are seemingly quite different from each other, it's very easy to fall into the trap of marketing in, in silos, if you will, and pushing product out to your customers as opposed to taking a solution mindset. So I, I like, I like how you kind of reframed that for the company and decided to look at it from a solution standpoint, but I have so many questions because that is way easier, said than done at a company of Dun and Bradstreet's size. So, you know, you can sit there as a marketing team and say, we want to change this orientation, but, but to use the analogy from earlier, this is a massive, massive ship that is underway. So how do you approach that when you're in a company of that size, what's the framework that you use to go about doing something like this

Nipul (10:41): So we did as part of this effort first is everything that we think about from a sales and marketing standpoint, like the key tenant that we believed in is outside-in approach, right? So when it comes to developing campaigns and when it comes to developing sales and pitch stacks, right. Obviously at some point we talk about product, but we also always, always want to start with, you know, who's the buyer persona and what's the problem that they're looking to be able to solve. So just kind of that shift in mindset what is foundational to everything that we do when it comes to developing our campaigns, developing our content, like, that's the number one question that gets asked rather than what's the product we're promoting. It's more like, okay, who's the target audience for what we're developing this campaign and this product for.

Nipul (11:45): Right. So it even extends to the product organization. And so, and that's pretty basic, that's like bread and butter stuff, right. As a marketer, you're always trained to do that, but somehow you know, this kind of, that focus had gotten lost. So that's number one. Number two you know, in terms of executing on that and the whole transformation we found, obviously it's really critical to be aligned on priorities. So between the sales team, the marketing team, the product team, right, the business development team and the executive team you know, we found that it was really critical that all of us are aligned on what are our business priorities, right. Which you know, which parts of the market do we really want to make sure we were growing and which parts of the market are we saying like, okay, they're just going to be on there.

Nipul (13:19): And the second thing is that we knew we wanted to make sure that we were all aligned on our priorities. You know, everybody from a product perspective, sales perspective, marketing executives you know, we wanted, you know, a key part of this was making sure we were on the same page in terms of, you know, from a business standpoint, what were the number one, two, three, four, five, you know, things that we wanted to make sure that we were focused on whether it's you know investing in a particular market you know, from a product standpoint that in a market go to market standpoint, whether it's, you know, kind of making sure that, you know, we were exiting a particular market and whatnot. So that alignment at the highest levels around our business priorities was absolutely critical. And then double clicking on that a little bit more, just kind of the relationship between sales and marketing.

Nipul (14:16): We felt that it was absolutely critical to make sure that we were all aligned on what our ICP was. So that was something that was you know, something that we focused on from a sales and marketing standpoint is what are the specific you know, for each of our business priorities who are the buyers that we actually want to target? And what did they look like, right. Not just in terms of the titles, but kind of the types of companies as well. Right? So company size company industry, right. If they bought a certain kind of D&B product already, right, as well as level of engagement that they might have in painstaking detail, we rolled out, you know, kind of our buyer profile, if you will, for each of the different parts of our business and made sure that, you know, from a sales and marketing standpoint, we were all kind of on the same page there. You know, as a, as a company that, you know, sells data insights and the ability to kind of end the promise of data and insights for sales and marketing, we felt like it behooved us to kind of drink our own champagne there. Right. so that we can drive that alignment which was absolutely critical.

Kathleen (15:30): I have to stop you and ask one question, cause this is like, I'm dying, I'm dying to know the answer to this. You said you all, you had to get on the same page with sales and business development and product. And of course I'm sure executive leadership, that's like, that's easy. Again, another thing very easy to say, but that's a massive, massive consensus building exercise. I mean, can you just give me maybe a short glimpse into, like, how did that process work and was it really driven top down? Cause I imagine you'd have to have high level executive buy-in to get all of those parties to the table and to get them to agree to fundamentally change the way they approach going to market.

Nipul (16:09): Yeah. We were fortunate that we did have that top-down agreement. Right? So everybody from the president of D&B down to the president of sales and marketing solutions to our EVP is down to my level. You know, everybody was aligned in terms of like, okay, like we have to take things from a customer first perspective if the D&B is going to thrive, right? Like that's a key, key aspect of growth for us, key lever of growth for us. And then in terms of the individual priorities, that's where again, kind of at the EVP and VP levels, that's where we kind of said, okay, you know, given kind of our high level targets around where we want to be as a company from a revenue standpoint, from a customer acquisition standpoint and an overall company growth standpoint, what does that mean for each of the business units?

Nipul (17:05): Like the sales and marketing business unit, for example as well as within sales and marketing business unit, what does that mean for the different kind of you know, solution areas that comprise that business unit? And so it was definitely a top down effort and we were fortunate to have kind of senior management driving that effort to kind of you know, make sure that we were successful. Because as you suggested, like I've been in companies where, you know, unless you have that top-down effort driving the alignment you know, it becomes a bit of a challenge, especially in large companies like the D&B you know, sometimes it becomes like pushing on a right, if you're trying to do things more at the grassroots grassroots level. Now having said that it's not like all of a sudden, you know, just because it was top down, everything just clicked into place.

Nipul (17:59): There was a lot of debate back and forth between you know, different folks within the business units and across business units as well. But ultimately we kept sight of, you know, kind of the values that we want to do in here too, in terms of making sure that we're honoring our client, making sure that, you know, we were investing appropriately in growing our franchise and so on and so forth. So there were definitely, you know, tactical things we needed to get done there to drive that alignment, but the top down set the stage, if you will for the alignment on the priorities.

Kathleen (18:36): Yeah. I can't even imagine what a long slow slog slash battle it would be if you were trying to do this from a, you know, initiated from, from the marketing department without that kind of support. So, so what does it, what, how did, how did it play out? Like what I feel like there are so many things that need to change. I mean, in essence, you almost need to change everything when you really make this shift. So how, how do you change everything?

Nipul (19:05): Yeah, no, absolutely. Right. So you know, when it came to changing and driving the actual transformation at a tactical level you know, there were really three key kind of pillars to our strategy if you will. First was segmentation you know, so and again, I'm speaking specifically to the sales and marketing business unit, that's kind of, you know, what, what we've been working on, but this a similar sort of exercise when, on, in the other business units at D&B as well. So you know, at the end of the day, you know, what we do is we sell to sales and marketing folks kind of this promise that you can engage with buyers in a more targeted way, in a more relevant way in a more customer first way. Like that is our value prop. And so you know, as I said earlier, like the phrase drinking our own champagne applied really well here.

Nipul (20:02): And so a key pillar to our execution strategy here was all about segmentation and making sure that we were really clear, like once we know what the ICP is, then it's a matter of figuring out, okay, you know, which of these, you know accounts and personas within each of these accounts. You know, we leverage our own AI models to be able to identify, which were the highest propensity targets for new customer acquisition for cross sell opportunities, upsell opportunities you know, what was the low hanging fruit in terms of opportunities where we might be able to arrest churn and improve on retention rates as well. So that segmentation where were able to leverage our own software to be able to kind of triage and identify, you know which accounts within our ICP we should actually be targeting was, was a key part of the execution which gave us kind of this list of accounts and contacts, if you will, for different campaigns that we would run.

Nipul (21:08): Right. We also then use data to be able to say, okay, for each of these accounts, you know, for new customer acquisition versus cross sell versus upsell and whatnot where are each of these accounts in the buying journey? You know, are they already like engaged with the D&B brand? Are they on our website? You know, have they like been engaging with our campaigns, they've been attending our webinars or are they just anonymously browsing our website. If they're not on our website, not engaging with us, are they actually in market? So right. We leveraged third party intense signals to give us a sense of kind of what kind of interests you know, that helps us to identify what use cases they might be interested in you know, to, to kind of identify. So what we did was as part of this segmentation exercise is really kind of take our ICP and our target market and segment those accounts into different cohorts, right?

Nipul (22:05): Based on propensity to convert based on buyer stage as well as based on the use case and the interest that they would exhibit. So that was, that was a first and the kind of very critical pillar of, of of this overall strategy from an execution standpoint. Once we have that, then it boiled down to how do we actually engage with these buyers in, in a more relevant way across different channels. And so the idea here is we developed programs, right, that were, you know display programs, paid social programs, you know, webinar programs, content programs, SDR, outbound programs, right. Where we would kind of say, okay, let's make sure that we design and develop these for each of the segments. And we call these always on campaigns where these are programs where we've planned them out to over like say 12 months.

Nipul (23:09): And basically the idea is that they're always on and you know, very targeted towards each of the different types of segments that we're going after, whether it's new customers, cross sell opportunities, upsell opportunities, and so on and so forth. So the second part of this execution strategy was very much a how do I kind of engage buyers in an omni-channel way across all of these segments that I've just identified. And then the last piece is measurement. You know, we are very well instrumented at this point to be able to kind of say, okay you know, what kind of top tips are working, what tactics aren't, what's the ROI on certain tactics. And so we don't, again, from a marketing standpoint, necessarily report on leads internally when it comes to identifying what's working, and what's not for our campaigns.

Nipul (24:06): What we're looking at is account engagement, right? So every week we'll look at a report that says, you know for our website visits, it's not just people who visit our website, obviously that's important from an overall brand standpoint, but we'll also look at website visits from our target accounts, from the high propensity accounts and the segments that we've actually identified. And the idea is that, you know, from a demand generation standpoint, we want that number to be increasing over time, same thing with form sales and leads or hand-raisers, whatever you want to call it. Right. We call them the hand raisers on our website. You don't want to just track anybody who comes in as an inbound way, right? Obviously we're not going to ignore them, but over time we want to see kind of that number of inbound leads coming in from the segments, the high propensity segments that we've defined to be increasing over time.

Nipul (25:00): Right? Similarly, we'll look at click-through rates on our ads, right. I don't know, you know, not as important to me to understand anybody who clicks through an ad more important for me to understand whether it's a target account, they're a high propensity target, that's actually click through on an ad. So that level of measurement where we look at not leads and clicks, but we looked at the engagement from the different accounts and segments that we've defined is absolutely critical because that enables us, like right now, we're in the process of planning for 2021. And so we're looking at all these numbers to say, okay, you know, a program might be really effective in terms of driving click-throughs. But if you add the lens of, okay, how many of those clicks actually came from, you know, high propensity targets like that program might not be as you know, good for us to invest in. So those are the sorts of discussions we're able to have as a result of, you know, kind of measuring, not leads and clicks, but the actual account engagement, if you will. So those are kind of the three key pillars for our strategy, if you will, when it comes to executing this one is all about doing the segmentation. Second is then, you know, engaging each of these prospects across the segments through 10 different channels, and then measuring the account level engagement that we get.

Kathleen (27:29): Okay. I have a lot of questions based on what you just said. The first has to do with software. So you started out talking about how you, the, the first order of business was really segmenting and using data and placing your, your ICP in different cohorts. And you're using your own technology for a lot of this. So the first question I have is is the technology that you're, this is, this is something that you're selling. And is, is this something that is only available to like large enterprises, or do you have SMB versions of this? Like what kinds of companies would your software be right for? Cause I'm just trying to connect in my head, like who out there could really replicate what you did using the same solution that you use for yourself.

Nipul (28:17): Yeah, no, absolutely. And actually we have you know, several thousand customers actually leveraging our software for various elements of sales and marketing. But basically what we do is we sell a an ABM platform and account based marketing platform. And it's not just for large enterprises. We actually have small and mid market companies leveraging this as well. In order to drive you know, more targeted marketing, more, you know, better marketing using our platform. And so yeah, I mean, ultimately you know, our, our software at least for, so we sell within our sales and marketing solutions business unit, we sell to different personas, right? So we sell to marketing like demand gen and digital marketers. And for them, our value prop is being able to use our platform. We have an ABM offering that enables them to execute on ABM programs.

Nipul (29:21): Like the one that I just described in a more scalable way. We also sell to you know, sales and marketing operations folks. And so there, we have a data quality and they customer data platform offering that enables them to make sure that whatever data they need about their prospects is as complete and as clean as possible. And they can then kind of merge all of their data into a single place so they could do segmentation. And so that's kind of the second audience. And then the third audience that we sell to is sales leaders. So sales leaders who are looking to improve on their prospecting efforts, we'll leverage our Hoovers offering, D&B Hoovers. And so, you know, there are a variety of data and insights and AI driven insights that we provide as part of that platform.

Nipul (30:19): That just makes it easier for reps to be able to say, okay, you know, if they're creating a prospecting list, they want to see, okay. I want to create a prospecting list that of folks who would be interested in ABM software, for example based on third party interest signals that they are expressing third-party intent that we might be expressing so they can use Hoovers to do that. So we have different flavors of our solution based on who it is that we're selling to and the problem that they're looking to solve. And so what I just described and what we're using is really our own ABM platform, which, you know, digital marketing and demand gen marketers would really care about.

Kathleen (31:00): Well, I love that you answered the question also by leading with who are the customers that it's right for it, because that's exactly what you're talking about as the whole theme of the podcast. So that's great. And that's one of the things I was like to ask, because I think it's easy to hear people say, we use this technology, but if it's not something that's somehow accessible to most marketers, then, then it, there's not a lot you can take away from it, but it's, it's great to hear that you have solutions for that. So my second question is, in listening to you talk about this, it struck me that, that it sounds as though this must have also prompted some internal changes as far as how your teams functioned and perhaps even potentially were structured because you're, you're really revising how you segment, you're talking about using data to hone in on who the prospects are, who's really in market, based on their intent signals. How did that change the way that you and marketing worked with sales in particular?

Nipul (32:00): Yeah, so I mean, there were obviously changes from a sales and marketing standpoint you know, in terms of how the organization structured and all that stuff. Right. but ultimately traditionally the marketing team at D&B was very functionally oriented right where you had kind of a paid media department, a email marketing department, a, you know, a social department and so on and so forth. And so what we did was we kind of shook things up a little bit by kind of making it more of a cross-functional team where you know, we have a demand gen team that is focused across all of these different personas and that demand gen team consists of kind of a program manager, as well as, you know an email marketer as well as a paid media person.

Nipul (32:55): Right. and so we've kind of made it more of a matrix organization where you know, each of these campaign teams, if you will, are accountable for driving revenue for pipeline and revenue for the company. And so my team, my team's role is to really kind of own each of the campaigns. So we have campaigns running against, you know, the marketing and digital marketing persona. We have a campaign running against the sales leader persona, and we have a campaign running against the sales and marketing operations persona. So I've got portfolio marketers who are responsible for kind of the programs within each of those, and they'll work closely with the demand gen folks to do the, to execute on the programs, they'll work closely with the appropriate product marketers to make sure we're incorporating the right product messaging and all that stuff into the campaigns as well.

Nipul (33:51): So there was definitely a little bit of a change in terms of how marketing worked, right. It was a lot less siloed we needed to within marketing, kind of get rid of those silos and act as one team that was, again, very much focused on the buyer and, you know, each buyer gets its own campaign. So like, you know, it's kind of like a campaign team there. At the same time you know, just kind of sales, you know, sales was always very much as usual is always very much focused outside in, right. When it came to engaging with targets and, you know their segmentation was you know, kind of a little bit ahead of ours when it came to how they were organized. So we're definitely more aligned with sales in terms of, you know, kind of our approach here from a campaign standpoint as well.

Kathleen (34:45): That makes sense. So you, your team is responsible for campaigns and you're, you're working on the portfolio stuff. I imagine that there are other groups within the company that are targeting the same customer audience that you are. And you talked about working closely with the demand gen teams. I'm really curious how do you, as a company resolve, making sure that it doesn't look like the right hand, isn't talking to the left and when the customer starts to get these different campaigns and communications.

Nipul (36:05): Yeah. Yeah. That's a really, really great, great point. Right. So so ultimately there's definitely a lot of, lot more collaboration. So for example, we've got campaigns aligned to each of the different personas that we'll speak to, and for each campaign, there's kind of a list of accounts that you target. Right. and the idea here is every week, like, as a team overall, we get together to say, okay, what are the programs that we're launching this week? And, you know, what's the potential for overlap. And so that's something that we're consciously, always looking at. And based on the specifics of the individual program, we may decide like, okay, it's okay for us to kind of send these two emails, targeting two different personas at the same company with two different offers. That's totally cool. But if it's the case where you're trying to send one, email, two different emails to the same persona at the same account within a particular week, that, that we don't find as much any more, to be honest, because what we've found is you know, because we've structured these campaigns to be persona specific and each campaign has its own list of accounts.

Nipul (37:25): You know, we rarely encountered a situation where we wind up sending to a, like a marketing leader. We're only sending the messages through the through our campaign that targets the marketing leaders, if you will. Right. and so we don't necessarily see that conflict as well, but you know, there are instances like we'll definitely be sending for example, emails and offers to one account but two different personas in that account. And we're constantly looking to make sure that, you know, there's not a lot of conflict there that we're not hitting. You know, we're not seeing as spammers if you will, for that account. So as a team, we kind of go through that. And I, I have to tell you that that's probably something where we need to improve on just in terms of developing more of a process oriented way of solving it right now. That's definitely more of a one-off thing that we're doing on a weekly basis as a cross-functional team.

Kathleen (38:26): Well, I think, I mean, if you figure out how to solve that, there's probably a whole nother market opportunity. And so you described, you described having a weekly meeting where you any conflicting campaigns but is that, is that same approach how you handle, because you talked earlier about having always on campaigns. And I imagine that's really where the biggest opportunity is to kind of trip up because you've got all this stuff running in the background based on rules. And how do you approach that? Because I don't have a good answer for that.

Nipul (38:57): Yeah, no. So what we'll, what we do is we basically, we look at things like we, so you know, we'll every week as we look at the reporting in terms of which of our target accounts, in which of our buyers within target accounts, are we actually pursuing you know, those are great ways for us to be able to identify like, Oh, why are we like sending, you know, the same email or like two different emails to the same person? Did they in like three days? Right. So after the fact we're definitely able to like, capture that. We also you know, again, if you think about it, like we have a campaign running against marketing leaders we have a campaign running against sales leaders, and then we have a campaign running against sales and marketing, like rev ops leaders.

Nipul (39:45): Right. and so because there are very specific titles that fall into each of those personas. You know, we don't, we haven't necessarily run into a lot of the, you know, on the outbound anyway, we haven't necessarily run into any of their conflicts, the conflicts come in where let's say it's a rev ops leader that fills out an offer for our for an offer that was intended to on our website that was intended to the marketing layer. In which case we have internal kind of pre negotiated rules of engagement, if you will. That again, reflect the current priorities of the business where we say like, okay, if it's a red lobster leader that raises their hand for an ABM platform offer, then you know, let's make sure that we're forwarding them to the right the row to the right SDRs for, for qualification.

Kathleen (40:42): Yeah, that makes sense. Now, the other question I have is you talked about how in account engagement is a very important kind of measure for you in terms of the quality of interaction and the responses to your marketing, as opposed to the hand raising and the leads. And this is something I've always grappled with. You know, when I look at things like lead scoring engagement, you, you have your demographic elements to scoring, and then you have your behavioral elements and, and engagement being a key behavior element. But I I've seen many cases where, where engagement scores don't work well because it's like, Oh, page views and email opens and this and that, and that it doesn't necessarily always equate to an in market person or quality leads. So how do you, how have you made sure, how have you architected your engagement scoring so that, you know, that in this case activity does equate to interest and lead quality?

Nipul (41:41): Yeah. And so that's where part of this is like, it's an ongoing kind of, we're tweaking this as, as we go along. Right. and so what we'll do is we'll kind of put different weights based on different types of activities. And right now we're at a stage where we kind of have a hypothesis as to what those weights are. Right? So if someone, for example, engages with us at kind of a highly curated online event, right. The equivalent of like a local dinner that we might be running, that's definitely weighted a lot higher than someone who just downloads a top of funnel, like white paper, right. So we, the way we've architected it, we kind of take into account, not just the person who's in the titles and all that stuff around, who's actually engaging on the CTA. But we'll also look at, you know, what kind of engagement that is, right?

Nipul (42:39): Whether it's a website visit, whether it's a download of a top of funnel, piece of content, whether it's just clicking on an ad, whether it's attending a webinar or an online event that's curated. And so we've got different weights associated with those that enable us to just really calibrate that. And right now, you know, we, we have kind of an initial model of that running. And you know, just based on my prior, cause we actually had a model of this running out loudest and we found that it requires iteration, right? You need to constantly tweak it. And again, that's where having a really good relationship with sales is absolutely critical. Right. you know, the SDR is actually within marketing. So I considered them to be marketing, but then also the, the reps in terms of, you know, the leads that we pass over to the reps, just kind of having that close relationship and that constant feedback with sales. You know, so in addition to the cross-functional marketing team that I talked about, we also have a weekly kind of leadership sync between sales and marketing. Right. and so there's a lot of, you know processes that we've put into place to make sure that that feedback is ongoing so that we can continue to iterate on this engagement model.

Kathleen (43:56): That's great. Well, I could talk all day about this because this is such a complicated topic, but we don't have all day. So I want to make sure to ask, I know you're not far enough into this where you have really concrete results yet, where you can say this was the transformation the before and after, but I imagine anecdotally you have some interesting results that you might be able to share.

Nipul (44:19): Yeah. Absolutely. Right. So you know the way I'll phrase it is, we've seen improvements in terms of our engagement rates within our target accounts and the segments that we've created, the high propensity segments. So at the top of funnel where we were looking to, like, we have programs running against targets that haven't necessarily engaged with the D&B brand, like they haven't visited the D&B website or whatnot. So these are effectively cold prospects. What we've seen is we've seen a 45% increase in terms of engagement from prospects who haven't necessarily engaged with us ever or at least in the last 12 months. Wow. Yeah. And then, so we've been able to, you know, kind of leverage our you know, our, our intent data and our targeting to, to help, to kind of achieve that. And at the same time, we've also been able to, you know, just improve on the ROI of our digital campaigns. And again, the reason for that is because we've been more targeted, right. We're not doing necessarily spray and pray anymore from a paid display campaign standpoint. And so we've been able to just make more effective use of our digital dollars there.

Kathleen (45:41): And that's in what time period, because this didn't, I mean, this hasn't been in place for very long. Yeah.

Nipul (45:46): Right. Yeah. No. So that's something that we've seen over the last three quarters. So yeah, so we started kind of in earnest around this earlier this year. And so we've seen kind of the improvements over that time.

Kathleen (46:00): 45% improvement is huge, especially when you have the volume that Dun and Bradstreet has. And especially during a time, like COVID, when many marketers are trying to keep their noses above water. So kudos to you and your team on that. All right. Shifting gears, before we wrap up, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. And I'd love to hear what you have to say on this. The first one is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. So I'm curious if there was a particular company or individual that you think is really showing the, the way when it comes to being a great inbound marketer.

Nipul (46:37): Well, I mean, inbound marketer for my Marketo days, and I still contend she's one of the best, Maria Pergolino. I think so she was the head of demand gen at Marketo way back when and then, you know, now she's off doing great things at she was at Anaplan, I think, and now she's at Active Campaign. She's their CMO. So she's awesome. Just as inbound, like in terms of setting up these huge inbound campaigns that deliver a lot of great results you know, obviously HubSpot from a company standpoint has always done really well there in terms of that. But outset. So I'm not going to just rely on that. I mean, I think you know, I'm, I'm a big marketing geek, so I try to sign up for as many offers as possible to see what people are doing.

Nipul (47:28): And, and so from a content standpoint, from a tactic standpoint, and so I found that like, NerdWallet is actually really good at inbound marketing specifically their content you know, use it to how they use content is, is really effective. I'm assuming it's effective. I just think it's really compelling from an end user standpoint, Notion and they, they provide kind of this Wiki like collaboration software for B2B and B2C. I, I think like they've been doing a great job as well in terms of their inbound marketing. So those would be my like three examples if you will, Maria, from a person standpoint and then Notion and NerdWallet from a company standpoint,

Kathleen (48:15): I love that you called yourself a marketing nerd. I too am a marketing nerd and we love marketing nerds around here at this podcast. Second question, speaking of marketing nerding out the biggest challenge I hear most marketers talk about is that it's just so hard to keep up with the incredible pace of change within the world of digital marketing, particularly how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?

Nipul (48:42): Yeah, I mean, I think so two things. Like, you know, first as I mentioned earlier, I mean, I try to just see what other companies are doing as much as possible B2B and B2C, because again, from a B2B standpoint, there's a lot to be learned from B2C tactics. So I like to sign up for a lot of offers just to see how other companies do it. So that's kind of that firsthand research, if you will, that's always ongoing. The other thing is obviously there's no shortage of communities out there and people to follow on Twitter and whatnot. You know, one community that I found really effective is the Revenue Collective community. I think you're a part of that as well. Right. And so I, I find that the discussions on Slack are really, really you know, are really insightful and really deep and really kind of cut to the core of, you know, what a person in our position would care about.

Nipul (49:45): So I found that was really effective. You know, and then a whole bunch of just, you know, other folks that I follow on Twitter you know you know, ranging from like Scott Brinker to Sangrum, you know, to, to, you know various other folks. So that, that you know, kind of just, again, like just kind of a news network, if you will that helps me to keep abreast of what's what's the latest and greatest, but I, I do have to say that the thing, I mean, it's funny, like over time as everybody kind of joins these communities and starts following the same people, everybody taking away the same lessons and you see a lot of commonalities in marketing. So I've started doing more and more of not just tech companies, but also just looking at more, you know, I keep kind of a personal you know, on my hard drive, I have all these Google word docs with screenshots of like ads or non-tech company offers that I just feel like you know, we'll, we'll provide a better lesson for me in terms of understanding, you know, kind of different angles, different tactics and so on.

Kathleen (51:02): Yeah. The echo chamber effect is definitely real. And I liked what you said about looking at B2C because it's true. I mean, even though we say we're B2B, we're still selling to people within these businesses. So it's like, it's all about selling to human beings, regardless of whether equity for a company and our spending the company's money or spending their own money. Exactly. That's great. Well, Nipul, if somebody wants to learn more about Dun and Bradstreet and, and some of the stuff you talked about, the products they have for sales and marketers, or if they want to reach out and ask you a question or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do all of that?

Nipul (51:36): Yeah, sure. So so first of all, just always available via my Twitter handle @nipulc. The first initial of my last name, I'm also available on LinkedIn. And then for D&B just check out D&B.com.

Kathleen (51:58): Awesome. I will put links to all of those things in the show notes. And so go check those out if you want to connect with Nipul. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard today, or you learned something new, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because they could be the next interview. Thanks so much for joining me this week Nipul.

Nipul (52:25): Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Can podcasting help you generate leads and close deals? Most experts say "no" when asked this question. Jay Wong says "yes."

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Podcast Your Brand founder Jay Wong shares the strategies he uses to help his clients hit the Top 100 when they launch new podcasts and then create podcast content that actually generates ROI for their businesses.

Jay is a successful podcaster himself, and he's parlayed his experience into a successful consultancy that advises brands both big (think Proctor and Gamble) and small on how to get results with podcasting.

In this episode, he shares advice that any podcaster can use to make sure the launch of a new podcast is successful, and tips on creating podcast content that will push your customers further along their buying journey.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Podcast Your Brand website
• Learn more about Jay's "done for you" Top 100 podcasting service
• Follow Jay on Instagram
• Check out the podcasts of some of Jay's clients:
  • P&G Alumni
  • Stackadapt
  • Young Leaders Across America

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Jay Wong. Who is the CEO of podcast your brand. Welcome to the podcast, Jay,

Jay (00:29): Super excited to be here with you, Kathleen and excited to dive into a bit of podcasts.

Kathleen (00:34): Yeah. before we get too deep in, maybe you could start by sharing your story and who you are, what you do, how you came to do it.

Jay (00:46): Sure. For sure. So I think like a lot of people that love the medium of podcasting, you know, started with, you know, high hopes of, Hey, let's go out, build an audience and be able to serve that audience. Right. And so I figured out how to launch my own podcast about five, six years ago now podcasting was very different in, in 2015 than it is at the time of recording this. And I figured out how to get my own show into the top 100 back then, there was this, you know, we're not just talking about like new and noteworthy, if some of your listeners and business owners know what, what I'm referring to, but actual top 100 in the iTunes section. And that actually got me my first, like 50 to a hundred email subscribers, right? Like this is how different podcasting was, you know, back back then.

Jay (01:40): And from there other individuals always, you know, reached out other business owners, other entrepreneurs that said, Hey, I saw what you did with the podcast. Could you do it with our brand? Right. And so thus started, you know, a little bit of consulting. We built an online program. We did two day intensives. We spoke at all the biggest, you know, podcast conferences. And, you know, one day when we were running a two day intensive one of my favorite kind of offers and services that especially when events was like a thing that people were, you know, when people could attend and, and, and actually that's in the past tense, unfortunate, hopefully it comes back because it's still one of my favorite, like, you know, models. And, and I just absolutely love it. But we, I remember we had, we had a lady at one of our events.

Jay (02:27): She came up to me, she said, Jay, I love what you stand for around podcasting. I love, you know, your way of thinking about it in terms of just making it a real marketing channel for our business. She was in real estate at that time you know, super successful on, in her own. Right. And she said, look, I'm just never going to do any of this. And I that's, that's just the truth. Right. but I would be open to writing you and your team, a bigger check, if you could figure out how I could just show up how I could just show up record. Right. And we can implement all those awesome things that you just showed us in the last couple of days. And I'd be very open to do it with you for the next year. Right. And so that, wasn't the first time that I heard a abbreviated offer like that for our agency, our done for you.

Jay (03:15): And to end, you know, service it wasn't something that I woke up that day and thought, you know what, today's the day we're going to do an agency. But we worked with a couple other clients. We worked with her, we figured out what actually works in our process. And now we've gotten the opportunity in the last two and a half years to be really behind the scenes of hundreds of top 100 launches. And not only did we get the shows and the brands into the top 100, we could talk more about that, but really we build them a customized ROI plan, right? So for some of the companies we're working with, they're looking to drive new members. They're looking at this as a retention strategy. They're looking at this as, as a new way of promoting their products and services. And those last two and a half years have been such an amazing adventure. And I say two and a half years because, you know, we all know so much can just happen in such a short period of time, but more or less, that's ultimately how we got all the way to the agency podcasts, your brand that you see and hear about today.

Kathleen (04:15): That's awesome. And it's so interesting to me to hear you talk about that journey because I had my first podcast right around 2015, the same time you did. And I mean, I did a terrible job at it because I just literally knew I wanted to podcast and I kind of jumped in without a really good plan. And I mean, it was a great learning experience, but, but it, it sort of taught me all the things not to do. You know, and then I, and then I ended that podcast and started this one, which has been a completely different experience. And as I've, I mean, I'm now like three years in, and as I've progressed with this podcast, I've seen podcasting really kind of take off and other people get more interested and, and then covert hit. And it was like, I thought podcasting was hot. And then it was just not to be goofy, but like, I mean, everybody, like I'm in a couple of online groups with heads of marketing from a lot of different companies and all of a sudden it was like every single person was talking about podcasting, which I just thought was so interesting because it's been around forever. Like it's been around a long, long time

Jay (05:22): Hundred percent, hundred percent.

Kathleen (05:24): Yeah. And it's just taken off in recent months

Jay (05:27): For sure. I, I, we, during the months of April and may, we had so many companies reach back out to us and said, Hey, remember that idea that you pitched us six months ago or a quarter a year ago. Right. We're going to do it now. And, you know, because we believe this would be an amazing time to be able to kind of capture some of that awareness and be able to add our 2 cents on the craziness and madness of the world, you know? And right around that time, we were the the, the show for Proctor and Gamble for their alumni network. And you know, man, we learned so much in, in those compress two, three months, I think we did like 10 launches. And within like a week apart of each other, it was just a crazy, crazy, you know, quarter. But you're absolutely right. More and more people I think, but even three years ago it was, it went from this like new media, you know, maybe it's the future of voice, right. Like it was right around there. Should it be a nice to have versus now I think a lot of companies are looking at it and saying, okay, we need to be the voice for whatever the industry, whatever the niche that we stand for and that, you know, this might be one of the ways that we can be able to do that. Yeah.

Kathleen (06:43): It's, it's fascinating. Now you mentioned Proctor and Gamble. You've done work with all kinds of different brands when it comes to podcasting. Can you name a few others?

Jay (06:58): Yeah. So you know, we worked with another company called StackAdapt. They built their own native advertising, programmatic ads platform. I'm pretty sure they're the largest one specifically in Canada outside of Google. But certainly they've won tons of awards in the U S as well as in Canada. We've worked with, you know, if people are familiar with like student works or college works or college pro pretty much every company in North America that has that model, we've partnered with them to be able to grow their retention and grow their communities. A lot of, you know, influencers, bestselling authors not just Amazon best selling authors, but real you know, credible, amazing individuals that, you know, have digital presences and digital backends as well. We tend to do really well for those guys as well.

Kathleen (07:57): And you help companies through all aspects of the podcasting life cycle. You know, when you and I first connected, I, I, and we talked and we were talking about kind of what you do with podcasters. I think my initial response was, you know, we've talked a lot about podcasting on this podcast. It's, it's sort of funny, it's, it's a hot topic as one might expect. And I'm always looking for, what's a different way we can talk about it. And one of the reasons I was really excited to chat with you is that a couple of the things that you brought up really are things that we haven't covered yet. You know, number one, being how to really come out of the gate strong. So when you launch your podcast, I think the Holy grail is getting in the top lists the top 100 or the top of this. So I want to start with that because we've covered in the past, like how to strategize what your podcast should be about and how to record and all of that. But let's talk about how to launch really successfully. Yeah. So

Jay (08:56): Really quick even added caveat for your listeners, is that what we're about to talk about right here? Even if you have a podcast this is still applicable, right? It's it's and, and yeah. So I think that's, that's, I get asked that question all the time. Hey, Jay, we've been podcasts in the last couple years, these are our stats. This is where we're at, right. Is it too late for us to hit the top 100, hit the top 200? You know, I would say this before we dive in as well, which is internally. And I think we talked about this internally. We refer to hitting the top 100 as the end of phase one, right? Because it is not the end all be all you're you're, it's not like the whole, it's not like there's a pre top 100, you know, life is pretty top 100 and life post, top 100.

Jay (09:43): But I do find that if we're going to spend all this time and all this energy and all of other people's energy to hop on the podcast, I think if you want to be able to launch very strongly, then it's going to be one of your better opportunities to get out of the gate. Right. And to be able to position the podcast and position to host, even create the right platform for future guests. Right. And just make your own guests feel amazing to be able to be featured on any platform. Right. I think these are just some of the things that you might be thinking about. When we're looking at a launch specifically, the iTunes algorithm works on a couple components, but really the main one is being able to increase your subscribers of that podcast, right? Anything that you could do to be able to do that, whether you're running a, you know, a contest, rather you're writing paid ads, there's so many different ways of going about it.

Jay (10:44): But a lot of times for our own clients, we build them based on their email list, based on the assets that they have are ready. We build them essentially a plan to be able to capitalize on their current assets, to be able to drive those subscriptions so that they can get out of the gate really, really strong and really form a community around their podcasts, because that's really prepping us to go into phase two as well. You know, talking about the ROI and new traffic. It just positions us to be able to win the whole game that much better. Does that make sense?

Kathleen (11:14): Yes. And I have a bunch of questions. So I've done a lot of reading about launching new podcasts and I've read different things. And I'm curious to get your take. The first question is I have read a number of articles that say that when you launch, you should launch with more than one episode. So it's not like, Hey, we've launched here's episode one. It's like, Hey, we've launched here's episodes, you know, one through five or one through eight. Sure, sure. But I've also read the opposite. So I'd love to get your opinion on that.

Jay (11:48): Yeah. You know, it's I, I've been seeing this trend more and more right. Where they'll essentially, and these are like really well known athletes or well known celebrities that are doing this as well. Keep in mind any strategy that you see any type of popular influencer or popular celebrity doing chances are that you cannot actually replicate what they're doing because of that celebrity factor. And they probably are bringing, you know, millions and hundreds of thousands of followers. Right. We've worked with people where you know, they'll have 2 million and Instagram following, right. Their numbers and their downloads. It's not going to be comparable right. To somebody that might not have that social capital. And, and, and, you know, you're not bringing that into the launch with that all, you know, so I've seen this trend where they'll release like a trailer. Right.

Jay (12:39): And it's like, it's coming soon, you know? And it's like a, maybe like a three to five kind of like a movie trailer I imagine. Right. And then maybe a couple of weeks after then they'll start releasing on like a weekly schedule. What have you I think of the launch like this, as in Kathleen, let's go try out a, this new restaurant down the street. We've heard amazing things about it. Our friends are friends with the owner. Right. And when we go in there, can we, you know, since we're trying out the place, let's order a couple appetizers, let's get a couple drinks, let's go through the whole experience of it a little bit. Right. And so I'm a very big believer that you definitely don't. I think you don't want to just release a trailer. You don't want to just leave them with one episode.

Jay (13:25): You know, if you look at the statistics of podcasts is right and, you know, for any of your listeners are marketers and business owners, you get, you guys could, could look this up as well, but I'm pretty sure when they released stats earlier this year, people spend on average, you know, six plus hours listening to podcasts is right. And I think they also spend on average listening to five to six different shows. So think about this, you're introducing them to a new show yet. There's only one episode there. Right. So we'd like to mix it up in that first batch, anywhere from three to five episodes. I think when you go beyond five, it gets a little, almost like too much. Even at five, I would feel like, Ugh, I don't know which one is going to be the best suited for me. Right. Three, four definitely would work. Right. Just in terms of just, Hey, here's a bit of a solo, here's a, maybe a longer form interview. Here's a, you know, some, you know, our, our welcome type of, you know, episode, right. So it just gives them kind of a full experience of what is to come. Right.

Kathleen (14:26): That makes sense to me. And it also intuitively makes sense because I, I feel like in the last couple of years, we've really become trained as human beings to expect, to be able to binge content, you know, the whole Netflix model of releasing the whole season at one time. And there's this level of frustration that arises when all of a sudden you're, you don't have availability, especially if it's something you really like, you know? And so I can see where that would make sense, because if I, if I'm come in and I get a taste of episode one, and I'm like, this is really good. I'm going to want, I just did this. I just did this. I'll also give an example. And I don't know how many episodes they released at once, but I discovered the, the podcast, nice white parents, which is by Serial and the New York times.

Kathleen (15:18): I just discovered it this past weekend. And I listened to, I think it was eight episodes or 10, one of the two, the whole, the whole podcast is it's. Cause it's not a, a podcast that goes on forever. And I literally listened to all 10 episodes in like a day or so, because it was good. I got hooked and I wanted more. And I think it's very easy to lose that momentum if somebody listens to one and they like it, and then they don't have that habit developed yet. Because to me it's all about building a habit. And if you haven't formed a habit yet, and then you are not able to satisfy that craving with another episode, I think it, it, it jeopardizes the longevity of your listener.

Jay (16:01): It's so good. What you're saying right now, because one of the things that we have to remind our clients, right. And just keep this in mind, but like, are I, I'm all for like, and podcast, this is, what's so beautiful about podcasting nowadays, is that there, you know, now Hollywood studios, right. Are, are shifting gears and they're deploying resources to be able to create some amazing audio programs. Right. Just think of your favorite type of true crime show. They're doing some really interesting things with like the history, you know channel and, and that, and that type of genre. But the shows that we specifically work on are a lot of times, you know, businesses, CEOs, and there's a whole brand behind it. They chances are they have different products and services. Right. And so when you're introducing a podcast, we're not just training are the hosts or the CEO, or whoever's running the, or whoever's the voice of the program to be able to create and get into the flow of creating the episodes. Right. You're also training the audience to receive the, the, the, the episodes from you to actually see that every single week or twice a week or whatever the cadence is right. To say, Oh yeah, that, that is what that's, what's, what's going on. So to your point, forming that habit right away, it's very, very important right. Out of the gate.

Kathleen (17:22): Yeah. Now, so, so if somebody starting out, you would have them do a couple of episodes for the launch. Talk me through the rest of your process for making sure that launch is strong. What are you doing to, to drive people to those first episodes?

Jay (17:39): Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's funny. Cause we, we had to make this distinction for even art, the business owners that we work with because we realized that some of them had, you know, this is one of the first launches that, that they were doing. Right. And so they would be after the first week, they would be, you know, pretty, you know, energy like exhausted, right. Because they, you know, they've just gotten a flood of emails and DMS and messages and questions and they're all social channels are being blown up. Right. But we always flick at the launch as this nice little two to three week period where once again, we're training the listeners to actually be able to tune in, we're publishing a little more on the front end before we go into a weekly cadence or a biweekly cadence, whatever it ends up working out for said business, but you're really forming, I think the beginning of the community around your show.

Jay (18:36): Right? So a lot of our clients they'll have some sort of a community aspect of this, right? Some of them, even the Proctor and Gamble one that we mentioned their main, their whole thing was, Hey, let's drive new members in our alumni network. So there's, this is more of like a, a paid, you know, network, you know, you gotta be a part of it. Right. But there are, you got, gotta keep this in mind, we call this the triangle effect within podcasts, your brand, which are three things that you want to really cycle your audience through. Right. The number one is the podcast or your main content channel, number two, basic for marketers and business owners out there. But it's going to be an email list. Right. So just even getting that cadence down, because so many times how guilty are we as business owners that we know that every time we email the list or we do it right.

Jay (19:27): You know, that that list is an amazing asset for our business. But so many of our clients, they, you know, maybe they, they, they, they don't know what to say. They, you know, they don't have the podcast right away. So once again, it goes back into training and that third piece is that community piece. Right. So whichever section that you're in, right. And this is something that we train there, the, our clients' teams on, if you're on the email list, you're promoting to the other two, right. If you're on the community, you're promoting to the other two. So if you're, Hey, have you heard the last podcast episode, Hey, go over here, sign up for our webinar coming up. Right. If you're on the email list right there, they're already signed up or what have you, Hey, you know, have you heard the latest episode?

Jay (20:08): How have you joined our discussion in our community? Right. So it's, it's th does that make sense? So you're kind of, it seems like you're everywhere, but really there's just three places. Right? And if you think about that breakdown from a consumer perspective, right? You've got their phone covered, you got the social media covered, you got their inbox covered. And the podcast really covers all those other moments that they might've been alone, you know, and they might've been alone cleaning the house. They might've been alone gardening. They might've been, you know, alone just wanting to be able to geek out on a certain topic, you know, and they might be listening to, to a show about inbound marketing, right. So it's all those little moments that our hosts and our, our, the people we work with, they get a chance to connect with their perfect customer.

Kathleen (20:52): So true story. I listen to podcasts when I vacuum, when I grocery shop and when I exercise. So the examples you gave are totally spot on. So my question about that though, is, does that mean you have to have already a large email list in order to do this well, like, you know, what, if somebody comes to you and they don't have a big list. Yeah.

Jay (21:17): So I think this is a really good question because not everybody has 2 million Instagram followers and not everybody has this massive email list, even though they might've been told that, you know, for months and years. Right. look, I think you have to understand that you're starting from where you're starting at, you know, and we got to leverage, you know, if you have none of these assets, there is no community, there is no email lists. Well, we're going to, in that process, we're going to help you start building some of these assets. Right. And it's going to go more into our, you know, our phase two, which is focused around new traffic ROI. Right. But you know, those are ultimately, you have to really have those, if you want to be able to maximize, we believe the podcasting channel and that whole experience around it.

Jay (22:04): Right. If you have an email list and you haven't been utilizing it, heck we've had clients where they come with a massive email list, but it's not really the right email lists for where they're going. Right. And so I think you have to understand that you're starting from where you're starting at. You don't have to have all three before starting, but certainly within all of our clients, we get them the amazing top 100 podcasts. And typically we have an email list, even if it's just, you know, a 50 or a hundred people that we're starting out with. And, and we kind of start from there.

Kathleen (22:36): Got it. And you kind of gave me the segue into the second thing. I was really excited to talk to you about, which is that there's a lot of debate out there within the world of marketing and podcasting about like why, what you should expect to get out of hosting a podcast or producing and putting one on. And I hear most people say, don't expect it to be a lead generator for your business. Don't expect to get deals from it. And I think in many cases, that's true, but I was really intrigued that when you reached out to me, you talked about having had some clients that have landed really big deals from it. And it's, there's no straight line equation. I mean, podcasts, all podcasts are different, et cetera, et cetera. But I wanted to kind of pick your brain on this, this notion of how a podcast becomes a part of the marketing mix to help you grow your business.

Jay (23:35): I love this question and I love this topic. And I think personally, the last few years has created, and I don't want to use this like lightly, but really it's created a whole industry where people are creating content because they feel like the idea of creating content is moving their brand and business forward. And it's not to say that sometimes, you know, you have to track every single piece of content. You can't create content just for fun anymore. You know, all marketers are ruining this. It's not to say that. But from a business owner standpoint, there are a lot of things that come up, whether it's Q and a, whether it is your objections. Okay. And maybe it's actually be easier if I share a little bit of a case study, think, go for it. Yeah. Like maybe I can do that because we worked with a client and, you know, we figured it out for her that her perfect client works with them.

Jay (24:37): Usually for about two to three years, she, you know, on a basic simplicity level, she helps people right around that half a million, you know, revenue part to be able to go into multi-millions. Right. It's not just a sales game, but it's actually like infrastructure operations, understanding finances team. Right? Like there's, and that's why it usually takes that two to three year period. Right. For her, we figured out that there was about four different stages that, and I'm not talking about like, just like four stages of like your IP, like your, for profit activators. You know what I mean? And I'm not necessarily referencing that, but four stages that she sees her clients kind of graduate from, right. Maybe stage one they're working to in the business. They're, you know, they can't see any growth. Right. They have a big vision, but not really anybody to support them.

Jay (25:32): Right. Like that, that would be stage one, stage four would be, they could sell their business, but they would never actually, you know, want to, you know, because they're actually so happy there, you know, 90% removed from any type of fulfillment, they just get to be their visionary. Right. so I'm just using this as a bit of example. Well, we created one of these episodes call, you know, the, the, the four stages of business growth. We obviously tailored it to her brand. Right. And till today, like we created this like late 2018, still to the day, I'll get messages from her team and her cause we've become good friends by now say like, show those, showcase people, applying for calls with them, right. Applying to chat with their sales team or with her. And they'll reference that, Hey, you know, I heard this, this episode, right.

Jay (26:21): And I I'm, I'm a stage one entrepreneur, or I'm stuck in stage two. I've been stuck in stage two for the last two years. Right. And I would love to work with you because I, one day I would love to be in that stage four that you talked about. Right. And, you know, we're talking relatively higher ticket, you know, certainly, you know, done for you type of type of service. And so for her, she's made a massive ROI from that. Right. And you know, once again, I think we have to tailor it for every single business. Right. But I would invite your listeners to think about this. What are all the biggest questions, most common questions you get asked, what are the biggest objections that come up over and over again? How can we start tailoring and creating content that really looks to address some of these things, because what we're really doing is you're optimizing for the future sales conversations, right. We all have experienced what it's like to sell to somebody or somebody on your sales team has certainly experienced this, where they made an offer too early, right. Where they pitched someone that was not really receptive or certainly would never even, you know, when it's not even at that stage where they could even think about it. Right. So we've all had that negative experience.

Jay (27:40): We've also all have hopped on calls where it wasn't really even an enrollment call or a sales call. Right. It was like, the person already knew what our values were. They knew what exactly what it is that we did. They knew what the result was. They knew what the outcome was. They were just checking logistics when, when can we start? Okay, cool. Right. It's more of a friendly conversation than anything. So that's really what we're trying to emulate. Right. And we do this with every single client because their strategy is going to be different. You know, some of those companies, I referenced earlier, student works as an example for them, it's not about generating the lead on the front end. It's about how they could get their entire company listening to the podcast so that they renew for year two, that they were new for them. Right. And so that changes exactly what we're going to talk about. That changes what content we're going to talk about. Right. For them, it's about how can we embed that customer journey and weave it constantly in to, to the content that they're creating that one day, if they're a part of the company, if they're lucky to be a part of the company in the next three, four years, they might have a chance to be able to see these types of results. Does that make sense from a

Kathleen (28:50): Yeah. So wait, I'm fascinated by this second example you gave of basically like preventing churn via podcasts. So how, how do you create content that gets everybody in the company listening or like maximizes the number of people?

Jay (29:02): I think, I think the, I think a lot of times people get really especially in this industry, right. In the marketing industry, everything is all about like numbers. Right. Which is totally understandable. So it's like, how many times are we posting? What are the downloads? It's, it's these types of questions versus for our clients. We're trying to get the most out of all the content pieces, right. If we're comparing, create one intentional piece of content, we're, it's kind of like we're planting that content on an external channel. Right. But internally, and all of those indoctrination email sequences were pointing to very specific episodes. It's never just, Hey, let's listen to listen to our podcasts. You know, it's listened to this episode on our podcast, right. Hey Kathleen, Hey, check out our top 100 podcasts.

Jay (29:55): That's good. Right. It's good. It's it's nice. But Kathleen, I saw that you were doing this project around inbound marketing. We just created this episode around inbound marketing, but I think you would find relevant. Right. So when we think about the types of content, our clients are creating it's how, where is it that they want their customer to go? Where is it that your listeners want their customers to go? And how can you talk about the vision of it? Not necessarily the straight up tactics of today, there's episodes for that. Right. But where is it that you could go? Right. And that's really how we're kind of essentially having these mini sales conversations every single time. And people still find amazing value from it because ultimately they see it as a reminder right. Of them going to where they, that, that ultimate destination, you know?

Jay (30:52): And I can't take full credit for this. There was a there I had a conversation with Dean Jackson. So shout out to the Dean who has a number of podcasts is one with Joe Polish. Another one where he does like live coaching in it. So, you know, he asked me one time, what I thought the true purpose of a podcast was. And, you know, I don't remember exactly what I said, but we came to the conclusion that the true purpose of a podcast is really to have an ongoing conversation. Right. It's kinda like if, you know, we all have people in our lives that are like the fitness fanatic people, you know, that every single time we see them, it feels like we should update them on like our high performance habits or, Hey, we're trying a new diet or, Hey, we, you know, I just started working out again.

Jay (31:39): Right. That's an ongoing conversation with that person versus let's say they might be chatting with you. And it's a little more about business marketing, right? That's that ongoing conversation. So if you run a podcast, if you have any content marketing, what's that ongoing conversation for you, what's that ongoing conversation that you can remind your customers of that they're on this journey with you preferably for a very long period. And that way you're increasing that LTV, you're being able to increase retention over time. And that's really what we start training our clients to start thinking about and leveraging the medium in this way.

Kathleen (32:13): I love that concept of kind of understanding your buyer's journey or that your customer's journey and, and tapping into that to create podcast content that resonates at different stages. But I think there's a fine line there of, you could easily veer into something that's very self promotional or very product centric. So how do you advise your clients about keeping the podcast content educational, you know, and not, eh, but like still relevant to what you do and to that customer journey?

Jay (32:46): Yeah. So it's, it's a great point because I think when you tell people, Hey, go, you know, here's like, here's no rules go sell, right. It ends up becoming this like long, crazy, you know, sales pitch it's, you know, great content has that educational piece as well as, as entertaining pieces. Right. And so, you know, we it's w this is a lot of coaching really, when we comes down to the content critiques of our, of our clients is how can we just get them out of like, you know, that, that expert teaching mode, right? How can we get them sharing a little bit authentically about who they are, right. Because don't forget what you said earlier. And at the beginning of the show, podcasting has been around for a very long time before it was called podcasting before this top 100 stuff, before all the ROI conversations, it used to be two or three people that liked talking with each other geeking about geeking out about a certain topic.

Jay (33:45): And it didn't matter how many people are listening. Right. They just throw it the recording online, raw recording, right. Maybe a little bit of music here and there. And it would be called internet radio. Right. That's like the true essence of, of podcasting. I think that's why a lot of people love it. It's because it's this unfiltered raw version. It feels like we're listening to a conversation that we are privy to. And we get a chance to, you know, seat in the back and not really have anything to say about it. And we get to listen to some of these amazing conversations. So how can we balance what it is that we want to be able to, you know, sell and, and that, that vision, and, you know, the customer journey, but also still have those human components. Right? So a lot of it comes down to storytelling, right?

Jay (34:35): A lot of it just like good marketing, you know, we have these things called the five connectors, right. And these are connectors. They don't all start with C. Right. But they're story connectors, you know, they're, they're, they're little nuanced things that you could do to be a better storyteller in the moment, right. In the podcast scenario. And that's ultimately how we try to find that balance. Because each time we have a client, they're not just becoming the voice for network marketing. They're not just becoming the boys for alternative medicine or conscious families or whatever the topic is that they stand for. We're also helping them find their voice. And it doesn't mean that they don't know how to speak. And a lot of them are very good speakers. A lot of them are great content creators, but what's that, what's that cadence, what's that flow. That's going to work for the, or right. And that requires a little more artistry and a little more repetition for all of our hosts. But that's ultimately what we try to do is balance that because you don't want it be too scripted. And, you know, this is where you insert the call to action and to, you know, overly produced. But at the same time, you don't have it to be this like loosey goosey type of, you know, whatever you feel like podcast experience.

Kathleen (35:50): Yeah. It's so funny that you bring this up because I just had this conversation with somebody who's thinking of starting a podcast. And he said to me, I'm not a good interviewer. And I was like, well, one way to get better is to just start doing it. And you know, like the more you have to hear yourself, I'll never forget when I first started podcasting listening to my own episodes. And I said the word. Yeah. And I still do it. Like when I start my sentences, you know, after a guest speaks, I'll say, yeah. And yeah. And this, and yeah. But what about that? And you become really aware of like, not only your own verbal ticks, but you know, your strengths and weaknesses and how you, how you are as an interviewer, as a conversationalist. And I think, I mean, at this point I'm like almost 170 episodes in, I don't, I don't have to do a lot of prep because like, I, I am so comfortable.

Kathleen (36:39): It's like second hand to me. But when you start in the beginning, you definitely, I agree with you that you don't want to be overly scripted, but you want to have like a loose framework within which to play that you can fall back on if you get stuck, if you're not sure what to ask, there's that degree of comfort there that, Oh, okay. I have these five open ended questions that I know I can ask, and it will just set my guest off on, you know, riffing on a topic that they love. But that's something that I think I discovered on my own, cause I wasn't working with anyone, but I could see where it'd be valuable, valuable to have a company like yours. Kind of guiding me in that process and shortening the learning curve in the beginning.

Jay (37:23): Yeah. Well, I mean, we all know frameworks and this is something we have to tell everybody, right. Which is like, look, we can talk about frameworks. We could probably have an entire different podcast episode on just frameworks, solo episode frameworks, interview frameworks, right. And, and, and, you know, storytelling frameworks and from a high level, you know, but at the end of the day, there's nothing that beats that natural curiosity, that natural energy or flow that that host has. And as you probably have experienced, and it probably can attest to, it takes a little bit, it takes just a little bit of time to be able to find that, that, that comfort level. Right. But if business owners or marketers out there that do a lot of content marketing right there, chances are, they're going to love you no longer form conversations even solo episodes. And I think it translates those skills, communication skills translate quite well when it comes to podcasts.

Kathleen (38:20): Yeah. Totally agree. Well, we are coming up on our time. So a couple of things as we wrap up the conversation the first is, can you give me just some quick examples of clients you've worked with, who've seen amazing from this, whether it's a great launch or great ROI, you've peppered a few in the conversation, any others that you want to mention?

Jay (38:43): Yeah. So we worked with a, a different SaaS company. They have multiple verticals that they're going after. We created pretty much think of it like a mini series per vertical, right. So much so that each salesperson responsible for whichever vertical or whoever you're chatting with, they would essentially have once again, these audio assets that they could go back to the client or a prospective client with, or go back to the prospect with and say, Hey, we actually created, if you're in the real estate niche, we created this mini series on how to be able to leverage what we do in the real estate world. Right. So context right away, they were able to get a client on the, like the second day of their launch, because we had launched with three, four different episodes. They had segmented their lists and said, Hey, if you're in this niche, listen to this one.

Jay (39:31): Right. Don't just support the launch. But listen to this episode that just created some great conversation starters there. Right. and, and they were able to see an ROI right off the bat. Other of our clients have went on, built the community, built up a bit of audience. They didn't have that email list coming in. And then maybe six months down the line, they opened up a coaching program. Even if it was like a beta version of side coaching program, they opened up their mastermind that they've been wanting to do. Right. So you can kind of pick and choose which product and service you want to be able to go. But yeah, so those are some off the top of my mind. Love it.

Kathleen (40:08): All right. Totally changing gears now. So I have two questions I ask all of my guests at the end of the podcast, and now it's your turn. Okay. the first one is this podcast is all about inbound marketing. And I'm curious, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to great inbound marketing these days?

Jay (40:31): So it's so funny because like you told me that you're going to ask me this. So the first company that comes to mind is HubSpot for whatever reason. Absolutely. And you know, I know that you, you know, there there's some, you know, affiliation and all that good stuff, but yeah. I mean, look, we're talking about them, so it's, it's working. And you know, I, I think they do a superb job.

Kathleen (40:55): Oh they are absolutely amazing. And you would not be the first person who mentioned them, so that's definitely to their credit.

Jay (41:03): Yeah. I added another point. Yeah,

Kathleen (41:05): Seriously. Second question. Most marketers that I talk to, one of their biggest pain points is that they have a really hard time keeping up with just all the developments in the world of digital marketing. It's changing so quickly. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself,

Jay (41:24): Okay. This is a pretty interesting question because I think we're living in a world where it's noisier than ever. And I see this happen to business owners and marketers, all the, where they get so excited about it. It could be anything. It doesn't mean the thing that they're getting super excited about doesn't, you know, is not applicable or, or, or works. Regardless of it's a mini webinar or a quiz funnel, podcasts, a tech talk, right. Like it, all of them work. Right. But I'm a big believer of mastery of platforms. And, you know, I'm not saying that just because we have all these amazing things for podcasting, it doesn't mean that your business like it, it might not be a good fit for your business, right. It's, it's, I'm not a big believer that everybody should have a podcast. Every business should, should, should do that. So the way I actually keep myself up to date with it is I pick one each year, just try to pick one marketing, like initiative and one marketing platform to just truly master. And I find, or at least the last few years I have found it to be more fruitful. Just from my productivity and my focus.

Kathleen (42:32): That's really good advice. I suspect a lot of people will struggle with that because we, as marketers also suffer from shiny penny syndrome.

Jay (42:42): It's business owners. Right. And I think that the question I ultimately asked myself about a year and a bit ago, which what kind of business and what kind of life do am I going to be happy with? Right. Do I want to, you know, find cool little hacks and things to create a little bit of momentum? Or could I find something to really double, triple, quadruple down on and actually just be able to dominate it. Right. And so it's like, I totally hear you because I think so many entrepreneurs and so many marketers in general, they want to be able to say, Hey, you know what I know about this, I know about this. And all of it is really amazing, I think you just have to choose. Yeah.

Kathleen (43:18): Absolutely. All right. Well, we're, we're at our time. So if somebody is listening and they want to reach out and ask you a question, learn more about what you're talking about or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that?

Jay (43:32): So two different spots. One is, if you want to see our entire podcast process from beginning to end, like we lay out all four stages, we call it the top 100 buyers podcast system. You can go see that whole system at doneforyoupodcast.com. If you want to reach out to me and socially stalk me, probably Instagram is the best way to being able to go do that. We post there pretty much daily and our websites, podcasts, your brand in case you want to dive into some other case studies and you want to see every, you know, all the deliverables and all that good stuff.

Kathleen (44:06): All right. I will put the links to all of those places in the show notes. So make sure you head over there to check it out. And as always, if you're listening and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, preferably a five star review because that's how other people find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass, inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Jay. This was a lot of fun.

Jay (44:36): Yeah. Thank you, Kathleen. This was great.